Wayback
2020 · 8m · Spain
Directed by Carlos Salgado
Genres: adventure, animation, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
In a remote planet a flower is picked up by a space explorer.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Wayback plays it safe in the mythic-adventure sandbox—solid animation craft, but it's mining territory that's already been mined to death by better-funded studios. The surreal tone promises subversion; the execution delivers competent worldbuilding.
Salgado's command of mythic language and visual composition places this firmly in the lineage of animated allegory, with each frame considered as deliberate gesture. The contemplative pacing and surreal spatial logic suggest a filmmaker thinking carefully about what animation can do that live action cannot.
What elevates Wayback is the decision to let silence and negative space carry as much weight as the imagery itself—that restraint in a sci-fi adventure short, the refusal to over-explain or over-animate, transforms what could be routine into something genuinely haunting on a micro-budget.
Reviews
"Wayback" is a stellar and beautiful animated science fiction short that implements computer animation to unfold a tale about exploration and trying to save an alien world. The short film is dialogue free, but the vision is absolutely vivid and explodes off the screen in fantastic fashion.