Welcome to O'Town
2020 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Euni Cho
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A bunny travels to the big city hoping to become a successful musician, but faces the challenges of adapting to her new home; keeping to herself as a street musician among bears, she eventually embraces the strangers around her. An independent Sheridan College graduation short set to "Tourniquet" by Hem.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a perfectly competent graduation short about a bunny learning to open up—exactly the kind of earnest, consensus-friendly premise that makes me want to nap. The Hem soundtrack does heavy lifting, but the film itself doesn't interrogate a single thing about ambition, loneliness, or what it actually costs to belong.
Cho demonstrates genuine facility with form—the pacing is assured, the animal-society metaphor sits gracefully within the coming-of-age tradition—but the execution feels like a well-executed student film rather than a work that pushes against its lineage or asks anything dangerous of the viewer.
The single masterstroke here is the sound design layering Hem's 'Tourniquet' against the ambient texture of the city; that choice—letting the song's emotional architecture do the narrative work while the animation stays sparse and observational—turns a modest premise into something genuinely affecting and shows Cho understanding exactly where her constraint becomes her strength.
Reviews
A bunny travels to the big city in the hopes of becoming a successful musician, but faces the challenges of adapting to her new home.
It can be hard to move to a big city, especially when you don't know anyone. In this animated grad film, Welcome to O'Town (2020) by Euni Cho at Canada's Sheridan College, a young bunny musician moves to a city of bears.