You are not alone
2015 · 6m · China
Directed by Yufeng LI
Genres: adventure, animation, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
In 2058, Beijing has become uninhabitable due to air pollution and sandstorms, forcing people to live underground. A teenage girl sets out with two robot friends to reach the surface and see her sister, who works above.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is *almost* there—underground Beijing, robot sidekicks, dystopian pilgrimage—but it plays the sci-fi setup too straight, too earnest; you can feel the film choosing safety over the genuinely weird collision of whimsy and apocalypse it could've detonated.
Li demonstrates confident control of tone and pacing within the animation form, threading contemplative passages against adventure momentum in a way that recalls Studio Ghibli's restraint; the work sits comfortably in a lineage of character-driven animated sci-fi that privileges emotional specificity over spectacle.
The decision to anchor the entire emotional weight on a single moment of the girl glimpsing her sister—letting that visual recognition carry the story's meaning rather than spelling it out—is exactly the kind of formal restraint that transforms a modest premise into something that stays with you.