Synopsis

A protagonist in his twenties, worn numb by the weight of everyday life. One day, he meets a droplet-shaped office worker who helps him rediscover the childlike wonder he'd long forgotten, along with a new way of seeing the world.

Director's Comment

The world itself never changes. It only appears different depending on the state of our hearts in any given moment. Some days, a sky stretching out endlessly and beautifully feels like an unreachable illusion; other days, it approaches us like an ideal we long to walk toward once more.

In this film, the city represents the adult, and the universe represents the child. The city is hard as concrete, and yet countless cracks run through it. The responsibilities and worries we accumulate as we live, and a heart that comes to hide more and more with time, resemble the shape of that city. The universe, by contrast, holds the world of a child — endless possibility and dreams, a future not yet reached.

But the city and the universe are never as far apart as they seem. Seen from high above, a city at night becomes, at some point, a universe of its own. The glow of countless screens, the small lights beyond windows, a lamp left on for someone — all of it glimmers in the dark like stars. The city, too, is another universe, formed from the gathered dreams and wishes of countless people.

A child's innocence seems to fade as time passes. But it hasn't disappeared — it's only been hidden for a while beneath the name “adult.” In the moment a piece of candy, dropped by an adult who seemed only sad, turns into the colors of a rainbow, I wanted to show that the innocence and dreams we thought we'd forgotten are still within us.

Rather than dividing the adult from the child, I wanted to portray a single life — one built together by who I once was and who I am now.

Staff

Producer/Scenario/Storyboard/Character Design/BG Design/Lay Out/Animation/Camera PARK Sunyoung

Effect/Sound/Editing PARK Sunyoung, JEONG Seungho 

Music KIM Dongwook

Voice DO Jun

Program Note

The film unfolds like a riddle, or a game of twenty questions. It seems, at first, to explain “how the universe becomes a city”, but it may actually be a story about rediscovering a forgotten universe that has lain dormant within that very city all along. Like a “kid-at-heart” wielding the small power to buy a whole box of Ten-Ten candy, the universe and the city belong to children who have, at some point, simply grown up. And on this planet, somewhere-loosened grown-ups go on living their lives.

LEE Hyejung