Very little is going well in the world we live in. The past month has been an extended tragedy played before us every night.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, social media is riddled with people lecturing the world. The opinion sites reel of endless articles of the ways we’re all wrong, how we’ll never do better.
But there are no easy solutions and there are only thousands of people pointing fingers.
I’ll keep this brief.
We should stand together.
But why vaguely discuss that here? I chose a simple film this week.
Mean Teddies by Tyler Novo is brutal. It’s metal. Metal in the ways Metalocalypse always made me laugh. Metal teddy bears brutalising the monsters beneath our beds.
I really do love this little film though. I’ve been saving it for months, waiting for a special time to share it, and I guess this weekend is that special time. Not because it’s the best film I’ve talked about here, not because it’ll change your life [it won’t], but because it will give you a moment to smile, to turn off your brain, and remember what it was like being a child, holding your stuffed animals close.
Because they were a big part of my childhood. I had dozens of stuffed animals. I played with them. I talked with them. I created epic adventures for them.
They fought, they loved, they cried, and they survived. We survived all the monsters and ghosts. They kept me safe.
And when I see the boy in that film holding the teddy bear tight–it hits me somewhere deep in the heart, rolling along the ventricle walls.
I remember that. I still feel it.
Sometimes I wake alone at night still looking for my dog, now three years dead. Just yesterday I went to my parents’ house and this wave of nostalgia nearly broke me. I imagined my dog greeting me at the door, dancing on her hind legs, the way she greeted me for fifteen years.
Because that’s what this film is about.
Those beautiful creatures and objects that gave us back the night. That made us safe. That made us beautiful and endless.
That’s what I love about this film. It packs an entire lifetime of emotion into one second.
Everything before that is just badass. I think of how I used to make my stuffed animals fight one another like they were super saiyans, flying round my room.
Everything was so real then.
There are few things that were ever so real in my childhood.
But forget all that. Just ride the short wave here. The awesomely brutal action that begins this. The epic grimdark fantasy that defines this.
Childhood was many things for all of us, but mostly it’s just over.
So forget the world today. Relive a moment of your childhood.
