Alike Review

Alike is a 2015 Spanish animated short film directed by Daniel Martinez Lara. It’s one of the greatest of all recent shorts.

This is a story about a boy and his father and how different they are from the world and the only thing that keeps them glowing is having each other. This is an incredibly sophisticated, deep look at the lack of creativity in the world and how the society basically kills your every instinct for creativity and how they want us to all be the same. The ending is wonderful in that you see in the animation of the city that the city remains the same, but these two remain creative and they are fighting it together.

Yes, the animation is absolutely gorgeous here. It is a perfect case for the power of this medium and how well it can tell a story without having a single spoken word. I loved how they glowed and how the city was grey and these two had color. Their personalities should have been a bit better developed, but they were still such wonderful characters. Another great thing about this animation is that it uses CGI differently and not only in color, backgrounds and light but also in unique character designs. And that score is just beautiful.

Alike is an immensely artistic, deep and poignant movie about creativity that truly blew my mind. Shame on the Academy for not nominating it.