Shiroi Unabara

Shiroi Unabara is a 6 minute short-film by Satomi Maiya. Have you heard her name? I hadn't, until I came across this beautiful short. Now you might be thinking, why did I give a 10 to a film that's not even the length of a trailer for a feature-length film?

The reason is, there's no rule to art. Art shouldn't be bound by restrictions. If a piece of art can express itself within 5 minutes and touch the hearts of people, it is just as much of an art as a two-hour long film. Hell, it's just as much of an art as a 100 ... episode-long epic.

Shiroi Unabara (Missing You) is art. I have never experienced anything that is more beautiful and touching than this short piece of animation. The gentle yet cold artstyle of this film builds a melancholic atmosphere fitting for the themes of this piece and the lack of dialogue lets us dip into the atmosphere and understand the themes it's trying to convey through our heart, rather than our logic. It's an emotional piece of art and I believe that we should view it as such.

This film deals with the themes of loss, longing, nostalgia and grief. The two main characters, the daughter and the mother, are subtly characterized through their expressions and behaviors. The daughter is presented as an innocent child who longs to meet her supposedly dead father and writes for him everyday, while her mother is characterized as a strict yet loving mother who misses her long-lost husband just as much but wants her daughter to get over the grief and grow up strong by throwing her letters onto the sea. The daughter picks up on this fact and follows her to the sea and tries to stop her from throwing the letters, but amidst the white snow-filled sea, they can do nothing but grief over the loss of their loved one and indulge in the nostalgia of what once was, and they gently let it go and let the letter flow into the sea, just like their memories and longing for their lost one, as they ponder over the fact that their lost one will never come back...

The message this short film is trying to convey is something we should engrain into ourselves. There will be times when we lose things that are precious to us, and things we may never gain back. But that shouldn't hold us back from living. We may have lost something important, but we still have something important that we need to protect. That's the melancholy of life, and this piece of art perfectly replicates that feeling.

P.S. The score we end up giving to a piece of media is irrelevant. They are just numbers and numbers mean nothing when judging art. There are no metrics that can measure the value of art so the score should reflect your personal feelings on it. If you think something is precious and life-changing, don't let anything weigh your score down for you, especially if that something is as inconsequential as its runtime.