Anthropormorphic Landscape In The Fourth Dimension

Image courtesy of Pixar

Day & Night is a Pixar animated short film, directed by Teddy Newton and produced by Kevin Reher (1) that heretofore has escaped my acquaintance. It demonstrates quite simply, succinctly, and (depending on your feeling towards cartoon animation) entertainingly, the notion of time in a landscape as the fourth dimension of experience.

Day & Night follows two characters, Day and Night. Inside Day is a day scene with a sun in the center, and inside Night is a night scene with a moon in the center. Whatever goes on inside of Day or Night expresses normal events that typically occur within a day or night, respectively, and these events often correspond with actions or emotions that the characters Day or Night express. For example, when Day is happy he will have a rainbow inside him, and when Night is happy he will have fireworks inside him. (1)

It captures quite well in all of its five and a half minutes the idea that we experience space, man-made or otherwise, in all of its dimensions, including time. Our feelings and impressions of that space are highly affected by a seemingly infinite amount of factors to create what we like to call experience.  This tapestry of experience weaves all of the physics that only physicists understand with the collective human experience and  individual memory and emotions carried autonomously by whoever occupies that space--the latter I dare say no one understands.  Least of all this author.  But what is truly interesting is that through the combination of 2D and 3D cartoon anthropomorphism and maybe a little silliness, we begin to grasp more valiantly at those concepts simultaneously.

Brilliant or silly is of course a value judgement.   The throwback 2D character style merged with the new-ish 3D animation is creative and fun.  Whether or not you 6 year-old will ponder the enormity of the universe and our human experience, well, only time will tell.  Enjoy:

Works Cited

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_%26_Night_(2010_film)