This week I took a look at another social media short story that got a lot of popularity on Facebook and Twitter. Coming from a couple of Pixar animators, Borrowed Time gained a lot of support and praise from critiques around the world. Their official website has only a teaser trailer, so I linked back to a youtube video instead. I originally watched it on an official Vimeo channel, but it has since been taken down.

The story is best experienced through the short, but it follows a ragged sheriff as he returns to the site of an accident that happened in his childhood. As he walks through the wreckage, now weathered and tattered, memories of that day come back to him, memories of the accident that killed the previous sheriff. As he relives that day, he has to come to terms with himself and find the strength to progress.

For the critique, I am looking at Writing, Originality, and Pacing.

Writing. The story in this is written beautifully. There are just a few spoken lines and they have such an impact because of their infrequency. They are very deliberate and tell us a lot about the characters and their relationship with each other.

Originality. Simply because the creators were Pixar artists, I was comparing this to a Pixar short. This is by far darker, grittier, and makes you feel a lot of emotions that Pixar shorts cannot simply by their nature of being consumed by children. This has a dark undertone, a real situation that isn’t just covered up and hidden, but dealt with on screen as the characters interact.

Pacing. The pacing here really impresses me. It starts off introducing us to the main character as an older gentleman, and as he moves forward, we are introduced to small portions of the story of the accident, until he comes to the conclusion, where we see him have to deal with his mistakes and come with the strength to overcome.