Coddiwomple

A small bird is trying to capture and eat an unusual fruit. The fruit seems to have a mind of its own and it’s always escaping when the bird tries to catch it. Determined to snatch the fruit, the bird is drawn further away from his home. Along the chase, the bird does through different unknown places and encounters bizarre creatures, who are somehow trying to distract him from his goal. He stays focused and eventually captures the magic fruit, takes a bite out of it, but to his big surprise he is disgusted by the taste. Lost in the forest, without a goal to chase he realises that his body is completely transformed. In fact the bird is no longer a bird, but more of a feathered human. Throughout the chase he has gradually been changing into a human. When he decides to go back home, following a passing flock of birds, he finds out that his adventure has reshaped him completely and he no longer belongs to his own past. So he is left stuck, lost and directionless in the present moment.

Director’s statement
The goal of this short is to examine the notions of desire and change. If desire is the fuel that drives us forward, then the worst thing that could happen is actually to attain what we desire. It’s an examination of the underwhelming and “empty” sensation you get when you’ve finally achieved your goals. Where do you go after that? In “Coddiwomple” the bird protagonist is gone through so much change that his goal has become meaningless and he has become a foreigner to his past self. He is left wondering, without direction and in a sense he’s reborn into a kind of traumatic freedom.
My goal with this film is to examine my personal frustrations into this absurd, contemporary fairytale, as an antithesis to the "circular" pattern of the hero's journey, thus relating more to a forward line filled with arbitrary occurrences in which the hero stumbles or "coddiwomples" through life.