Every film is only as it is, not as you'd prefer it to be. Find fault with a film's concept, or its execution, but with its duration? Every frame of that film is as essential a part of its identity as any other - if you feel a good film drags out into a bad film, that its resolution overwhelms what came before it, you're discounting the value of that resolution against that of the rest of the film. Maybe it's the other way around - maybe the rest of it was too short for a pretty good resolution. Still, there's a certain delight in discovering a film that's precisely the length it ought to be, and since such a delight has come in the form of Inner Workings, you can surely imagine that I was entirely delighted upon watching it. The scenario is inventive, but it's the manner in which Leonardo Matsuda devises schemes to mobilize that scenario into a fully-fledged work of actual, identifiable art that turns it ingenious. And while it's fittingly so, Inner Workings identifies the ease with which animation can strike, so uncannily, almost ironically, at the viewer's heart, and the near-necessity of exploiting that ease, thus evolving swiftly (this is a short film, after all) into a work that's equally affecting. It's quite the charm at such a clip, and in that its brevity allows such little space to slip up; yes, this is the perfect duration for Inner Workings, if for no better reason than that, at any longer, it might have broken its short, sweet spell by some misstep or another. But as it is, I wouldn't prefer it to be any other way.
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