A Boy And His Dog Wreck Your Emotions In This Three-Minute Short, Spacebound

By Nick Venable | Updated

Before watching this, realize that it’s a heart breaker. It’s NSFW only if you don’t want to get teary-eyed in front of your coworkers.

I would love to applaud animator Kyle Moy and 3D artist Ellen Su for their beautifully rendered and optimism-imploding short film Spacebound, seen above and tracked by the filmmakers on their website. But I think my applause would have their faces in between my hands, and it would just be me slapping both of them for making me feel so goddamned meaningless, sitting behind my computer screen, wanting to sip a beer that had long since gone empty.

In less than three minutes, all appreciation for life accelerates a thousand-fold, as we watch a young boy and his dog take on the ending that so many of us never reach — one of togetherness and minimal sorrow. I can imagine troubled people who never had a child or a pet or a friend or a clue not being affected by this short, but Moy and Su clearly aren’t those kinds of people.

This is like the opening of Pixar’s Up mixed with the “Jurassic Bark” episode of Futurama, all rolled into one tiny cup of tear-filled miso soup. It’s only miso because I want to drown my sorrows in sushi, because I love sushi, and if I knew I was going to die in the next so-and-so minutes, I would gather my friends at a sushi restaurant, and we would drink hearty. But having a game of fetch across celestial bodies sounds pretty fucking cool too. Gah, I just want to get under my desk now. Here’s something more light-hearted about something just as terrible.