Spoiler Alert
Available on Apple TV Plus
Joe Mateo’s computer animated short film, Blush, is definitely his most personal to date. After working on high-profile movies like Meet the Robinsons and Big Hero 6 in varying capacities, to see him direct is a win. In the former, he wrote the story about a boy getting a glimpse of the future, but is facing abandonment issues (he was left at an orphanage), and the latter, about a teen who loses his big brother and fears he has no one close to be with ever again.
The theme of loss is common for this storyteller, and he ups it another notch by exploring what it’s like to lose hope when a spaceship crashes on a desolate dry planet, and there’s no way to call for help. He’s somewhere in the boon dogs of space, and the small planetoid he lands on is bereft of life.