the short life and times of a little meteor…

You've probably never seen a meteor quite like this...

Movies feature alien encounters of virtually every kind, from altruistic little gray humanoids who come down to bring us peace and understanding, to vicious extraterrestrial monsters who want to exterminate us and mine our planet of every last valuable mineral. But animators Sascha Geddert and Wolfram Kampffmeyer decided on a rather unusual alien encounter as the subject of their short: following a little anthropomorphic meteor as it wakes up just before it's about to rocket through our planet's atmosphere, headed for a big splashdown.

I know, I know, it's a tad reminiscent of the sequence with the sperm whale from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy minus the witty dialogue and a depressed robot to pontificate on the futility of existence. But by focusing solely on the little meteor's flight, I think it demonstrates one of those strange things about humans. We like to give everything around us, even inanimate objects, our features and relate to them by doing so. In kids' movies we do it with animals and toys. For adults, we do that with robots and aliens in sci-fi movies. And now, a team of animators did the same thing with a meteor plunging through the air as so many meteors do every day…