The gorgeous short film called “The Short Story of a Fox and a Mouse” follows a hungry fox who is trying to find food in the snow during the cold, harsh winter. He sees a mouse and goes for it: the chase is on. However, then they meet two owls, and that leads the pair into danger when they accidentally end up running across a frozen lake. Somehow, working together, the two manage to get to safety and during all of this, a friendship formed between them. This is a delightful little film that’s absolutely timeless as it takes the audience through a beautiful forest in wintertime.
The landscape of the film was created in a realistic style but it has minimal stylization except for the beautiful trees, which you can see when the mouse is leaping up a tree via a mushroom. If the snow and ice seem hyper-realistic, it’s because they are. Both the snow and ice reflect light in an incredibly beautiful way just as they would do if you were watching a real-life mouse and fox chase around in a winter wonderland. When the fox is trying to escape the icy lake, the ice starts to lose some of its realism and the edges look a bit artificial. Also, the ice starts to lose the reflectiveness of the surface.
However, the snow remains wonderfully authentic throughout the entire film. In fact, you can see the snow around the characters reacting just as real snow does, as it crumbles around them with several layers of shadowing. As far as the characters go, they’re very interesting and although quite stylized, they’re also very realistic. For example, the fur on both the fox and the mouse is unbelievably realistic. You can actually see the individual strands of fur. When they’re underwater, the fox’s fur moves and reacts just as it would in real life. Also, you can see the wind blowing his fur.
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The level of detail in this little film is remarkable. Watch it below.