This short animated film is dark, philosophical, and a tad frightening. In the film, time seemingly passes faster as you get older, since each minute becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life with every passing second. The main character is so fixated on slowing his perception time that he forgets to enjoy life. This reminded me of something my Dad used to (and still) does tell me: “Don’t get too busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” This quote rings true to me and for this movie. The main character never has his mind in the present moment and misses out on enjoying many life experiences, such as fishing with his son or going to a bar with his friends in college. The real fault is that although time is passing by quicker, the main character is mentally stagnant throughout the entire film as he is mentally ‘stuck’ ruminating on time. The film was made so that the passing of time actually does go by quicker, so the main character gets older faster as the animation progresses. Toward the end of the film, he finds a Eagleman Stag beetle that can regenerate its own cells. Instead of using this discovery to cure cancer, or do something good in the world, he decides to create two elixirs: one to wipe his memories and another to regenerate his own nerve cells. This plan is supposed to slow his reception of time, and in a way, act as a new beginning. After ingesting the elixirs you see his grave, which illustrates that his life metaphorically ended after he wiped memories. Then you see that he is actually alive and is shown holding an earthworm, which is exactly what he did as a child at the beginning of the movie, but this time it does not even seem like he understands what he is looking at, where he is, or what is even going on. The last line talks about how he is now an intimate object, depicted as a gravestone. This is because after he wiped his memories, he was only a shell of a person; an empty, meaningless physical vessel that could not comprehend the world around him and had nothing to show for his entire life, almost as if he never existed at all.
My antidote to this dark film is something that the movie failed to portray: even though time seems to pass faster, one’s appreciation of every passing moment grows greater over time. The collective sum of one’s life experiences both good and bad--if you so choose to fully experience them and live in the present moment--will overcome the perceptual limitations of time itself and make everything worth it.
Psychologically, time seems to pass faster because as a child your brain is still developing (in particular, the areas needed for attention, inhibition of actions, and perception), which causes time to seemingly move slower. Little kids cannot hold their attention on one thing for very long and require many breaks during school because of this. As you grow older, those brain areas keep developing until around age 21 which is when your neural pathways are set. As the brain develops, our attention (total time we can spend focusing or waiting) and perception of time mature to make it seemingly pass at a faster rate. This along with the movie’s statement that each moment becomes a smaller portion of our life result in time seemingly passing faster.
