This honestly really got to me.
Pale Cocoon is a short, fairly experimental film mostly about two people who work as archivists in some kind of vast, underground, vertically-oriented colony. It is set well, well after some kind of devastating apocalypse that we don't know the nature of, but we can make some guesses.
Visually speaking, this film has aged honestly kind of amazingly. The CGI is definitely of its time, but it's employed super tastefully and with the exception of a tiny handful of shots I really never felt like it looked tacky or was overdoing it. There's a lot of spatial sense to the directing; lots of pivots, slides, etc. of the "camera" as though it were a real physical object. The UI design on the electronic books the characters use---a huge part of the story---is also really visually interesting and I'd honestly put this up there with Lain in terms of fictional UX I would kill to use.
Thematically, though. Woof. Essentially this is a...very frustrated film about the fate of humanity. Riko, the female lead, has a very relatable breakdown about halfway through the movie where she cries and yells at the male lead (Ura) about how she feels like their archiving job is pointless, seeing all of the mistakes that led humanity to where it is now---reduced to a handful of people in dying underground colonies---gives her no hope for the future. She wishes she understood *less* about how things got to this point. It's a really relatable impulse, but I think the film provides a careful (and gentle) rebuttal.
See, Ura's main driver throughout the film is that he's trying to decipher this....mysterious video from the archives he's found. It takes a while until he's fully able to watch it, and the whole time he's speculating about what it is and why it looks how it does---there's all these rapid cuts and it doesn't seem like the imagery makes linear sense---and when we finally see what he's actually found, it makes perfect sense to *us* watching: it's a music video! For a really sweet and beautiful song, also called Pale Cocoon, that, reading between the lines a little, seems to have been recorded as part of some kind of cultural time capsule. The singer, who is also interviewed on the same tape, mentions that the Earth is "rust-colored" and how she's been sent to some sort of space colony aboard an immigration ship, and how she's grateful, but how she misses the sky. This is enough to drive Ura, seemingly, to attempt to breach the surface, and the last moments of the film are him, floating in the air, because the colony, the twist is, is not on Earth at all, but on, seemingly, the Moon. (Hence *Pale* Cocoon we suppose.)
Is this a happy ending? Honestly it's open to interpretation---there's a real case to be made that Ura's literally about to die, so that would not be great!---but there's a real tranquility there, and the final shot of the Earth, now its natural pale blue instead of the toxic rust color of the time of the archive's recording, gives it a really strong optimistic overtone. Like I said, it really got to me in a way I did not see coming at all. Great little film and I highly recommend it....gosh.
