Buried Treasure Glassy Ocean  by Justin Sevakis, Jun 25th 2009
Glassy Ocean: Leap of the Whale (Glassy Ocean: Kujira no
Chōyaku)  It's hard to know where to begin with a short film
like Shigeru Tamura's Glassy Ocean. Like most experimental
animated shorts it's ostensibly a children's piece, one with
such nuance and beauty that perhaps a child would connect to it
in a way that an adult simply wouldn't know how to. It's
reflective of how a child sees the world in his or her mind's
eye, a visual flight of fancy that traps a moment of imaginative
splendor and preserves it as if in amber.  A boy on an ocean
liner stands at the railing with binoculars, looking out upon
the vast ocean. A man (presumably his father) asks if he sees
anything, and he does... but just some flying fish. "I'll bet
there's a really big fish with his eye on us," his father muses.
From there, the ocean turns into a vast sea of green glass,
suspended in its perpetual motion. The idea of the ocean as
glass isn't a new one; rather it's someth