This is my very first completed film as an animator.

It is a film inspired by education in my home country, China, where there are still a lot of students suffering from unreasonable amount of homework and punishments.

In my film when glasses wrote “What’s the point of studying” in his letter to Mr Thief, what I really wanted to ask is: What is the purpose of education? As I remember a line from the book The Courage To Be Happy:

“The objective of education, in a world, is ‘self-reliance’. “

And I think, at least, is not to define a child by grades and numbers, and to make it the only value one lives for; at least it is not to destroy a child’s curiosity to the world by giving pressure; and is not to trap a child with trauma that the parents haven’t overcome in their lives.

It’s more about how we live as a person, and I want to quote another line I saw elsewhere: To let a child become himself, to become a real person. And due to the time limitation, I could only express the 2 adults completely negatively in the film–their personalities formed during the time they grew up, which reflects the characteristics of the generation. —and so do us.

The film took 1 year and 10 months from start to finish, I have experimented a lot and learnt a lot–as well as feeling hopeless as the whole educating system is a huge complex social problem. Having said that, my intention at the very first beginning is just want to speak out for some of my friends. It was as simple as that.ob