Pearl is a 2016 animated short film, directed by Patrick Osborne, the director of previous Oscar-winner Feast.
A little girl named Sara grows up touring around the country with her father, an itinerant musician. They spend years living in an old hatchback, playing on sidewalks and corners, as the girl grows from a small child to a rebellious teenager to an adult.
Made in 360-degree virtual reality, the view of the film can be manipulated by the viewer.
Tropes:
- Age Cut: One shot shows Sara and her two friends, a girl and a boy, piling into the back of the hatchback. The film cuts to the same three kids, all still in the back seat, but at least five years later or so with all of them teenagers. The other two kids wind up in Sara's band.
- Call-Back: Sara and her father play a game where they hold their breaths whenever they drive through a tunnel. Years later, when she's tooling around with her band, Sara and her bandmates do the same.
- Flashback: This scene is interrupted with a very brief flashback to little Sara and her dad doing the same.
- Daddy's Girl: Sara clearly adores her father. At the end, when she's hit it big, she picks him up and brings him to her concert.
- Drives Like Crazy: Multiple scenes of both the father and Sara playing guitar—which takes two hands—and driving a car at the same time.
- Happy Ending: Ends with Sara hitting it big—with a band named "Pearl"—and bringing her father to a concert.
- How We Got Here: A young woman retrieves an old hatchback. As she gets inside, the film becomes a portrait of her life with her father in the car.
- Missing Mom: So where's the mom? One scene shows the father and Sara leaving a house, with a standard nuclear family of four waving goodbye, the father looking a bit wistful. Is that the mom, with a new husband and two more kids? Or other relations?
- Skinnydipping: Not with her father! Later, after Sara has formed her own band, one scene has the lot of them skinnydipping in a lake by the side of the road.
- Street Musician: How the father makes a living. When Sara gets old enough to play an instrument, she joins him in their act.
- Time-Passes Montage: The whole movie, pretty much, with scene after scene as Sara grows into adulthood.
