Dandelion's Odyssey

In the wake of a catastrophic nuclear event on Earth, four dandelion achenes (or seeds) — dubbed Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto, and Taraxa — catapult themselves into space, crash-landing on a distant planet.

Filmmaker Momoko Seto crafts a richly imaginative voyage of exploration, friendship, and resilience entirely without dialogue. The tale’s heroes express themselves solely in the shaking of a stalk, the rustling and occasional stress-shedding of fuzzy pappi, the delicate hairs that help the seeds fly. Yet their distinct personalities emerge as they face various challenges in rooting down in alien soil.

This new world has elements of both the familiar and the otherworldly: there are garden slugs and fungi that resemble the mushrooms on Earth but with a hyperaccelerated growth rate, while dreamlike sea creatures float through both the vacuum of space and air as though in the depths of the ocean. As our achene adventurers adapt and survive, their journey mirrors the human experience of migration — voluntary or forced — and our impending crisis in navigating a transforming planet.

A quiet fable about nature’s infinite capacity for regeneration in the absence of human interference, Dandelion’s Odyssey may draw thematic comparison to Flow (TIFF ’24) but remains singular in its execution. Seto’s team employed an intricate blend of time-lapse and ultra–slow motion macro footage shot across Japan, France, and Iceland, StackShot imaging, and robotic motion rigs with 17 cameras running simultaneously to capture miniature plant sets in studios. The result is a visually transcendent hybrid of live-action and computer-generated compositing that expands the boundaries of genre and animated storytelling.

ROBYN CITIZEN