Every parent and child can identify with this little girl who struggles to get to sleep. Equipped with her pocket torch she takes on the dark and the strange shapes that the night lends to the things around her. Her bedroom becomes a small theatre of shadows, a mini-cinema in which she learns to overcome her fears and turn them into creative forces. At first Matilda is scared of the monster’s head projected on to her wall, but then she realises it was formed by the shadows cast by her stapler and pencil pot – and that she, too, can conjure with these ... Similarly, she comes to understand that by moving things closer to or farther from the light source, she can make characters seem bigger or smaller and more or less imposing!
In a realistic set and with very detailed stop-motion animation (you can even spot a reference to the technique above Matilda’s bed, where there’s a poster of My Life as a Zucchini by Claude Barras), Irene Iborra and Eduard Puertas offer us a treat that carefully blends fear and excitement. Children will have no trouble relating to this short film which may help them put words and images on their own nocturnal worries.
