Amid lush and colourful nature, three children literally stumble upon a mysterious bone. The budding palaeontologists take turns imagining which creature it could have come from. Did it have fins? Paws? A tail? Or, best of all, perhaps all three? These hybrid animals appear on the screen like drawings that have been coloured with markers by kids, while most of the backgrounds and characters were done with watercolours and a mature level of skill. That, along with the sets made by hand from cut paper, serves to create a decidedly joyful world in which the story is told clearly without words in a way that young viewers can readily follow. We see the youngsters’ joy in making discoveries and giving free rein to their imagination even though their creativity clashes with the views of adults who are set in their ways. Each of these adults represents an authority – educational, parental or scientific – and either will not listen to them or refuses to even consider anything that does not conform to what they already know. Whereas the children wander around nature, the adults’ spaces seem constrained by school, the apartment or the museum from which we don’t see them come out. The film’s ending vindicates the children’s imagination and shows that imagination is not antithetical to scientific discovery – rather it can advance it.
