Wild Summon (2023)

Swapping human beings - in pink and goggled wetsuits - for the fish, this entertaining short film takes us on the salmon run. From high upstream where they spawn through the perilous journey to the sea and then, of course, back up the river again to lay their eggs and start the process all over again. These folks face the same dangers the fish do - bears, long-beaked birds, trawlers and just as they feed on smaller things, they are fed upon themselves before some succeed - and even that merely delivers death from old age or exhaustion. The animation is fun, quirky and sometimes even a bit brutal displaying some parallels to the human rat-race of the day-in day-out routine, urban congestion etc. I did quite enjoy this.