22 The Lost Thing

The story starts with this guy, a bottle cap collector, also called the protagonist. getting out of the train. You can already see the city looks very busy, signs everywhere, very industrial. He walks over to some stairs where he finds a bottle cap. He puts it in his collection. The stairs lead to a beach where he went for a walk. He was looking around him but didn’t seem to find many coins. But after a little while of walking he saw something enormous sitting in the sand(1:35). He goes to check it out. It starts moving, the guy found out there’s life inside this monstrosity. big octopus arms and crab claws come out of certain holes of this machine. 1 latch opened of this machine type creature, it spit out a volleyball. He just wanted to play with the bottle cap collector. He was throwing the ball while the creature would run after it and bring it back. When the guy throws the ball away, the creature comes back with a huge pipe, which is comedic. It was all part of a montage, throwing the ball, looking at the guys bottle cap collection, making a sand castle. Then the guy said one of the key sentences in this short film. “Soon there was no denying the unhappy truth. It was lost.” Which directly relates to the title of this story The Lost Thing. The protagonist then asked a few people on the street if they knew anything about it (3:48). No one seemed to know where he came from. He then went to a friend of his, who always knew what something was. He is a flat character because he only has a minor role in the short film. Sadly enough, he could also not figure out what it was. His parents are also flat characters, they’re only included for a short bit. The protagonists parents would not like it if he took the creature home. So it had to stay in the shed outside for the night. In the shed the guy throws all sorts of stuff into the creature. The bottle cap collector then saw a place on tv where he could bring this creature to drop him off (7:44). The next day the 2 go check it out. But when they got there, it was a very negative space, which had to be represented to show that it was like a flat antagonist, a minor part in the short film, but it was a antagonist. The short film uses sensory language throughout, such as the protagonist saying it smelled like disinfectant. The janitor that worked there told the 2 main characters that this was a bad place, and showed them a card with the direction to a better place. The 2 then followed those directions, which took a while. This was another comedic part, where there were so many signs leading everywhere that it was hard for them to find. They made this into like another montage, it was represented as a montage of a very long dramatic yet comedic trip. When they found it, they saw it was a small little gap in an anonymous street(11:19). They went into the gap, the creature almost doesn’t fit into the gap. The protagonist sees a key and turns it. It then starts turning by itself which make sit more magical. Then the huge door opened up, revealing a secret land of lost creatures which do not seem to fit into the real world. The place is the exact opposite of the real world, it’s very positive, alive, and natural, while the real world looks dark, negative, gray. The creature directly becomes very happy. The 2 main characters say goodbye, which they made very dramatic for effects. Then the creature went into this world, and left. The protagonist lives his boring life like he used to. He got a job, and was a part of society in that world. He started to notice less things that were lost or different. He thought that either less things were lost, or because he just didn’t notice it anymore.

I think the message behind this story is, that being different is good, because if we were all the same, the world would be very plain and boring. By being different, there’s lots more to learn from, more opinions, and it can make you happier being different, which the movie represented with the secret world which was very positive and the opposite of the world where everyone is the same.