Season Review: Belonging Season One

It can be hard to remember or keep track of how much time has passed, but the Covid-19 Pandemic first started spreading across the globe four years ago this month. Due to incompetent leadership in multiple countries, the lockdowns didn’t start until several months in, which would be the major cultural footprint of this event. Just about every place of business closed, families and friends forced to keep distance for their own safety, and productivity and mental health took a nosedive as some had to deal with the isolation all alone. In the case of actor Eric Bear, he decided to seek connection by bringing together a remote team of animators and filmmakers, using motion capture technology and the character rig creator Metahumans to create a series of shorts of intimate human moments to see if viewers can learn to connect and identify with “virtual people”. It’s an admittedly pretty ambitious idea, as well as a cool way to show that the spark for creating art can still thrive even during a global crisis, with artists from all over the world coming together. So, with all of that in mind, how did these ten shorts end up coming out?

Well, I have to be frank, not very good. Perhaps due to the rather abstract nature of these shorts, they basically all end up being monologues where Eric Bear is voicing someone who is sitting or standing and talking at another character (in some cases another character voiced by him) and bringing up details about a story we seem to just sort of stumble into and then stumble right back out just a couple minutes later. In the first short, he’s sitting and telling someone how he wishes he was dead because he had a great time at sea once. In the next (only one that feels like an actual dialogue), he’s telling his wife he doesn’t want anymore kids. Then he’s trying to relate to his son about a gay experience, a southern teen with his sweetheart talking about a duck hunting trip, a cop threatening a random guy who he thinks is hitting on his partner, a tech mogul who has a beef with some guy’s dead dad, or a son who wants to tell his old lawyer dad that he wants to play the piano. As an anthology, there doesn’t necessarily need to be a narrative throughline with these, but I feel like there should be a clearer consistent theme than just “Eric Bear clumsily exposits a character for three minutes”. The titles don’t do much to help either (Night, Water, Here, Duck, Partners, Trust, Rosaline, Fiction, Fire, and Farewell), with some only barely relating to the scene they’re for, and others not connecting at all.

Thankfully, if you do decide to watch this, it is pretty short, clocking at less than an hour. For something that was done under limited resources and done entirely remotely, this is certainly an interesting experiment, but that novelty is not going to make it any less weird to experience. I initially thought the use of 3D models would be incorporated into the plot in some way, like these are short stories about people meeting up in a VR Chat type setting, but no such luck. Two of these shorts are pretty much just Shakespeare recitations, which are fine on their own, but the PS2 level graphics aren’t a big help at selling the gravitas I think Bear wants to convey, and none of the original stories ended up seeming worth further exploration either. This whole thing can basically be summed up as neat, but weird. If it’s available for free anywhere, I’d recommend that over paying, because even the rent price is kind of a rip-off for not even 50 minutes of content.