Settling into a feature film as a shared experience—watching from start to finish—has become an almost Herculean feat. The mere proposal is greeted with a synchronized, collective sigh. When the choice is theirs, it inevitably falls upon the infinite scroll of YouTube ‘Shorts’: fleeting seconds of Roblox sessions and micro-sketches—a relentless stream of high-velocity stimuli consumed in rapid succession.
I realize now that this drift began years ago. Even when my five children were small, the animated classics that shaped our own imaginations were rejected out of hand. Stripped of cutting-edge 3D aesthetics and a frantic pace that denies any pause, those masterpieces were simply ‘boring’ to them. What was poetry to me was, to them, nothing more than stagnation.