The Imagination is a Very Powerful Thing

Last week, my friend Kathy's son, Milo, 9, watched Ark for the first time, and he made these effortlessly profound statements and descriptions:
• Are they looking for the sea or what? Are they looking for a map of the sea?
• It's like a scavenger hunt.
• I guess they're using their imagination. The imagination is a very powerful thing.
• Oh look, it comes back to the beach; I always thought that would happen. It could go to all these places--to China!
• [The narrator of the last scene says "cause if you don't tell a dream, it might come true. I knew that it was gonna come true."] Sometimes the universe speaks to you in dreams. The universe spoke to her.
• It was hard to open. . . probably because it was very, very old.
• They kept on adding dolls. . . through generations.
• The universe is very strong to that family.
• The dream was completely true about everything. Every single thing.
• [The children put the box in the ocean]. Just as it has been, for generations and generations.
The contemplative Ark seems to have held the gaze of this thoughtful child who I thought was at the higher end of the age spectrum. Turns out that Kids First! Film Festival's child jury named Ark an official selection this year, and the festival labelled it appropriate for a 5-12 year old audience. That was a jump into the older regions of childhood, for Ark, but after hearing Milo's fascinating commentary, I agree that the 9-12 year-old set should definitely see it.

Notice that above, in Milo's drawing of the lid from the box, which the children discover and interact with throughout the story, he includes a representation of the photograph that is part of the inside of the lid of the box, so it's a drawing of a photograph, but not only that: Milo has drawn the box itself into that photograph. Once he told me that, I pulled out the real box itself and showed it to him, and he checked to see if the box was there in the photograph, inside the box lid. It was not. But shouldn't it have been?

Here are two more works of art Milo made that day, "Deep Space" and "Abstract":