Rewind Virtually to the Past with ‘Cycles’ (Review)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
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October 23, 2018
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3 min read

Disney Animation treads familiar ground in their first virtual reality short

I’m in the foyer of a very stylish Mid-Century Modern home, with huge windows, a pool in the backyard, a sunken living room, and an eat-in kitchen. The water in the pool shimmers in the California sun and I can almost make out the hills just beyond the stone wall — we look like we might up in the hills above Los Angeles, but I’m not quite sure exactly where I am or when I am. The house is empty but suddenly starts to fill with furniture. Bits and pieces of a life well-loved start to flutter to life all around me—and a family emerges.

Rae, the aging matriarch of the family is having a serious conversation at the kitchen table about moving into assisted living. Her adult daughter, Rachel, concerned, sits next to her. I’m a fly on the wall as she says to Rachel, “it’s only temporary.” Then cardboard boxes start to pile up around me and the furniture around me begins to disappear. It’s moving day. Time to say goodbye.

The heart of the piece takes us to either present (or the recent past), and then zooms backwards in time, as we see the now-adult daughter growing younger and younger in each scene. She’s a teenager sneaking in after hours. She’s a little girl. We travel back through the years until we see the pregnant mother dancing with her husband, an partially-assembled crib next to them. And they end their dance with a kiss reminiscent of a certain Life magazine cover. The vignettes fade in and fade out in 360 degrees around the viewer, with characters sometimes popping up startlingly close as they make their house a home. The retro-leaning animation style is, as expected, gorgeous and fitting perfectly with the architecture of the house and the framework of the story.

In a pre-experience reel, creator Jeff Gipson explains that the two main characters are directly inspired by his grandparents’ relationship and his family’s own experience with moving them into an assisted living residence. If you’re the type of person who cried at the beginning of Up (guilty) or at the end of Coco (ditto), you’ll find yourself in a similar emotional place with Cycles, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Cycles is Disney Animation’s first foray into VR and is both satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. It’s a short film, and it’s, well, incredibly short, capping out at a whopping three minutes long. The viewer doesn’t really have time to do much but process what happening around them; your only agency is choosing the perspective from which watch the story. But the amount of story packed into a three minute experience is astonishing; taking the headset off, the transition back into the real world felt totally jarring.

I saw the piece at the New York Film Festival as part of their Convergence programming and my fellow attendees had a lot of questions around where this could go in the future. Cycles has similarities to the animated shorts that precede Pixar movie screenings, and yet, VR hasn’t quite yet hit the mainstream in that fashion. And it also seems absurd to envision this as a standalone, ticketed experience in the future since it is both so short and requires expensive gear to view. Perhaps best to look at Cycles not as a finished VR work but more as a taste of what’s yet to come from a storytelling juggernaut, bringing an emotional weight to what’s possible in VR.

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