Ten Minutes That Linger for Days

Read Time:5 Minute, 27 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Pocket Princess
–

Genre: Animation, Fantasy, Horror, Short
Year Released: 2024
Runtime: 10m
Director(s): Olivia Loccisano
Writer(s): Olivia Loccisano
Cast: Naiya Novak, Natasha Brault, Amie Reiman, Camille Blott, Maya Malkin, Pete Flatiche
Where to Watch: TBA

RAVING REVIEW: POCKET PRINCESS on the surface is miniature: stop-motion, threadbare fabrics, papier-mâché edges, and a dollhouse scale that invites you to lean in. The undercurrent is anything but small. Olivia Loccisano utilizes the tactile limits of the medium—visible seams, deliberate roughness, and handmade textures—as an emotional buffer, allowing the film to confront material that many live-action features refuse to touch. That choice isn’t just aesthetic; it’s a thesis. The deception keeps us from flinching long enough to process what the story is actually saying.

A young girl clings to her doll collection as the only constant in a life reordered by grief and predation. The collection becomes a private court, a chorus, a rulebook, and a dare. In a traditional fairy tale, dolls advise kindness, or cleverness, or patience; here, they press toward something more drastic. Loccisano stages the “advice” not as a cheap shock but as the final rung on a ladder you’ve been climbing since minute one. The film keeps cutting between the child’s ritualized tasks and the rituals of an adult world weaponized against her. What appears to be a game at first becomes a survival plan.

Form and content lock together. The slightly staggered motion communicates a body being careful—careful not to be seen, careful to do chores exactly, careful to keep a secret. The sets look handled, like objects that have been wiped and wiped again, a lived-in grime that reads as both domestic and menacing. You can feel the fingerprints in the dough, the lint on the bedding, the scuffed paint on a door. That texture is storytelling. It tells you how long this has been going on, and how much labor is represented by the word “home.”

A room hums in a way that never settles. The scrape of a chair and the distant echo of footsteps play like storm warnings. The score threads a lullaby through dissonance without getting ornamental; it steadies the film’s pulse and lets the darker notes ring out exactly when they need to. Nothing here is over-sweetened to soften the blow. The piece trusts the viewer to connect what’s implied with what’s shown and to understand why a child might accept this life when every other exit has been bricked over.

As a ten-minute narrative, it’s remarkably complete. Loccisano structures the story in a clear arc: a status quo that is never safe, a test that appears to be a game, and an outcome that refuses to offer easy absolution. The final movement doesn’t chase; it earns it. When the choice arrives, it lands with the heaviness of inevitability. The film is very careful about who carries the burden of that choice and about the frame through which we judge it. It’s not asking for celebration; it’s asking for comprehension—of what it costs a child to survive in a house where an authority is covered for harm.

The voice performances understand the assignment. Naiya Novak’s Anna speaks sparingly, allowing the animation to carry much of the feeling, but you can hear resolve gathering in the pauses. The adult voices arrive with a calm that reads as control first and coercion second; that reversal is the film’s point. The dolls—especially the “princess” that titles the piece—sound like a council that has learned human rules and found them useless. The guidance they offer is practical, not magical. That pivot is where the fairy tale turns into something like a case file.

There’s artistic confidence all over the screen. The puppets and set fabrication, and the way props reinforce the theme and little acts of bookkeeping, form a tight circle. Each element repeats in miniature what the story argues in full: that systems can be tidy and wicked at once, and that order can be a trap.

The film’s warning-label opening line—calling itself “a film for children. Perhaps.”—sets a daring tone. The piece is strong enough to trust viewers to find the parallels without any nudging. As it stands, POCKET PRINCESS is a powerful example of why the shortest work can carry the greatest weight. It treats stop-motion as both shield and scalpel, allowing us to step back from horror just far enough to examine it honestly. The craft is intentional, the storytelling disciplined, and the ethical line carefully drawn: compassion flows toward the child, accountability lands where it belongs. When the credits roll, the afterthought isn’t the cleverness of the form; it’s the human reality the form made bearable to face.

This is exactly the sort of short that belongs on festival programs and in classroom discussions—the kind of film people recommend with the caveat that it’s difficult, and then recommend anyway because difficulty sometimes equals truth. Ten minutes later, you know something you didn’t know before. And you can’t unknow it.

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