Lost in the Plot

What could have been an ordinary cut from one location to the next is instead a beautiful interlude that perfectly embodies the tone of the film. As a chance to exhale between two scenes heavy with action and dialogue, Andrew Stanton guides us from the dentist’s office to the open ocean in a sequence of five shots.

Accompanied by one of the best cues on the soundtrack (titled Haiku, in reference to the sequence), the camera glides through the window, into the deep blue and slowly towards the whale. For these few moments there is no overt storytelling or subject matter; instead we feel the ambient calm of the sea, the resonance of space. It’s a great example of filmmaking where mood, imagery and story are treated in poetic terms, more abstractly rather than literally. Tolstoy regarded transitions and context as the two most important elements of storytelling, and this sequence demonstrates how effective these can be.