Right from the powerful opening image, the idea behind Dandelion’s Odyssey (Momoko Seto, 2025) is simple. We see the stars in the sky, the universe in all of its constellations, before the animation subtly shifts into a dandelion, equating the vastness of the cosmos with the infinite beauty of a single flower.
While Dandelion’s Odyssey boasts a unique animation style, almost photorealistic at times, quite bizarrely computer-generated in others, the overall story — depicting the travails of four dandelion seeds as they escape from a ruined planet and search for a new home — never hits the cathartic heights found in the best kind of animation.
Given that it’s a wordless eco-conscious cartoon about a non-human hurtling through a world that has been destroyed by humans, comparisons to Oscar-winner Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) — which played last year in Un Certain Regard — are hard to avoid. Where this film struggles and Flow soars is in its choice of characters. While a cat and his other animal buddies are easy to like and identify with, dandelion seeds, blown around by the wind, have no identifying/cute features, making for exceptionally passive characters.
This decision, certainly anathema to this cartoon’s future success as a children’s movie, is obviously intentional, yet it forces Seto into a difficult technical battle that is unfortunately not won here.
I’m not saying that the seeds have to start talking about their feelings like in a Dreamworks movie, but their complete absence of individuality makes them impossible to identify with. The Press Kit informs me that the four seeds are named Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa (and that they escaped nuclear disaster!)— but they all look so similar and move in the same way, that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart, let alone become emotionally invested in their story.
What starts off as a charming idea quickly grows tiresome and repetitive.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.