"Nowhere did that feeling register more strongly than in Leto S. Meade and Agata Leniartek’s The Fishman, hands down the most visually entrancing of the menu. An animated short chronicling a dying fish’s last moments, it follows its moribund hero – a humanoid fish sporting a Where is Waldo? striped shirt – as he travels through an Escher-like incubus of shapeshifting landscapes, circus choreographies, and food chains. It’s a hallucinatory journey through different worlds and visual media: one minute we follow the fishman as he stares at his pencil-coloured reflection on a pond, the next we jump into a purple ocean, the waves no longer hand-drawn but made of digitised polygons, squares heaving and falling like flakes into the abyss.

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The hypnotic charm of The Fishman lies in its playfulness, its magic in the way the whole journey is seamlessly stitched together, so that the transitions between different styles unspools as a single, entrancing continuum. And if the aesthetic turns the film into a lysergic trip, Jack James Riley’s sound design adds a spiritual touch that makes the odyssey a surprisingly moving experience, interweaving electronic melodies with a haunting rendition of Mary Pickney’s “Been in the Storm So Long”, whose refrain, “Oh lord, give me more time to pray,” echoing as the fish draws his last breath, doubles as a singular hymn to cross-species empathy. The highlight of the night – and in retrospect, of the entire festival – was this: a short that packed more ideas in its 4 minutes and 40 seconds than many feature-length films ever do."

- Leonardo Goi, 1st Long Distance Film Festival