An effective animation with indirect hints to something of value

Rating: 8/10 (6 February 2014)

You gotta love animation. It's a natural breeding ground for fun, boundless creativity and innovation, without taking itself too seriously. When done competently, it gives us glimpses of multiple structural narrative elements at the same time (layers of realities, references, allegories etc.). These elements are not meant to be completely developed. Instead, they are supposed to reveal something important about the genre and its target audience.
This starts with a 2 dimensional "incomplete" framing story that puts "everything" into perspective. However, it's not until an hour into the main story that we are allowed to compare it to the repressed memory of the bear as we observe the process of assembling the puzzle/achieving "inner piece". Indirectly, this hints how deeply intimate shared narration and creation of complex mental constructs can be. This aside, as always, there are several nice visual and verbal references(e.g. games, movies, people) that help us bridge the gap between the outer reality and the inner ones. See this, it's good.
I did not particularly like the poke at China but I do not see it going away anytime soon. The mentality has been there for decades. After a while, it gets amusing.
4/5 - Worth a watch