“The Windshield Wiper” follows a middle-aged man at a café, chain smoking his way through asking a simple question: What is love?
This short film tries to answer that question through a series of different vignettes using a variety of visual styles.
This is a highly-anticipated film from animation star, Alberto Mielgo.
He is a director and an animator best known for his work: Love, Death + Robots.
Many people may not understand the storyline of this film because it focuses on the question asked from the beginning—but it gets beautiful as the unique art style carries the whole transformation of the mood. The next few minutes into the film will be a montage of how people perceive love or how people want to see it the way they want to. Mielgo proves that love is enormous and indefinable through this film.
In vignette films, you will come to appreciate the simplicity of the scenes when it’s very short and vague. You rather focus on answering your own personal question you made inside your head rather than having to critique it first.
Mielgo even said that the meaning of love kind of changed drastically over the past generations and this inspired him to come up with this concept.
The art approach used was surreal to realistic approach. Other than that, to achieve its aesthetic, they used painterly backgrounds and a mix between 2D and 3D to offer a film that is simultaneously old school and intrinsically modern in the way it uses new animation tools.
Mielgo’s style is trying out 3D possibilities but leaning more on a simple narrative that contrasts the visual style.
This is not the typical art style used in mainstream films. His style is personal and always realistic. It’s an abstract story about an abstract concept with no explanations or easy answers.
In the past years, many mainstream films moved away from Disney style of hyper realistic 3D. Some of those films include ‘Spider-Verse’ and ‘Klaus’ and this paved way and gave validation to Mielgo’s approach in his own style of animation rather than pursuing hyper realism.
