‘Moonfish’ Review: Morgan Spector and Lucy Liu Voice a Spare but Evocative Animated Sci-Fi Suffused With Loneliness

A study in sadness, loneliness and the quixotic struggle to survive extremes, grayscale animated feature Moonfish offers an eerie, resonant microdrama set five hundred years or so from now. Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Zvereff’s feature debut after some lovely shorts (including Drago and Life Is a Particle Time Is a Wave ) offers a deeply dystopian vision of the future wherein pairs of astronauts are little more than indentured servants, sent to mine asteroids with pickaxes, forewarned that if they don’t meet their quota, no one will come to collect them.

Morgan Spector and Lucy Liu voice one such ill-fated couple, bringing warmth to material that might otherwise have felt overwhelmingly depressing until a welcome upbeat ending glows up the story with a bit of color. Zvereff’s handmade, extremely spare and minimalist aesthetic, served up in a boxy, claustrophobic 4:3 ratio and featuring bald humans drawn with just a few fine lines, will limit this commercially to arthouses, fests and adventurous streamers. But the talent on display whets the appetite for the multihyphenate’s next projects after this work’s debut in Venice as part of the wider Biennale College. Related Stories Movies 'NAZA' Israel-Gaza War Doc Sets U.S. Theatrical Release Movies 'Woman Unknown' Wins Golden Lion in Venice: Full Winners List Moonfish The Bottom Line In space, no one can hear you cry. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Biennale College Cinema) Cast: Morgan Spector, Lucy Liu Director/screenwriter/editor: Daniel Zvereff 1 hour 29 minutes

The opening minutes showing Cassius (Spector) and Vesper (Liu) sleeping in bed together on a space station, barely distinguishable given that both are bald and kitted-out in baggy clothes, suggest they are a romantic couple, although their interactions seem pretty sexless. They’re more like intimate co-workers, who quietly prepare to set off on a landing craft for an asteroid on which they have been contracted to collect chunks of rock for 355 days, the latter representing the amount of time it will take them to orbit the sun.

There is one more crew member making the journey with them: a goldfish, living in a plastic bag like the kinds of fish we here on earth win as prizes at fairgrounds. The piscine companion isn’t just there for the relaxing spectacle of watching it swim around though. Astronauts bring them on journeys to keep an eye on whether or not the water filtration systems are working, much the way miners used to take canaries down to the coal mines to check for poisonous gas leaks.