Moon &
the Dolphin 

An animated feature in development. A Cornish fishing village, a few years after the First World War. Moon is a fisherman’s son with Down syndrome: cheerful, ignored, and, like every child in the village, afraid of the sea and never taught to swim. The older boys hunt him for sport, through the streets and alleys, over the walls, down into a cellar, and everyone in the village knows what a Moon Hunt is. None of them think of it as cruelty.

Then a dolphin finds him in the shallows. Moon is terrified of the water and she is patient: she waits, she circles back, she lets him hold her fin until he can let go. In a hidden cove the village can’t reach, the boy they hunt learns to swim. She is the first one to see him as he is, and they stay friends for years.

Two things had to be right before anyone could picture the film. Moon had to be a particular boy and not a condition, so we drew from research and reference of real children rather than a type. And the village had to be a real place: Cornish luggers at their moorings, a granite jetty, the sea wall where everyone sits and watches the water without going in.

Nobody funds a feeling. So the trailer is made in the finished style of the film rather than as a pitch for it: a minute of a film that doesn’t exist yet, about a boy who kept waving at a village that never waved back, until the day it did.

Feature · In Development