The animated short "Lost and Found" actually discusses the same old topic: growing up and saying goodbye. But the imaginative presentation makes the story uniquely interesting and memorable.
The interpretation of this story is inseparable from the discussion of the following questions: What are those things without owners? Who are their owners? Why were they abandoned? Where do they end up going?
Although cats and dogs are human pets, their lives are essentially given by nature, and they are only a dependent symbiotic relationship with humans. But those things without owners are different. They are born with the imprint of humans. The reason why they can show the characteristics of life-like bodies is because humans have given them "life".
This is the meaning of the strange shapes of the unowned things in the short film, which imply a close connection between such things and humans. This connection is spiritual, emotional, not material, so the friend who believes that "everything that exists physically can be identified by empirical methods" has a question about what the teapot monster is. , appears helpless.
However, as their masters, humans have abandoned and forgotten these antiquated things. They are "busy with their own business" and no one notices the existence of these unowned things. Why is this happening? Why have humans forgotten them? What do these unowned things symbolize?
The story takes place when the narrator "I" was a boy. That summer many years ago, a boy who was keen to collect bottle caps traveled through the gray city and found a teapot monster on the beach. The Teapot Monster "was sitting there doing nothing, with a strange look, just that sad, confused look".
The Teapot Monster showed friendliness and enthusiasm incommensurate with its large and monstrous physique, and it became the boy's most faithful companion. But the boy can't leave it at home, because the parents don't accept the monster, so the whole short story follows the boy's footsteps to see how he finds a suitable place for the teapot monster.
In a symbolic sense, the journey of finding a home for the Teapot Monster is the journey of the boy saying goodbye to his innocence and getting ready to enter the adult world. This can be seen in the film's many deliberate emphasis on the difference between boys and adults.
Take the attitude towards the Teapot Monster, for example, the boy wants to keep it, because the Teapot Monster has no place to go, and it is very pitiful; but the boy's parents don't think so, the mother thinks the Teapot Monster is too ugly and scary, and the father is afraid that the Teapot Monster will infect him with the virus . The starting point of the two parties, one is for others, the other is for themselves.
This is the biggest difference between children and adults: children are full of curiosity about the whole world, eager to explore and discover, and eager to establish various connections with the world; adults have long been accustomed to the world and ignore it, and they no longer care about where they are in the world, and are only concerned with their own desires and purposes—they seal themselves off from the world.
The reason why those unowned things can have life is that when human beings have not closed themselves up, they have poured their own emotions, beliefs, enthusiasm, and kindness into them. They are the extension and embodiment of human life vitality. Abandoning them means the decline of vitality.
Growing up is a helpless process. In the process of growing up, people always lose something, perhaps the accordion that they used to be with, the pencil compass used in class, or the innocent, enthusiastic and energetic self. The boy couldn't keep the Teapot Monster in that grim and dark storage building because he "really cared about it" and what the Teapot Monster represented. He can't stop the pace of growth, but he can still make a tender farewell to the past.
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