"Le Spark" is an animation about fireflies. Some animations have deep meaning. Some are just light entertainment. I'm putting this in the latter category, though, if you're really into the mating habits of fireflies you may disagree.

Anyway, this is a cute three-minute animation with a lot of, well, cute touches. There's a lot of nice detail and flourishes that make you forget before the three minutes are up that these are, well, fireflies. That things go, shall we say, "wrong" may bring back memories of some of your own dates. But there's a lot of truth in the interaction of these little guys. As usual with this sort of thing, we're not really talking about fireflies, are we?

It appears a great deal of effort went into making "Le Spark." The background music is well-done and apparently original. I assume they used the resources of a university to assemble everything together, else I don't know how you get that much input on an independent animation on any kind of a reasonable budget. The end product is what matters, and it is definitely quite fun.

Directed by Nathaniel Winckler (natewinck.com)