Watch Cabbit: A Handmade Animation by Crosshatch Artist, Soogie

Those prone to using “twee” as a pejo­ra­tive, par­tic­u­lar­ly in con­nec­tion to the films of Wes Ander­son, should lay in a sup­ply of anti­dote before view­ing the ani­mat­ed short, Cab­bit.

Its cre­ators describe the tit­u­lar char­ac­ter as “a charm­ing lit­tle ani­mal spir­it whom (sic) spends its days tea-danc­ing with kin­dred spir­its and explor­ing the won­ders of the nat­ur­al world.”

As in The Lorax, indus­try and the fool­ish humans in its thrall are major bad­dies. But where­as the apoplec­tic Lorax takes an activist stance, Cab­bit drifts along, serene in its tweeds.

As eco­log­i­cal state­ments go, it’s pret­ty mild stuff.

For this view­er, the more intrigu­ing ele­ment is the back sto­ry. In ani­ma­tion terms, Cab­bit is a throw­back, painstak­ing­ly hand drawn with Sharpie mark­ers by a most­ly house­bound Mis­soula artist, who flies under the code name Soo­gie. His crafts­man­ship caught the atten­tion of sound design­er, John Kassab, who saw punk where oth­ers saw twee. Kassab may not pilot a diri­gi­ble or squash pos­sums with his Mod­el T,  but as humans go, he’s pret­ty up on tech­nol­o­gy. With Kassab as pro­duc­er, Soo­gie waged a Kick­starter cam­paign, suc­cess­ful­ly tea danc­ing with kin­dred spir­its who under­wrote the pur­chase of high end dig­i­tal equip­ment. Kass­ab’s next goal is to ush­er the oth­er­world­ly, anthro­mor­phic Cab­bit onto the film fes­ti­val cir­cuit. Til then, it must abide entire­ly with­in the con­fines of this steam­punk world we refer to as the Inter­net.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is Wes Ander­son­’s #1 Fan.