Film Review: Timeless

In the art stylings of Dali meets Monet, comes a dreamy musical number “Timeless” from the animated film series Alan the Musical. Alan the Musical is about an inanimate lion plushie that is offered sentience and a chance to spend a lifetime with his human companion.

The easy-listening ballad “Timeless” sung by Matthieu Eymard focuses on memory as a theme. Cleverly that theme is carried through the visuals. Alan and his human show moments of bonding, walking together as time passes, visiting old historic monuments. History and memory are intrinsically linked. They are what enable living beings to be timeless as the lyrics, poignantly written by Christina Teenz Tan, point out.

Creative Director Susan Lim and Director of Animation, Samundra Kajal Saikia, nailed a dreamy, nostalgic art style for the song. The art weaves surrealistic images of Dali’s melting clocks with repeated patterns like Alan’s eyes looking like stars in the sky with an entirely different impressionist style that showcases bright colors with lots of texture. It’s bold, emotional, and makes the whole piece feel alive as if vibrating.

The animation is clean, crisp with fluid movement. It keeps you immersed in the story without calling attention to itself. The music by Ron J Danziger flows with the smooth, serene animation and features calming acoustic riffs that pluck at your heart strings.

Even though the song is called “Timeless,” it really seems like a reflection on mortality. It’s an optimistic outlook that states we stay alive through our memories and monuments. Perhaps there is no stopping our telomeres from shortening, but we can still stay alive in the abstract.

The tragic beauty of the song is that by the end, implicitly, Alan, the plushie, now knows about death as well as life. But he is seeing time as relative. He presumably realizes that time can be captured and reviewed later as you continue to move forward. That is a painful but beautiful truth about living as a human.