I’m kicking off a new Monday night spotlight series. Think of it as a weekly dive into animated (and occasionally not-animated) short films that punch way above their runtime. Little cinematic gems. World slices. Those “wait, why isn’t this a full movie yet?” moments we all love. I have a bunch of old ones I'll need to dig from my archives of liked videos.
And for the very first entry, I had to start with something that recently grabbed me instantly.
That something is The Lost Tower, a Blender short by concept artist Florent Lebrun.
A pilot, a plane, and an ocean full of ancient secrets
The premise is almost meditative, a lone pilot gliding above uncharted waters, searching for one of the fabled Lost Towers. No narration. No lore dump. Just atmosphere thick enough to bottle.
Lebrun’s painterly touch is everywhere: soft haze, massive structures half-buried in mist, and that beautiful tension between loneliness and discovery. It feels like a keyframe from a forgotten French sci-fi graphic novel… the kind you’d find wedged between Moebius collections and some obscure out-of-print RPG manual.
It’s not action-packed; it’s evocative. And that’s exactly why it works.
