The keystone of the short is the moment following the point where Landreth tells Larkin he wishes Larkin would give up alcohol. Landreth put the question to Larkin on the last day of interviews, and he had no idea what to expect. In fact Larkin was slightly inebriated at the time, and in the 20 seconds of silence that followed, he laughed it off before exploding “What?”

Landreth brought it up because alcohol contributed to the untimely death of his own mother, Barbara. He could see a lot of his mother in Ryan, and he said as much. “That angry response of his, as you see quite clearly in the film — I thought, ‘There’s no way I can leave that out,’” Landreth says. “But if I was to include that, along with the line about my mom, that really forced a lot of issues, and the big issue of course was ‘I’d better get myself in there.’ If I had not put myself on screen, at best it would have been coy to suggest that and not follow through, and at worst it would have been voyeuristic toward Ryan.”

The exchange captured on tape is extraordinary enough; what appears on screen is just as amazing — 20 seconds of animation that represent one of the truly great acting moments of the year. In person, Landreth says, Larkin simply tried to laugh off his comments. On screen, animator Sebastian Kapijimpanga has turned the moment into a miniature epic of gestures and interior decisions. Ryan’s hands and head move through one thought after another, each decision closing a door behind it, ending in a shrug that seems to indicate acceptance. It makes Ryan’s barked-out “What?” that follows even more shocking. “It’s an extraordinary 20 seconds,” Landreth says.

When he’s not traveling, Landreth is currently doing consulting work, plus twice a year he does a three-hour course on animation for students at the University of Toronto. In terms of his next project, he’s keeping his cards close to his chest, but he says a feature is probably not his ultimate goal. “I’m not using any of my films as a calling card for a feature film,” Landreth says. “The stylizations I do would not carry through a feature. There is so much more room for experimentation in a short, where in a feature you have practical constraints and narrative constraints. It would be really hard to do a movie that didn’t have your classic three-act structure.

“The short film is a completely misunderstood and completely underutilized form in telling stories. Part of me would like to stay doing it forever.”

Taylor Jessen is an author living in Burbank. He was the only third-grader in his class with credit card debt.