Children, MoMA curator Juliet Kinchin observed in her superb design history of childhood, “help us to mediate between the ideal and the real.” They perform this mediation as supreme masters of metaphor, bridging the real and the ideal by being fiercely unafraid of failure.

There is little more to say about this short film by Brooklyn-based filmmaker and radio producer Bianca Giaever, who asked a six-year-old to write a film with her, except that it’s on par with Neil Gaiman’s animated dream and among the loveliest things I’ve ever seen — a wondrous journey to the center of the imaginative, semi-sensical, immensely insightful consciousness of the child, which yields a profound piece of wisdom on overcoming fear and self-doubt.

Complement with John Gardner on what children can teach us about risk and personal growth, scientists’ and philosophers’ answers to children’s simple yet profound questions, and James Geary on what children’s minds reveal about the evolution of the human imagination.

Thanks, Dawn