Short Film Highlight: Disney’s Modern Day ‘Jill & the Beanstalk’

With a heart full of the Christmas spirit, our mates at Show Me Shorts gifted the world a batch of choice fantasy short films they highlighted this December. I wanted to get in on the action by suggesting a fantastical short that you can show to the whole family, and very few fit the description better than Penelope in the Treehouse.

This Disney-produced short integrates an authentic family tale about a girl feeling lost in a new family with the whimsy of a grown child’s imagination – rendered with almost no digital effects. When her mother’s new partner and his three obnoxious kids move in, the frustrated Penelope grows a massive tree with a house in it to get away from them all. At first, she thinks being by herself is the greatest, most adult-iest thing ever – until she learns that living alone in the sky isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.