I watched a fairly recent film on television this week. Family animation Epic (2013) reminded me how we live in a small world. But this small world has big life.

Epic home garden

The home garden in Epic is a small world, but a big life.  Epic’s garden contain big powers of life.

Epic’s father character is obsessed with finding tiny creatures. While he’s scurrying around for them, his daughter thinks he’s paying too much attention on a fantasy. However, when she joins the tiny people and insects in their garden, after getting shrunk their size, you can guess how her opinion of her father changes. She discovers a whole world of life.

These are the forces of life preventing decay, helped along by the tiny humans. Pestilent forces are the deadly bugs (with animated human features) and general environmental decay, but which can be stopped from taking over life.

Our world

And like Epic‘s garden world, our world is full of the powers of life though our world is really, really small. This small world we live in is “epic”.

For earth being such a lonely place in the known universe, we have so much life at our disposal.  In the known universe, we are pretty much alone. But there is so much life invested into this planet, that the mind boggles.

We just need to look at our backyards to see something of this life. As if we did not notice, home garden life are insects, flowers, plants, and birds, and it is absolutely lovely. This is a small world, but a big life.

The movie

Epic as a movie strikes a nice balance between what is familiar living and the other world in the garden and there are other nice juxtapositions like the newly shrunk young woman (who’s from the human world) who meets the handsome guy (but who’s actually from the tiny human world).

Voice work by Amanda Seyfried, Jason Sudeikis and Christoph Waltz Director: Chris Wedge