The 2023 short film The Day I Became a Bird distils Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrew Ruhemann's gift for delicate, emotionally resonant storytelling into a brief but luminous coming‑of‑age tale. The film follows Frank, a boy who becomes so overwhelmed by his bird-obsessed first crush that he painstakingly constructs an avian-inspired costume, wearing it to school as his feelings outgrow the limits of his small world. Ruhemann treats this metamorphosis not as fantasy spectacle but as a metaphor for the strangeness of early longing—that sudden sense of becoming other, becoming noticeable, becoming vulnerable.
With its soft visual palette and gentle pacing, the tender film captures the awkward poetry of childhood desire, offering a story that feels both whimsically surreal and quietly, universally true. The short was made using the Unity engine, and after its release it emerged that Ruhemann's company, Passion Pictures, was working with Dundee indie studio Hyper Luminal on a videogame adaptation of the film. The finished work is one of five titles featured in the BFI London Film Festival's Games Lounge, which forms part of LFF Expanded and is located in the BFI IMAX, where it is available for the festival's duration.
The four‑chapter game is available on Steam, PlayStation and Nintendo, and I played the Steam version. I did encounter one notable bug, which caused the game to crash repeatedly at a point where the player is prompted to flip over a school chalkboard. In the end, the workaround involved temporarily turning the master audio volume all the way down, after which the chapter played out smoothly. Other than this, there were no performance issues of note. As the game—like the film—is primarily aimed at younger children, the controls are nice and simple, and can be further streamlined via the menu's accessibility options.
The game sticks closely to both the film's story and its hand‑drawn art style, as Frank undertakes his quest to catch the eye of Sylvia, his dream girl. As such, it carries the same effortless charm as its source material (which in turn was based on the eponymous book), and its gentle challenges make for a pleasant and relaxing couple of hours. While you could barrel through the game in under an hour, that approach seems contrary to its mellow sensibilities, which extend to omitting the film's scenes of Frank being picked on by his unthinking classmates. For such a short game, the RRP is a little steep—although the Steam version includes a download of the film—but it's a title worth picking up at a reduced price.
