Rustbucket
In a city of sand and steel, a precocious young girl discovers a "friend" amongst the rubble.
World building is a hard thing to do in a feature script, never mind a short, but Rust Bucket from Colton Simpson uses just ten lines to take us to a future LA full of decaying materials both organic and mechanical. He also introduces us to our hero, Lylly, a tiny 9.5 year old little girl living her life as a scrapper.
LYLLY D'ya need a friend?
This is a story about friendship and sets about hammering home the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, and it does so with quite the punch. There’s moments here that take us back to the likes of WALL-E but Colton isn’t here to hold back and tell us something fit for a division of Disney - Rustbucket swings a lot harder.
Despite getting no response, Lylly sees something in the LAPD Defender Bot she has stumbled upon and, despite her slender build and tiny stature, sets about dragging the beast to her ramshackle home, in which lies something ominous and dark.
She soon gets that metal beast a new lease of life but nearly at the cost of her own. We learn why this public servant has been sent to the trash heap and she offers both care and repair to his mournful moans.
LYLLY Why would someone throw you away?
Then things take a turn and we see a sad side to this future dystopia which is worrying familiar in our own. Trash and treasure take a new meaning and, well... this line says it all.
GONTHER See Jhames? I love the fiesty ones.
The final conclusion, you’ll have to read it to see yourself. Just like raw iron oxide, it ain’t pretty.
Despite the rundown World it encapsulates, this script is highly polished from the storytelling to every word that carries us on our journey. There’s a good reason why it won the Reddit Short Film Proverb Contest and any filmmaker rummaging through all the short scripts out there needs to take a look at this gem that's just begging to become animated.
