I’ve been watching today’s film compulsively over the past couple of weeks, screening it in its entirety at least eight or nine times. With a runtime just a touch over three minutes, that’s not the biggest of lifts, but how many videos gladly inspire multiple repeat viewings like this?We’re Kind of Different hits my funny bone in just the right way, though, and has enough absurd asides and details to encourage this endless revisiting. A clever, subversive, and in spite of itself, poignant spoof of a children’s moralistic sing-along song, Ben Meinhardt has produced the kind of animated earworm that might live on in internet memory for years.The film is sung from the first-ummm…person(?) perspective of a tiny pale figure with a butt on the front of its body. The character makes its way through a drab office-like setting, singing its expository song, and while cheerfully conceding that theirs is an unusual body shape, it doubles down on the concept of everyone being special, and that our diversity is an ASSet.It’s goofy and vaguely scatological, and I struggle to define why it works so well, but I believe a key element is that it is rather sincere. Our butt character, and some other fellows that show up at the end, are designed by Meinhardt’s young son, and this sweet influence on the film modulates the shock humor. There is a scene where the lead character makes a blithely dark declaration to an authority figure, the kind of twisted turn that short internet animation thrives upon, but Meinhardt undoes the impact almost immediately. Over-the-top transgressive humor has become such a norm that zagging away turns out to be the true twist.It’s also suffused with jokes, both explicit and non-explicit, so even if not every gag works for you, something is likely to. The two kids who hail our character with kazoos like a color guard during the chorus kill me every time, while my kid howled with laughter at the lead busting through the wall Kool-Aid Man-style, seemingly at random.With the song-film format, Meinhardt returns to the style that first landed him on our radar 16 years ago when we featured his Vancouver Film School short, Dancing Animals in Love. Today, therefore, marks the longest gap between selections by far of any creative we’ve highlighted, but Meinhardt has been consistently working in the interim—as a commercial animator and in the animation departments of several TV shows, and also as an independent creator of shorts that have played Annecy, SXSW, and Ottawa. We’re Kind of Different, in fact, will play at Ottawa’s upcoming edition in September.While having experienced festival success over a 20-year career, Meinhardt’s sensibilities are, in many ways, a perfect match for the modern online animation ecosystem on YouTube and Instagram. It’s a bit of a shame that he’s from my generation and not well-equipped to capitalize on it properly; however, after several Vimeo Staff Picks for his work, he has begun to push his YouTube account, which is still under 1000 followers. Come and give it a look, it has half a dozen other excellent shorts there, and consider hitting that subscribe button!