Once a year, this moment comes – one that never fails to set my heart racing. For most, it’s just another couple of weeks in the calendar. But for anyone who lives and breathes animation, these days belong fully to the Gobelins 2025 graduation films.This year’s slate arrives brimming with the school’s signature range of voices and visions. And among them, Tumbleweed, directed by Johanna Bouaouiche, Louis Creuzet, Marie Hareux, Wilson Hinh, Arthus Mariet, and Masha Moran, rushes in strong, raising expectations as it charms those of us who’ve spent much of 2025 waiting for this very moment.The story of Tumbleweed begins with Hurle, a young girl who spends her days pouring coffee and tending to her mother, while holding onto dreams that sag under their own weight. Then, in a single breath, her rhythm collapses. Enter an eccentric petty thief: reckless, magnetic, and impossible to ignore. He steals from Hurle, yet what he leaves behind is far more valuable – the spark to slip free from her invisible prison. It looks innocent enough, but it is among the largest and most fearsome prisons we know: the subtle tyranny of routine.When the thief enters the coffee shop, Hurle’s life is thrown upside downAnd, with a pace worthy of the filmmakers’ own hunger for adventure, Hurle delves into her quest. We’re carried along in waves of dense colors and fluid animation, each frame capturing that feeling of freedom as something that cannot be contained, something alive. The film reminds us that the same spark still exists within our own lives, waiting to be set free.The one trying to prevent the inevitable is Hurle’s mother, who horrors at the thought of her daughter facing an outside world that can be unforgiving. I felt that fear resonate deep within my own story, as travel has been my rebellion and my nourishment for the last six years. Like Hurle, I longed to leave my routine behind and taste what waited beyond familiarity, while my own mother, like hers, feared for me. Over time, she learned to meet the world through my eyes. Watching Tumbleweed, I recognized that fragile space between care and freedom, between the safety we inherit and the risks we must claim for ourselves.Tumbleweed is the first film in the release of the 2025 Gobelins grad filmsTumbleweed is a celebration of possibility. It captures the charged moment of stepping beyond what is familiar, understanding that the “ordinary” was only ever a fragile construct waiting to be undone. The thief is not merely a thief; he is the tumbleweed itself – rolling into Hurle’s life with mischief and promise, scattering seeds she did not know she had been waiting to plant. Hurle does not flee her reality when she follows him. She dives into herself.What lingers after the final frame is not the chase itself, but the leap it represents. Tumbleweed is less about theft than about the cost of desire – the price of following, of leaving, of trusting that one’s own life is meant to be more than repetition. The film acknowledgea our vulnerabilities while giving us room to bloom, quietly yet urgently, like a secret carried on the wind.So take this as your signal: to leap. To wander. To claim the fact that you are alive, right now