With the goddess of war, Athena, at his side—and bearing the weight of ten years worth of war and the lives taken by his hand—Odysseus is confronted by a monster, a cyclops, on his journey home.

To have a goddess by your side offers unprecedented potential, but it comes at a heavy cost. Each time Odysseus kills, or rather “shatters” a person or any living creature, a shard of them attaches itself to his arm, echoing the voice he knew them by before they met their fate at his hands. Though his mentor watches, and despite the cyclops having taken the lives of many of his men, Odysseus cannot bear the weight of shattering yet another soul.

Based on Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus & Athena is a short animation project that draws on this mythology to tell an original story. It follows Odysseus through his memories of training under Athena as a young boy, his time in the Trojan War, and his present-day dilemma of being unable to kill the cyclops before him.

Using a stylized animation style set within a crystallized world, Odysseus & Athena seeks to answer the question: what happens to a relationship built on pressure and expectation, when it results in a one-sided accumulation of guilt, burden, and regret?