My Wonderful Life Loosely based on her mother’s grueling daily schedule, Calleen Koh’s delightfully animated My Wonderful Life brings to life the deranged fantasies that can plague the overworked. Office drone Grace Lee falls strains her body beyond its breaking point—the demands of her workplace, family and even a local stray cat cause her to collapse on the job. When she wakes up in the hospital, she feels an odd sense of relief and relaxation. She can finally rest without feeling guilty; as a result, she resolves to extend her hospital stay by any means necessary. When her body begins to heal itself, she begins to inflict increasingly horrifying harm upon herself.
My Wonderful Life is one of five winners of the 2025 Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative program from The Gotham, Focus Features and JetBlue that is available to stream via Focus Features’s YouTube channel and offered in the air as part of JetBlue’s in-flight entertainment selection. However, due to film festival prospects, Koh’s film will not be available to stream alongside the other winners.
Koh answered a few questions over email, touching on how studying at CalArts influenced her artistry, her mother’s reaction to the film and winning the Best Pitch Award at this year’s SeriesFest Pitch-A-Thon at SXSW.
All interviews with all of the sixth annual Student Short Film Showcase winners are published here.
Filmmaker: How have your MFA studies at California Institute of the Arts enriched your practice as an animator and filmmaker?
Koh: I’ve seen a drastic growth in my filmmaking voice since coming to CalArts. The mentors here really push you to be confident in your own style. I’ve noticed a lot of student filmmakers shy away from their individual voice and lean into trends, but our mentors encourage us to embrace what makes our work unique—even the parts we feel insecure about. They help you see that what you perceive as an imperfection could actually become your signature style if you refine it.
Before CalArts, my films were heavily reliant on world-building and chaotic situations, but the characters often felt less deeply developed. My mentor pointed out that in my earlier work, crazy things happened to characters, but the characters themselves didn’t have much agency. Part of that was because I used to be scared of writing dialogue—I worried it would sound cringe. Making My Wonderful Life changed that for me. I fully embraced creating character-driven stories that felt real and personal. One thing I learned is if you embrace authenticity, it doesn’t feel cringe—it feels real. Through this, I’ve learned to lean fully into my chaotic dark humor style, which also carries some warmth while being culturally critical.
I’ve also expanded my animation practice by embracing both my 2D background and my newfound love for stop motion. Rather than sticking to “pure” mediums, I enjoy creating hybrid pipelines that merge different techniques. Each medium has its own strengths and drawbacks, and through my studies at CalArts, I’ve become much more open to experimenting and blending them together in new ways.
Filmmaker: I was really amused by the graphic violence and black humor employed in the film. Did you ever get any notes from professors or colleagues trying to get you to tone it down?
Koh: I don’t think any professors or colleagues ever told me to tone it down. In fact, it was [initially] less violent, and everyone encouraged me to make it more and more violent! Everyone has a lot of pent-up grief with life they want to see represented on screen, I guess…
Filmmaker: Grace, the protagonist, is loosely based on your own mother. Has she seen the film? If so, what was her reaction?
Koh: Yes—from her character design to the bedroom and even her hobby of feeding stray cats, Grace is very much inspired by my mom. The whole film came about because my mom was hospitalized and looked a little too happy being in the hospital.
She watched the film twice: first at home when my sister leaked her the private Vimeo link (thanks Valerie), and then again in the theatre—as she should’ve experienced for the first time—at the Singapore International Film Festival. The first time she watched, she was shocked, because she initially thought the film was 100% based on her. She kept asking if I really saw her as that depressed and I had to keep telling her it’s a fictional character. But after seeing it in a theatre with a lively audience, she appreciated it much more. But it was really cute, she dressed up as Grace Lee when she came for the screening at SGIFF. She’s also been proudly telling her friends I “drew her” in my film.
Filmmaker: What can children, co-parents (and cats) take away from the film’s honest depiction of the exhausting existence of working mothers?
Koh: Be kind and try to make life easier for the people around you—but not at the expense of your own well-being. Part of surviving is finding the balance between caring for others and caring for yourself. You can’t pour from an empty cup.
Filmmaker: You won this year’s Best Pitch Award at SXSW’s SeriesFest Pitch-A-Thon. Tell me a bit more about Down at Motel 629, which you hope to craft into a TV series.
Koh: Yes! Before coming to CalArts, I started developing this wild animated series with my co-creator, Matthias Teh, inspired by the real-life seedy love motels scattered across Asia. The show follows a group of down-on-their-luck oddballs with no business savvy, trying to keep one such motel afloat. My producer, Tan Si En from Momo Film Co., loves to describe it as “Rick and Morty meets Veep” to give you an idea of what to expect. We’re currently in development and looking to attach studio partners to bring the chaos to life!