ExploratoriumEmbarcadero, Northern Waterfront

Being Human

Now showing16 June 2026 – 10 April 2027$39.95

Four short films in the Osher Gallery 1 Microcinema, including Leonard Cohen's Plato and Jessica Yu's Sour Death Balls, reflect playfully on what it is to be human. 32 minutes.

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On now All of October 2026

You watch a child take an excruciatingly sour Japanese candy, and the camera holds on the pucker. Then the next one does it, and the next, and later the adults. That's Jessica Yu's Sour Death Balls, shot in black and white in 1992 at a Los Angeles nursery school on a hand-wound 16mm camera.

It's one of four short films in the Microcinema in Osher Gallery 1, 32 minutes in all. Jeff Scher's Grand Central is live footage shot through prisms. In Plato, a flat cartoon man meets a 3D cube; its director, Léonard Cohen, is a French animator, not the singer. Anna Ewert's Into the Middle of Nowhere spends 15 minutes with three- to five-year-olds at a forest nursery in Fife, Scotland.

Nobody has reviewed the program as a whole, though Plato won the Junior Jury award at Annecy in 2011. It's free with museum admission and runs until 10 April 2027.

Look for

The faces in Sour Death Balls
Children and a few adults each try a Sour Death Ball, and the black-and-white camera catches every pucker, wince and twist at the moment of impact.
Plato's cube
A flat cartoon man busy tracing squares suddenly faces a 3D cube and tries to use it to escape his two-dimensional world, in hand-drawn 2D and stop-motion.
The log that becomes a plane
In Into the Middle of Nowhere, a dry log and a bunch of branches become a plane for the children at a woodland nursery.
Grand Central through prisms
Jeff Scher shot this four-minute film as live footage through prisms rather than drawing it.