Striking shadow puppetry illuminates a skater kid’s memories of Boy Scout camp

‘It was a Boy Scout camp, and I was far from a Boy Scout.’

‘A skater kid goes to Boy Scout camp’ sounds a bit like an elevator pitch for a 1990s comedy. But for the US comedian Whitmer Thomas, it became an all-too-real summer experience after his single mother checked into a rehabilitation facility for alcohol addiction and he got sent off to a sleepaway camp with his buttoned-up Boy Scout cousin. Featuring Thomas’s polished storytelling skills, expressive shadow puppetry and an idiosyncratic synth score, Scout’s Honor taps into the summer-camp movie tropes of yesteryear to form something at once nostalgic and original. The short has depth far beyond its fish-out-of-water premise, as Thomas confronts coming of age in precarious circumstances with raw honesty.