Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evenings at the Chilmark Community Center. The films begin at 6 p.m., but at 5 p.m. the circus — complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music — gets under way.

An advanced screening of the films was arranged. In a world with few certainties, the kid critic is the critic to trust. This week’s reviewer is Tobias Henry Lash Roberts aka Tobey (age 7).

Fish Wish (Dir. Josephine Gutianjo / Canada / 2007 / 2 min.)

It’s a cartoon about a penguin. It is a very short film. It’s pretty funny. I think it’s a great film for six and seven year olds. The main guy is trying to get a big fish to eat by throwing a rock into ice, but in the end something funny happens.

The Fantastic Flying Books (Dirs. William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg / U.S.A. / 2010 / 11 min.)

This is a long one and it’s a little more complicated and sad. In the beginning it might be scary for really little kids because it’s a storm that is a tornado. It’s a cartoon but it feels a lot more real than the first movie. At the start the storm destroys the town. The main character gets picked by some books and a fairy to come to a magical book house because he is so good with books and he understands them. He is the books’ parent. This one book was really old and needed fixing and he saved it by finding the story. When he gets old he finishes his book and he dies but it’s okay because he did have a fantastic life with all the books and a little girl about my age comes to take over for him to take care of the books.

Tadpole (Dir. Guillaume Delaunay / France / 2011 / 2 min.)

This one is really funny. The tadpoles make a flower grow while one of them was trying to rest. It’s in a pond but there is a whale in there! I’ve never seen that. I thought the music was funny. It’s animation and little kids could definitely understand this one.

Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct (Dir. Peter List / U.S.A. / 2012 / 7 min.)

Edwina the dinosaur is the main character. There is a boy who doesn’t like Edwina; he ends up liking her because when he tries to talk to her about being extinct she listened to him and people usually didn’t listen to him. Then Edwina runs away because she doesn’t care that she is extinct. This is very funny especially when the boy who doesn’t believe in dinosaurs cries boo-hoo-hoo. It’s a cartoon and the voices make it really silly. All kids would like this.

Gulp and The Making of Gulp (Dirs. Sumo Science / U.K. / 2011 / 2 min, 6 min.)

It’s a sort of cartoon but then after they show how the movie was made with real people actually doing it. There was real sand in it that I could see — so you see it was drawn on sand. Some of it, like when the time bomb explodes in the fish, might be violent for little kids but I thought it was funny because it couldn’t really happen like that.

There is a second movie that was kind of part of this movie about how you make a movie like this. It was real. It surprised me how many people it took. It might be fun to be part of this movie. I’d want to help make the monster. They used a crane to help film some of it. Older kids will like this, especially kids who want to know how things work.

Giraffe and Penguin Penpals (Dir. Ned Miles / U.K. / 2011 / 3 min.)

It’s a cartoon about being friends. It’s a silly little movie. It’s just strange because penguins can’t walk all the way to Africa and they can’t find someone’s house and giraffes can’t go to Antarctica because they would freeze and die. It just didn’t make sense. But even though this couldn’t happen, you can still be friends.

Monarch (Dirs. Victor RenéRamírez Madrigal and Jorge Arturo Tornero Aceves / Mexico / 2011 / 8 min.)

This movie is about a man and a boy and Monarch butterflies. It is a little bit sad because the old man was sick. The little boy became friends with him and saved him once. The old man did die except the butterflies recognized the man’s hat and when the boy wore it they knew he was their friend. The butterflies were going someplace but I don’t really know where and I don’t think they knew either. It is animation but sometimes it seemed real. It was okay to not know the answers.

I Love Rock and Roll (Dir. Brent Dawes / South Africa / 2011 / 5 min.)

Let’s go from the beginning. Wow, that movie was silly. It was very much animation, totally not real. It was about an antelope that wanted to make Rock & Roll. He was trying, then a rock picked him up and he ended up in this huge cave. He was trying to get out but he was slipping. He got out by getting on another rock that was flying out. He made his own stage but broke it with a stamp of his foot. I couldn’t believe the whole instrument thing. The end was basically boom, boom, boom, WHAM! I want to see this one again.