Shane Acker

He was born in 1971 in Wheaton, Illinois. He is an American

animator, film director, screenwriter and animation teacher. He is
known for directing "9", a film which is based on his 2005
Academy Award-nominated short film. He graduated from UCLA.

People being self-destructive: This short talks about how not

accepting your mistakes can take you to self-destructive conducts.
In this film, this is represented by the example of the hangnail. The
man sees a hangnail and instead of accepting that there is and it will
go away by itself, leaving it and not touch it, he wants to remove
it. That's why the hangnail, instead of going away, starts to get
bigger and bigger until it already does irreparable damage. This
represents in a way our conscience when we've done something we
know is wrong. You know that feeling and you have two options:
face it and fix it, or throwing it away into the back of your mind.
When the boy tries to rip off the hangnail, he is trying to get rid of
that voice which tells him he's done wrong. Because of that, the
problems just becomes bigger and he has to suffer greater
consequences.

We think that the director decided to choose a dog and a person as

characters, since it represents the superiority that people have over
animals.