A Stop-Motion Film About Power in the Wrong Hands

"When I was twelve years old, I went to John Henderson Junior High School, unaware that we were all being systematically civilized to one day take over the planet," the Canadian animator Cordell Barker says, in voice-over, at the beginning of "If I Was God." Barker's eight-minute short, made with stop-motion animation, is about him, at twelve, daydreaming in science class as he dissects a frog. "I spent most days doodling," he says. His doodles, he tells us, often depicted some kind of godlike h...