Ani, a first-generation Armenian American in her twenties, crawls through late-afternoon Los Angeles traffic with her mother on speakerphone. Their trilingual chatter ricochets between grocery lists and unfinished stories while the turn signal ticks like a metronome. Then Ani taps the screen, and the GPS goes dark.

The city loosens. A familiar restaurant dissolves into an empty lot. Buildings elongate, freeways buckle into boulevards, and a painted yellow horse steps off a sign and onto the road. Doorways appear in the street like thresholds. Ani follows the horse and drives through them, entering homes that feel both intimate and impossible: breakfast tables, ironing boards, homework spread across oilcloth, morning radio exercises in the language of childhood.

With each house, Ani's rearview fills with women's faces, grandmothers upon grandmothers. At the far edge of this passage, the doors open onto a Nagorno-Karabakh village where eight men light matches to their own houses without looking back. The call crackles, then drops.

Night has fallen. At a roundabout that offers no exits, Ani's panic pries open. In the rearview, the ancestral line reappears as company. She syncs her breath to the tick of the blinker until a small yellow reveals itself: a bus-route stencil on the curb. She takes the third exit.

The road stabilizes. Sevan, her favorite restaurant, flickers ahead, warm with life. Ani drives toward it, toward a definition of home that is less a fixed address than a practice of orientation.

Something Yellow is an 8-minute hand-drawn animated short that translates solastalgia, the grief of watching home become unrecognizable while you still live in it, into something you can drive through rather than drown in.