Lola
What’s It About
This beaut directed by Kyra Bartley and created by the global charity Made By Dyslexia was designed as a deliberate campaign to “hijack search engine algorithms. That is, the filmmakers specifically named the film after the commonly searched phrase what is dyslexia so that when newly diagnosed children or concerned parents look up information online, they are greeted with an empowering, visual narrative rather than cold, clinical definitions like “learning disorder” or “deficit.”
Hoo-ah!
On with the Review
Type these four words into a search engine — “what is dyslexia” — and the result can be disquieting. “Lifelong learning disorder.” “Word-blindness.” “Disability.” For an adult, there is no ouch. Not so, say, for a 7‑year‑old who has just learned that this is the name for what has been making her feel bad. It’s more like a verdict. Director Kyra Bartley’s and her filmmaking team’s exquisite animated short WHAT IS DYSLEXIA was made to disrupt that moment, and does it with grace, intelligence and visual daring that deserve to be celebrated not only as advocacy but as filmmaking of notice.
Lola
WHAT IS DYXLEXIA opens in a school library where Lola (voice of Hope Day) sits alone while, somewhere off screen, adults can be heard talking about her. Lola is doing what many kids do, self-learning: She searches. Brutal words bloom across her screen and begin to fall around her, oversized and oppressive, until the floor opens and she tumbles into a black void of letters.
It is the first of several sequences in which Director Bartley externalizes the inner life of a dyslexic child with precision. We don’t just watch Lola feel hopeless; we feel hopeless with her.
Out of that darkness emerges “The Inventor,” voiced by veteran actor Jeremy Irons who himself is the product of a family of dyslexics. His voice in his many films has always carried a kind of quiet authority, but here he uses it as a balm. He doesn’t talk down to Lola, and the film, crucially, doesn’t talk down to its audience.
Instead, he tells her the truth: that the brain in her head works differently, and that different is not the same thing as broken!
What follows is a whirlwind that would feel manic in lesser hands but here delivers a joyful catharsis. Lola is whisked through a kind of imaginative pantheon of dyslexic thinkers — brushing past Henry Ford, glimpsing Leonardo da Vinci, and, in an exhilarating set‑piece, climbing into the boxing ring opposite Muhammad Ali (Jaalen Best, soon to be seen as Ali in Amazon’s upcoming series The Greatest).
A crowd chants her name. She knocks the champ flat. It’s a wonderful comedic image. Actress Liv Tyler appears as a film director who shows Lola that storytelling does not require neat handwriting — a sequence that sneaks up on the audience. Tyler’s warmth is the perfect complement to Irons’s gravitas, and together they form a kind of mentor-like chorus, resulting in a transcendent moment. The London studio Art&Graft has built a hybrid pipeline here that quietly rewrites the rules of what a short can look like: Hand‑drawn brushwork, deliberately varied frame rates and painterly textures all woven through a 3D backbone.
Skin is built from warm ochres and bruised purples; hair crackles; light doesn’t illuminate scenes so much as soak into them. The early frames lean almost classical, then slowly bloom into something more expressionistic as Lola’s confidence grows.
By the time she’s falling through neon trails of color or floating into a star‑strewn sky, the screen feels like a sketchbook that has come alive in your hands. The roughness is the point. A film about an associative, image‑first kind of intelligence has been built in an associative, image‑first visual language. The medium is the message.
Underscoring all of it is a film score by the Grammy‑winning Lorne Balfe, written with Ted Griggs. Balfe.
There is a song, too, with lyrics by Griggs that border on the devotional, and the moment it arrives over the film’s climactic montage is one of the most moving uses of music in any short I can recall in recent memor. It’s the rare gem of a children’s‑aimed score that adults will keep humming after the film ends.
It would be possible to write all of this off as a glossy charity film, and that would be a mistake. WHAT IS DYSLEXIA was commissioned by the global charity Made By Dyslexia, founded by executive producer Kate Griggs, in partnership with ClemengerBBDO and produced through Finch. Its strategy is as inventive as its imagery. 
Hijack!!! The team has described the project as an attempt to “hijack” the search results for the very phrase that titles the film — to use the cultural credibility of a real piece of cinema, with a real director, real stars and real reviews, to surface itself at the top of the page where, currently, only clinical despair lives. That is a remarkable piece of media thinking. The film is, in effect, both the artwork and the delivery mechanism. Every review (this one included) is part of the engineering. There is something defiant as well as lovely about that.
And the cause is not abstract. Made By Dyslexia’s own research reveals that nine in 10 children can experience those first searches feeling worse about their futures. Anyone who has watched a bright child quietly decide they are ‘the stupid one’ in a classroom knows how that is a wound that can heal but not easily.
Bartley’s film offers a counter‑story, that dyslexic minds tend to think laterally, see patterns others miss, build worlds, run companies, win heavyweight titles, paint Mona Lisas. None is sentimental fiction; it is documented history, presented to children in the only language they really trust — a great story, beautifully told.
WHAT IS DYSLEXIA is one of those gems that will be seen many times more than once. And it will be shared. Those of us who have a dyslexic child in our lives should sit down and watch it with them and let the credits roll all the way to the end.
The next Lola who types those four words deserves to find this film waiting for her instead of a verdict. Bartley, Irons, Tyler, Balfe, Griggs and the wildly gifted team at Art&Graft have built her a door. The least the rest of us can do is hold it open, wide open.
WHAT IS DYSLEXIA (2026). Directed by Kyra Bartley. Written by Gid Goldberg. Starring Hope Day, Jeremy Irons, Liv Tyler, Jaalen Best and Lee Perry. Music by Lorne Balfe and Ted Griggs. Animation by Art&Graft. Produced by Finch for Made By Dyslexia in partnership with ClemengerBBDO. Runtime: approximately 5 minutes.
Watch the film at whatisdyslexia.org
the WORD Editor Gregg W. Morris
