Not every student film is a winner. As a graduating animation fag, a lot of the times films like these suffer is due to some of the factors
1: Person wants to do a specific part in animation rather then animating, like storyboarding, illustration, 3D modelling, rigging, etc. Sometimes they don't want to focus on doing a story and would rather be doing something else like animating.
2: Students that want to make good stories start off well with good intentions, but either due to the amount of time it takes to make it (such as the length of it), people dropping out of projects to work on other stuff causes issues like that, or at worse, having to cut the story and interesting parts about the film in order to make a finished film. Everyone wants to make their best film that shows off their passion for story telling as well as their own calling card, but unfortunately things like that happen.
Of course there are exceptions to this. For all the shit that CalArts gets, they atleast make their students do a film every year, a lot of which get posted on /co/ or other classes from students that want to do that kind of movie. Ringling makes every student become a 3D generalist, utilizing modeling, rigging, animating, and rigging. SCAD just recently updated its animation senior projects that allow students to just work on people's films for their portfolios rather then making their own film, which will hopefully reduce the dropout of people working on projects.
I've seen several films from friends and colleagues that have suffered through some of this. This isn't meant to defend the film in the OP, just that things are unfortunately a bit complicated. Everyone wants to do something like
>>89257514 or the wide range of films from CalArts or Gobelins, but unfortunately settle for whats on the OP.
I'm down to answer any questions if you guys have any. 
