‘If anything happens, I love you.’
This animation, describing the heart-breaking life of a ten-year-old cut short by a school shooting, forms twelve of the most skilfully articulated minutes among modern shorts.
In animation, since all movement and positioning has been meticulously pre-planned, through storyboards, keyframe mapping and backgrounds, every aesthetic element has to contribute to the overall production. Then, the audio: it has to guide the audience emotionally, and, when done correctly, can project any feeling the character may be experiencing onto the observer, forming that real connection so sought after by artists.
First, the plot. There is none. Or, rather, there is no conservative ‘A to B’ storyline. It is a film based heavily around the estrangement experienced by the parents due to such an abrupt and violent passing of their daughter, and has the purpose of carefully representing the raw hurting of the loss. The short opens with grief, and then, through fragments of hope, of happy memories and of small gestures, frames, for the somewhat unsettled audience, the brutality that a child so young and a family so close was faced with. And it becomes heavier as you realise that, although not based on a specific event, this animation is a reflection of the not-so-fictional modern world—one of the main successes of the creative decisions in this film.
That said, however thought-out, this progression would not have earned the short its respect were it expressed through any other style of animation. Not only does its minimalism accentuate the lack of vitality in the parents’ lives, it also adds to the honesty and vulnerability of the topic. I noticed this particularly enhanced their supposed ‘tunnel vision’ when the Mother came up the stairs with the laundry. The staircase is exposed behind her – a detail that would have been difficult to animate in 2D, but also something really highlighting how much narrower her world has become – until it shows the door, far, and isolated. There was no drawn path towards it, it was truly a broken relationship.
The colours, too, were so intricately manipulated to pinpoint the significant elements of different scenes. For example, the colour blue, representing the girl (both as the paint on the side of the house, and as the small shirt discovered in the washing machine), was used to subtly create focal points in frames, without breaking the minimalism and the otherwise subdued greys of the colour scheme. Notably, I thought the contrast between the softer, more pencil-like tones used for the family and the bolder, more overwhelming ashes of the school made it clear where the comfort versus the danger was, and added to the power of the film by singling out the location of the event.
As mentioned before, where animation and story provide the visual details, well-selected audio helps to project the emotions onto the viewers. This is what makes people cry, or sigh in relief, of laugh. The relatively deafening silence at the beginning suggested that tension between husband and wife that caused them to shut in. By contrast, the song playing from the daughter’s record (‘1950’ by King Princess) echoed brief elevation, subtly changing into a more delicate piano melody (think ‘Inside Out’ theme tune), before being broken by the bell. Then – silence. An uncomfortable one. Silence until the gunshots and until the cries of the children began.
These decisions relating to the audio sequence are what provided the final sophistication and the final layer to this masterful exploration of one story, one representing many others. It was the music, the art and the initial concept that formed this symphony, and it was this symphony that left the lasting impression on every member of the audience.
