04/06/2020
The short animation film About a Monter was actually found by accident at one night when I was looking for some inspirations of my school project. After watching this film, I felt so touched and impressed, and even could not hold my tears at all. At that point, I thought it had touched a common ground of one’s deep heart——the selfless love.
This is an approximately seven-min-long graduation animation made by Dina Velikovskaya in 2016, with gaining a series of rewards after school. It has a simple and direct description of its narrative, telling a story about a mother living in a small tribe with her three children. She has an incredible long black hair. When every time she is raising her children by feeding, combing their curly hair, and do what a mother will do, her hair always makes some troubles to her neighbours like tripping others over ground, obstructing fishing boat，and even disturbing houses and woking people on a windy day. But her hair does not keep holding drawbacks all the time. And this mother will eventually make a reconciliation with her neighbours by apology, giving fishes from the net of her hair, and let her hair as a shelter to neighbours on rainy days.
In the second section of this animation, the three children suddenly grow up as teenagers one by one and leave their mom and hometown via huge ferryboat, helicopter and train. The mother feels happy at first, but soon she finds a little bit lonely and missing about her boys. Later she receives letters about their troubles in life, she cuts her hair to wave a strong net for the first boy’s fishing work on ship, a parachute for the second boy’s skydiving mission, and a heavy coat for the third boy when he travels to an icy country at Christmas.
In the end, this mother stands in the centre of this small tribe, with no hair on her head but a faintly satisfied smile on her face. It seems to indicate that even if she loses her hair, she feels happy to be able to help her children, and her hair looks like a symbolic implication of a link carrying a mother’s selfless love for her children. I can see the delicate love from every moment the mother gives to her children without any complaints via obviously direct depiction of her actions and facial emotions like smiling, surprising and hug. And this story ends with an imaginary scene of the mother that the hair grows again from her head into a moving lens of many fragments of her boys’ new life that she is missing, even though she is not around them.
It is crucial to have a look at this film’s unique art style and representations that the animator made successfully. I can see that clearly the animator chooses an African tribe as the background of the whole story, and adopts a simplistically rock-art-like hand drawing style for all frames in black and white. This monochromatic rough style of buildings, trees and the river in screens appear to give a sense of purity to the audience, and it is also shown in the character design which uses black dots and lines on characters’ bodies and faces, and a simple geometric shape of the mother’s body as an inverted bowl with two swirling stripes. And the background drawing nothing but only white makes me more concentrate on the movements and emotions of the characters. What is more, the wild shots from this film remind me of the ancient rock art drawn by Africans without any perspective rules, but revealing a kind of primeval beauty from the nature. Like in some transition shots, the film uses a graphic morphing of plane from one scene to another scene with simultaneously background objects changing. According to the sound using, the film chooses a minority language from Africa, which emphases the strong atmosphere of a tribe. On each actions, it adds quite right sound effects to bring a real-world feeling to the audience.
From my personal views, this out-of-rule form could efficiently expand human’s imagination of the drawing, and strengthen the ability of the surreal expression that only animation could make. Moreover, the vital point is that it does make sense of conveying a feeling of aesthetic purity in animation art, which gives me a chance of rethinking animation itself as a more useful media of illustrating the pure story and pure feelings without any extra visual and sound effects. Simply the touching contents can succeed in gaining a wide sense of identity from the public, and the topic of love is always an eternal beauty and meaning throughout all human histories.
Animation Film Link: https://vimeo.com/416460138