Director – Kate Bush – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 4m
*****
As modern warfare decimates a landscape, a shrew crosses countryside and town as a small, spirit-like light falls towards it – short accompanies the UK cinema release of From Hilde, With Love on Friday, June 27th
Musician / songwriter Kate Bush originally recorded the song Snowflake, which appeared on her album 50 Words for Snow (2011), in part to record her young son Albert’s voice before it broke. The creative process is such that people don’t always know exactly why they do what they do, and that is clearly the case with this song, since Kate has returned to it after the event to direct an animated film around it. Animation being a painstakingly slow production process, the soundtrack for the short is an edit of the song, pulling it down from almost 10 minutes to 4 minutes. The 4-minute edit is surprisingly coherent and seems to distil the essence of the piece.
Most of the lyrics are sung by Albert, yet Kate sings the haunting refrain:
The world is so loud
Keep falling
I’ll find you
It’s impossible to listen to this without thinking she is the mother somehow waiting for her falling son, whatever that means. It can probably mean many things.
Whatever it means, the film, made in black and white, features two main elements, a shrew and a snowflake / life force. The title suggests a falling snowflake, but the images start out with a little shrew in a round, womb-like space which dissolves to a cloud formation or nebula in space with what one might presume to be a comet flying past. Or perhaps it’s some sort of force imparting being to what then becomes a snowflake falling from the clouds. Or maybe a sperm looking for an egg to fertilise. Eventually, it enters the Earth’s atmosphere and goes into a cloud, turning into or triggering a falling snowflake.
The shrew meanwhile exits the pocket of a recently dead soldier, who lies slumped against the trunk of a tree as light streams through the canopy of the forest like beams of light shining into a cathedral. Another object appears in the sky, a dark aircraft equipped with two white missiles, one below each wing. A flash, and down on the ground, the shrew goes into terrified spasms. It has no comprehension whatsoever of what is going on. It runs, but has nowhere to go. Another flash: more spasms.
Like the Curtis Kittyhawk WW2 fighter aircraft I remember from my childhood Airfix kit building days, this aircraft develops a snarling mouth and spews black pollutant, a reminder of how weaponry can pollute the natural environment, or an airborne shark flying toward you – take your pick. It unleashes a guided missile, which starts flying towards its target of its own volition. More shrew spasms as the poor creature is caught in the blast. It lies motionless as, in highly effective jerks, the camera pulls out to the image of a block of flat decimated by a bomb. (The image is taken from a photograph of a bombed block of flats in Ukraine by Reuters drone videographer Maksim Levin who was killed by Russian soldiers some two months after capturing this image.)
After this, the shrew comes back to life. Or does he – is he dead and this is his spirit searching for something – meaning, perhaps? Anyway, seeing the snowflake / spirit, he climbs a damaged telegraph pole to touch or catch or hold it. The only way he can do that, though, is to leap into the air and fall.
Kate worked out a rough storyboard based on the recording, then approached her chosen illustrator Jim Kay on the strength of his illustrations for Patrick Ness’ novel A Monster Calls (filmed by JA Bayona in 2016). Kay is a sharp choice: his way of creating and detailing images on paper gives them a stark quality, and background artist Nicolas Loudot makes them work for animation. The soldier’s tunic pocket the shrew crawls out of near the start helps define the world into which the creature enters; when you see his body against a tree, your understanding of the world grows.
As the shrew traverses miniature landscapes, crossing detritus such as a dropped gun, a broken pair of spectacles and twisted metal fittings, you gain a sense of that landscape scarred by war. The use of different image layers panning at different speeds brings a whole new sense of depth to Kay and Loudot’s work. It’s an old enough animation technique, completely unlike live action cinematography, but it does much to bring all this to life. Augmenting this are (for example) images of battlefield smoke floating behind the moving shrew, presumably the work of Jon Carin, credited for atmospheric sfx.
James Clifford is credited with hope and drone animation, which one imagines being all the outer space comet, sky, up in the air, falling snowflake material. This, too, contributes much to the overall atmosphere.
The little shrew itself is lovingly rendered by Alan Henry. Like a live action film, where a central performance or performances of the protagonist(s) can make or break a film, much hangs on the animator called upon to bring the little shrew to life. That animator Is Nicolette Van Gendt, and her work here is exemplary. As the little creature comes into the world and scampers around, you get a real sense of its initial sense of wonder and exploration giving way to fear and the need for a safe haven. You know this is merely moving drawings, yet the animation transcends that so that, even through the images before your eyes are closer to moving illustration than photographic naturalism, you believe you’re watching a real, flesh and blood shrew with its own complex awareness, feelings and emotion.
Since I seem to be checking off the entire crew here, the animation compositor responsible for putting all the different bits and pieces together on the screen was Lorenzo Cenci Di Bello and the overall producer, once animation company Inkubus and production company Tomato Twist became involved, was Gayle Martin.
The genius of this little short is that its central idea, embodied in the lyrics – the son’s voice describing his whereabouts and what he finds as he travels, the mother singing that as he falls, she will catch him – can be interpreted in different ways. Is the little shrew, caught up in the midst of a war it doesn’t really understand, the falling presence, who will be somehow caught? Is the mother promising to catch the snowflake? Is the little shrew trying to catch the snowflake? Does the creature stand for a human child lost and alone in a conflict zone? And so on. As you watch the film, the possible meanings of the song shift around, the imagery bringing something more to the recording on the soundtrack than was in the original, much longer, standalone recording.
It would be all too easy to dismiss this as a pop video (which, on one level it clearly is – it made me go back to 50 Words for Snow for another listen, and made me appreciate the track Snowflake in a way hadn’t really done before) but I submit that it works extremely well as a little narrative film in its own right. As an essay on “the loudness of the world”, this is right on the button.
The film is intended to raise money for the charity WarChild; please click the link to donate.
The short Little Shrew (Snowflake) accompanies the UK cinema release of From Hilde, With Love on Friday, June 27th.