Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Little Shrew
(Snowflake)

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.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Series Television

Hellbound
(Jiok,
지옥,
lit. Hell)

Director – Yeon Sang-ho – 2021 – South Korea – 6 x 50m

*****

Angels state the time of death then demons come and cart people off to hell, generating a circus of fundamentalist, religious activity – series airs on Netflix from November 19th – reviewed for All The Anime

The new Netflix series Hellbound (2021) from South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho, creator of zombie outings Seoul Station (2016) and Train To Busan (2016), began life as a webtoon some 11 minutes in length back in 2002. The first three x 50-minute episodes (out of six) have played a number of international film festivals.

Those first three episodes – screened at the London Film Festival where this writer saw them – explore notions of sin, eternal punishment and damnation. As in Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael’s hilarious and highly inventive comic, religious satire The Brand New Testament (2015), people are sent the date and time of their death then dazedly watch the moment approach on their mobile phones. After its announcement, when the time comes, three black and white, Hulk-like demons turn up to pound the person into a pulp, suck out their life force and burn the corpse… [Read more]

I review Hellbound (eps 1-3) for All The Anime.… Read the rest