Rob Munday

Parenting is tough. As a parent you want the best possible future for your children. For some that means the best schools, for others it means the best jobs, but for a group of snow monkeys, it’s all about survival. Hors de l’eau, an eight minute animation from a team of five GOBELINS, l’école de l’image students, submerges its audience head first into a simian society and as we learn about their harsh rules, it’s hard not to take a sobering look at humanity and our own rules.

Told from the perspective of a macaque mother, Hors de l’eau is a truly immersive experience (feels like the type of story I would have love to seen told in VR), where you feel every blast of icy wind and every drop of freezing snow. Through telling its story from this unique point-of-view, it makes it impossible not to take a self-reflective look at the events that unfold. The characters on-screen may well be primate, but the issues of class and privilege are very human.

Animation has a deep-rooted history of using anthropomorphism to make stories more relatable and accessible to an audience, but there’s no need for that approach here. As we witness the lower-ranking members of this macaque community, literally left out in the cold, the results are truly devastating. I’m not sure if the film has the same effect if you don’t have kids, but I’ve seen it multiple times now and have been left ruined after each watch!

Though the powerful storyline is certainly the biggest talking point here, overlooking the craft totally would be doing a huge disservice to this obviously talented team of animators. From what I can gather from the team’s Facebook posts, the aesthetic is created from a combination of hand-crafted miniature sets as backgrounds with 2D animation added on top. This visual approach once again adds to the immersive nature of the film and the authenticity of the story. As a viewer, we know what we are witnessing isn’t real, but with its story inspired by reality and its visual approach adding a very tangible feel, it makes a transition to suspension of disbelief very easy.

Hors de l’eau is the third film from GOBELINS students we’ve featured on Short of the Week in the late months of 2018. Tackling climate change (Thermostat 6), addiction to technology (Best Friend) and class systems in society, it’s nice to know these young minds aren’t afraid of tackling some grand subjects. And are doing it with style and originality. Long may it continue.

I’m now off to hug my children and make sure they’re warm and cosy!