Serafima Serafimova

In her poetic film Schovka (Hide N Seek), Barbora Halířová tells a story about the passage of time, told through everyone’s favourite childhood game. Crafted with unassuming simplicity, the seven-minute animated grad film jolts the audience into a high gear from the very start, all the way through to the end of what is an unsettling journey, laced with hidden meaning and nostalgia. It’s a short that makes an impact with its narrative ambiguity and emotional weight, leaving the viewer in a haze of confusion and a sense of regret. Watching Hide N Seek is much like looking back on a lifetime that has flashed by, with the memories that shape it forever morphing and twisting in its wake.

At the heart of the story is a young boy who, after being denied his mother’s affections he so desperately craves, starts a game of hide and seek with his sisters. Soon, inanimate objects come to life and transform into shapes of substance as the boy searches for a suitable hiding place in his family home. The bra snaps off the model on a magazine cover and lands on his face. The carpet becomes an ocean of liquid temptation – subtle clues hinting at a lifetime of excess and addiction. As the game goes on, the boy grows into a man, though his reflection remains the same, and his entire life flashes before his eyes. 

The directors describes her approach as “Classic 2D hand drawn animation in TV Paint with scanned backgrounds made on paper with ink”

There is nothing subtle or gentle about the film. A few seconds in, and we’re thrown into the turbulent world Halířová has hand-crafted with jagged lines and a palette of a few bold colours set against an off-white backdrop of nothingness. The lack of detail and texture in the frames allows the viewer to engage with this strange yet strangely familiar world, and draws the eye towards what matters – the characters and the objects they interact with. This stripped back approach to the animation design reflects the way unnecessary details from memories fade with time, leaving only the people and things that shaped our lives. 

A semi-silent film, with mumbled fragments of dialogue, Hide N Seek is scored by a frantic a cappella choir, which adds to the disorienting vibe of the animation and evokes a sense of loss of control. It’s as if you’re watching your childhood and youth slipping through your fingers without the ability to stop it or fix the mistakes made along the way. The film forces us to reflect on our own past, and therein lies its pulling power and impact. It might be a somewhat unsettling and chaotic watch that’s over before you’ve had a chance to make sense of any of it, but then isn’t that just life?