Céline Roustan
Unexpectedly bumping into your ex has to be one of the weirdest situations someone can face. So when Alice and Teddy see each other at a train station, their brief encounter is emotionally charged with all the memories of their past relationship. We are super excited to welcome back to the website (for a fifth time!) festival darling and multiple-time S/W alum Renee Zhan with her 2021 hit Soft Animals.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
While the film is centered around the actual interaction between these former lovers, what Zhan actually captures is all the emotional baggage that unravels because of their encounter, or as the director puts it the “strange, unexpected, and powerful feelings that bubble up to the surface”. As we’ve become to expect from Zhan’s work, their interaction is not depicted in a rational way, their chance meeting quickly becoming more of an animalistic affair. With the conversation they’re having almost irrelevant when compared to the physical manifestation of their interaction. What starts with awkwardness, moves on to all the memories they share and where both their minds go during that moment. Like the line from the Mary Oliver poem that the short’s title was inspired by explains, ‘you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’.
Soft Animals is also animation at its best, as it uses the medium to translate, in images, what live action never could. The way Zhan plays with different techniques, and her use of color, contribute greatly to the emotional rawness of the film. The story is universal, or at the very least relatable, and she appeals to that in every single viewer by crafting on screen depictions of emotions we have all felt, instead of just focusing on the tangible reality of the exchange. Yet, the few actual lines spoken, from the initial awkwardness to the false promise of seeing each other again for coffee, are quite compelling and revealing in their own right.
“I like the traces this method of animation leaves on the page, like the traces we leave on each other” – Zhan explains the choice of animation technique in Soft Animals
Even the process she chose is a conscious storytelling tool. Using the draw/erase technique, where each shot is made, then erased, before the next one is drawn on top, is the perfect metaphor for memories. The lingering presence of the previous frame helping to put the focus on the past and in the case of our reunited ex-lovers, the remains of the preceding drawing echo what Zhan describes as “the traces we leave on each other”. The sound design is also quite impressive and is another vital element in immersing the audience in the universe Zhan has created, as it feeds into the (soft) animal side of the characters and intensifies the effects of the images.
Soft Animals has had an incredible festival run with notable stops – to name only a few – at Annecy, Telluride, TIFF, Sundance, SXSW, before it debuted online as a Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere. Zhan is currently working on two new projects. The first a live-action/animation hybrid horror film with BBC Films, which is about a British-Chinese violinist, named Fei, whose world turns upside down at the arrival of another talented violinist named Mei. The second a YA animated feature film idea about a cult that worships birds! We also hear that she has a new short that will be released this year, so watch out!