I'd like to take you through a list of three independently made animated shorts that differ wildly in style and tone, but have one motif in common: death. More importantly, I'd like to talk about how they each handle the idea of death differently: the nature of it, the fear of it and how it affects us. I'll be leaving links to each of them so you can check them out for yourself. I'll list them in order from most lighthearted to most terrifying. Let's begin!
- The Life of Death by Masha Onderstijn
Beautifully animated and morbid yet heartwarming, The Life of Death personifies death as a ghostly figure that loves creation as much as any of us do, but is put to the daunting task of ending the life of a creature once its time comes. For Death, this is sad, but simple. However, Death becomes enamored with a deer, which makes his normally simple duty harder without heartbreak.
Unlike other portrayals of Death, this one isn't inherently malicious and doesn't particularly take glee in what he does, but rather he only does it because it's within his nature. We learn from Death himself how to cope with grief and let go of the things we love. Death isn't a monstrous villain, but something that must inevitably come to all of us.
2. There's a Man in the Woods by Jacob Streilein
Created as a project by a CalArts student, this short is about a preschool teacher who gets fired after one of his students, named Sid, spreads a rumor about a so-called "man in the woods," so that he can hog all the honey suckle blossoms growing just beyond the woods next to the school's playground. The loss of the man's job eventually drives him insane.
You might ask yourself, what this has to do with death?
While it's true that no one actually dies, this story is a cautionary tale about the fear of death, and how greed and ignorance can feed into the spread of it. While it makes sense to fear the end, at the same time it's unwise to let that fear control how we live, especially when said fear is based on rumors. This "man in the woods" is at first a ridiculous ploy, but due to the outrageous response of the other students, teachers and parents becomes a self-fulfulling prophecy. We should be cautious, but not terrified.
The words of the spanish painter Francisco de Goya ring true by the end of this short; "The sleep of reason produces monsters."
3. 10 Two Sentence Horror Stories by Let's Read!
Unlike the other entries on this list, this video is just straight up horror, and not a watch I would reccomend to the faint of heart. It's a short animated anthology series of two sentence horror stories, each one more nightmarish than the last.
Although the animation is much more crude and not as clean as the last two shorts, this is something that works in its favor, whether intentional or not. While the proportions are crude, the movements of the characters are fluid and carry momentum, which makes for an uncanny viewing experience.
The way in which this tackles death is also much more broad than the other two, involving scenarios that show characters fighting for their lives in different situations, whether they be brought about by other humans or lovecraftian atrocities.
These shorts might be a little old, but their themes of death and our fear of it ring true possiblly even more so now than they did before, given our current climate. The best thing we can do is not to cower in fear of death, or to avoid the inevitable at all costs, but to come to terms with it. Only then can we truly start to live.
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