(10 minutes)
‘When the Day Breaks’ is an animated short film which features anthropomorphic animals going about their day. A woman (who is a pig, by the way) bumps into a man (who is, indeed, a chicken), causing the man to drop his shopping, notably a lemon into the sewer below. Afterwards, the man is involved in a car accident, where he is killed. The message of the film is that the symbolic relationship between people is inextricable.
Easily, the most interesting aspect of this film for me was the animation style. It’s done by filming shots in reality and then painstakingly recreating those shots frame by frame by hand drawing it. Obviously, this also involves changing details of those shots, with the main changes made in this film being the change from humans to animals. The end result of this animation method is that it all looks very fluid and the movements of the camera and people look very life-like, despite being an animation. I feel that this makes the film a very unique watch and entertaining to watch.
The film’s style of having a story that is mostly about its symbolism isn’t something that I want to utilise for my own short film. However, even if it’s an animation, the cinematography is still interesting. There was a shot where the camera followed a wire down from a plug socket to a toaster, and it’s shots like that which I feel I may want to use in my own short film.
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