How do household noises influence
our bodies?
Our daily life has its own kind of
music.
When I first discovered the
animation of Shiho Hirayama (平山志保), b. 1979 in 2009, I was delighted by the simplicity
and humour of her works. She has a great
eye for movement and the transitions in her short line drawing film Swimming (2008) are delightful in their
gracefulness and originality.
With Sound of Life (生活の音, 2010), Hirayama adds the
three-dimensionality of claymation to her trademark line drawing animation
style. Sound of Life is an example of
how animation can make the ordinary extraordinary and cause us to think about
our lives from a new perspective. I was
reminded of Nick Park’s Creature Comforts (1989), which
animated interviews with people about their daily lives, transforming ordinary people
into claymation animals living in enclosures at the zoo. Sound
of Life does not use interviews or dialogue, but instead the soundtrack
consists of the noises that one encounters in the course of the day. The soundtrack blends documentary sound with musical
interpretation of the soundtrack of our lives (piano, synth) which Hirayama
mixed herself.
The film begins in a minimalistic way:
three children kicking a ball around in an undefined public space. A woman joins the scene and picks up the clay
ball and looks at it and the scene shifts to a moving walkway (of the kind one
might find in extra long corridors when changing trains in central Tokyo)
complete with the soft female voice that warns you to watch your step. Bustling crowds where the line drawn people’s
hair has been replaced with colourful clay.
Blue clay fills the screen, as if replicating the slightly
claustrophobic feeling of being caught up in a crowd.
There’s a lovely sequence of people boarding
a train, with the clay filling the windows of the train. The train’s departure is captured with the
blurring movement of the clay, and then Hirayama transitions into a scene of motorcycles
on the street. She ease with which
Hirayama changes perspective and scene recalls the great master of changing
perspective, Georges Schitzgebel.
From traffic noises and road repair
drilling to the more subtle sounds of the wind in the trees or the more mundane
sounds of a taxi driver yawning as he waits at an intersection with his turn
indicator on, Hirayama draws our attention to the sounds of everyday life that we
might otherwise ignore. The animation
movement and the amount of clay used onscreen increases as the soundtrack becomes
more filled with music/sound. Soon there are no
more line drawings left, but the screen fills with clay sequences depicting a
bird feeding its young, a mother with an infant, and the film returns to the
image it began with: children playing with a ball. The boys remain faceless, but the screen is full
of colour this time. The closing credits
are played over an abstract sequence of clay colourfully moving and shifting as
if powered by the forces of nature.
It is an uplifting experience to
watch Sound of Life as the film
reminds us not only of how our lives are all interconnected by our shared
experiences of sound, but also how the sounds that make up our everyday lives can
affect our mood and general well being. With
so many people today blocking out the sounds of life by listening to music or
podcasts on their portable devices, Sound
of Life draws attention to the simple pleasures of listening and being aware
of the environment in which we live.
