“Mukashi mukashi. . .”
(Once upon a time. . .), begins Shin
Hashimoto’s 2010 animated short The
Undertaker and the Dog (葬儀屋と犬 /Sōgiya to inu, 2010) in the
age-old opening of a Japanese fairy tale.
The story continues in the style of a typical fairy story, telling us
that in a land far, far away there lived a beautiful princess. But, if the shaky aesthetic with smeared
black ink on an unevenly paint-washed background wasn’t enough to suggest that
all is not what it seems in this “fairy tale”, the sight of the madly grinning
princess with darkly stained lips and cheeks will surely tip you off that this is
no ordinary tale. Particularly when she
runs off towards a modern cityscape and is unceremoniously run down by a taxi
cab.
This is the
story of Snow White turned into a horror story.
The dwarves, painted with a smear of yellow gather around her body as
flies circle around the red flower that has grown from her belly. We then see a montage of brief vignettes: the
quiet cemetery, a violent mob attacking an object (perhaps a turtle?) with
sticks, a close up of a turtle, a large man dragging a cart through the
mob. The large man is the undertaker,
who approaches the corpse of the princess but the dwarves try to keep him away
from her so he brutally attacks them.
The scene is shot from interesting perspectives including the “camera”
itself being punched “in the face” and one dwarf falling on his face with the
legs of another fallen dwarf looming in the foreground.
As the
undertaker passes a fence he spots a mangy bitch walking upright on her hind
legs with her overlarge breasts heaving as she leads her litter of scruffy,
half-starved pups in a somber march. He
reaches into his cart, now teaming with the corpses of the dwarves and offers
the bitch one of their bones. An odd
moment of kindness from a man who a moment earlier demonstrated only cruelness
and heartlessness. The atmosphere of
this grotesque short is accentuated by the strangely captivating music of Hiromi Ohta.
Shin Hashimoto (橋本新, b.1979)
is a member of the CALF animation
collective. A Tokyo-based artist,
Hashimoto did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Tama Art University
(aka Tamabi). Hashimoto is known for his
nightmarish animated shorts such as Beluga
(2011), which played widely at both domestic and international animation
festivals and received a Special Jury Mention at Animafest Zagreb 2012. Check
out his work on Vimeo. To see the
film in full resolution check out the new DVD/Blu-ray L'Animation
Indépendante Japonaise, Volume 1.
Catherine
Munroe Hotes 2014
