For the first assignment, we must pick a film or animator from our home country and give a presentation about their process/the themes in their work. There’s not much animation that comes out of Hong Kong except for McDull, a charming kid’s cartoon about a little kid pig and his life in school and at home. I decided to go for Canadian animation instead, which is how I stumbled across this charming short film from the National Film Board of Canada.

After watching When the Day Breaks several times, I’m starting to notice how the animation style influences the portrayal of life in the city. These characters are disparate individuals, some of them seemingly quite isolated, and there are actually no positive(?) or overtly friendly interactions between characters.

But the camera still chooses to take us on a journey midway through the film. It pans from the protagonist and travels down electrical wires or water systems to other homes and other characters, who are all singing to the same song. It is as if they were all joined by a sense of community otherwise not apparent. It reminds me of Rhapsody in Blue because in that city, too, there are isolated characters that never meet but are joined/unified in the narrative through the animation. More thoughts on this later.

T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land is another thing I’m considering:

“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

Cities as portrayed in Western animations often feature the isolation of individuals, despite extreme proximity to each other. One feels disconnected, part of a crowd but not a community.

Animation seems able to draw these connections out in a way poetry, prose or realistic live-action is unable to. I’ll just have to figure out more sources and look into technical choices to see how this idea works.

Meanwhile…HOCKEY CHICKEN!!!!