ONE WEEK ABOUT Kaboom Animation Festival
The annual Kaboom Animation Festival – from 13 to 22 March in Utrecht, Amsterdam and online – presents the latest, most creative, innovative and daring national and international animation productions with the theme ‘Human Touch’. Over the coming days, we will be showcasing a number of the Dutch participants, today Sophie Olga de Jong & Sytske Kok.
Hondenleven (A Dog’s Life)
When Luna goes to stay with her grandmother, she likes to play with her dog Stella. Like a little general, she orders Stella around the garden and enjoys that Stella has to listen to her. But Stella is old and sick and collapses before Luna’s eyes.
Luna ‘knows’ that you become a star when you die. Grandma does not want to take away this belief from her granddaughter and is secretly relieved that she can avoid reality because of this. Together they bury the dog.
But when Luna asks a while later if they can make a hole to see how Stella is doing? Grandma is shocked and strictly forbids her. However, the thought does not leave Luna and in an unguarded moment she digs the hole anyway to be able to see for herself.
There she sees to her horror how Stella, partly eaten away by the worms, lies at the bottom of the grave. Stella has not become a star at all! Grandma comforts the sad Luna guiltily and quickly covers the grave again.
Luna carefully asks whether Grandma will become a star when she dies? There is a sense of hope in it, that the gruesome fate of transience may only apply to animals. Grandma hesitates for a moment whether she should maintain that hope for Luna, but then she decides to no longer beat around the bush.
Luna breathes a sigh of relief; it apparently reassures her that Stella eventually will not have to lie under that dark sand all alone. And while Luna continues playing, she leaves Grandma behind in the melancholic realization of her own finitude.
Directors’ statement
For us, Hondenleven (A Dog’s Life) is not primarily about grief. It is more of a philosophical film about the incomprehensibility of death. We drew inspiration from children’s thoughts on this subject.
The film is for all ages. The perspective of the story is mainly that of Grandmother, or perhaps more accurately that of an omniscient narrator in the form of the camera. Nevertheless, we believe that even for children aged 6 and up, it can be interesting to see that adults also struggle with questions about death.
For Hondenleven, Sophie sought out darkness in her design, without completely losing the playfulness. In doing so, she looked for a balance between realism and abstraction, tenderness and rawness. Because for Sophie and Sytske, it is in that tension that the poetic charge of Hondenleven resides.
