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REVIEW: This is the most devastating and heartbreaking 12-minute drama you’ll see all year.
Executed simply but superbly, If something happens I love you (now streaming on Netflix) might as well leave you in a pool of tears.
The fact that Michael Govier and Will McCormack’s short film is a wordless, almost mute, mostly monochrome, animated feature that is aesthetic and similar to pencil sketches, sometimes incomplete, makes its achievement even more remarkable.
It opens to two parents seated at each end of a long dining room table. Heads bowed, they both look lost in deep thought. Through their shadows, we see their true feelings – anger and sadness, both clearly expressed to each other in some recent past.
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As she hints to speak, he gets up from the table. As they go about their separate chores around the house: him on chores outside, she does the laundry, we watch him look longingly at a paint splatter on the side of his house, and she is lost to discover that a young man’s t-shift has been updated. in the dryer. Both elements are highlighted in vivid light blue (to the girl’s red jacket in Schindler’s list).
When he returns inside, a series of events takes them to the same space. A soccer ball falls over the dryer and rolls into what appears to be a child’s bedroom. As he continues to roll, he hits a record player, causing the needle to move and the 33 ”spinning, playing a tune (King Princess’ 1950) are not heard in the house for some time.
Netflix
This little masterpiece lives up to the best of Pixar when it comes to stirring up emotions and delivering devastating drama.
The fact that the parents come together brings back memories of their daughter growing up, her 10th birthday, and what she thought was a secret first kiss. However, her fleeting happiness turns into overwhelming pain as she remembers THAT DAY, the day she was sent to school, and she never came home. The one who received his final text: “If something happens, I love you.”
With its bright, haunting, and heartbreakingly understated combination of the still image of a closed school gym door under an American flag with a scream and a few other sounds, If something happens it will leave you in doubt about the horror, devastation and destruction wrought by a society where the right to bear arms trumps public safety.
As I watched it, it was hard not to think of New Zealand’s brush with the mass murder in March last year, an afternoon when thousands of Christchurch children were found locked up in schools, as police feared that several armed men were loose.
Netflix
The heartbreaking text that also serves as the title of the short film.
Former Sopranos actor (played Jason Le Penna between 1999 and 2001) and Toy story 4 The minor masterpiece from co-writer McCormack and fellow writer / director Govier lives up to the best of Pixar when it comes to stirring up emotions and delivering devastating drama.
If there is any fairness, this will be seen by parents and teens everywhere, it will win its creators the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, and it could change some Americans’ perceptions of guns. Come on, look at it now, but keep your tissues handy.
