An engaging and short animation about living with grief, the impact of losing a loved one, and the effect this can have on relationships. It is also a cleverly constructed film that avoids being preachy, while still conveying the senseless loss of life and childhood due to gun crime in America.
Drawn with simple but impactful illustrations, the artwork brings to life an engaging and empathetic story that will have a special resonance to those who have lost someone. Set around a family, the film looks at the aftermath of losing a child; with the parents having distanced themselves from each other, and life.
It is only through their shadows that the parent’s tell of their unspoken emotions; blame, hiding, denial, to only living within the memories, while they themselves withdraw and become numb to the world.
But in their memories their daughter is still alive, and as such they wish to remain there. But that fateful goodbye soon replays before them, their mind racing to undo it, to stop the action from playing out. The film’s sequence revealing in equal measure the comfort and pain to be found in memories.
In having an almost minimalist style to the film – the illustrations being charcoal and ink line in appearance – the story can be focused upon. The film making poetic use of colour and sound, with both being used sparingly and to a point. In the film’s use of colour it’s shown only in relation to the little girl they have lost; in the blue of her t-shirt, the pale pink of her baby blanket, the orange warmth of a sunset, in backgrounds that emit a sense of play and first love. But the brightest colour of all is in the school’s American flag – thereby highlighting the issue at hand, and an irony of a country which holds itself so proudly while allowing its lack of gun control to mean the death of children. The red and blue of its flag soon changing instead to the colours of a siren.
Meanwhile the film’s sound works in beautiful combination with the colourful memories, producing a sweet, innocent, and playful melody befitting that of childhood. Until there is silence, punctured only by a noise too often heard in American schools, and it’s not screams of happiness that resound. Initially, music doesn’t return to the film, but the sounds of life and its pain; such as heavy raindrops that are really tears. When the melody once again resumes you’re hit harder by the loss of a smile – beautiful but gone.
Small but powerfully moving, If Anything Happens I Love You aims to stir the soul, and with it the hope of action. Heart-rendering and warm, as much as it breaks you, you come away watching something that makes you want to engage with changing the situation. Having far more emotion, and with it power, than any news report, which have come to be cold and statistics-based. Instead, If Anything Happens I Love You reminds you of its very personal cost.
Director & Writer: Michael Govier
Director & Writer: Will McCormack
Other notable works:
- Claws 2017-2022
- Toy Story 4 2019
