Little Shrew: Review by Simon Thompson.
Kate Bush’s Little Shrew is a hauntingly beautiful short that fully utilises the powers of both music and animation to tell the story of a shrew trying to make her way through the remains of a war-torn city devastated by bombs in the pursuit of safety.
The contrast between this beautiful and innocent creature of nature making its way through manmade horror after manmade horror is a powerful one indeed. What makes the short so emotionally resonant however, is that despite the shrew being nearly shot and blown up, she keeps trying to find safe shelter no matter what.
Visually speaking, the animation provided by Inkubus studios perfectly complements Bush’s arrangements and the message of the lyrics themselves. The animation is entirely in black and white, and for the most part done via hand drawn (minus some uses of 3D animation for the devastated tower blocks and the plane sequence) and still photo techniques.
The best way I could describe the visuals is that they look like the end result of a collaboration between Raymond Briggs, Kentaro Miura, and Shaun Tan giving them a distinctive haunting storybook like quality.
Little Shrew in only four minutes paints a complete and devastating picture of the dehumanising effects of conflict. Produced in collaboration with the charity War Child (an organisation which seeks to help child refugees and children in conflict zones) Little Shrew is not only a stunning work of animation on its own, but also a fantastic piece of press for a worthwhile charitable cause.
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