"If Anything Happens I Love You" But I Hate Myself
An Animated Short to Make You Cry This Year
Released in 2020 and directed by Will McCormack and Michael Govier, If Anything Happens I Love You is an emotionally taxing 12 minutes of runtime.
It won the Academy Award for Best Short Film (Animated). It made me cry at work. It is still tragically relevant in 2023.
Like we’ve learned nothing as time has passed us.
I am, as we all know, an absolute sucker for anything animated and this was no exception. For me having taken so long to find and finish this is actually kind of disappointing but here I am ready to share it with all you lovely people!
Because as emotional as this story is and how straightforward the narrative is dispensed, it uses the medium well.
This short is about gun violence. In an elementary school. And follows the parents who have to live with the depressing ever after.
We know that is the through-line, we know that is what is going to happen no matter what. We watch it to see how they tackle such a public narrative that has been tackled every which way and still cannot express the anger, frustration, and debilitating sadness that gun violence has caused.
There are really no words to make something this traumatic better, so they don’t. No one speaks in this film, either as the voicelessness parents feel IRL or as the metaphor of words being not enough, you take your pick.
It is a silent film.
The sounds diegetic and nondiegetic, but no voices to make sense of the world they are in, most of everything music and sound effects and, at the beginning, laughter.
There are no words, but the emotion conveyed by the characters dancing on the screen and the sounds layered on top makes them feel so alive, so real.
So much so that when one of them stops living, it is jarring.
The medium they chose is perfect. The way they handle the threads of such a delicate topic is perfect.
If this was a short film with actual actors, it would feel too close to home. It could be anybody’s school in America, anybody’s family, anybody’s trauma. Here, the animation equalizes and detaches the narrative from the audience, but like many things we enjoy, we grow attached to it.
The backgrounds are bare and bland, the hyper focus of the family on moments and feelings.
Color is sparse but its arrival demands attention. The brushstrokes of the shadows playing a different story than the one we see in the foreground with the parents. We see the coldness in their physical forms and we see the desperation for warmth in the shadows they ignore.
Without so much as a single word being said, we learn to love what they love and we hurt when they hurt.
The saddest part of this narrative is the inevitability of it all. We know.
We know from the moment the first scene starts to every gap-toothed smile to every childhood memory immortalized on this screen.
We know this will not last.
The parents are living through their life in a hollowed shell of what it once was, blaming themselves, blaming each other, hating that nothing could have prevented this.
Nothing could have prepared them for their daughter’s final words:
