When I was a kid, my Dad told me that the crunching of plastic and glass I heard inside a recycling machine was coming from little men with hammers and tiny machines, working to ensure we got our 5¢ for every bottle. Like the elves in the North Pole or the tiny lady who gives us money for baby teeth, teams of teeny beings around the globe work hard to ensure that our big, complicated human lives run smoothly.
This week’s Staff Pick Premiere is a story about the most crucial of small helpers: the scrappy system of organs that call your insides their home. Directed by London-based animation dreamteam Luca Schenato and Sinem Vardarli, “The Brave Heart or (The day we enabled the sleepwalking protocol)” follows a stressful moment in a regular ol’ day for the leader of the crew: the heart.
When a young man drunkenly stumbles into a deep slumber after a night of partying, his careless young brain clocks out for the evening. Suddenly, an emergency arises in the man’s bladder and the heart (wearing only underwear and a captain’s hat) must take action to avoid an inconvenient disaster. What follows is a (mostly) anatomically correct journey of the heart through the bustling chambers of a hungover man in trouble. Luca and Sinem told us more about the inspiration behind this ridiculously imaginative short:
“Luca was reading some books of Oliver Sacks and also other medical articles about the sleepwalking biological mechanism those days. So the idea of a body as a submarine vessel style machine comes to his mind. Here the inner world is isolated and mediates with the external world throughout tools/senses, and the crew needs time to time make their independent decisions without the need of the body consciousness, in order to save the day. The challenge was to set up the story around the banality of something like taking the body to the toilet during a hangover morning. We wanted to make a comedy, but we also wanted to tell a story using the archetypical hero journey, where the hero travels into the underworld and face the dragon.”
Soaring through the small intestine while barking orders in an adorable Charlie Brown-esque “blah blah” language, the heart races to its destination through a somewhat accurate playground of body parts. Elaborating on the artistic liberties they took in this regard, the filmmakers explained:
“The small intestine in adults misused around seven meters (23 feet), so we definitely took some artistic freedom here. We constantly worked with an anatomy atlas on the desk during the production which was essential for the pseudo-medical look for the environment design. But we also thought that if the organs have consciousness they might perceive their own reality in a different way…half way during the production, we started questioning our-selves if we were doing the right thing about spending all this energy for telling a film about a poo.”
We bet you haven’t been on a journey like this since boarding Ms. Frizzle’s Magic School Bus. Expect a more mature upgrade with “The Brave Heart”, from stunning CG animation to a clever (albeit gross) sequence of events. Wanna board this crazy train? Strap in and press play.
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