Written, directed and soundtracked by Bush, built up from sketches she drew herself, this four-minute animation is suffused with both love and horror
All of Kate Bush’s sense of wonder, and how she tempers it with not just melancholy but outright sorrow, is threaded through her devastatingly moving new animated short film, Little Shrew.
Bush has long wrung stunning material out of family dynamics. Cloudbusting is full of the boyish admiration sons have for their fathers long after we become men; This Woman’s Work, about a crisis amid childbirth, is so stricken with awe at new life; Aerial was full of this material, from the maternal study of A Coral Room to a wonderfully guileless song about Bertie himself.
It always felt bigger than Kate and Bertie, but Bush adds a terrifically powerful new dimension by making it, in Little Shrew, a lament for children affected by war, particularly in Ukraine . As Bush says of Bertie in an accompanying essay: “I think his performance is extremely moving and although I’d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.
Little Shrew follows a Ukrainian pygmy shrew, captivated by a ball of cosmic light emanating from deep in the solar system. The creature scurries out of its cosy spot in the top pocket of a coat – and the animation coolly pans back to show that this is the corpse of a soldier sitting against a tree. The shrew makes its way through a war-torn landscape, and into the melee of Russian strikes, fired from under the chillingly blank face of an unmanned drone.
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