Au 8ème Jour (On The 8th Day) (Agathe Sénéchal, Alicia Massez, Elise Debruyne, Flavie Carin, Théo Duhautois, 2023): France

Reviewed by B Pyle at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2024.
 Gestalt, zeitgeist, collective-dream-nightmare, how to communicate without words the thematic myth of emotional disconnect and global overheat and our collective possible peril in the world today, and Earth’s collective story, using yarn, felt beings, 3D animation, and music in eight minutes?  How did the Bible tell the story of the world created in seven days, and what are humans going to create on the eighth for our own story?  Au 8ème Jour (On The 8th Day) (Agathe Sénéchal, Alicia Massez, Elise Debruyne, Flavie Carin, Théo Duhautois, 2023), does this with beautiful effect and feeling, and had its US Premiere in the Animation Shorts and Shorts Winners at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2024, and won the Bruce Corwin Award for Best Animated Short Film, making it now eligible for the 2025 Academy Awards.  View the trailer at https://vimeo.com/850726920.  It is a French student film from fifth year students at Pōle IIID, pole3d.com, directed by Agathe Sénéchal, Alicia Massez, Elise Debruyne, Flavie Carin, Théo Duhautois, with music by Thomas Peyrounette.  As well as being a winner at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2024,  Au 8ème Jour (On The 8th Day), has been nominated at the South By Southwest Film Festival 2024 for Animated Short, and the Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project.

What will we create, or recreate?  Yarn is a metaphor for a tale, and also a craft project we choose, and weave ourselves. The world faces global existential crisis.  2023’s top grossers, and all time grosser Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023), also talk about existential crisis and emotional disconnect issues, and help people to be aware of and heal them.  Resulting collective Barbenheimer, as a global phenomenon, where people double view both movies on the same day, when they opened together and beyond, was also created in our collective existential crisis gestalt, zeitgeist, collective-dream-nightmare of everyday in 2023.  Au 8ème Jour (On The 8th Day) is like a biblical tale and time group think for plotting possibilities:  eight minutes of animation to remind us all of our love and better choices, a parable we don’t have to end up in.  Why don’t we save ourselves with all of the innovative and powerful technology we have?  This seems an obvious question a child might ask, like the emperor has no clothes.  This also speaks to voice and voicelessness, and the preciousness of preserving all life.  What voice does a child or animals who communicate differently have?  How does an artist show us to care about ourselves and our world?  The materials and music in Au 8ème Jour (On The 8th Day) echo this and evoke softness and childhood, nurturance and crafting, using 3D graphics technology to make it all move and flow, and with no words like a poetic documentary with only music.  This softness and music also has a reflective inward looking and feeling quality like Impressionism in music away from brash Wagnerian nationalism in the late 1800s, and grunges’ inward turn away from heavy metal excess in the 1990s.

How does the world make our way out of existential crisis?  In Au 8ème Jour (On The 8th Day), the Avatar-like life cord gets grayed, depleted and disconnected, as we see the destructive forces overtaking idyllic nature scenes on wonderfully yarn-thread-connected sea and land with no sound from the beings themselves.  Divide and conquer spiritually, emotionally, and physically:  no language, but we see what’s happening, like fashion changes, and people around the globe adapt.  There is definite visual similarity to Avatar (James Cameron,2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022), in theme and look, including the bluish people, and the life cord symbol at the end like the connecting cord of the blue beings and the animal beings they ride in the Avatar films.  Avatar was a blockbuster winner of all time globally, as the world resonated with the message of divide and conquer extraction’s threat to all beings, when it was released.  This animation has a similar message.  This time the bluish creatures are more human earthling, and the dying animals are earth animals.  Do we destroy what the Bible said God created in seven days, in our eighth day?  Or will we learn to steward God’s creation?  We are the yarn makers both in story and our own lives collectively.  This film is worth seeing and feeling in both visual innovation and creative beauty, and insightful empathy.  It will be released in March by South By Southwest Film Festival (imdb.com).