Trees and Other Birds

Animation Film by Emma Claire Sardoni

(Music by Sten Wouters and Pieter Van Dijk

Sound by Vadim Bakker

Voices By Maryam Sserwamukoko, Casper Schoolmesters, Pieter Van Dijk)

Mountains sing, flowers love, horses cry.

If humans would go extinct, would there still be music on earth?

What about all the very human dreams and imaginations we had about nature, where would they all go?

Billy and Pot live in a grayscale world, nature is a vague concept, it’s almost just a memory out of Disney films, Windows screensavers and meaningless chatter. Only their fantasies live in full color.

This film is an absurd yet critical ode to our very human ways of depicting nature.

As we mourn for lost nature, lost humanity, do we also mourn the beauty of landscape paintings and the silliness of cartoons with dancing animals?

Trees and Other Birds

2D animation on paper, frame by frame

Billy and Pot live in a grayscale, desolate world, all of nature seems to have gone esxtinct in their eyes. As they walk through the landscapes,  chatting about memories of nature, we are introduced to progressively sillier nature-characters, flowers, trees, birds, mountains. The film climaxes with a musical style song with a singing horse.

The film is structured on these two opposite realities, the desolate, black and wite, dystopic world of the humans,  and the silly, colorful, naive, lively world of nature.

The conceptual subtext of the film is a reflection on how Western society  hardly ever attributes consciousness to nature, yet in an animated film it’s such a classic to anthropomorphize it. Is the only way we can relate to nature, a delusional human-centric fantasy take on it? In the brinks of imaging human extinction, having destroyed our ecosystem, where do we grieve for the imagination that we once had of it?

There is music in the dirt

That keeps the flowers growing

It’s something deep in the earth

That keeps me fa sol la ti doing

And that little patch of grass

On which the shiny sun is cast

and the trees the winds are calling

All fill the air with songs and pollen

Won’t you escape with me

To landscapes made of green

Something you have never seen

It is the place to be

Sit down, enjoy the show

Come watch the pintrees grow

See how the river flows

But now the curtains close

Oh what a lovely sight

The end is burning bright

I try with all my might

To make it through to t’morrow night.