A small mammal searches for hope as she makes her way across a bombed-out city in the new animated short Little Shrew, set to Kate Bush’s song “Snowflake,” from her 2011 album Fifty Words for Snow. The song also features her son Albert (who was 12 at the time) singing the roll of a falling snowflake expressing the hope of a noisy world soon being hushed by snowfall. In an interview with the BBC, Bush said she had written and directed the animated short to raise money for children impacted by war. The black-and-white, four-minute short aims to raise money and awareness for the charity War Child.
Bush wrote and directed the film, storyboarded from her own sketches. The illustrations are by Jim Kay, the illustrator best known for Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls and illlustrated editions of the Harry Potter series, and then animated with the studio Inkubus.
Free to watch, Little Shrew is released on Bush’s official website today (Oct. 25). It was partly inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “I started working on it a couple of years ago, it was not long after the Ukrainian war broke out, and I think it was such a shock for all of us,” Bush told BBC Radio Four’s Today program. “It’s been such a long period of peace we’d all been living through. And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation that would feature, originally, a little girl. It was really the idea of children caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to how horrific it is for children. So, I came up with this idea for a storyboard and felt that, actually, people would be more empathetic towards a creature rather than a human. So I came up with the idea of it being a little shrew.”
She added, “I think war is horrific for everyone, particularly civilians, because they’re so vulnerable in these situations. But for a child, it’s unimaginable how frightening it must be for them. I think we’ve all been through very difficult times. These are dark times that we’re living in and I think, to a certain extent, everyone is just worn out. We went through the pandemic, that was a huge shock, and I think we felt that, once that was over, that we would be able to get on with some kind of normal life. But in fact it just seems to be going from one situation to another, and more wars seem to be breaking out all the time.”
The iconic 66-year-old singer-songwriter rose to fame in 1978 with her seminal hit “Wuthering Heights.” Her long list of hits includes “Hounds of Love,” “Babooshka,” “King of the Mountain” and “Running Up That Hill,” which shot up to the top of the charts again in 2022 when Netflix’s Stranger Things re-introduced it to a new generation of fans.
Sources: The BBC/The Guardian
