Sea child is an 8-minute hand-painted animation. It does have a narrative, nevertheless, I still consider this animation as a conceptual abstraction.
The narrative of the story is simple: a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman follows a group of men in the streets to find her mother. Abstraction comes in the representation of her nightmares and the symbolism of the eel fish.
This animation can be defined under the genre of drama. The combination of animation techniques and chosen theme creates a very dark mood and leaves a long-lasting impression.
The animation shows a male-dominant world where all generations of women are serving and pleasuring them. From a young age, girls are besieged by men that are trying to make them do whatever men want. A symbolic eel fish represents the idea of womanhood. It is killed and served to men and fed to a young girl so she can become the same.
The animation was hand painted with mostly black and red ink. Only in a scene of a city were added colours to make it look vivid. Kim, the director and animator, said about the technique, “I really liked the texture and the way it looked. It felt very analogue as the ink stayed on the wooden boards no matter how hard I tried to remove it. The trail of what had happened before keeps a sense of the time that was put into and it felt right for the story”. (Munday, R., (2016) Experimental about innocence in animation. Available at: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/10/04/sea-child/ Accessed: 27.10.2022) The domination of black colour created a feeling of isolation and anxiety, while drops of red colour represented blood and womanhood. The domination of male characters is shown by their visual enlargement, while a young girl becomes smaller compared to them, or she fully disappears.
The audio in the animation mostly enhances the movement and sounds of the world. There are only three additional songs that are performed by three women there: a young girl, her mother and her grandmother. Each of them has its own motive and represents each generation.
