Last Updated on May 15, 2024 by Sangita Ekka
Grief is not an easy subject to depict.
No storyteller wants to leave its audience hopeless, and yet it is important to convey the truth, the uncomfortable bits. The movie Canvas is one such short and silent animated movie about an elderly artist who is processing the grief of the loss of a loved one.
Art is personal. Every artist out there knows it. The instinct to pick a brush is a calling, a force that cannot be forced. And so, how do you go back to the inspired work when your muse is lost? How do you pick that old brush and paint again? How do you go back to the old life that you knew is now lost forever?
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The movie Canvas is an attempt to answer such questions, not only for artists, but for anyone who knows the difficulty of picking up the pieces and moving on with the life ahead. It gives a strange sense of closure, almost therapeutic, for anyone and everyone who has ever lost a loved one.
Canvas animated movie is written and directed by Frank E. Abney III who is also associated with popular animated movies like Frozen, Coco, Toy Story 4 and some more short animated stories.
It’s such a shame that thought-provoking and heart-warming short movies like Canvas rarely make it to the newsfeed for the majority of people. Two hours of content do not guarantee quality.
Finding the movie Canvas was a happy accident for me, and if I had not clicked the play button when Netflix suggested it to me, I would have forgotten, and hence missed out on an absolutely wonderful movie.
What amazed me about the movie Canvas is how much of the story it tells in a few frames. Empty beds, hidden doors, the placement of the easel, reflection in the old man’s eyes, the movements; each frame is carefully crafted – there is nothing extra, there is nothing less.
Another striking feature of Canvas, from the perspective of the animation industry is it’s inclusivity. Animation in its older days picked stories from fairy tales and served us characters with European features. When we didn’t see human forms, we found animals which could talk or plants which could emote.
While the animation industry experimented with animating the inanimate, somewhere the stories of cultural diversity of an era were lost. It’s a sheer delight to see movies like Bombay Rose or Over The Moon to bridge that gap.
Inclusion of variety means attention to details. When you are portraying a certain culture or race, you pay attention to their facial features, skin colour, their clothing, their hair, their mannerism, their bodies. The Canvas animated movie is a wonderful testament that big impacts of inclusivity can be made through short movies.
Originally a Kickstarter project by Chainwheel Productions, the movie Canvas has made its way to Netflix and I hope that more people will search for it and give it the love it deserves.
