MEET LITTLE SHREW…

In 2022, with war breaking out in Ukraine, I decided I wanted to make an anti-war animation. In particular, I hoped to draw attention to the children caught up in war.

I based the storyboard around the song, Snowflake, which was sung by my son when he was a child. I think his performance is extremely moving and although I‘d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.

The original track runs for over seven minutes, but as animations take a long time to make, it made a lot of sense to shorten it to three or four minutes. I was concerned that the song might lose something by being edited so intensely but actually it’s held up pretty well.

I knew I wanted the featured character to be a child caught up in war, so I made a very rough, off the cuff story board.

Although I’d initially thought to make the character a human child – a little girl – I settled on the idea of a Caucasian pygmy shrew (Ukrainian shrew): a tiny, fragile little creature. I felt that people might have more empathy for a vulnerable little animal than a human…

This little shrew would take a journey on a moonlit, winter’s night through a war-torn city, initially unaware of what was going on around her in this land of the giants. She can sense that she’s being called by a kind of spiritual presence… HOPE.

She starts to search for HOPE. Sometimes hope is all there is to hang on to.

This is my sketch of Little Shrew from the original storyboard;

Many years ago, I’d seen the illustrated book, A Monster Calls. I was completely blown away by the power and the originality of the drawings.

I knew I wanted this animation to be black and white – its starkness felt right for the context of war – and I thought of those images I’d seen years before.

I got in touch with the illustrator, the very talented Jim Kay, but I thought he might not be interested or would be too busy working on other projects. So I was very excited when he said that he would like to be involved, and that he would have time before starting his next project.

I really felt that he was the only person who could create the kind of environments I imagined, so it was like a dream come true that we would be able to work together. I sent him my roughly-sketched story board and the process began.

Unbeknownst to me, Jim is a huge lover of wild life and already knew a great deal about shrews!

Along with the backgrounds, we began to develop the character and Little Shrew began to come to life:

We worked pretty intensely for a few months and completed about half of the story board before both Jim and I had to move on to our separate projects. The animation had to be parked for a while.

Eighteen months later, at the beginning of 2024, and with all the archive projects behind me, I returned to Little Shrew to see if she and I could continue our journey together.

The next stage was to find the right animation company. Through a friend, the animation company Inkubus was recommended.

Usually the look of an animation would begin at this part of the process, but the character was already fully developed and the atmosphere of the environments was strongly established because of the ground work that Jim and I had covered.

It has been enormous fun working with this incredibly talented team, and part of that was the unusual opportunity to work with such a small company. It made it much more personal, and meant that the continuity of the look has held great integrity. It also meant we could work one-to-one and keep a consistent flow of dialogues throughout the whole process, along with my continual bombardment of notes.

Gayle and Lorenzo have been the main liaisons in the company and they suggested Nicolette as Little Shrew’s animator.

I feel very lucky to have worked with them all and especially this wonderful and extraordinary animator who has brought Little Shrew to life, with the tenderness that her character deserved.

Alan has worked alongside Nicolette, patiently rendering Little Shrew, making her fur look as soft as velvet and painting on every delicate, quivering whisker.

Working on this has been a fascinating process. I love being creative in the visual medium as well as in audio. Working directly with the animators has been surprisingly similar in many ways to working with musicians, where you are creating through someone else’s hands.

We worked for 5 solid months for just over 4 minutes of film. Everyone has worked so very hard and we’re all really proud of it.

Both the animator and the background artist live in different countries in Europe. The animation company is based in London and although I went in for initial meetings, most of us then worked remotely for the majority of the project – using emails, phone calls and zoom calls.

If this had been truly hand-drawn, like old-school, it would’ve taken forever … but with all the animation tools that are now available, well…. we did it!

I wanted to make sure that the look and feel of the animation didn’t move away from that early developmental work.

The soldier lying under the tree started like this in my story board:

Here’s are a couple of early sketches of Jim’s:

…and here is the masterpiece: Jim’s final drawing that was then redrawn for the animation:

I love the way this feels like a chapel in the middle of the wood. It’s incredibly powerful. I wanted the whole animation to be lit by moonlight so it had a kind of eerie ’shimmer’ throughout the piece.

Another member of the team is the fabulous animator James, who has brought Hope to life as the magical entity that sings and calls to Little Shrew as it falls through the sky and travels towards her.

We used the reference of a will-o’-the-wisp type character that is playful and childlike.

Hope is the only element in the whole piece that has colour. Yellow felt right – a colour often used to represent hope and sometimes used by families in the form of ribbons to signify hope for their loved ones at war.
I wanted the portrayal of war in this animation to feel contemporary, and not World War One or Two.

When I was looking for current images to use for the bombed-out city, I found this.

It was when we applied for the clearance of this photo that we found out more about the photographer.

This photo was taken by the Ukrainian photographer and videographer Maksim Levin. It’s a still, taken from video footage he shot from a drone flying over the area.

He was a well-known and very talented photographer who had worked closely with Reuters for several years, having become a war photographer. He was working in really dangerous situations, shooting important footage and sharing it with the world, drawing attention to the scale of the war. He was making an impact through his work and was risking his life doing so. He was a brave man.

Very sadly, he was killed by soldiers from the Russian army a couple of months after taking this image.

I wanted to use his powerful photograph as part of a sequence that would step outside of the drawn animation, to open a door into reality for just that brief moment, before returning to the world of animation.

We’re very grateful that we’ve been given permission to use this photo and I really hope that Maksim Levin would’ve been happy with how it’s been featured.

There’s not meant to be an exclusive focus on the war in Ukraine, but it was that war that instigated the making of this animation. All wars leave horrific scars: ruined lives, families ripped apart, life-changing injuries, trauma and loss on a massive scale – but it’s the children who suffer the most in so many ways. Their past, present and future melt away into fear and uncertainty.

I would like to ask that if you watch the animation, please make a donation to War Child, or to another charity that aids children in war.

Even a tiny donation will help enormously. War can be an unimaginable horror for a child.

You could be hope for that child caught up in war. You could make a real difference.

Thank you for supporting this project,

Kate

 
CREDITS:

Written and directed by Kate Bush

Animation Co : Inkubus

Production Co: Tomato Twist

Animation producer: Gayle Martin

Animation compositor: Lorenzo Cenci Di Bello

Little Shrew animation: Nicolette Van Gendt

Hope and drone animation: James Gifford

Concept artwork: Jim Kay

Little Shrew Rendering: Alan Henry

Background artwork: Nicolas Loudot

Still photo: Maksim Levin

Lead vocal: Albert McIntosh

Piano: Kate Bush

Orchestration: Jonathan Tunick

Guitars: Dan McIntosh

Drums and percussion: Steve Gadd

Atmospheric SFX : Jon Carin

 
Special thanks to:

Albert McIntosh, Geoff Jukes.

Many thanks to:

Del Palmer, Stephen Tayler, James Guthrie, Cat Irving, Teddy Hall, Martin Drey, Alison Eldred, Pat Savage.