So there's this stop motion filmmaker named John Clark Matthews. I think very few people have seen any of his stuff, but for whatever reason my family owned everything he ever produced, about a dozen short films for children in the 80s and 90s. Most of them were based on books, I think. I had to check his
IMDB page just now, and yep, I've seen every single one. And most are book-based.
His movies always had an unsettling edge to them. Not exactly creepy, but his characters always looked extremely ugly and unfriendly to me, even when they were supposed to be friendly characters. In spite of that, my siblings and I would watch these videos all the time, partly because we genuinely liked some aspects of them, and partly because the bad stuff was funny to laugh at. Yeah, I've been ironically watching bad movies since elementary school.
But this one video. This. One. Video. "Uncle Elephant". I haven't read the book, but the way the story is told in the movie, the plot is very clearly a metaphor for death and the grieving process. An only child elephant's parents go "missing", and he is left to fend for himself for awhile. He goes into detail about how sad he feels. Then his uncle shows up, who I think he had never met before. He goes to live with his uncle, and although at first he dislikes how how different things are, he eventually warms up to the uncle and develops a familial bond. Now the story wraps up with a happy ending - the parents come back.
Do not let this movie fool you. It fooled 9 year old me, and I thought it was a fun story about making new friends and having adventures. 10 year old me was not fooled. I knew his parents were not coming back. At that point I knew about death... not "my goldfish is floating" kind of death, but the real human death that we all have to face. The movie teaches kids that it's okay to feel sad when a loved one dies. That things will feel bad for awhile, things will feel different. Depending on who dies, it can even change what your family looks like, and that adjusting to that takes time as well. But eventually things become okay. It's really a fantastic teaching tool, whether it's for a child who actually has to deal with loss, or for teaching a regular kid like me who would eventually have to come to grips with something scary about life.
Still. Fuck this movie. Specifically the nightmare sequences. Yes, there's more than one! I found a clip on Youtube, and I can't bring myself to watch the whole thing. The absolute worst bit is around the 4 minute mark... there's a surreal shot of the young elephant falling into a pit or something, and at one point his eyes just become empty white circles. To this day, I can't deal with that imagery. White faces with empty black circles for eyes, like a skull? Not very scary at all. Even my avatar has them. But empty white circles for eyes? I'll take Nopes for $1000, Alex.
