Life is scary, let the talking animals help you out: celebrating Niki Lindroth Von Bahr

Life is scary, let the talking animals help you out: celebrating Niki Lindroth Von Bahr

By Tenzing Pixley

A monkey who works as a telemarketer dramatically sings about the failure of his life atop his work desk. A deer who works as a bathhouse manager is continually pestered and harassed by entitled customers. Touch-starved bathrobe-clad anchovies bellow about their loneliness in a hotel that is specifically catered towards depressed anthropomorphized fish. These are a collection of just a few poignant moments from the short films of Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr. 

Over the last decade, the Stockholm based animator has built up a small yet punchy œuvre of stop-motion animated shorts, all of which depict absurdist scenarios not unlike the one’s just described. Aesthetically, think Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) but with half the symmetry and double the existential ruminations. No, triple. The typical Lindroth von Bahr short goes something like this: anthropomorphized animals fill human roles and deal with day-to-day mundanities with a pessimistic twist. It’s humorous in presentation, after all, who wouldn’t laugh at animated sardines singing about their woes. But there’s a very dark subtext to much of her work, as you come to realize that the problems of the talking sardines aren’t too different from your own problems. I think the funniest thing about her shorts is that the only thing separating her work from the realm of reality is the fact that all of her subjects are animals, and this is ironically the most superficial aspect of it.

Her sophomore effort, 2014’s Bath House, focuses on a deer who works as a manager of the titular establishment. Throughout the short’s 15 minute runtime, our protagonist is repeatedly pestered by entitled customers and harassed by small-time criminals who end up botching a heist and spilling chemicals everywhere. However, it isn’t the heist or the motley of other side plots which take precedence, it’s the mental toll it takes on the manager. As their working conditions get worse and worse, we feel for the manager not just because the narrative trajectory is a downward slope, but we know that they’re an employee and it is their job to sort out this entire mess, even after the camera stops rolling. The fact that Lindroth von Bahr’s subjects are all animals is the only thing separating them from human. Otherwise, the problems they face and the emotions they feel are all those of mankind. We’ve all taken on occupations that we’ve hated and dealt with people we’d rather not. We’ve all faced rough patches in our lives, where loneliness can be suffocating or our occupation uninspiring. Simply put, Lindroth von Bahr’s body of work can be distilled down to “cinema of the overworked and dispassionate”. And this manifests itself in no place better than her seminal 2017 short, The Burden. Picking up over 80 awards across festivals globally, the short once again chronicles her signature mentally-fatigued anthropomorphized animals as they grapple with existential meaning, loss of ambition, and lack of emotional contact with others. Except it’s now recontextualized as a musical, where stop motion anchovies sing in shrill autotune about how they have no friends or loved ones. And this tore me apart. Visually, how could I take this seriously? Swedish autotune-singing anchovies, what’s more ridiculous than that. But the subject matter they sing about is so distinctly human that it’s impossible not to sympathize with the malaise fish.

The titular “burden” is life itself. It’s deeply pessimistic, but Lindroth von Bahr’s narrative style is one that shows great contempt for the social constructs created by humanity. We are a cosmic coincidence by definition. Animals in every sense. Outside of reproduction and the desire for carnal pleasure, we have no reason to exist. Thus, we create constructs, society and everything it comes with, to give our lives meaning. The problem is that more often than not, these constructs can be depressing or devoid of any creative passion yet are so deeply rooted within human tradition that it’s nigh impossible to go against the grain. When you rewatch The Burden with this context, it’s easy to see that von Bahr both holds disdain for life, yet understand its inevitability that we must go through it. All of her characters are clearly disillusioned with their occupations but positive or proactive change is rarely ever shown. When her characters are discontented with life, they don’t fight against the current, they submit and wallow in their misery, hoping that one day something will change. And in the final shot, it shows the town where all of the animals live, a plot on a giant slab of rock, floating through space. And like the depressed foxes and rabbits of her art, the slab continues floating onwards, its course as unpredictably bland yet inevitable as life itself.

As of this very sentence, Niki Lindroth Von Bahr’s most recent work, The House, has just been released on Netflix. A four-way collaboration between herself, Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, and Paloma Baeza, it is aesthetically in-line with Von Bahr’s œuvre, and thematically might be more of the same or a completely new direction. Either way, if you are or aren’t familiar with the Scandinavian filmmaker, I’d strongly suggest exploring her work. After all, who doesn’t want to wallow in the monotony of life?