Everybody Goes To The Hospital

Children get sick a lot. Everybody knows this. New parents panic, but after a while they settle into a routine, assuming that it will just be another minor illness. Then occasionally, the sickness goes on for too long. By the time the heroine of this short Fantasia animation is taken to the hospital, doctors say that she’s in dangerous condition, that her appendix has burst and she will need immediate surgery.

The appendicitis is just the first thing to go wrong in a mundane but no less awful horror story based on a real incident. What really makes it distressing, however, it not so much the pain or the strangeness of it all but the behaviour of the adults. The refusals to explain directly, meaning that the situation has to be figured out from snippets of overheard conversation. The personal revelations likewise overheard as adults bicker. The resentment that they show where there ought to be love. Only a teddy bear provides affection, and it is as vulnerable as the child.

Narrated by a child, the film unfurls in plasticine form. Michael J Bishop and Mukhtar Kaissi’s charismatic model work adds oodles of expression. Vomit sprays out of the child’s mouth like green worms. Intestines, red and wiggly, are lifted from the body to be washed and replaced. The hospital exists alone in space, against a backdrop of stars, remote and alien; it is approached along a rubbery road which bounces and shifts in the way of things which adults get used to and ignore but which worry children.

Not everyone is good at the job of being a parent, and not all parents care, but unless explicit abuse is involved, this is often elided from conversations about trauma and how incidents in childhood can retain their power over the years. It is the absence of love which is felt most keenly here, and which colours a film which might otherwise verge on comedy due to its unusual, sometimes absurd perspective. The intensity of the narration carries it. Watch the credits sequence for a couple of small notes of reassurance at the end.