Squish!

A fairground skirl, like a roundabout off true, an off kilter helter skelter. Entities, substances, against a background of colour. That sound, askew, will be replaced by the metallic tension of a trampoline, repetitive compression.

A thing tense, the sound of pencil on paper on perspex. An ear twitches upon the screen. The transmutation of the pencil's intestine into the body. Our narrator has no mouth but can speak. Speak she does.

What filmic butterfly will emerge from the scurrying passage of the clockwork caterpillar? The reflection of a hand in an eye, drops upon it replacing tension with surface. Against that wet lens a clear sheet, ink drawing a new pupil in black unseeing above the seeing. Superimposed after this the leg of an animal, animated evocation of x-ray upon it. Bunuel would be dogged in his pursuit of similar goals. To make something finished from an unfinished sketch, to circle around truth like a spirograph. Stare at the skin. Join the dots. This is not "perpetually childlike", it is gleefully childish. Unbothered by the requirements of proprietary. Make noises. Turn the stomach. Stick to it. Feel it.

Shapes that might be stickers are moved upon the plane, archive audio. Approach the government and ask the Thai Air Force for aid for animation for agriculture. Live in a chemical filled environment. Better living through comedy. Delirious in its whimsy, the headless chicken draws progress in its wake. Yet this is not just fun, but the lack of it. The need to "pay to be healthy mentally", to quote from later Q&A, but that makes explicit what the film covers and costs (and coats) differently.

Our narrator does not care what will be real or not, and texturally that doesn't matter. The wrist may not be real but the wounds within it are. To see the word green upon a shape is to have colour evoked where it is not. It is not our hands that two-fingered drum, that squeeze the wet glitter or the undancing brain, that pull dolls from balloons or make ice in a glass of red liquid seem teeth in an invisible watcher's mouth.

When it stops being something else and starts not being YouTube, or at least a convincing simulacrum of that trade dress, angry metal over still smoke, red/green 3D shapes on bewitching watercourses, a succession of dissonances from the kawaii to the compressed. Standing on one leg upon the lightbox, Tulapop Saenjaroen is variously literally within his film.

Giddy in its layerings, there is a moment that evokes the Cambrian explosion. There within the shapes an echo of Hertzfeld, of Hallucigenia. This is at least as dense as the Burgess Shale, finding in online views an ooze primordial. Four bits of music (one titled "Slimy Fields Forever") produce something whose chaos is directional. Described within the Q&A at 2022's Glasgow Short Film Festival as irrational it may not be mathematically divisive but is likely to be so to audiences.

Not just unbalanced tonally, it is consistent with itself. It is a thing to enjoy, to allow to wash over you. The titular Squish! is not just the flow of substances under pressure but the depiction of depression. This is a place of, if not ill-health, then unhealth. Within the film are user reviews of a non-existent app, a tribute to a pioneer of Thai animation, a lost legacy half-finished and a lacuna clearly patched. Even that state of incompleteness, a lost film's last elements brought back to life, creates a sense of intent, of emotion, of expectation. Existing within a blurry middle ground between animation and live action, the autobiographic and the documentary, Squish! makes of the apparently solid the permeable. Soft and violent, cute but dark, original and reverent, all are given space to co-exist and to compelling effect.