Wild Summon

One day it may become difficult to identify which films belong in the Live Action and Animation categories. In the meantime there is this delicious work by Karni Arieli and Saul Freed, shortlisted for a Best Animated Short Oscar, most readily discernible as belonging there because of its fantasy elements, so smooth that it comes ravishingly close to reality in places. Nobody would ever doubt its awards-worthiness. It’s an imaginative spin on the natural history documentary, Marianne Faithfull lending her husky post-Covid tones as narrator in lieu of Attenborough.

Another voice comes to us first – without words, but replete with personality and emotion. Tired, gasping, a feminine figure crawls up onto a rocky riverbank. Her body is covered in layered reddish scales, her lower legs bound into tapering flippers, her eyes covered by a diver’s mask. We watch as she dies, as Faithfull explains that she has completed her journey now, fulfilled her purpose.

The river runs through a long green valley, studded with granite outcrops, which might belong in the highlands of Scotland but which the later presence of a bear suggests is more likely Canada. Down in the waters, hidden in the gravel, the dead woman – she and her progeny described throughout as salmon – has laid her tiny eggs. We watch as they hatch, each releasing a tiny child wearing a tiny, green-grey wetsuit and diver’s mask. Soon, these children must set off on the lengthy journey to the sea. numerous dangers await them along the way.

Following the life cycle of a salmon and inviting us to look at it with fresh eyes, perhaps with greater empathy, the film explores hazards both natural and artificial. Bears, birds and predatory fish are just part of the equation, as we will also encounter pollution, trawlers, plastic waste, disease-riddled salmon farms and more. Our heroine, distinguishable on account of the pink ribbon with which she is tagged by environmentalists, witnesses horrific things as she swims, as her body/suit grows and changes colour, as her mask grows to accommodate her adult frame. In due course she must return to the river and swim back upstream, exhausted, starving, to lay eggs of her own.

It isn’t just the quality of the animation that is stunning. It’s the creativity with which is is deployed to explore these myriad phenomena without once feeling forced or overbearing. The flow of the water and the movements of our heroine’s body create a sense of fatalism or of destiny, in which every action follows naturally from the last and there is little room for analysis or contemplation. Such concerns are left of the viewer, and for afterwards, at it is easy to become immersed in the moment, thereby crossing the barrier between human reasoning and animal instinct.

A superior example of the animator’s craft, Wild Summon has much to recommend it besides, and much to say. Catch it if you can.