Reflective Encounters

“Animation against a black screen gives Bad Mood a shadowy quality. Rays of lights pool like water, giving shape to people and objects previously hidden in the void. The film alternates between flat lines and figures, and evocative tableaux with greater depth. Flickering lines add texture to the relatively simple animation, giving them a slight instability, hinting at their being vague memories, sketched out to accompany the daughter’s voice-over narration about her mother.

Although the narrator discusses the realities of death and the anxieties that come from financial precarity, the literal darkness of the film bolsters a strange calm established by the sound. Voices can be faint and muffled by noise mixed in with half-remembered snippets of music. Occasional shots of a blinking light and white noise on a screen give the sense of serene drowsiness that comes from dozing in front of the TV in the early hours of the morning. Through this union of animation and sound, Bad Mood creates a reflective space in its twelve minutes, enabling viewers to gently feel through the narrator’s ruminations.”

— Cathy Brennan