Reflective Encounters

“The mixed-media offering Soft Animals comes from Renee Zhan, a recent National Film and Television School graduate whose work explores “issues of the body, nature, and sexuality - all things beautiful, ugly, and squishy”. While these sensibilities are evidenced to varying degrees in all her work to date, including her Harvard University-produced Pidge and Hold Me (Ca Caw Ca Caw) as well as last year’s NFTS musical mini-epic O Black Hole!, they are perhaps at their most concentrated in this film, a densely-packed three minutes of fraught emotions, tensions and lustful urges.

We’re presented with the ostensibly straightforward scenario of two former lovers happening upon one another by chance and doing their best to maintain a cordial dialogue, though it is quickly revealed their civility is at odds with their still-raw recollections of the passion they once felt for each other. As they go through the motions of polite small-talk, we see inner thoughts manifest as a dance of almost baleful, libidinous desire conveyed through manic charcoal strokes, brutally animalistic character performance and globular, flesh-toned expulsions of paint evocative of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. Through its effective juxtaposition of loose (yet disciplined) character design against the tactility of the materials used, the short effectively conveys how the ghosts of lovers' past can sometimes haunt us in spite of ourselves, and the bittersweet ambivalence that comes from memories of intimacy.”

— Ben Mitchell