Reflective Encounters

“Franck Dion’s Under the Skin, the Bark begins in a painting of a strange creature - a stag wearing a humanoid mask, much like the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke. We see a person wearing a stag mask walking past, brandishing a hunting rifle. The human masks of prey deceive the hunter, making mockery of his ignorance and disrespect of the natural world.

The hunter moves through this greyed-out forest combining gorgeous pencil-drawn animation with 3D effects towards a window in which he sees his mask reflected back at him. The hunter goes through the shimmering pane like Alice Through the Looking Glass into a stop-motion studio where a wooden creature draws the frames of the forest scene. In this space, the character experiences an existential crisis imposed by the animator and the screenwriter, who express a lack of interest in the hunter figure they have created.

It’s a powerful consideration of discarded characters, and consideration of how we might feel were those characters able to feel the abandonment of their creator(s). For the hunter, this gives him the impetus to draw his own destiny, changing his form and entering a different world to the one his creator(s) put him in.”

— Lillian Crawford