Your Mountain Is Waiting

Animation's ability to rapidly and massively recontextualise is core to Your Mountain Is Waiting. It makes an inner journey an outer one, as smoothly and robustly as it makes pools of puddles, swaps the swimming splash for the swirling spoon.

A city, somewhere. There are shades of Hokusai, both in the mountains' repeated shape but the waves of a washing machine. Other shades too, the long legs of the guiding fox thrown by the lamps higher than the tall fence. Above the dark sky and along the dark road to a fresh somewhere, escalation, intersection, circularity.

The floor bleeds into foliage, the worm in the spirit turns. Character design that pushes perspective too, a foreshortening, a gleefulness that suggests heads, shoulders, knees and toes is, knees and toes, a guiding proportion. Everywhere that playfulness with scale, the translucent snow, the night sky many-legged, the creep of crawl and snowflake become snowdrop.

Hannah Jacobs has a distinct style, hand-drawn digital animation that makes extensive use of textural variation. Highlights include the patterning on the fox's neck and tail, and in the pack of animated video vulpines it is a compelling addition to The Henhouse, Fantastic Mr..., and more. As an avatar of the natural world they are less obvious than those eight-foot Na'vi, but the scale her is of inner, not outer, worlds.

Harriet Gillian also has a background in corporate animation, a distinction that feels pettier than accurate. I find no fault in film-makers going where the funding is, this is no less or more advertising for being awarded by the BFI's short form animation fund in 2020. Both have worked on the Headspace App, and the general sense of wellbeing through place and space is present here.

Kerry Leatham's score, and Arzu Saglam's sound design which makes extensive use of Rebecca Glover's foley work create a tone that reinforces tangents to realism, paths to the mystical. Many of these too are wet, the clink of ice, splash of puddle, synthesiser-seeming strings giving way to vermiform squelching and the rattle of laundry. That recontextualisation of image draws from those sounds, wind might be wings, feathers become valleys, stars become sea. A triumphal surge, a mobile malleability feel less like enlightenment than an LED indicating a destination has been reached.

In trying to thread a needle of specificity and empathy, Your Mountain Is Waiting risks the flattened affect and inspiring the anxiety it seems to depict. It's affirmations that things change, that perspective can make them small, are unspoken. It does not seek to put ducks in a row but it still endeavours to array animal, vegetable, mineral. With a frequent return to water in several forms it brings life where there had been dehydration and despair, but the process is, at times, close and closer to nauseating. That the natural is in places pushed away before it, pink in tongue and twain, it reasserts myself is more obvious than much. The serried ranks of metaphor might not feel a match to the notes of reconnection with intuition because their call is so clarion. The fog of warring nature and self is banished by banners and bearing, the subtleties here are not guerillas in the mist.

As with many such stories it serves as envelope to message, if not moral. Carrying several stylistic stamps, this may not have an entirely corporate outlook, but it might lose something in the exchange.