Between Lines
2023 · 3m
Directed by Sarah Beth Morgan
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An all-women-team animated short about the scarring experience of schoolgirl bullying — and the recovery that follows — as a young woman navigates isolation, exclusion and anxiety toward healing and connection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Between Lines does the expected thing — bullying trauma, healing arc, all handled with competence and gentleness — but there's nothing here that makes me sit up and ask 'wait, WHAT?' It's sincere where I wanted subversive, contemplative where I wanted to be destabilized.
Morgan's animation sits comfortably in the lineage of humanist indie animation about interior states; the formal restraint and color palette are rigorously controlled, and the pacing shows someone thinking carefully about the space between moments.
The all-women team matters less than the single choice that makes this work: the decision to animate the exclusion and anxiety not through distortion or visual noise, but through negative space and careful sound design — letting absence do the emotional work that a heavier hand would've squandered.
Reviews
Mir imponiert neben der inhaltlichen Tiefe vor allem aber auch grafische Darstellungsstil, der äußerst gelungen ist!