How To Narrate Your Life Story - School Of Life
2017 · 5m · UK
Directed by olga makarchuk
Genres: animation, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
An animated essay narrated by Alain de Botton exploring how we unconsciously author our own autobiographies, urging more compassion and care in the way we narrate our life experiences to ourselves.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
De Botton's self-help platitudes get the animated-essay treatment, which at least means watching doughy blobs morph around for four minutes—but it's still essentially a TED talk with better rendering, and I'm not sure pastel dreaminess redeems the fundamental conventionality of 'be nicer to yourself in your internal monologue.'
Makarchuk's handling of form here is genuinely considered—the morphing figures and tender visual language create a register where the philosophical argument lands as felt experience rather than lecture, situating the work in a lineage of animated essay-films that trust the image to do the thinking alongside the voice.
That decision to animate the internal narrator as a small, vulnerable figure in conversation with a larger, more expansive feminine presence—that one formal choice transforms what could've been a straightforward voiceover meditation into something about scale and self-witness that the animation *shows* rather than tells.
Reviews
Some lovely moments in this short animation for School of Life by recent Royal College of Art graduate Olga Makarchuk.
Dreamy, surreal, ironic, with lots of metamorphosis and camera movement... pastel colour palettes, doughy characters and unusual transitions.