The Gravedigger's Tale
2013 · 14m · UK
Directed by Min Young Oh
Genres: animation, fantasy, romance
Tones: melancholic, mythic, tender
A solitary female gravedigger lives apart from the village she serves, her isolation eased each night by a haunting violin melody from the forest edge; the melody belongs to Death himself, and what begins as loneliness resolves, unexpectedly, as a love story.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A stop-motion film from the NFTS that reinvents the fairy-tale death figure with the discipline and emotional restraint of the finest British animation tradition — its sweep of Southampton prizes and its Palm Springs and Santa Barbara qualifying runs are simply the official record of what the craft already declares.
NFTS production, wordless stop-motion, gravedigger and Death as love story. Fourteen minutes. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya comparison is wild ambition. Min Young Oh is making a deliberate, slow film and the puppet animation could carry it. Or not.
NFTS stop-motion puppet film recasting Death as a courtly suitor and the gravedigger's marginalization as the condition that enables intimacy — that inversion of the usual horror frame is genuinely lovely. Wordless puppet work demands real craft.
Reviews
THE GRAVEDIGGER'S TALE is about the everyday death — this is really the tale of a society's inability to deal with its own fate.
Festivals
- Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013
- Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2014
- Southampton International Film Festival 2013, Best Animation, Best Animated Screenplay, Best Score, Best Achievement in Art