Seed (2009) Online

Seed is a pretty weird short. It is also a film that will stay with you long after you've seen it. You might say: it is ridiculous, it is surreal, it is weird, it is scary, it is slightly horrific, it makes no sense. However, it's not ridiculous but pretty serious; it's more metaphorical than surreal; it's more unusual than weird; it's more harsh than horrific. And it makes sense, totally, because the film has an organic nature and story.

To get the film, you need to see beyond what is in front of your eyes, disregard your initial reaction to it (whatever that might be), and see it as a big metaphorical tale about the harshness of the natural world, and how Nature makes the impossible possible for a seed, egg or creature to reproduce and survive. Think about this: to reproduce, some plants and animals have to endure a grueling process of transformation, had to kill others to reproduce, had to die themselves to release the seed, need of exogenous agents to take care of pollination, need of the right temperature and humidity for the components of the seed to be fertile, have to kill their partners after mating, have to travel thousands of Kilometres to mate or lay eggs; some baby animals have to jump a rocky cliff from their nest before knowing how to fly. The examples are infinite. Nature is not a sister of charity. Nature is brutal. Nature is difficult. Any seed fertilized, any egg hatched, any pregnancy happily finished is a miracle. If not, well, try again, Nature doesn't have any hurry, start over, the same, for millenia.

This is one of those shorts you love or hate, nothing in between. Seed needs of the viewer's willingness to be surprised, shocked and mesmerized by the absurd, the grotesque, the ugly and the apparently nonsensical to have the message delivered to you on a silver plate.

This also a film that challenges the viewer's expectations about what animation has to be and can be, what can be expressed through animation, and an example of the power of animation to express powerful complex concepts with no words.

Seed is a mini-masterpiece, it is just difficult to watch. It is not cute or pretty to look at despite the excellent animation and its originality.

Svankmajer was the first person who came to mind when watching this film. I think because Seed has a similar mix of oddity, meaningful play and powerful embedded message to that of the Czech master.

An egg and an apple sit atop two different piles of garbage in a wasteland. The egg hatches a bird-like creature while the apple moulds into a creature with a claw. In the middle is a building containing an old transistor radio, which brightens up when the bird manufactures a broadcasting tower for music. Seeing this, the claw starts construction on its own tower with the aim of drawing the radio to it.

If the plot summary sounds odd then you probably are not prepared for what this film becomes once it gets going, since these few sentences represent the more accessible parts of the film. There is a meaning here and I think it is broadly about the destructive nature of competition and something about the drive to reproduce and how things cycle – I think. It is really hard to say because this rather oppressive, dark and macabre film doesn't tend to help the viewer too much. Seeing one of the countries of origin of this film listed as Czech Republic really didn't surprise me because it did very much have the grungy, industrial feel of Eastern European animation in here. With the plot getting weirder and weirder as it goes on, it is hard to stay with it but the animation remains engaging.

It is rarely pretty to look at but technically the stop motion animation is fluid and visually arresting (not attractive) and it is hard not to be impressed by what the makers have done – even if at the same time it starts getting odder and odder to the point where it feels a bit overwhelming in its weirdness. I wish I had connected better with it, because technically and thematically there is a lot going on, but it is a hard sell.