Organ Thing of The Day – “A little shrew searches for hope as she makes her way across a bombed-out city”. A film and a piece of music written and directed by Kate Bush for WarChild.

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“In 2022, with war breaking out in Ukraine, I decided I wanted to make an anti-war animation. In particular, I hoped to draw attention to the children caught up in war.

I based the storyboard around the song, Snowflake, which was sung by my son when he was a child. I think his performance is extremely moving and although I‘d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.

The original track runs for over seven minutes, but as animations take a long time to make, it made a lot of sense to shorten it to three or four minutes. I was concerned that the song might lose something by being edited so intensely but actually it’s held up pretty well.

I knew I wanted the featured character to be a child caught up in war, so I made a very rough, off the cuff story board.

Although I’d initially thought to make the character a human child – a little girl – I settled on the idea of a Caucasian pygmy shrew (Ukrainian shrew): a tiny, fragile little creature. I felt that people might have more empathy for a vulnerable little animal than a human…

This little shrew would take a journey on a moonlit, winter’s night through a war-torn city, initially unaware of what was going on around her in this land of the giants. She can sense that she’s being called by a kind of spiritual presence… HOPE.

She starts to search for HOPE. Sometimes hope is all there is to hang on to”… read on

More from Kate Bush’s website

Written and directed by Kate Bush
Animation Co : Inkubus
Production Co: Tomato Twist
Animation producer: Gayle Martin
Animation compositor: Lorenzo Cenci Di Bello
Little Shrew animation: Nicolette Van Gendt
Hope and drone animation: James Gifford
Concept artwork: Jim Kay
Little Shrew Rendering: Alan Henry
Background artwork: Nicolas Loudot
Still photo: Maksim Levin
Lead vocal: Albert McIntosh
Piano: Kate Bush
Orchestration: Jonathan Tunick
Guitars: Dan McIntosh
Drums and percussion: Steve Gadd
Atmospheric SFX : Jon Carin