Bluebird (animation)
Poem by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom O'Bedlam
This is a line animation of Charles Bukowski’s poem, Bluebird. In the poem, Bukowski speaks of the bluebird in his heart, which he repeatedly smashed down and hidden away. The recurring motif symbolizes emotion, and in particular happiness, his curious nature. Entering the adult world, we have to wear our masks and everyday amour with the fear of being found out not being mature; afraid of being taken less seriously as if being emotional (happy) were a stupid and weak act. Thus, we hide our real selves, our weakness and vulnerabilities, until we can finally let it out again temporarily, at night, when no one’s looking. With this as the main concept in mind, I didn’t follow exactly the stanzas and narrative, instead having my own images/sets, and interpretation of the bluebird as also our everyday pressure and anxiety. The audio is the poem read by Tom O'Bedlam, and a royalty free music on Stock, “And-We-Walk-After”.
I took the main motif, bluebird, and the conflict between the narrator ‘I’ and the bluebird, as the characters and recurring plot/scene in the film. I used a color palette of black, red and blue, each symbolizes: the image ‘I’ present in front of people, the act of control, and the real me undercovered. To exaggerate the visual contrast and conflict, I used highly saturated colors, medium blue and scarlet red. The color switch then also symbolized oppression on the bluebird.
Like said, I didn't follow exactly the narrative of the poem, instead, I set up four scenes of some everyday routine we might all have encountered - the morning scene standing in front of bathroom mirror, the scene in a bar representing leisure time in public space, the scene on a bus to work, and finally the night scene on rooftop to suggest a extreme sense of isolation. In these sets, the bluebird sneaks out from ‘my’ reflection, shadow, phone, and the cigarette ‘I’ smoked. And eventually, they went back to hidden through deformation of graphics done by reverse playing of the frames. Other than emotion, I interpreted the bluebird as also our (my) pressure and anxiety that sometimes were triggered by the surrounding but try our (my) best to hide in the public to maintain our (my) otherwise dignity and unbreakable facade. For example, the first scene in front of the mirror suggests an anxiety or inconfidence from appearance.
Other imageries like the teardown body parts in the introduction implies that the bluebird is in beyond heart but everywhere in ourselves - from what we saw, smelled, heard, spoke, and touched. The part where the eyes blink and open to be a cage of the bluebird shows control, and self-restraint from the moment we wake up. And the “secret pact” ‘I’ had with the bluebird mentioned in the last stanza. The final scene in the film where a person with a bird head and suddenly blackout responds to the verse “it's nice enough to/ make a man/ weep, but I don't/ (blackout) weep, do/you?”, to let the audiences see themselves in front of the dark screen and left space for thoughts and reflections.