Document Anglais/LELE

 Camille Noel


I chose a short animated film called "Francis", directed by Richard Hickey, and written by Dave Eggers in 2014.  

This short film is an interesting case of adaptation from the written media to the visual one. Adapted from a short story by novelist and screenwriter Dave Eggars, the idea for the film was originally conceived when radio host asked a number of writers to create a short story about “Adventure”. The story appears first on the radio and was later turned into a short film.
Director Richard Hickey chose to keep the voice-over, omniscient narrator and all sounds because they are very important in the story for the atmosphere. It was staged in a natural environment, a lot of effort has been dedicated to creating 3D scenery of the lake and its surroundings with special attention dedicated to lighting.

In this animated short film called a young man tells us about his memories of a camping trip. As he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, he often went camping in the Quetico Provincial Park, up on the border of Minnesota and Canada. He tells why he will not return to it any more and says the story of Francis Brandywine. He will be the omniscient narrator and the voice we hear from the beginning to the end.

The story takes place a night on a family camping trip to Quetico park. The reckless Francis waits until her family has fallen asleep, she wants to leave the campsite and to be alone. The landscape is dark and creepy, the young girl takes a lantern before she goes. The atmosphere is very gloomy, Francis cross a disturbing forest and takes a rowing boat out to the middle of the lake. Hoping to find a quiet spot where the teenager can lay on her back, stare at the sky and write in her diary.
The environment with a big, deep, quiet lake, which seems black, the music slow, terrifying and the darkness are symbolic of the Gothic style.

Her expectations of a peaceful night at one with nature are soon shattered when an unexpected noise comes from the water below. She hears something strange, as if somebody knocked in a door, but in the middle of the lake and there is only she and its diary. The silence returns and she thinks of having to dream but once again something seems knocked, stronger, against the hull of the boat.
She is scared like us, the viewers. We feel like the character, smalls and ridiculous in this immense and terrifying lake, the camera and every sound play a role to make us feel that.

She says to himself that it is an animal but it doesn’t reassure her because what kind of animal would knock as we knock at a door? The music becomes more and more alarming… Then stops giving way to the suspense, we await to what’s going to happen, as Francis.
And when she thinks it’s her imaginary the knocks came again, harder. She panics, she tries to row and to go back on shore but the boat doesn’t move as an invisible force prevented it from making it. The teenager is exhausted, scared and desperate, she tries to keep calm but after twenty minutes the knock shakes violently the boat. She takes the boat oar to touch what terrorizes her but this thing pulls the object in the water and the other oar fall in the lake too.

She has no more way out, she waits for the morning and decides to write in her diary which is the only show of what it’s happened.
In the morning we fin the boat near of the shore, with Inside only the diary of Francis which the last page is wet and on whom is written with blood or mud : « I did knock first ».

I chose this short film because I find the animation beautiful, well realized and the gloomy atmosphere is very successful. The story stays mysterious because we can’t know what’s exactly happened to the principal character and what has make us anxious during this short movie, if it was a monster, a ghost, the lake, a mermaid… And the sentence left in the diary which seems to be written by a finger intriguing to me a lot. Furthermore, I find that the music make us feel many things, violins and piano always play at the good time. It reminded me Tim Burton's works and I think that it corresponds to the Gothic theme because it makes us feel the fear and the horror of the character and we want to know how the story finishes with graduation of the suspense.

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