Death in animation is too easy. In the mainstream, rarely does the medium explore the wider cultural and emotional issues surrounding it. Instead, as viewers, we are often bombarded with the Hollywood idiom that death is for the wicked, the brave or the profoundly tragic. THE GRAVEDIGGER’S TALE is about the everyday death. The death of a stranger or a loved one, and the death that fills the cemeteries in our towns. Death which constantly surrounds us, but which we can’t (or won’t) see through the casualised slaughter we absorb in mainstream cinema. This animation’s narrative depicts the stigma of death faced by a figure whose communal duty it is to dispose of the dead. THE GRAVEDIGGER’S TALE is about a society whose irrational fear of death causes it to shun those who remind us of it. The Gravedigger lives on the boundary between life and death, and has been abandoned by the people who she serves. Marginalised by her liminal state, the Gravedigger’s only companion is the grim spectre who summons the souls of the dead after they’re buried.

… this is really the tale of a society’s inability to deal with its own fate …

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S TALE has a pacing that is near meditative and echoes the process from which it was created. In fact the film often works as a philosophical metaphor for the animation process, as the Gravedigger herself reanimates the dead. However, her connection to the inevitable is too harsh a reality even for a reanimated puppet. A stern warning that one cannot manipulate the game to win at death. Even as animators create life from inanimate objects, it’s only an escape artist’s illusion shrouding the bitter end. In the climatic scenes, the cinematography is used ingeniously to emphasise the hollow shell of the Gravedigger’s life: two open doors allow the wind to pass through her empty shack and waft her ceremonial robes. A taunting reminder of the futility of efforts to alter her own destiny, which is isolated and as yawning as her abode. It’s details like this which elevate THE GRAVEDIGGER’S TALE beyond banal euphemisms of fatality and enable it with an empathetic weight. THE GRAVEDIGGER’S TALE never aims straight for the heart; instead its objective is to present a logical, descriptive case for death. The director, Min-Young, wants us to understand the agony of the Gravedigger before we empathise with her. For this is really the tale of a society’s inability to deal with its own fate, and while Min-Young doesn’t draw any conclusions in these captivating twelve minutes, she does remind us that there is a fundamental element to our lives that is all too often ignored. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcpUDkHn6ZE