My First Animated Film - Part I
Beast & Beloved
(working title)
TW: death, suicide, grief, societal failure, the acceptance of death and suicide
Our anxious Hero, an ant-like spirit, embarks across the perilous underbrush of a spirit dimension to rescue their Beloved. However, instead of vanquishing the Beast they held responsible, the Hero must confront their Beloved and the nature of Death itself.
That is the current logline of my first animated short film. Currently imagining the film as no more than 10 minutes.
I’ve been developing this film since 2021. It started with a vision. A vision of an ant spirit battling with a much larger death spirit, and the story unfurled itself from there.
Between 2021 and today, I received three small grants that have allowed me to start the development of a soundtrack and concept art. From the Black Music Grant in 2022 and two Scribe grants, the Next Level and Planning grants. We thank you.
I hope that I can generate enough materials with these funds to apply for much bigger funding to hire the artists and animators that would make this film possible. I already have such a lovely team of artists:
Kilamanzego and Auto worked on a sample track.
Abayomi Louard-Moore has been working on character design.
Arantza Pena-Popo has been working on concept art.
Cybee Bloss has been outstanding logistical support and producer.
NOVA CYPRESS BLACK provided integral early concept feedback thanks to the Next Level grant.
I am an animation director but not an animator.
All of my stories, every single work you’ve seen of mine, I imagine animated. That is my dream art form. It’s the art form I think most accurately represents the nature of reality. With film, you manipulate existing elements, but with animation, you craft a world from its very atom (pixel) of being. You create the physics, the chemistry, the biology. When working on Smile4Kime, I quickly learned my brain is not well suited to the technicality of animation. However, it’s very suited for conceptual and spiritual translations, suited to balance multiple moving parts and realities. To lead and support a team. To summon worlds.
Progress
Here are samples of the early character design process. Through visuals alone, you can see the dialogue between Abayomi and me as we craft the Beloved (she/they) character. Abayomi does most of these, but the final concept drawing is by me.
Grey doodles of different shaped bodies of that are a mix of humanoid and insect imagery.
Dark pink shilouettes of insectoid inspired humanoid bodies for the Beloved. There’s an experimentation of where wings can could go or be rethought of.
A continuation of the dark pink shilouettes from above. The final drawing is a more detailed doodle where the beloved has a peaceful face, folded mantis-like arms, and large rounded thighs. This drawing influences the latest design.
This was the final drawing for the first round of character designs. This monochrome grey, black, and white illustration with defined ink brushwork makes a segmented insectoid-inspired bipedal body. The head has a large upper part resembling a beetle’s shell. We discussed how the markings on the beetle’s shell could move like a lava lamp and show faces opposite the Beloved’s genuine emotions. The segmentation didn’t feel quite right, but we had to wait for more funding to go back to the literal drawing board.
I did some writing and reflected on the story between the phases of concept art. These are some of my thoughts that were a result of that. Perhaps the Beloved is not simply a “worker ant” like the hero but an ant transitioning to become a queen ant. This would make her much larger than the hero, and they would have a different body configuration. You can see bits of my sketchbook that I brought into this Photoshop document and some inspiration. I wanted to find a way to make a spirit with insectoid qualities RATHER than an insect with humanoid attributes. I also wanted to avoid the snatched waist of many insects, including ants. I wanted her to be round, full of her potential for birthing (the singular role of a queen ant). The whole colony thinks this is a potential worth living for but does not interest the Beloved or ground them to this reality.
You’ll have to wait for the next update to see how the Beloved’s design evolved in the second round of character designing! Other updates will also include environmental concept development and the character development of the Beast and the Hero.
The Story ~ Spoilers in this Section ~
I am still summoning this story, and it will go through many rewrites with the help of Circles (check Next Steps below).
But, the essence is this.
The Hero thinks the Beast has kidnaped their Beloved, but that is not true. The Beloved has gone to the Beast willingly, as the Beast is a death spirit that tenderly ushers beings into their death. The Beloved has willingly gone to the Beast to die. The Hero must contend with that choice, and we witness the various levels of metamorphosis resulting from that decision.
Why this Story?
This story is about death. It’s about autonomy in death. It’s about letting loved ones go—Honoring experiences. Honoring death as a transition, not an enemy.
This story comes from the personal experiences of being a loved one of people with suicidal ideations. Accepting the autonomy of their lives was the only way I could genuinely be a loved one and not an anxious caretaker. I too have struggled with my place in this existence. Often I have felt like Princess Kaguya, waiting for my true family, beings beyond humanity, to take me home by any means necessary. But I persist in this human experience. That doesn’t make me braver or better than anyone who has transitioned out of this life by their own choosing. Death is not a failure, and that is why I want to make this film.
As a loved one of a person with suicidal ideations, how can we express our grief and love for the person without using our emotions to control the other or manipulate the other into staying with us? If we’ve lost a loved one, sometimes we feel sorrow or even rage. How could you leave me here? These are valid processes of grief, yet our American socialization of death can teach us that a person who transitions via suicide is a coward, is someone who wasn’t tough enough to make it. In black culture, we are taught to survive, that our only power is our resilience, our ability to continue to exist in oppression. This film is a lot of questions. What if one modality is not better than the other? Who makes the value system of survival?
My characters are not humans, nor do they even live on our earthly material plane. They are spirits with personalities and configurations drawn from insects, plants, and other decomposing things. There is African and Indigenous cultural influence from Zulu and Hopi cultures, specifically because both groups have folktales about ant spirits.
What if we remove the value judgement between what is the known, and what is the unknown? We demonize death because we do not know it—don’t remember it. I want to return the contemplation of death to the earthly cycle, to ancestor wisdom. Our deaths have become unnatural—our lives gutted by state violence, institutional harm and neglect, and destruction. Especially for black people, what does it mean to contemplate our lives, our deaths? Would suicide exist if we lived in a system that loved and nourished us? I think so. I think there will always be those called to the other side earlier than the organic dissolution of age. Death and our desire for it is not contingent upon the state or capitalism and our place in it/outside of it/in opposition to it. Death is a part of the cycle of all things.
I believe we can take our deaths back.
Our deaths do not belong to the police, the economy, or the state.
And in the reclamation of our deaths, can we learn to live more as one with the ecological rhythms of our home—our earth?
Next Steps
In this moment my funding has run out and I offer a pause for my visual artists. I don’t want to have them work without payment, unless if feels aligned with their spirit to do so.
My next mission is to begin diving into the script.
But I don’t want to do that alone.
I am looking for Circles:
Circles of artists, psychologists, death doulas, thinkers, dreamers, feelers, and more to be readers of my script and provide feedback. People to investigate these questions with. Could that be you?
My characters are not human. This provides distance from our human experience and explores death outside of institutions—at least for a moment. But this film doesn’t exist in a bubble. We bring with us the state violence, personal trauma, and institutional failure that affects us when watching.
Are you willing to bring your perspective to this script, to support it by molding it with many hands, many voices?
If yes, please email me: hello@malachilily.com
If you know someone who would be a good person for this community accountability feedback, please send them this blog post.
If you know of any grants that should be on my radar, please email me!
It’s always good to remember this film may shrivel and curl into itself at any time to make room for other projects. I trust the journey, growth, and death of this film. The world might not be ready, might never be ready. I try to move by listening, and in my listening, I’m continually given visions for this film. So, for now, I persist with this concept. Listening is an ongoing process, and I am willing to move at a root-reaching and snail-sucking pace.
Until the next update!