If Anything Happens I Love You: Taking Another, and Hopefully Final, Look at Grief

For my fifteenth post, I’m going back to my first and taking another look at grief and its representation in film. It wasn’t long after I watched Pieces of a Woman (POAW) that I came across Michael Govier and Will McCormack's If Anything Happens I Love You (IAHILY). In preparing for this post, I found out that IAHILY is now an Oscar-winner, winning best animated short this year (In my opinion, Burrow should have won, but that’s a topic for another day). My focus on POAW wasn’t pointing out what a bad film it was, but challenging its praised portrayal of grief, which I found to be lacking. Originally, I compared the film to Andrea Arnold's Milk, but a new contender has entered the ring.

I think grief is one of the most complex emotions to portray cinematically. I believe this is because it provokes a very individual response. Nobody knows how they will react to death or how they will grieve until it happens to them. It can also be hard to make it genuine without it coming across as over the top. Grief encompasses a range of emotions: sadness, anger, relief and sometimes there is joy to be found in grief. So you cannot just have an actor simply cry; you must show the range and extent of grief. If an actor were to cry to express their grief simplistically, it would either be over the top or unrealistic. Grief is not something that is fixed overnight or ever. In fact, it is something that remains with you; it simply changes over time. Were a film to attempt to show the ‘end’ of grief, it would run into problems as it does not end. Showing this may suggest that it has been forgotten or the person has managed to get over the loss. I find it interesting that I have compared POAW with two short films. IAHILY is only 13 minutes long, so perhaps the answer in portraying grief lies in keeping it short and sweet.

The duration is not the only big difference between the films. IAHILY is animated and is about the loss of a pre-teenage child, not an infant, but the loss of a child is unbearable no matter what age they are. I have spoken before about how I believe animation is the perfect avenue for exploring difficult topics and emotions. It is a removed representation of our own world. It’s not real, so we can explore what we usually cannot or what is difficult in reality. The means of death in IAHILY is so brutal, violent and, sadly, an actual real risk in our society, so not only is the barrier of animation helpful, but it’s needed. Without it, the film would have taken on a more political tone rather than just exploring grief and familial love.

The animation itself is pared back, with just straightforward details and not much colour, except when needed for emphasis, which works well. This allows for complete focus on the story. I really liked that while we don’t literally see the event that led to the death, there is still great impact. How the film tells the viewer what happens is possibly more affecting than if they had been shown the actual event. Again, had they decided to show it, we would be deviating from the film's core message. The animation stills and sound are used. The screen fades to black and a flash of red and blue indicates sirens. As a viewer, we are thrust into a moment of panic and loss. With the clever use of sound and a transition from the previously sweet drawings to darkness and sirens, we begin to understand the level of sadness that the main characters must be feeling.

For those of you that are familiar with my first post (and if you aren’t, please go read it), you will know that one of my main issues with POAW was with the character of Sean. I know the film is called Pieces of a Woman and not Pieces of a Man, but I don’t think the film needed to, or should have, totally invalidated male grief. Sean was a cliche and a stereotype, and worse; he was turned into a complete monster which meant his feelings didn’t matter. Men grieve when their child dies and IAHILY shows that.

As I’ve said earlier, grief can be difficult to show. It's something that changes from day to day. IAHILY uses shadow puppets to express the inner feeling and desires of the main characters and it does this in equal amounts. In this case, grief has created distance between the two parents. There is so much that they both want to do and say, but they are unable to. The father is more unengaged, but he is not made into a villain. Both parents are distant at times and both are trying to find a way to cope. Both have equally joyous memories of their daughter and both struggle to not see the sadness with this joy. They are a collective, a family. They all loved each other. They all hurt.

It is simple, but a charming animation with a lot of emotion. It says everything while saying very little. It is not just the animation that is cleverly used, though. It's the whole format and layout. It is about what it shows us as well as, equally, about what it doesn’t show us. The film ends before we know if everything will be okay, but we have taken a step forward. The film takes something extremely complex and whittles it down to the essentials. This is how it can explore such a loaded topic. We don’t discuss grief; we watch it. We watch the complications of wanting to say and do so much, but being overwhelmed by emotion and not knowing where or how to start, showing that sometimes you can simply come back to what you have in common: love for your child.

As I have said, POAW is not a bad film, but when you see so many other films with such wonderful portrayals of loss and grief, you have to compare them. In cinema across the board, we are so used to seeing men as the ones telling the women ‘ it's time to move on’ or other sentiments of that kind, but they too feel loss and sadness. They are not always the monsters trying to discourage their wives' grief or responding by going off the rails and hurting everyone around them. POAW, IAHILY and Milk all centre around the death of a child, but only two of these films show the father grieving without vilifying him.

IAHILY is a powerful film and a very ‘real’ film. Animation provides a buffer to explore difficult topics and emotions. It also allows a politically charged topic to come back to its human elements while not shying away from the difficult topic. It tells a sweet but sad tale about family bonds. It realistically shows the devastating realities of grief in equal amounts for both mother and father and doesn’t attempt to show that life will somehow be okay again. It simply shows two parents taking comfort in the love that they both shared for their child.