Short Film // Feral

Directed by   Daniel Sousa

Running time 13 minutes 

Feral is a 2012 short film, which uses the concept of a 'feral child' as a concept for the story line. The film is about a wild boy found in the woods by a solitary hunter who is then bought back to civilisation and uses the same techniques he learnt in the wild to survive in society. 

The animation style of Feral is very stylised, but works really well to communicate isolation, and loneliness, this is also contributed by the fact there is no spoken dialogue for the duration, only action and hand gestures etc. The animation itself is incredibly fluid, which works out well in scenes where animals, wolves for example are running and chasing other animals. Or when children are playing in a playground in another scene. The use of camera angles and shots is

also another one of the films strong points, I noticed several uses of a panning shot throughout the film to convey the passing of time in a montage like way which I thought worked nicely, and left a lot of the experiences the boy encountered during the montage to your imagination. Shadows are used effectively, and came hand in hand which the art style used for the animation, and the colour palette which consisted of mainly browns, beige and black, with some grey tones. This colour scheme effectively made a lot of the characters and environments into silhouettes. In a way, this added to the feelings of loneliness that perhaps the feral child felt, he didn't know or accept any of the other children in the playground in the scene where they cornered him, and they were just silhouettes in that scene, laughing at him. As the audience, this means we also feel no emotional connection to the characters. In fact, the feral child, the main character, is one of the only characters if not the only character not to be shadowed out but instead possesses a light beige colouring, perhaps to make him stand out and signify his independence and loneliness.  

The music is highly appropriate and used optimally in certain places to create a dramatic atmosphere in key scenes. Primarily it's used in the scenes that show the passing of time, whether that be a panning shot, or the image of the sun rising and setting in a time lapse-esque manner. Due to the nature of the plot and the animation as whole, animal imagery is used throughout to reinforce the idea of the feral child and put humans and animals on the same level for the purpose of making you feel connected to animals more than humans, since the humans are made out to be the bad characters, mistreating the boy in some respects. The animals shown include, wolves, deer, chickens and birds.