Just read the title of this short animation – ‘This Seen Makes No Cents‘ – and you will guess the ironic, playful intention of the director. And yet Natasha Redmond doesn’t create here what we could call an ordinary comedy. There is, indeed, quite a bit of humour in this project, but behind it lies a bitter taste, a reality that is not necessarily funny. Obviously, this aspect doesn’t prevent the viewer from enjoying this animation. On the contrary, the strategy by which the director defies the conventions of this kind of (sur)realism, tackling aberrant conventions of the corporate universe, manages to provide us with a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Thus, the animation hides a rather cynical message about the routine in a corporation, following a brief excerpt from the “educated jungle” of the hierarchies imposed by such a job.
The characters are constructed (maybe too) schematically, embodying some general features, some recognizable patterns, while the director doesn’t claim to psychologize, to exploit in a classic way a clear conflict. In fact, the focal point of this project is deliberately blurred, as if the apparent lightness of discussions between bosses and colleagues, the inability to truly communicate would suggest the madness of contemporary corporations that intentionally depersonalize their own employees. In this equation, the human becomes a robot whose main purpose is productivity, while passions, dreams, and aspirations are seen as parasites.
This false lightness with which Natasha Redmond builds her project is supported by a minimalist animation style, defined by simple, monochrome lines and figures drawn in a slightly naïve convention. However, this minimalism is by no means approached in a monotonous way; on the contrary, the director opts for a dynamic image that spontaneously captures the inner and outer reality of the protagonist in an equally frisky and coherent panorama of the emotions of a person who has to get out of this dehumanizing captivity. ‘This Seen Makes No Cents’ is a bittersweet animation that, despite its somewhat experimental, surreal style, depicts with an indigestible authenticity a fragment of our contemporary jungle.
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