Review 5. Everything Turns

Everything Turns
Director. Max Hattler
Duration. 1 Minute
2004

Inspired by Durs Grünbein's poem Vertigo.
Life makes your head spin, and before you know it,it’s over. A very short film about time, life and death.
Everything Turns is produced in a surreal way but with a very real Narrative.
The craft is stop frame animation with simple drawings.

It begins with a clock ticking and a spinning childrens playground ride. The clock turns into bubbles that pop and the ride flattens into a clock. Time is shown going very fast through the speed that the hands on the clock are moving. The ride symbolises the beginning of life, childhood and that then turning into a clock shows childhood goes to quickly.
Next appears a scratchy barcode next to numbers that are counting down. These numbers are in digital form, once again reminding us of time.
Eyes then appear and turn into a woman and man having sexual intercourse. We can see the womans heart beating. The mans penis then turns into a baby in the womb. Obviously this represents birth but also a very important time in life, it is one of the key events.
Next a hand wipes over the screen and we hear a baby cry.
As the hand moves back over we see a fast food box land and a black splodge spread across the screen as it does so. Words begin to appear on the fast food box; "fast," "fast food," "live fast," "faster," "fast food." This represents that bad food will only make our lives shorter, making time obviously go faster. The repitition of the words, i believe symbolises our craving for bad food.
We then see a fruit being sliced and fall into a machine, along with words all jumbled together.
I believe that the machine represents us and our life and everything that we put into it.
The screen then begins to flood over with white. The white is water and we see ducks pass along over the screen. Next to the pond is an old man, this is a very stereotypical image of elderly people feeding birds. The man begins to shrink, aging rapidly as he does. As he becomes shorter and older he turns into a tombstone. Which is the most obvious symbol for death.
At the beginning we see the childs playground ride and at the end we see the old man with the ducks. The similarity between the both is that they are both fun for their age and the idea that as we get older the games and fun we have differ.
The sequence in which it is shown is the sequence in life. If it had been shown in another way the idea of life moving too quickly would not have been as powerful.