Here’s the Plan is a beautiful animated short film about relationships and how they should work out problems in a healthy way over time. Via Short of the Week:
Here’s the Plan, Fernanda Frick’s ambitious 18min short film, is notable for its audacity—the audacity to tell a relationship story about two people who genuinely love each other and work to support each other and their marriage. This is neither a romance about the initial hot and heavy days of the chase and infatuation, nor a heroic adventure about love conquering all. It is instead a remarkably grounded narrative that traverses years of its central couple’s lives and documents the minor sacrifices and changing priorities that cause a shared dream to be deferred.
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Frick and the team are Chilean, yet the voice acting is in English to ensure a larger potential audience. Frick has some knowledge of the potential benefits that can accrue from international recognition, as PunkRobot, a Chilean studio that is prominently credited in the film, is responsible for Historia de un oso, which won the Oscar for best animated short in 2016, becoming the first Latin American winner of the category. The decision to record the dialogue in English has its pluses and a minuses however. While the voice acting is by and large good, it is also cloying, and the saccharine nature of the narrative can be off-putting to audiences at first. We’re used to independent animation being edgy, and so the wholesome sincerity evinced can be obnoxious. Yet the undeniable truth embedded in the character development is refreshing, the unvarnished depiction of a relationship as it could, as it should be, is daring. Frick, via email described her inspiration as a desire to fight against “perpetuating gender stereotypes”, feeling that the majority of onscreen romance “normalizes toxic and bad relationships, making you think ‘maybe that’s how it is’ when it doesn’t have to be.”