Director: Yu-Hsuan Teng
Running time: 5mins
Vestige is a sumptuously realised animation, following an artist’s yearning to find a world that’s already dead and gone. As our nameless protagonist wanders through the beautiful landscapes wrought by Yu-Hsuan Teng, she passes through the ruins of her once-thriving hometown, and the skeletal remains of now-ancient warplanes; some of which have been reclaimed by nature, or hollowed out for people to live in.
There is no script to speak of, so all the storytelling is intuitive – taking the form of a living graphic novel, which is minimally animated in-between frames. It is swept along by Gage Behnkendorf’s orchestral soundtrack – which in another film I might have felt was overbearing in telling us how to feel; but with little more to guide our judgement than still images in many cases, it is a welcome addition here.
As the woman in the story presses on, and finds her family home, it becomes clear she is looking for someone in particular. A childhood friend, who she was forced to leave behind when her family put her on a train to escape the coming war – a scene chillingly rendered with the abstract silhouettes of approaching bombers against the winter sky.
Asking for locals who have made new lives in the carcass of the old world, the woman is eventually pointed in the direction of a distinctive house under a hill, using a sketch from her childhood as reference. Leading up to this point, the story has been reminiscent of Grave of the Fireflies – a potent mixture of charming nostalgia and horrific realism – and that will probably clue you in to what she finds when she completes her quest. That doesn’t make it any less emotionally impactful when we finally put everything together though.
There isn’t much more to say about this story, but in a historical moment where cultures, communities, people are being erased, there is something particularly devastating about Vestige. If the world’s leaders are allowed to continue as they are now then the future will be riddled with the ghosts of collapsing order, living on in the bittersweet memories of a few survivors.
As a piece of art, Vestige is itself a haunting trace of an art that is in danger of disappearing. In the so-called age of AI, producers of ‘content’ insist that they can thoughtlessly pump out animations without the need of skilled artists anymore. Animations that broadly look terrible if you observe them for longer than a second, but still… It is not difficult to imagine the sluice-gate of unmitigated dreck that is about to wash over the animation industry as a result; without having to apply thought to the ‘how’, there might soon be a million tech-bros auto-generating utterly tedious animation, making something as considered and deliberate as Vestige that much harder to find.
I wonder how much space will be reserved for artists like Yu-Hsuan Teng – who dare to not take that maximalist approach, and are instead willing to adapt a story to what tools are at their disposal. That is where a lot of the true magic of independent cinema is – and I hope that this does not turn out to be one last fleeting trip into the kind of cathartic, enchanted world that animations like Vestige can provide.
That is not to say that this film will please everyone. Inevitably there will be armchair critics who insist an animation needs to be more active than what is essentially a storyboard committed to film. For some, ‘realism’ has become a word which is seen as interchangeable with ‘quality’; but so often it is its antithesis. The insistence of ‘live action’ remakes for Disney animations is only part of this short-sighted discourse – which if you were somehow under any doubts, is a bid to sell old rope for new money by arbitrarily trashing ‘old’ art forms. Animations with very little movement at all are just as legitimate as the latest mo-cap studio fodder, though, especially when they have been imbued with as much care, thought and heart as Vestige.