Director: Frank O’Neil
Writer: Frank O’Neil
Cast: Jacob Cunningham & Libby Dyer Douglas
Running time: 4mins
In George A. Romero’s genre-defining Dawn of the Dead, a band of bedraggled survivors hole up in a (mostly) abandoned shopping mall. As time passes, a huge swell of the undead congregate around what is essentially a cathedral for American capitalism.
“What are they doing? Why do they come here?” asks Francine (Gaylen Ross).
Her partner, Stephen (David Emge) speculates the horde is driven by instinct, tied to some faded memory of what these shambling corpses did before their death. After all, “this was an important place in their lives.”
In that moment, Romero’s most tragic message is distilled. We might find plenty of surface-level revulsion at the decrepit figure of the ‘zombie’ (though that was a term Romero largely shunned). We might be horrified by the sight of human body, stripped of its personality and agency, mindlessly driven by nothing more than a set of animalistic impulses. But when you boil the concept down to its essence, you realise that whether we get bitten and turn into one of the undead or not, we have been living as zombies for most of our lives.
The importance of the mall has declined dramatically in the decades since that fictional outbreak – to the extent the Monroeville Mall that once served as the focal point of Dawn of the Dead’s consumerist apocalypse is now threatened with demolition. But in the post-lockdown years of our very real global pandemic, it has become clear that late capitalism has other sacred spaces, which many people feel instinctually bound to return to, whatever the risks.
While countless studies during the initial Covid-19 office closure found that staff were just as capable of working from home as in the office, the years since have seen a steadily growing drive for them to return to their desks. Feckless bosses either baselessly accused staff working from home of being lazy, or cited conveniently vague metrics such as ‘creativity’ as reasons why everyone just had to return to a miserable, germ-ridden panopticon, where their toilet usage could be monitored. Even when the fact is that a reduction in office space saves companies large amounts in rent, and colossally reduces their carbon footprint (if they are still pretending to care about that), the need to return to the office – as a temple devoted to ideologically disciplining the workforce – is instinctively placed above any of those factors.
In the same week in which 28 Years Later parodied a Britain where ideological illusions of the nation’s exceptionalism persist even as it flirts with becoming a failed state, Crèche & Burn presents another biting satirical take on life there. It offers short-but-sweet, absurdist skewering of the collective recall to the British office space – in spite of all the risks. In a cutely animated cityscape, we follow the sharp-elbowed Business Dad (voiced by Jacob Cunningham) and his neglected son Joshy (Libby Dyer Douglas), push their way through streets of the undead. Constantly making deals over the phone as he strides forth, Business Dad is determined to palm his young charge off onto a crèche. This isn’t because he is willing to sacrifice his safety for the sake of his darling child possibly surviving the apocalypse, though. It’s because private enterprise cannot wait – apocalypse or no.
As the story progresses, Business Dad’s blinkered worldview becomes increasingly detached, and devolves into absurdly basic phrases; grumbles of “business business business” delivering a decent laugh, but also underline the fact his character has been a de facto zombie for some time already. Keeping us onboard throughout the four minutes – where the dialogue, and verbal humour, don’t really get any more sophisticated than that – are some wonderfully expressive animations, with every motion complete with a pantomime swoop, sag or bounce. An extensive crew of student animators joined O’Neil to realise this, and breathe life/unlife into the character designs of Dyer Douglas and Ciorstaidh NicChoinnich. A full list of them can be found here; and while it would take far too long to commend them all personally here, every one of them deserves credit for their efforts.
Sound design and music could probably use a little more attention and intricacy. More could be done to leverage the audio to build up a world of horrors for the audience, without having to take the time to animate them – and boxing more cleverly in this regard will be important for O’Neil in the future – because after graduation, acquiring such a huge team of talented animators will be harder to do. But at this stage, that is a fairly minimal point.
Instead, with all the creative powers of his animation team, O’Neil builds towards a fantastically zany conclusion, in which his story fruitfully plays with the famous argument that it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. The instincts of the office-dwelling undead mean that, even when they are in the blood-dripping ascendance here, their primal ideology confines them to an incredibly dull, listless existence.
In the years following the coronavirus lockdown – where a potentially lethal virus still stalks public spaces, but where we have also been ordered to simply accept it as part of our daily lives by predatory bosses, landlords and politicians – I have long hoped to see this kind of story creep into zombie horror. While that theme is by no means extensively addressed here, O’Neil’s simple-yet-effective debut script still impresses, precisely because it manages to feature such an innovative concept at all.
When there is no more room in hell, the dead shall return to the office.
In many ways, Crèche & Burn is what an ideal first-time project might look like. It’s short, straight-forward, and doesn’t take itself too seriously – but also manages to introduce an innovative tweak to the genre it is engaging with. I look forward to what Frank O’Neil and his horde of animators come up with, when the time comes to build on this early momentum.