Director: Simon Krawczyk
Running time: 4mins
A lot has been made of people’s dependence on mobile phones. Or at least, a lot has been made about it in lazy observational comedy.
Endless piping-cold takes shared between middle-aged social media profiles chastise people in the modern era for being absorbed in their phones when they cross the street, or only ever viewing life through a 9:16 vertical rectangle. Nobody ever lives in the moment, unironically crow a generation who – if they could afford access to a camcorder – lived through continuous reems of buzzing 4:3 VHS cassette.
People write satirical poems about our phone being the lover whose face we stroke before we go to sleep. A cottage industry has popped up in short films trying to emulate the latest ways Black Mirror says the technology is rotting your brain. And most of it is pointed squarely at the user – a mindless zombie, no longer able to think independently, having signed every last scrap of agency to the shiny screen in their pocket.
There are, of course, valid reasons to say humans need a break from the endless noise of the device they carry with them 24/7. But the failure of this kind of analysis is that it never pushes beyond laughing at the general population, to actually interrogate the power-structures that have enforced this way of life. There are very good reasons why our mobile device accompanies us everywhere – and which mean it is wrong to simply lay the blame for it at the door of ‘lazy/brainless consumers’.
In the 21st century, life under capitalism has been almost entirely rerouted through the phone. In the Netherlands, for instance, it has essentially become the national insurance card – with governments and businesses expecting you to use it to access and disseminate your most important information, if you want to open a bank account, look for housing, apply for an identity card, or register as self-employed. So, people might make fun of the great significance we place on our phones, but if something happens to your device in this society, you’re essentially half way to becoming a non-person. Constantly guarding it, or interacting with it, is not a simple reflection of someone’s lack of imagination, then, it is a survival impulse. Its maintenance is now linked to our ability to live in any moment.
Simon Krawczyck’s short animation Safe Travels is built around this concept. Following tourist Kyle on a trip to an unspecified European city, the story kicks into gear when he smashes his smart phone – as he attempts to take a picture of a landmark, he never actually sees for himself. Having pushed his way into a crowd surrounding the hidden artefact, largely because he saw other people’s phones pointing toward something – thus attributing it with ‘value’ – he now finds himself alone in a land of strangers, without means of communication.
But Kyle is not half-way to becoming a non-person for very long. The stakes actually get higher, when – as he pines over the shattered screen of his mobile – a thief snatches his bag. Presumably, as he is wearing a t-shirt and shorts without pockets, that means his cash, his cards and his passport are all gone, in one fell swoop. There might be few things more terrifying to anyone who has travelled internationally – especially in this era – than the idea that all evidence of your identity, your right to be in a certain country, and ability to return home, have gone up in smoke.
For a second, this utter terror consumes Kyle. He clings to a paper map with the address of his hotel on it – but without his portable translation unit, and satellite navigation, he is unable to use it effectively. Spiralling into a breathless panic, he zones out – only stumbling to the locked doors of his accommodation after closing time. Shivering in the cold, he waits for sunrise, and an uncertain dawn.
But as dawn approaches, he finds himself lifted by the view of the city. Sitting atop a hill overlooking the sprawling mass of humanity, he takes solace in the beauty below – living in the moment, as the memes would have it. That’s all well and good, but Kyle still has to reckon with the carnage of the previous day, and find his way to an embassy. Things might work out for him in the long run – but he’s a long way from being able to take comfort in the beauty of the world around him, as a temporarily stateless individual, with no money and nowhere to sleep.
It might not be entirely fair of me to expect this four-minute animation to explore this nightmarish state of limbo further than it does. Especially as this is a student project, where most likely the emphasis from those setting the task was on showing how Krawczyk could use style and movement to convey emotion and tell a story. And it is worth noting, to that end, that Krawczyk does that very well.
The crowd itself is largely motionless, and drawn as featureless silhouettes – something which will have helped economise on the efforts of the team of animators working with Krawczyk, but also meant the figures can be used as a blank slate to convey shifts in tone and tempo. At various points during Kyle’s ordeal, the faceless mass of humanity changes shape and colour to reflect his emotional state. Warmer colours when he is comfortably seated at a café, still in possession of his identity, transform to a cold grey when he loses everything – and a washed out blue as it dawns on him how much trouble he may be in.
At the same time, Krawczyk uses the time and space the crowd’s lack of detail frees up very wisely. Kyle is an expressive, rubbery central figure, whose movement is accentuated well to help us pick up on the contrast between his moments of peace, and panic.
All this bodes very well for the future career of all the students who worked on this, as animators and visual storytellers. They have the tools needed to imbue any tale they pick with enough kinetic energy and human emotion for any audience to be able to relate to it. I just hope that in future, they use that for stories that are more challenging, and not founded in the pallid truisms of something like anti-phone culture.