Research 8 - Backwater Gospel

This is another BA animation graduation film, however in comparison to Entropy it had a much bigger production team working on it, with a director and a producer. The film is very dark and is about a back water western town that is visited by an undertaker, who is closer to an angel of death with black wings to boot, he gets viewed as a harbinger of death and it is believed people will die because of him. This has angered the corrupt and twisted vicar who has controlled the towns people with fear and religion and tells them to take their anger and blame out on a penniless, disabled (physically, missing a leg) homeless man who finds the whole event ever so amusing, mocking them for their fear. However once the towns people kill the man there is now a corpse for the undertaker to work with so he has no reason to leave now. This leads for the towns people to fall into mass panic murdering each other screaming that it won't be them whose murdered or die. The film goes on to end with the undertaker measuring a corpse for a coffin, black wings spread wide and ominous.

The first time i saw this animation i was really scared of it, mostly because of the cell shaded like art style of the characters. They had this heavily shaded flat look to them based in a 3D world. There was a wide breadth of shapes and sizes in the characters. Its design was what really made it creepy along with the disturbing story, the whole town was crooked in warp in shape and personality with the church and vicar being the most twisted of them all. It definitely presents religion in a corrupt manner however i think it was more a case of using it as a theme of control in some form and for a small back water town it fits.

This animation works with a really twisted and dark view of the human mind to me. how the town is gripped in fear, manipulated by the vicar and quickly descends into mass hysteria. Its a terrifying way of presenting a concept as well as drawing attention to a subject. The animation had a some symbolism in it when the beggar died, specifically, how his corpse and blood splatter created a cross and signalled the madness to take hold.