Golden Shoes

A clever and haunting music-box melody plays over ghostly murmurs of a song. The animation is composed of intricately placed dolls (wax and paper) with charmingly painted backgrounds. Dame Darcy is a magnificent singer and artist (doll-maker, banjo-minstrel, illustrator). I cannot commend her work sufficiently, it's an unmarried bride clothed in silver faerie fish-mail.

To be more implicit: her illustrative art-work focuses on images of haunted, pale beings with opera-style theatrical makeup, bayou kingdoms, and insinuations of phantom violence. Her music is intentionally simple and pretty. Her voice is soft and calming. This can be enjoyed best as a relaxing Halloween ceremony. After the travels, after the costumes are shed, after the playing has become a smile you might listen to Dame Darcy's Golden Shoes while you sit on a candle-light yellowed bedside.

The plot line is dreaming: it is a metaphor for solitude and soft mourning. We view the losses and loneliness from a distance, just like the "watching girl" in David Lynch's Inland Empire.

I love her. You will too, someday when your spirit wakens and the honey is pasting your lips to the heart of truth.

Told like a stop-motion nightmare of death and ghosts, this very short animation is a Gothic piece with an effective, if grating score. The central figure of the little girl makes a dark character at the heart of a story that I didn't totally follow but involved graves, angels, rotting corpses and so on. It is effectively done and the animation is strong throughout. The music supports the atmosphere of the film but it is not anything that you'll be rushing out to buy because it is fairly unpleasant for what it is.

Gravois and Darcy have done a good job with the film, producing an effectively atmospheric piece that has hardly dated despite now being over ten years old.