Tina Kakadelis
One of the long-standing truths of life is that death always comes. There’s no set time and it’s different for everyone, but it is coming. That much is undeniable…until it isn’t. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence and other forms of technology, death no longer has the inevitability it once did. We’re growing closer every day to companies that are fighting to perfect the commodity of the afterlife. In Brian Tetsuro Ivie’s SXSW Film & TV Festival-premiering Anima, that day has arrived, but it’s not about those companies. It’s about Beck and Paul.
Beck (Sydney Chandler) is the daughter of artists. Her now-deceased father was a musician who spent far more time on the road than he did at home. At one point, Beck thought she might want to follow in her father’s footsteps. Now, though, she’s lost and applying for jobs with interviewers who tell her she’s just not the right fit. And then along comes Anima. They say she’s been mathematically aligned with Paul (Takehiro Hira), a terminally ill man who will be kept alive by the Anima company’s new-fangled technology. It’s up to Beck to accompany Paul to his final appointment.
Anima has Latin roots and means “an individual’s true inner self.” One of the promises the Anima company makes is that when someone decides to use their services, their truest essence will be captured. Beck initially takes that promise at face value, but as she spends more time with Paul, she wonders if this is possible. How could a company of strangers know when they’ve captured the essence of a person in electronic form? Is that even conceivable? Isn’t humanity special because we’re so difficult to copy and replicate? This film reckons with the fact that money can buy a lot of things, but it cannot buy life beyond an individual’s numbered days.
“So, are you happy?” Beck’s mom asks her. In Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, the same question is asked, but from child to parent. The parent replies that a child can’t ask questions like that. Yet, when the role is reversed in Anima, it’s perfectly reasonable. Anima asks the audience to consider the path to happiness and whether it comes from following the footsteps of our parents or from carving a path of our own. In reality, the answer is somewhere in between. Our passions can be traced back to the family who raised us, even if they’ve hurt us in the past.
The tragedy of life is that there’s never enough time. No one is talking about living forever, but it all seems to move so quickly that when the end comes, it’s an emotional tidal wave of nostalgia, regret, and remembrance. Anima’s look is warm. The film is grainy and crackles with life to make it appear tangible. It’s as though this is a memory we can touch, feel, and allow to wash over us. The colors are saturated in the way that only film allows (kudos if this is a post-production effect) and this puts it just on the edge of retrofuturism. Both Paul and Beck are fascinated and afraid of the promises of Anima. On this trip, they experience a sensation of pain for a loss that’s imminent. A sense of sadness for the moment as if it’s already happening. Anima can’t fix that. It can’t fix the fleeting sense of life, because even if they can capture a person’s essence, things will be slightly off.
“Would you have painted in another life, sir?” one of Paul’s employees asks him on his last day in the office. Paul is looking up at a painting and he describes it passionately, which prompts the question Paul cannot answer. Anima is a film about making amends while also making plans to leave this world. But what do these amends do for those who continue to live? Is a drive-by reconciliation better than nothing? Perhaps the answer is different for all, and in sharing this time together, Beck and Paul have found a way to heal.
Beck tells Paul that if she had to pick the last song she ever hears, she’d pick “In Spite of Me” by Morphine. As the song implies, the singer is proud of someone close to them who managed to achieve something grand in spite of the fact that the singer failed them. Paul and Beck come to this song from different points of view, but it’s another piece of connective tissue that bonds this unlikely pair. Anima is about the ineffable nature of connection and its ability to be brief, disjointed, or lengthy. The beauty of it, the reason we crave it, is that we cannot know which version we’re going to get until it happens.
