Birdlime is a short animated movie created by director, Evan DeRushie, that shows us the exotic pet industry from a birds’ point of view. In the movie, we see handcrafted and stop-motion human hands, birds, trees, and instead of dialogue, there are undefined sounds.
DeRushie found inspiration for the movie when he traveled to Thailand where he was introduced to the exotic pet industry. To make it come to life, he made the characters using painted cushion foam. He worked alone and tried hard to make everything last long enough to shoot the movie with limited edits.
“Thinking about the way that animals are represented in animation, and the effects in the real world (like how clown fish populations were decimated directly after Finding Nemo), I started seeing animation as a powerful and scary tool,” DeRushie said in a statement he publically shared. Keeping this in mind, he wanted to portray a respectful human-animal relationship and to show the bird as what it is without too much unnecessary anthropomorphism. His goal was to make the audience feel like they are viewing the movie from the cage with a twisted perspective of the world.
See it below.
