Soft Thunder

There is a moment near the middle of Soft Thunder where the camera if you can call it that in an animated film holds on a field for what feels like a very long time. Nothing happens. A blade of grass shivers. The sky does not change. And then, gradually, you become aware of how loud the silence is. It is one of the most technically simple and emotionally devastating sequences Cheese Sama has produced, and it is the key to everything the film is trying to say.

Directed by Gottfried Mentor, Soft Thunder began as a response to something the director had noticed: that almost all stories about belonging are really stories about arrival. A character comes from somewhere, goes somewhere, and is accepted or rejected. But the feeling of belonging real belonging, the kind that settles into you slowly and cannot be willed into existence almost never makes it to the screen. Mentor wanted to make a film about that feeling directly, not about its absence or its achievement, but about the strange, quiet texture of it.

The characters are three sheep and one small fish. This combination was not, as reviewers sometimes assumed, chosen for its absurdity though the absurdity is real and productive. It was chosen because Mentor was thinking about what it means to be a creature in a world that was not quite designed for you. The fish in the field is not a joke. The fish is anyone who has ever felt that the environment they inhabit was built for a body slightly different from their own.

The film was animated using a technique Mentor had developed over several years, layering hand-drawn line work over painted backgrounds in a way that gave the images an unusual quality figures seemed to exist slightly in front of their environments, as if they had been placed there rather than born into them. This visual grammar worked in precise service of the film's theme: the characters are in the world, but not entirely of it, and the film makes you feel that condition rather than explaining it.

The sound design, composed by a musician working out of a studio in Osaka, draws on field recordings made during early morning hours when ambient sound is at its most sparse and peculiar. Rain that has almost stopped. Wind that cannot decide whether it is arriving or leaving. The score sits underneath these recordings rather than on top of them, reinforcing the film's refusal to impose meaning on the images.

When Soft Thunder was completed and submitted to festivals in late 2021, the response divided audiences in a way that delighted the studio. Some found it slow. Others found it the most moving film they had seen in years. A group of students who watched it as part of a university animation seminar spent two hours discussing whether it was finished not because it felt incomplete, but because it ended in a way that felt deliberately unresolved. That disagreement, Mentor later said, was exactly right. A film about belonging probably should not resolve.

The three sheep, incidentally, were given names during production that never appear in the film. The fish was not given a name. This detail, discovered in a production diary that circulated online, attracted more commentary than almost anything else about the project. People had opinions about whether the fish should have a name. Mentor declined to comment. The fish, in the film, does not seem to mind.

Director: Gottfried Mentor
Production: Cheese Sama, 2021