Madama Butterfly

The word that kept popping into my head while watching the animation is “primal”. There could be one use of it, but in this animation the word primal kept changing definitions. At the beginning, the word primal could be used to describe the landscape - mountains, ocean, beautiful sky - and the sexual acts being performed. The lack of clothing, aside from a sailor’s hat and a lanky robe, added to this very minimal set up. However, even the technology included in the animation - the record player, the car, the yacht - could not take away from the primal feeling throughout the video. The tenderness of the sex scene echoed this sentiment of primality as they were very in-tune with each other’s bodies - almost being in sync with the nature surrounding them. However, it is the moment the protagonist gives birth that drives the feeling home. 

When the protagonist gives birth, she gives birth to what seems like a fetus - more like a fish - that begins to grow in her arms from new born to toddler. The umbilical cord never being cut from the mother and child until the man comes back and takes the child away from the mother for his own family is heartbreaking. It gives feelings of imperialism - taking whatever you want from those people who have less - while also evoking this sense of helplessness as the woman has nothing and no one to help her. But, once again, the primal emotion does not leave the animation ever and that is due to the score. The score brings out every emotion the woman is feeling from triumphant at the beginning to absolutely empty and devastating at the end. Sometimes scores are pretty cheap in the emotions they are supposed to evoke but there’s a bit of mystery to the score in terms of what emotions line up with it; the animation takes the score and adapts it perfectly. 

The last scene left me floored. The woman not only walks out of the setting she was in throughout the whole animation to the world of what seems like the creator and begins to disassemble herself. Her daughter was her only reason to live once the man left. Even once he came back in the hopes of starting a family, her daughter was still the most important thing. The symbolism of the umbilical cord being the reason to her being alive and once she lost that, all of her will was lost. I wouldn’t call the last scene depressing, I would call it justified. The woman has nothing left; so her only option left was to, for all intents and purposes, kill herself. She did not want to deal with the pain any longer - she could not even stand to her favorite music on the record player.