Sub Terra

Jeffrey Zablotny’s creeping animation Sub Terra opens with what feels almost like a documentary depiction of a young woman in a hi-vis jacket, identified in the credits as The Arborist (Anna Mernieks), examining a roadside tree. She hammers a series of nails into the bark and then taps on them, using a handheld device to assess the tree’s health. As she does this, the image abruptly jumps from the live-action surface world to a murky animated perspective, looking up at the soles of the tree surgeon’s feet. This is where the action remains for much of the rest of the film, as we adopt the viewpoint of an unidentified creature moving through a surreal realm beneath the earth.

The underground world that Zablotny (who directed and animated the film) and his sound designer Jana Irmert have created is one in which the planet’s crust encloses an eerily still watery void. When the camera first looks up at the arborist’s feet, it appears as though she is standing on a sheet of ice and being watched from below it, except for the murky brown colour that hints at a more recognisable soil underfoot. Zablotny’s illustrations are created using a variety of animation techniques – 2D, 3D, photogrammetry, motion capture – that sees the visuals occupying an uncanny elsewhere in which workmen’s tunnels, underground railroads, and sewage pipes lie in a shadowy bog. Irmert places the viewer in proximity to a squelching, wriggling soundscape that is also punctuated by the muted echoes of the surface world, mimicking the effect of listening underwater.

Despite seeming to be more interested in creating a palpable embodied experience of this subterranean navigation than anything approaching a narrative, much of what we see does lend itself to a potentially critical stance towards human intervention into the earth. From the shallow roots of the tree being inspected in the film’s opening moments, to the constant appearance of cerement tubes carrying people or waste, the impact of homo sapiens on the creature whose gaze we have adopted seems significant. Sub Terra may not be a work of environmental activism per se, but it draws attention – quite haptically, almost – to the unthinking ways in which we intervene in even the tiniest and most hidden of lives.

Director, producer, editing, animation: Jeffrey Zablotny
Cinematography: Morgana McKenzie
Music: Viktor Orri Arnason
Sound: Jana Irmert
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Short Film)
No dialogue
8 minutes