‘Little Shrew’ by Kate Bush tells the story of a shrew in a war-torn city. The four-minute animated film will be screened in Picturehouse cinemas on June 24 before the World War II documentary ‘From Hilde, With Love’. Previously, the animation was shown at the Berlin Film Festival.
On her website, Kate Bush shared that she wanted to create an anti-war animated film — particularly about children during wartime — after the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
About the plot of the animated film
The animated film is based on the song ‘Snowflake’, which Bush recorded with her son in 2011. At the time, she wanted to capture his voice before it changed in adolescence. However, in the context of ‘Little Shrew’, the song has taken on a new meaning.
‘The world is so loud, keep falling, I’ll find you’, Bush sings.
At first, the singer wanted the main character to be a little girl, but she later decided to replace her with a Ukrainian shrew — ‘a tiny, fragile little creature’ that, in Bush’s view, people might have more empathy for than for a human.
‘This little shrew would take a journey on a moonlit, winter’s night through a war-torn city, initially unaware of what was going on around her in this land of the giants’, the description of the animated film reads.
The shrew can sense that she’s being called by a kind of ‘spiritual presence’ — hope — and starts to search for it. Hope is also the only element in the animated film that has colour.
About the project’s development
The development of ‘Little Shrew’ began in 2022. Bush and illustrator Jim Kay created the main character and the setting in which the animated film takes place.
The project was put on hold halfway through production and resumed in early 2024. The animation was created by the studio Inkubus, a process that took five months.
According to Bush, she wanted it to be clear that the film refers to a contemporary war, not the First or Second World Wars. As a result, a photograph by Ukrainian journalist Maks Levin served as a reference for one of the scenes in ‘Little Shrew’.
‘He was a well-known and very talented photographer who had worked closely with Reuters for several years, having become a war photographer. He was working in really dangerous situations, shooting important footage and sharing it with the world, drawing attention to the scale of the war. He was making an impact through his work and was risking his life doing so. He was a brave man. Very sadly, he was killed by soldiers from the russian army a couple of months after taking this image’, the singer says about Levin.
Bush added that Levin’s shot “opens the door to reality for a brief moment, only to return to the world of animation.”
