It’s All Soup in the End, 2024

SIGNAL, Melbourne

It’s All Soup In The End is a hand-painted stop-motion animation that faces the futility of fixating on the inevitable by exploring death, absurdity and anxiety. Each frame is hand-painted, exaggerating the plasticity and extremes of cartoon visual language through the liquidity of the paint.

Inspired by the mediaeval fool archetype, this animation depicts helpless cartoon figures being ridiculously deconstructed. Upon seeing the collapse of their peers, each character becomes increasingly anxious before transforming into gelatinous, primordial puddles in a successive process of metamorphosis. Using the materiality of oil paint, each figure’s messy demise unfolds with visceral textures and illogical narratives, drawing upon slapstick comedy. References to cartooning are continued through the use of SIGNAL’s window frames as a structural device, creating a comic strip effect as the work moves across the windows in a domino-like sequence.

So, rather than shying away from death and increasing one's dread, this animation explores how reframing and accepting dying as a generative transformation can be an antidote to anxiety.  

This project was seeded by City of Melbourne through SIGNAL’s Screen and Sound Commissions 2024.
More information here: https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/arts-and-culture/signal/signal-screen-sound-commissions/Pages/signal-screen-sound-commissions.aspx