Kate Bush's beautiful new animated film just made me cry

Kate Bush has always been an enigmatic and eclectic artist. Most famous for her career as a singer and songwriter, and hit songs like Wuthering Heights, she's also explored visual art. And she's just released a beautiful short animated film (see our pick of the best 2D animation software for your own work).

Kate wrote and directed Little Shrew (Snowflake), which also features a new radio edit of her track Snowflake, which originally appeared on the 2011 album 50 Words For Snow. Just over 4 minutes long, the film depicts a little shrew searching for hope as she makes her way across a bombed-out city.

Little Shrew (Snowflake) - YouTube

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The poignant and beautifully animated piece sees the little shrew try to find its way out of a dark and distressing moonlit war zone. The movement and personality in the adorable character design contrasts with the static and menacing atmosphere of the backdrop, creating an engaging piece that ends with a message of hope: “You could be hope for a child caught up in war. Please donate to War Child”.

On her website, www.katebush.com, Kate says she was moved to make an anti-war animation when the conflict broke out in Ukraine in 2022. She particularly wanted to draw attention to the children caught up in war, so she based a storyboard around the song, Snowflake, which was sung by her son when he was a child. "It has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation," she writes.

She initially planned to make the character a human child but shifted to the idea of a Caucasian pygmy shrew (a species present in Ukrainian) because of its diminutive size and fragility. "I felt that people might have more empathy for a vulnerable little animal than a human," she says.

Kate drew initial sketches herself, inspired by the illustrated book, A Monster Calls. "I knew I wanted this animation to be black and white – its starkness felt right for the context of war," she says. She then reached out to the illustrator Jim Kay, who turned out to know a lot about shrews, making him the ideal collaborator to create the real illustrations.

The London-based animation studio Inkubus then came on board to turn the illustrations to film. Kate suggests that "working directly with the animators has been surprisingly similar in many ways to working with musicians, where you are creating through someone else’s hands."

For more gorgeous new animations, see Flow, Gints Zilbalodis’ new animated film that was made in Blender. Also see our character design tips.