Toon of the month: Yield

Caleb Wood is one of the most energising and inspiring new indie animators on the festival circuit right now. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, the Minnesota animator has made somewhere in the range of a dozen experimental films incorporating an array of techniques and themes.

In 2012-13, Wood was in Japan for a residency (he eventually made Goodbye Rabbit, Hop Hop for the programme). In his spare time he photographed avian anal street stains. Wood then animated the each piece of white shit into Bird Shit, an ingenious abstract animation that at one point fuses the individual droppings together to form a single flying bird. Top that, Mr. McLaren!

Last year Wood made about half a dozen films, all worth seeing, but my favourite is Yield, his unofficial follow-up to Bird Shit. This time Wood uses road-kill as his inspiration. A slew of ex-animals race randomly by until one magical point where – look closely – a stunning regeneration occurs as the carcasses seem to claw, walk and run towards rebirth… until a final shocking image puts a halt to any and all dreams of immortality.

“I’ve been compulsively documented instances of death for awhile,” says Wood, “but without any conceptual goal. After I made Bird Shit it hit me that I could reassess my impulse to document death through animation. The ultimate goal would be to bring life back into death, to create movement from documentation of life’s final poses.”

It took Wood two weeks of driving around Minnesota state roads to collect the roadkill images. “I drove around in a circuit twice,” Wood adds, “mainly on county roads. Sometimes I’d find something on highways, but those situations are much more dangerous in terms of other drivers, and I’d have to pass them by. There’s not one person who won’t say ‘what the fuck?’ and get distracted to some extent when they see you photographing dead animals on the road, so I tried to keep observers to a minimum. Cops also have no problem pulling over to ask you questions, and can be pretty difficult to convince.

“If I saw a tuft of fur, circling ravens or even dark red skid marks, I’d pull over and document the scene with my camera phone. I never touched, moved, stepped in or interacted with the dead animals in any way, other than capturing what I saw in photos.”

In just under two minutes, Wood has created an ingenious work that reminds us of the frequently violent and callous way – in life and death – that we treat animals, and a stark reminder that our own existence could be as fleeting and forgotten as a road-kill.