Chickens are good animals
And small.
Scratch and Crow is a 1995 five-minute animated short film by Helen Hill.
It is a meditation on the life of the chicken. The film, hand-drawn by Hill using watercolors, is a dream-like affair using surreal imagery to follow the life of a chicken, from hatching to death. The animation is occasionally interrupted by a poem written by Hill.
Made by Hill for her MFA thesis. Hill's career as an avant-garde animator was tragically cut short when she was murdered in 2007 at the age of 36, a crime that remains unsolved.
Tropes:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The chickens are so blue, they look more like bluebirds.
- The Blank: The cat that hatches the eggs doesn't have a visible face, although it does have a tongue which it uses to lick the eggs.
- Cradle-to-Grave Character: The life cycle of a chicken is shown, from hatching to death and flying off into the clouds.
- Deranged Animation:
- The thought balloons of a chicken turn into rain clouds, which rain down nests. The nests then eject chicken eggs, which fly, until they land again, and are nurtured into hatching by a cat. Similarly surreal animation is found throughout.
- The sequence in the middle which represents the chickens' adulthood (which can only really be called that as it takes place in-between their chick stage and their death) is difficult even to describe, with a strange shape that looks like a fish skeleton, a jagged horizontal line that resembles an electrocardiogram, falling feathers, beaks and eggshells, rain, and a teapot.
- Interspecies Friendship: The eggs are nurtured and hatched by—a cat.
- Line Boil: Plenty in this hand-drawn animated short.
- Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: There is no music and very little sound, save for the whirring of the projector and the clucking of chickens.
- Title Drop: One of the verses of Hill's poem.They should be looked after
For how to peck
And scratch and crow
After what is good - What Happened to the Mouse?: The cat is never seen again after it hatches the chicken eggs.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: The end of the short has the chickens exiting their tomb and flying off to heaven. (Chickens, of course, cannot fly.)
