The Animator's Tale

by Edward Picot

To support animation classes for children in Gaza, click here. To support Medical Aid for Palestine, click here.

Even before she retired from teaching, Sybil spent a lot of time making short stop-motion animations on the table in her kitchen.

Her films were usually no more than a couple of minutes long. She used bits of cut-out card placed on a painted background. One cut-out shape for the character's head, one for the body, one for each arm, one for each leg. If you moved them a little a bit and took a picture, then moved them again and took another picture, then moved them again and took another picture, you could do things like making them walk and gesture. You could make them dance. You could make them run. You could make them jump around and wave their arms in celebration or alarm.

She made an animation of the Three Bears coming home and finding Goldilocks in bed. The Three Bears came into the bedroom, noticed Goldilocks, and threw up their paws in anger and consternation. Their paws had sharp black talons on the end, their mouths had sharp white teeth, and the insides of their mouths were red. Goldilocks' eyes popped open, and she saw the Three Bears standing next to her. Her eyebrows went up high, her little rosebud mouth turned into a black O of fright, and she jumped out of the bed, throwing back the bedclothes in a rumple. The Three Bears tried to grab her, but she leapt out of the window and ran off up the garden path, through the flowers, lillies and irises and delphiniums and foxgloves, towards the garden gate.

Sybil lived on her own. Her husband was dead and her sons had moved away, one to Australia and the other to Scotland. She used to have a cat called Thompson, but he died too, soon after her retirement, and although she missed him she was also a little bit relieved. Thompson kept jumping onto her animation table and knocking the bits of cut-out card all over the place, so eventually she had to shut him out of the kitchen. After that he miaowed pitifully outside the door every time she was at work, which made it hard for her to concentrate. When he got ill she nursed him for a week and felt terrible pangs of guilt for neglecting him, but after he died and she had buried him in the back garden and stopped crying, she had to admit to herself that his absence made it much easier for her to get things done.

She devoted a couple of hours every day to gardening, a couple of hours to shopping. Every other Saturday she drove to a life drawing class in Hastings. Other than that, she spent her time on the animations.

It was always difficult to get started. No matter how well things had been going the previous day, she always approached her animation table with a sense of reluctance, convinced that today she wouldn't be able to find any inspiration, and everything would go wrong. She would put off making a start by checking the weather forecast online, putting some washing into the washing machine, cutting some flowers in her garden, bringing them indoors and arranging them in a vase, or dusting the cobwebs out of the neglected corners of her windows. But once she did make a start, the process took hold of her with irresistible force. She would glance at her watch and find that several hours had passed. She would tell herself that she'd just finish the next bit - then suddenly it was dark and she had missed her supper. She would make herself a sandwich or a bowl of pasta, drink a glass of white wine, and go straight to bed, tired out, happy and full of ideas. But the next morning she would wake up empty of inspiration, and have to go through the whole process again.

Most of her animations were based on fairy stories or children's books. After a while she started to post them online when they were finished, on YouTube and Instagram, and as a result of this she gradually made connections with a number of other animators. One of these was called Animator Samira.

Animator Samira was a Palestinian woman who organised animation workshops for children living in Gaza. She got the children to make up stories, then to make drawings of the stories, and then to turn the drawings into animations. Online she posted pictures of her classes, with the children gathered around a table, eagerly drawing or cutting out their characters. And once every couple of weeks she would post a completed animation.

The first one Sybil ever saw was about a boy who was football mad, but nobody would pick him for their team. Then one day he found a magic football and suddenly became the best footballer in the town. A bad boy stole the magic football and thought it would make him the best footballer instead; but every time he tried to kick it, the ball rolled away from his foot and he fell over. Then along came the first boy, looking for his football, and as soon as he appeared it rolled back to him. That was the end of the story.

The next animation, a few weeks later, was about an old horse. At the beginning of the story it was standing by itself under a tree, saying 'God be praised! I'm an old horse now and my bones and muscles are weak, but I've served this family my whole life, and now that I'm old they still take care of me, and don't burden me with anything heavy. I hope to live a few more years, and God willing they won't overwork me.' But then the horse's master came and hitched him to a cart. 'What's this?' said the horse. 'I thought my cart pulling days were over. I pray to God that they won't put too much into it.' But it turned out that the family were having to move, because their home was about to be bombed, so they were piling all their household goods into the cart. 'What? They're putting the bed in there as well? And the chairs and table? How can they expect me to pull all of this? And now the mattress, and Grandma climbing on top of all the rest! May God preserve me! May God spare my aching bones! This will be the death of me!' When the cart was fully loaded the whole family came and stood next to it, and the father tugged at the horse's bridle and attempted to get him moving, but although the old horse strained with all his might, the cart was overloaded and he couldn't budge it. The father was just about to take a whip to him when the children pleaded: 'Father! Father! Don't whip our poor old horse! He's doing his best! He has helped us ever since we were little, so we'll help him now!' Then the children began to push at the back of the cart, and eventually even the mother joined in, with the father pulling the bridle in front and only the old Grandma sitting on board - and with their help the cart began to move. 'God be praised!' said the old horse. 'When the whole family strives together, no difficulty is too great to overcome.'

Sybil had given up following the news years before, because she found it too depressing. She wouldn't have been able to say which political party was in power, or who the Prime Minister was, let alone what was happening internationally. She didn't know where Gaza was or where Palestine was, and she didn't understand the difference between the two. She gathered from the reference to bombs in the animation about the old horse that it must be a troubled area. She didn't like to think of the children in Samira's animation classes being in danger from bombs - children in brightly-coloured clothes, most of them girls, the older ones wearing head-scarves, eagerly making drawings and cutting out shapes for their animations around a big drab table in a white classroom or a tent. Having seen their faces, and having taught children of their age, she almost felt as if she knew them personally.

She sent a message to Samira via Instagram: 'Dear Samira, It's so inspiring to see the animation workshops you're doing with all those lovely children! And the animations are marvellous! I do hope all the children are safe!'

Samira sent a message back: 'Dear Sybil, Thank you for your kindness and your words of support. The children are miracles! No matter what is happening in their lives, they always seem to be full of creative ideas. We pray for their safety, and we know that if they grow up they will become the most wonderful individuals.'

On Animator Samira's Instagram account there was a link to a GoFundMe page, where you could donate to keep the animation workshops going. Sybil followed the link and donated fifty pounds.

The next animation from the workshop was made by a group of young women rather than children. It showed a newly married couple living in a tented encampment. To begin with, all their neighbours were very kind and gave them wedding gifts - a rug, some patterned silk, a silver cup and a cooking pot. But the newlyweds felt embarrassed to be living so close to other people, with nothing but tent walls to shield their privacy. They whispered to each other at night that it was difficult to make love or even talk freely when they were always worried about being overheard. Then the neighbours began to complain amongst themselves about the young couple. One said that she had called to borrow a cup of flour and found them in bed together, even though it was the middle of the day. Another criticised the young girl for spending so much time trying to make herself pretty instead of doing proper housework, beating her rugs or sweeping the ground in front of her tent. A third grumbled that their lives were too easy because they didn't have any other family living with them - there was always enough food for the two of them, and plenty of space in their tent. But then the young man's sister and her two children had to come and live with them, because her husband had been killed by a bomb. 'Now they will find out how the rest of us have to live,' said the neighbours. To begin with, new arrivals spent all their time crying and bewailing their misfortune; but soon the two children, a boy and a girl, got over their grief and started to play and quarrel outside. In one of their games they accidentally knocked down a shelter which belonged to an old man with one leg. So then all the neighbours started to complain about the noise and disruption they made. They came to the young husband in a body, to tell him he must stop the two children misbehaving. The old man with one leg, waving his crutch for emphasis, described how they had knocked down his shelter. Just as they were having this conversation, a bomb fell on the encampment and several people were injured. The young married couple, the husband's sister and her two children all helped to carry the wounded to the back of a flat-bedded truck so that they could be taken to hospital. Then all the neighbours thanked them and said 'We may quarrel amongst ourselves sometimes, but when God sends us misfortune we will always help each other.'

The next animation after that was by Samira herself. It began with her sitting at her desk working on some drawings. First a crack appeared in the ceiling and the rain started to drip through, so she had to move her desk. Then another crack appeared in the wall and the wind started to blow in, sending her drawings whirling into the air, so she had to move her desk again. Then the electric light went out, and she went down to the basement to start a generator. But when she got to the basement, she found an evil black creature squatting on the floor. The shapes of its arms and fingers were like the cracks which had appeared in her ceiling and her wall. She ran back up to her room, and when she got there she locked the door and lit an oil lamp, but as soon as it was lit she saw the evil black creature squatting in the corner of her room next to her door. Black cracks started to appear all over the walls and ceiling, and chunks of plaster came raining down. She unlocked the door and ran out into the night with her oil lamp, with all her drawings tucked under her arm. In the last scene she was in a new apartment, clean and white, with no cracks in the walls or ceiling, spreading out her drawings on a new desk and getting ready to start again. But when she went to the window and looked out, there outside in the sunshine, next to the ruins of a collapsed house, she saw the evil black creature squatting in the dirt. It reached out its arms, and the whole screen was engulfed in black.

Sybil typed into her computer 'What is happening in Gaza?'

Her computer said: 'On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a large-scale surprise attack on Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. This attack triggered the current and most severe phase of the Gaza crisis.'

Sybil typed, 'Who are Hamas?'

Her computer replied: 'Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamist political organization and militant group that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. Its stated goal is to liberate Palestine and establish an Islamic state in place of Israel. It is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Israel, and several other countries.'

'Why are people being bombed in Gaza?'

'After Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a massive military offensive in the Gaza Strip that caused unprecedented death, destruction, and a severe humanitarian crisis. The conflict has since seen periods of intense fighting, temporary ceasefires, and ongoing international mediation efforts. Israel began with heavy airstrikes targeting Hamas sites in Gaza. This was followed by a ground invasion with the stated aims of destroying Hamas, retrieving the hostages, and securing Israel's borders. Israeli forces have moved through Gaza, leading to intense urban combat and large-scale displacement of the population.'

She couldn't bear to read more after that. The troubles seemed to go back many years, decades in fact, and to have been getting worse and worse in all that time. It was hopelessly complicated and catastrophic and intractable and miserable - all of the things which made her avoid watching or listening to the news. She couldn't bear the thought of those children in Samira's animation classes, caught in the middle of such a conflict. She went back to Samira's GoFundMe page and donated another fifty pounds.

Then she went out into her garden to do some weeding and planting in one of her borders. It was a sunlit afternoon in late Spring. The woods that began at the end of her garden were flooded with bluebells, and the cool air was full of their scent. The trees were all putting out small leaves of delicate tender green. The blackthorns in her hedgerow were smothered in white blossom, and beneath them glimmered primroses and wood anemones. A few solitary bees were flying around, and blackbirds and wrens and tits were calling from the bushes, as the sky began to darken. A robin came hopping across the grass and perched on an upside-down flower pot to watch her digging. It was her favourite time of year, and normally she would have simply let the beauty of it wash over her, but today everything felt different. Behind the beauty there was a hollowness, a stretched-out anxiety, a moral chaos. She suddenly felt ashamed of her life, because of its safety and privilege. How could she be entitled to live in such a snug house and such a pretty garden, how could she be entitled to her pension and her savings, when elsewhere in a hot dry country bombs were falling on concrete apartments and tented encampments, and children's lives were in danger?

She made an animation of Handsel and Gretel. Handsel was trapped in a cage in the wicked witch's house, and the witch was forcing Gretel to sweep her floor and fetch heavy buckets of water and bundles of firewood. The witch was fattening Handsel in order to cook him and eat him, but she was too short sighted to see him properly, so every time she gave him food she would tell him to put his finger through the bars of the cage, and she would feel the finger to see if he was fat enough to eat yet. But Handsel fooled her by holding out an old finger-bone for her to feel, instead of his own finger. 'Hm, still very bony,' the witch muttered to herself as she shuffled back to her rocking-chair. Then the animation showed the inside of Handsel's cage, and behind him in the cage were skeletons of several other dead children, which was where he had got the finger bone from. In the hand of one of the skeletons - a hand with one finger missing - was a sheet of paper inscribed with the words 'HELP US'. Meanwhile, outside the witch's house, Gretel was gathering wood for the fire, but she was also using some of the sticks to spell out a message on the flat earth in the yard. Seen from above, the words she had spelt out were 'HELP US'. But the only people who saw this message were some big black crows and some other witches on broomsticks who were flying overhead, and all they did was laugh.

During the next few months there was a noticeable change in the faces of the children at Animator Samira's animation classes. They still clustered eagerly around her drawing-table as they had done before, but they looked thinner and there were dark rings under their eyes. In her accompanying messages, Samira mentioned that there were shortages of food, that many of the children had been forced to leave their homes, some of them more than once, and that many of them had lost family members in the war. 'Praise God,' she said, 'when they come to my classes they are always enthusiastic and their imaginations and creativity are wonderful!'

But their animations reflected the troubled lives they were living. One of them showed a group of children playing football, when bombs began to fall on the houses around them, and they all threw themselves on the ground to avoid the explosions. Two fairies passing overhead saw the bombing, and decided to do something to help the children; so they flew to the ammunition store, and cast a spell on the bombs. The next time the bombs began to fall, instead of bursting into explosions when they hit the ground, they turned into flowers and music and food instead, and the two fairies smiled at each other happily as the children sat down to eat the food.

Another animation was simpler and more grim. It showed a monkey-skeleton chasing after a flatbread, which was suspended in front of him on the end of a piece of string, which dangled from a pole fastened to the top of his head, so that he could never reach it. As he pursued the flatbread, bombs were falling on the buildings in the background and smashing them. Eventually a bomb fell closer at hand, and the flatbread was blown to bits. When the monkey saw that the food he had been chasing was gone, he sat down on the ground and put his face in his hands and cried, with all the buildings of the city smoking in ruins behind him.

Every time Sybil saw one of Samira's posts she would make another donation online, and every time she did so she was left with the feeling that she hadn't given enough.

She asked her computer: 'How much money should I give to charity?'

The computer said: 'The amount you give to charity is a personal decision based on your financial situation and what feels meaningful to you. Some people aim to give 10% of their income to charity, inspired by the historical practice of tithing.'

Sybil did some calculations. Her combined income, now that she was retired, came from her state pension and her teachers' pension, and it amounted to about £2,200 per month. So she set up a monthly contribution of £200 per month to help the children of Gaza. But it still didn't feel like enough. And there was no sign of the children's plight improving.

She made two short animations. One of them showed Chronos devouring his children. The Chronos in her animation looked like the Chronos painted by Goya two hundred years ago - an emaciated grey-haired giant with staring eyes, apparently out of his mind. But the children looked like the children from Samira's animation classes: mostly girls, in headscarves and brightly-coloured tops. There was no story. Chronos was picking up the children one after another and biting off their heads and their arms, then gobbling their torsos. His chin was spattered with blood.

The second animation was based on the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It showed Lot and his wife and two daughters escaping from the city. Walking in front of them were two angels, in the form of two white herons. The angels were guiding them across a plank bridge over a chasm. Lot and his family were dressed in Victorian dress - Lot in a top hat and a black suit, carrying a walking stick, and his wife and daughters in frocks and bonnets, carrying parasols. But they all had the faces of birds. Lot had a crow's face, his wife's was like a white owl, and the two daughters were wrens. The smouldering city in the background was based on a Second World War photograph of Dresden after the fire-bombing, and the black silhouettes of Lancaster bombers were gliding through the glowing air above. As Lot and his family reached the safe ground at the end of the plank bridge, Lot's wife turned back to see the destruction of her home, and as soon as she turned she was changed into a pillar of salt.

The Sodom and Gomorrah animation took Sybil three days to complete, during which she didn't sleep or eat at all, stopping only for cups of tea. After it was done she ravenously finished a packet of chocolate biscuits, which turned out to be the only food she had left in the house, apart from packets of spaghetti. She needed to go to the shops, but she was too tired. So she went into her garden instead.

It was late summer, and there had been a long succession of very hot and dry days. When she looked at her flowerbeds she saw that the plants were all showing signs of dehydration. She felt a pang of guilt for neglecting them, and to her overtired mind the thirsty flowers seemed like the thirsty and hungry children in Gaza. She started to trek backwards and forwards with a watering-can between the flowerbeds and the brass tap on the back wall of her house. The brass tap was in shade but the flowerbeds were in the full glare of the sun. Every time she stepped out from the strip of shadow onto the baking lawn, she felt the impact of heat on the top of her head, like hot yellow paint. It made her feel giddy and slightly sick. She kept thinking she'd fetch one more watering-can and then have a rest - but she couldn't shake off the feeling that if she stopped watering the plants before they had all been given a good drink, she was somehow letting down the girls in Samira's animation class.

Then something zoomed past her, and looking up, she noticed that there were big insects whizzing backwards and forwards in the air above her head. She put down her watering can and looked back at the house. The insects seemed to be clustering around the roof. Their silhouettes kept appearing and disappearing where the roof-edge was outlined against the hot blue sky. She'd had wasps nesting in her attic before, but these looked bigger than ordinary wasps.

There was a stab of excruciating pain in her left forearm. She looked down, and there, perching on her bare skin, was an enormous hornet. 'Go away!' she shouted angrily, and smacked at it instinctively with her other hand. But it flew off unharmed. A wave of nausea and light-headedness swept over her. The garden and the house seemed to be wheeling away. She tried to set out towards the back door, but her legs collapsed and she found herself lying face down on the lawn. The grass prickled the side of her cheek.

Just in front of her eyes, there was a black ant trying to climb to the end of a diagonal dead twig. As soon as she saw it, her entire soul became focused on the ant's progress. If only the ant could reach the end of the twig, everything would be all right. She willed it forward with all her might. But it kept hesitating, waving its antennae, as if it wasn't sure whether the best thing would be to turn back. She noticed that actually the ant wasn't black at all: there were hints of glowing russet in its armour: and it seemed as if this was a great secret, which might solve all the difficulties of life.

At last the ant reached the end of its twig, and she closed her eyes in relief.

The computer screen now filled the whole sky from top to bottom, and from one side to the other.

'Why do innocent children have to suffer?' asked Sybil.

'There is no single, simple answer to this question,' said the computer. 'Life is inherently unpredictable and unfair, and bad things happen to innocent people without a clear reason.

'Some philosophers conclude that the reasons for suffering are beyond human comprehension, that suffering is part of a divine plan, and that it will ultimately be redeemed or compensated in the afterlife.

'The philosopher Epicurus said that if God is willing but unable to prevent evil, he is not omnipotent. If he is able but unwilling, he is not benevolent. Therefore God does not exist, or at least not the omnipotent and benevolent God traditionally described.

'But others believe that humans have been given the task of creating their own meaning and purpose, in a chaotic world where suffering is a fact of life. If the innocent are still suffering, and especially if they are suffering at the hands of other humans, then we have not done enough. And this means that we have not passed God's test.'

To support animation classes for children in Gaza, click here. To support Medical Aid for Palestine, click here.