Fred and the Apple World (1992)

A cautionary tale about the dangers of wastefulness, over-consumption and the misuse of resources, Fred and the Apple World was directed and animated by Dagmar Jordan at Kingston University and appears on the Connoisseur Video VHS title Green Animation.  Released in 1992 in collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature, Green Animation is a collection of short animations, predominantly student films from the UK and MTV-commissioned promos from the US, made with the intention of promoting awareness for environmental issues.  Most of these are very short, with few running longer than a couple of minutes.  The compilation is presented by Tony Robinson (our friend from two Sweet Disaster shorts, although best known for playing Baldrick in the BBC sitcom Blackadder) and Aardman Animations co-founder Peter Lord, fresh from making his Academy Award-nominated short Adam (1991).  A companion video, EcoToons, was released in 1993.

Fred and the Apple World, a claymation short without dialogue, has long been one of my picks for the stand-outs of this collection.  The central metaphor is a relatively simple one, but effective - the Earth is represented as a giant apple, which the ravenous, absent-minded Fred (who represents the very worst of human excesses) keeps munching away at, until the globe is reduced to a core, and Fred's weight becomes so immense that the weakened Earth is unable to support him, and finally gives way.  Hurtled off into an ominous black void, Fred's appetite remains insatiable even after the shock of the fall, and he eats away at the remains of the broken Earth until he is seemingly the only thing left in existence.  The short could easily have ended here, but a horrifying additional sting in the tail comes when Fred is granted a second chance - a new seed of hope literally materialises before him - only for his hunger to fatally overwhelm him yet again.  Fred holds the seed in his fingers, as if contemplating its significance and potential, but, unable to control himself, he devours it on the spot, before destroying himself in a fit of despair and desperation upon realising that he has squandered his only hope for renewal and continued survival.

Being a student film, the aesthetics of Fred and the Apple World are not especially polished, and if the film has one particularly notable weakness, it's in the occasional moments of motionless which are meant to signify pauses but are not entirely convincing - at the end of the short, when Fred is examining the apple seed, it looks merely as if the animation has come to a total standstill; as if someone has hit the pause button rather than Fred being convincingly alive.  Nevertheless, the film is still charming to look at, with the papery green leaves of the apple tree that Fred initially shares his Earth with (before it too becomes a victim of his hunger) having a lush, pleasingly handmade quality, and Fred's facial expressions, while always very simplified, successfully conveying the character's crippling obliviousness to his increasingly dire situation.  We can buy Fred as being more careless and lacking in long-term vision than he is a true villain (at his most bloated, he is always recognisiably a human figure, and never portrayed as outright monstrous), his apparent inability to keep his primal urges in check rendering him an unsympathetic but still painfully ill-fated character to watch.

Where the film really excels is in the ambiance it creates.  The film's use of sound, credited to Peter Barnfather, Emma Knight-barnard and Miles Tranter, is wonderfully understated, giving us a sense of the Earth as it exists at various stages of Fred's reign terror - from the tranquil birdsong of the opening sequence to the subdued murmurings of a human civilisation as Fred, having devoured his apple tree companion, starts tearing away at the Earth's continents, to the chilling winds conveying the final emptiness of the depleted Earth.  It's effective but subdued enough to make the film's most crucial sounds - the successive chomping noises Fred makes as he bites his way through the apple in the opening sequence - appear startlingly ominous.  The dissolve that accompanies each bite, showing a notably larger Fred as he grows in size and eventually comes to dwarf the tree by his side, while an obvious means of overcoming the animation's limited motion, is effective nevertheless.

In the end there isn't a whole lot to Fred and the Apple World, but it works and, despite the crudeness of the animation techniques therein, remains a hidden gem in the field of UK claymation.  Both colourful and haunting, the film takes on on a progressively nightmarish but consistently understated quality at a perfect rate, and if anything, its message, concerning the need to be mindful about our use of the world's resources, has only gotten all the more resonant nearly two and a half decades on.