Uncle (1996)

Before he went onto create the Academy Award-winning short Harvie Krumpet (2003) and the feature film Mary and Max (2009), Australian claymation animator Adam Elliot kick-started his career with a trilogy of shorts based (somewhat loosely, as Elliot indicates) upon his relationships with various male family members: Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998) and Brother (1999).  The three shorts, combining greyscale aesthetics with Elliot's now-familiar bug-eyed stop motion models, follow a similar narrative format - a collection of miniature anecdotes in which the narrator (voiced in all cases by William McInnes) attempts to piece together his various recollections and impressions of said family figure (invariably, these are all relations who, for one reason or another, no longer play an active role in the narrator's life), blending the banal with the eccentric and, on occasion, the truly tragic.  The result is a vivid, charming and haunting picture of who each relation was, but also one which leaves a number of deliberate gaps, hinting at further aspects of their life and character which were either unknown or not understood by the narrator.  The full human, now gone, remains a mystery; this is what still exists of them in recollection.

The first of the trilogy, Uncle, made while Elliot was studying at the Victorian College of the Arts and based upon a composite of eight different uncles from Elliot's life, gives us a portrait of a man in his retirement years, and of the various quirks, qualities and contradictions observed by his nephew in their interactions.  We do not, at any point, learn the name of this man, but we learn much about his intense hatred of snails, which seemed at odds with his generally very gentle and tolerant nature, his fondness for burning various household items in his incinerator, and his devotion to his prized lemon tree, which he by turns urinated on and adorned with fairy lights.  While it cemented the tone for the rest of the trilogy, and for Elliot's subsequent work, Uncle is unique in the family trilogy in focusing upon an elderly figure (Cousin and Brother deal with much younger relations), the underlying narrative of the short charting the increasing isolation and physical decline of the titular character.  After the death of his wife (in one of the film's darker spots we learn that she took her own life by ingesting ant poison), his primary sources of companionship become his pet chihuahua, Reg, and a pair of Mormon missionaries who pay him regular visits (a relationship which clearly made the narrator feel uneasy, although the missionaries remain one of the uncle's few steadfast sources of moral support to the end).  Animals tend to be ill-fated in Elliot's shorts - in fact, pet loss is one of the unifying themes of the family trilogy (a fixation Elliot attributes to his failed childhood ambitions of becoming a veterinarian) - so you can bet that sweet-faced little Reg isn't going to make it through this intact.

 

Uncle does not offer an uplifting or comforting depiction of the aging process.  The film follows the titular figure as he goes from earning the awe and admiration of the narrator (then a small child) by twisting a pipe cleaner into the shape of a spider, to his inevitable deterioration and, finally, death within the alien confines of a hospice.  In between, the unnamed uncle is seldom afforded much in the way of dignity (exemplified by the close-up shot of his exposed buttock crack as he tends to his piss-soaked lemon tree) and for all of his eccentricities, his existence largely seems to flicker between dullness and forlornness (his declension in the narrator's eyes is apparent in an anecdote regarding one Christmas in which the family humoured him during his feeble attempt at pretending to be Santa).  And yet the narrator's affection for him is evident at all times, ensuring that the film never takes on a mean-spirited or derisive vibe.  Certainly, we genuinely feel for the uncle, and the final moments of the film, which concern the uncle's near-complete loss of autonomy (to the extent that the last semblance of "control" in his life comes in fastening his dentures to his clothing while he sleeps for fear of them being stolen by other patients), come off as utterly heart-breaking.  As do the words of wisdom he dispenses to his nephew shortly before his total decline, which convey the terrors and frustrations of feeling that one has reached the end of the road and is left with nowhere to go beyond one's reminiscences: "Life can only be understood backwards, but you have to live it forwards."  The feeling that this man's best days are now behind him is somewhat abated by us sensing that his life was never a particularly exciting one to begin with, and yet his final epiphany, that life's greatest joys are to be found in the very simplest of experiences and pleasures, leaves him, finally, with a glimmer of nobility.

Availability: Uncle can be found on Disc 2 of the Cinema 16 World Short Films DVD release.  This includes a commentary from Adam Elliot, although he has very little to say there about Uncle specifically.