The hardest thing about entering into Co Hoedeman's 1997 film The Garden of Écos is the intuitive understanding, straight off the bat, that the titular paradise is not fated to last. The title, recalling the Garden of Eden, already seems telling enough, but there is something so intricate, so beautifully-realised and, above all, so guileless about Hoedeman's paper-crafted world that makes it instantly ripe for destruction. The Dutch-Canadian animator, who is best known for his Academy Award-winning 1977 short The Sand Castle, has here created something that seems at once vibrant and deeply nostalgic. The colours, the lighting and the movements of the characters are beyond resplendent; the garden feels alive and meticulously constructed as a functional ecosystem, while also being evocative of some bygone childhood dreamland, one that was always destined to fade into the stuff of faint memory the second the outside world crept in. The Garden of Écos is on one level an ecological parable, dealing with the mismanagement of natural resources and illustrating how the breakdown of one thread of the web of life can have catastrophic consequences all over. On another level it is an anti-warfare narrative, showing what happens when co-operation is displaced by conflict as an overriding value. The common teaching is that, without recognition of the interconnectivity of all things, and our dependency on a shared environment, none of us can hope to survive.
The opening two minutes depict how a typical diurnal cycle plays out in the titular garden, focussing on the various animal lifeforms that populate it and the niches they've carved out within. Many are visibly based on real-world animals, the most prominent being a family of sheep-like quadropeds, including a parent and child who function as the emotional nexus of the narrative. Other lifeforms have a surreal or fantastical twist that reinforces the intersection between familiar ecology and playful fantasy. One critter looks like a mishmash between a flightless owl and an animate cloak; another is spherical, resembling a kind of terrestrial sea urchin with a brood of sprightly golf balls constantly in tow. Hoedeman takes time to carefully establish the distinctive ways in which each of these species interacts with their environs and with one another, imbuing them with a character and vitality that is immediately endearing. Even the ones that lack obvious facial features, such as the spherical beings, are able to convey such life and personality as to engender the viewer's empathy, eg: when we see two of the smaller spheres hesitating before travelling down a ledge.
Even at its most pristine, Écos is not exactly symmetrical with Eden. Death is never entirely absent from the garden, it being a daily reality that some of its inhabitants prey on others. The buzzing yellow insects that emerge from their hive every dusk form a vital food source for a species of winged nocturnal beings that behave like bats but make distinctive bird-like calls. Meanwhile, the baby spheres are picked off by green snakes that camouflage themselves in the grasses, yet even the presence of animals who survive by devouring another's young do little to negate the overwhelming sense of peaceful equilibrium that characterises those earlier moments. There is, above all, an overarching cooperative spirit that seems to permeate the garden at all corners, even among those predatory beings - one of the snakes, upon catching a young sphere, is seen to feed it to its companion. From the start, we are primed to feel an intuitive respect for each creature's role within the scheme of things.
The inevitable upset to this balance arrives in the form of a swarm of creatures resembling something between a caterpillar and a crustacean (for simplicity's sake I'll just refer to them as "shrimps"), who raid the garden while most of its residents are sleeping and ravage the flowers on which the sheep depend. What immediately marks the shrimps out as outsiders to the garden's ethos is that they do not share in its community spirit; their tendency toward coaction does not extend beyond their own kind, and they exhibit no awareness of the bigger picture. In contrast to the sheep, who take only as much from the flowers as they need, the shrimps pick massive quantities and hoard the buds away inside a cave - the same cave in which the nocturnal avians roost during the daylight hours - for purely their own usage. Their wastefulness wreaks grisly consequences when the stockpile of picked buds begins to decompose en masse, unleashing lethal gases into the cave and poisoning the nocturnal birds. Obviously, these shrimps are a swarming disaster zone. Yet Hoedeman makes the curious but effective choice of choosing to portray the intruders, who on paper should represent the absolute worst of an unchecked culture of excess and consumption at its most rapaciously catastrophic, seem less malevolent than they do incompetent and out of their depth in a world that's clearly much bigger than their comprehension. For the purposes of this story, it is important that they come across as as fundamentally little and vulnerable as everything else in Hoedeman's world and that, much like the garden residents, all that they basically want to do is to survive (honestly, they're probably the cutest lifeforms in the picture). When the locals finally resolve to get violent with the raiders, the results are harrowing and in no way cathartic. The most disturbing aspect of the narrative trajectory is that the cooperative spirit that defines Écos, while in some respects fortified by the shrimps' invasion, does not, ultimately, prove redemptive. As a team, they remain united to the finish, yet it is their willingness to cast the shrimps as enemies and make the us and them division that proves most lethal to their garden's vitality. Écos is a tale of poisoning and how it pervades and corrupts a formerly pristine paradise, and that poisoning takes multiple different forms.
The native critters attempt to weather the hardship as a community, by gathering together the ravaged flowers, while one of the owls tries (unsuccessfully) to carry some of the poisoned birds to safety. And yet even they are not immune to the same kind of short-sightedness that facilitates the shrimps' ravenous consumption, by not considering the wider-ranging impacts of some of their own actions. Without the nocturnal birds to control their population, the buzzing insects multiply and become a nuisance to the other creatures. One of the owls discovers that squeezing a type of flower will disperse toxins into the atmosphere that kill the bugs, a seemingly resourceful innovation it shares with its neighbours, which merely furthers the proliferation of poisons around the garden. The toxins that now scatter the ground prove just as lethal to the spherical creatures, in turn rendering them inedible to the snakes. Obviously, this is analogous to the use of pesticides and their potentially catastrophic impact on the wider environment, while also symbolising the seed of animosity as it spreads its corruptive influence, finally prompting the once-peaceful garden inhabitants to declare full-blown war upon the shrimps (they do not seem naturally hardwired toward violence, their first instinct being to flee rather than fight, although they rise to the challenge when prompted), rather than attempt to reach a more amicable solution. As a survival tactic, it proves as bogus as their measure taken against the insect population, culminating in a tragedy so terrible that it stops both sides in their tracks.
The hardest thing about exiting Hoedeman's film is the deliberate lack of resolution. The dispute between the garden inhabitants and the invasive shrimps, not to mention the broader ecological problems caused by the introduction of the various toxins into the garden, remains unsolved by the fade-out. For a fleeting moment, we are teased with the possibility of peace, with all parties united in their recognition of the devastation their joint hostility has brought about. The shrimps seem as concerned by the young sheep's death as the garden's denizens; while two of them were responsible for pushing down the boulder that killed the young sheep, it looked to me like they were attempting to help the friend a snake had cornered on a lower ledge, and it is evident that the young sheep was not their intended target. That final wide shot, showing all of the survivors coming together to gaze upon the body of the crushed sheep, provides the one moment in which the sense of community that previously enabled Écos to thrive seems to extend across all barriers; neither side wanted it to end with this. The possibility of understanding is there, but alas, Hoedeman insists that it is not realised. The garden inhabitants, upon noticing the shrimps attempting to participate in the mourning process, angrily turn on them and force them to retreat, definitively denying them a place within their order. Whether the garden has seen the last of these interlopers remains up in the air, but there is no feeling of victory in their closing expulsion. The point of no return has already been crossed, with the death of the young sheep indicating the termination of any last hope of recovery, both for the garden and its inhabitants. The fallen youngster, a symbol both of innocence and of the incoming generation stifled by the shaky decisions of its elders, has been extinguished by a toxin of a different nature, one that both sides are fully culpable in proliferating through their mutual inability to share resources and see eye-to-eye. The residents of Écos have compromised themselves, and even if life within their garden is able to continue on in some form, the gentle guilelessness that once pervaded the land seems irrecoverable. Death had always existed in Écos, but by the end it has truly come to signify the snuffing out of life, and not the process by which life perpetuates itself.
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