Little Heart
Calgary 2010
6:43
Dir: Janna-Marynn Brunnen
Digital Stills of Hand Drawings and Paintings
Animation
Young Audiences Program
This remarkable first film from Janna-Marynn Brunnen aptly and enchantingly describes a journey to an altered understanding of love starting from its destruction, along with the idea that it lasts forever, through the subsequent fallout, eventual healing and finally to epiphany. Brunnen hand drew, painted and photographed over 4800 images to bring Little Heart to the screen. Moments of humour emerge as her film’s protagonist tries to process her emotional wounds. There are also inspired images - not least the depiction of love as a soaring and tumbling joyride on the back of a great bird that swoops through the clouds. Brunnen’s use of paint - characters in quivering acrylic lines, backgrounds in ephemeral, shifting watercolours – and the thematic development of her red, blue and yellow colour scheme are, ultimately, beguiling. And the simple piano and percussion soundtrack she composed and performed herself is admirably apropos.
JANNA-MARYNN BRUNNEN
Janna-Marynn Brunnen grew up in and around Calgary. At the age of eighteen she attended Alberta Theatre Projects’ Youth Playwriting Program and it’s Apprenticeship Program. In 2003 she graduated from the Technical Production Program at the National Theatre School of Canada and, over the years, has worked in Canadian theatre as a Lighting Designer, Sound Designer,
Technical Director, and Stage Manager. Little Heart, her first animated short, was made possible by the National Film Board of Canada/Quickdraw Animation scholarship for study and production, which she received in 2009. It premiered in Canada at the International Festival of Animated Objects in 2011 and has since premiered in the uS at the Palm Beach Women’s International Film Festival 2011 and won the Gold Kahuna at the 2011 Honolulu Film Awards.
