HONOUR

Frederic Siegel's Animated Intergalactic Journey

image above and cover image: stills from frederic siegel's animated film honour

BY: Dante Fresse

Honour depicts a colorful animated world where a creature is banished from its tribe and must survive on the outskirts of the wild. In the outer edges of the wild, our protagonist finds the remains of a space station, along with two corpses of astronauts. The film flashes back to the reason why these two individuals are dead, and then it’s revealed that one killed the other. The estranged traveler equips himself with a fire torch left on the body of one astronaut and returns to his tribe to challenge the creature who banished him.

On the surface, this animation is simply innovative and original, capturing the whole screen and plunging the viewer into a world that is strange and beautiful. However, upon deeper inspection, Honour is a film about primal nature, tracking the inner wildness that governs humankind’s baser desires and tendencies. Both the astronauts and the leader of the tribe are haunted by a fiery drive to attack. The tribal chief forces the central character into the wild, while the astronauts get infected with a demonic wish to kill one another.

Director Frederic Siegel does not clarify if this is a result of the planet’s environment or if these characters act on their own volition. Nonetheless, the concept of fire comes to play both as the form which the vengeful characters’ bodies take when they have bloodlust, and the tool which the protagonist takes on to win back his honor. Fire is the inception of human development, beginning with the discovery of fire by the Cavemen, so Siegel could be connecting fire as man’s destiny and demise, becoming a tool of war and violence as well as an agent of technological change.

Honour’s animation style is beautiful and simplistic, using varying shades of orange to color this world. We are transported into a state of bliss and wonderment as the shades and humans of Honour take on new shapes as the film goes on. Honour was an Official Selection at Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, Pictoplasma, and Dresden International Short Film Festival.

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