Invention of Love

The invention of Love is an animated short film used as a graduation project at Saint-Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts by the class of Lyudmila Lazareva, Galina Kovalskaya and published by HHG Film Company. It was written and directed by Andrey Shushkov practicly doing the production design, the animation, the editing and compositing all by himself with support from Ekaterina Dementyeva and music and sound by Polina Sizova, Anton Melnikov and Anna Gudkova.

The animated short starts with a scene showing a messy workshop and the main character on a chair, sighing and listening to music. We are taken immediately to the next scene where the inventor is riding a mechanical horse and meets a lady. She is impressed by his invention and they both take a ride on it stopping at a nearby tree where they kiss.

Soon after, they get married and decide to leave to another town. The bride was saying farewell to her relatives as her groom was packing their luggage into blimp and they soon took off to a city where presuming it is the inventor's home.

The next day or soon after they've arrived, the two lovers are shown in the inventor's workshop, where the wife was taking care of a flower she brought with her and the husband minding an invention of his. The wife was prepares to get out of the house, and they both kiss until later. As she walks along downtown, she's uncomforted with all the smog and the waste all the mechanical vehicles, machinery and factories were producing. She meets a dog along the way that she tries to pet but find out that he's actually mechanic, walks by a plant store where all the plants are mechanic, all this makes her feel bad and she decides to go to a nearby park for some fresh air but only to find more fake life such as artificial trees and even a mechanical butterfly.

Meanwhile her flower at home dies; the inventor notices and believes it is better if he would replace it, throwing the original down the window and placing an immortal mechanical one instead of the old one. When the wife arrives home, she gasps and quickly goes outside to find her flower, as she does she tries to blow away the dust off of it, but she coughs. In the next scene her husband is at the hospital receiving news that his love has died.

Upset, he then destroys his inventions in his workshop, looks at her lover's flower and makes a hard decision. He brings back his wife to life, as an artificial human, with a mechanical hearth and everything. Although he succeeded, and she looks as if she would be alive, it's not herself anymore. The inventor looks sad at her flower he preserved, and the animation lets out an open ending.

The animation is organized very well and acceptable for a team with so few people, but of course because of the lack of man power, the film can't reach a great achievement such as in visual quality but they made a very good job making it unnoticeable. Example: The animation has only two colors in every scene, black for the environment and characters and another color representing the sky and the light, depending where the scene takes place. If the production team was bigger then they would've bothered with adding more graphic features, but they haven't and this is what makes the visuals of this animation so interesting.

Like most of the short animations, Invention of Love lacks voices. Usually when creating an animation, the producers take care of the voice actors first to organize the lines and see if they can come up with any improvisations then they do the actual recordings and after that the animators try to animate the characters gestures, expressions and lip sync according to the recorded lines of the voice actors. This takes a lot of work, so for a graduation project, this is very often avoided or replaced with narration. In the invention of love, the actual actions of the characters and the background music help telling us the story. The graphics are amazing, a psaligraphic (cut out) stop motion style improved with CGI showing a steampunk theme not only helps as an eye candy but it is also fits very well with the story and the moral, replacing real life with artificial one, trying to bring love back not alive but artificial.

The prologue of the film is speculated to actually be a scene from the end, a part of the epilog judging by the messed up workshop the character is in, there aren't really much details to prove if it is actually a part from the epilog but this is how some films start in order to keep the watcher interested. For a semi-muted animation, the girl's illness is very well made evident quite from the start when she coughs at the steam released by the mechanical horse, and this is shown on different parts along the film.

The music is a very good narrator, the film starting with the main character listening to a piece of music that continues to all the way to the scene where he kisses his future wife, giving the illusion of a flash back, of a memory. When they take off, the music gets more adventurous and by the time they reach the city, it changes to one that would fit the admiring emotion of the audience and especially with the kissing part of the scene. The soundtrack from the blimp ride is the most enthusiastic one so far and it would've been a done better if it would've been extended all the way where they fly trough the city, with even a more allegro-positive line to increase the enthusiasm, the current one is good and it matches very well the kissing part, but this is only a matter of seconds comparing to all the ride through the city. The music in the workshop matches the environment of a small family but it stop after the wife gets out of the house and wanders around the city. The silence the scenes of her hours spend in the city matches her small negative mood / surprises she's experiencing.

The part where she would die was expected, and her husband rage, tarring down his workshop is simply expressive as well how he brings her back to life. All this part is silent and it lets an open ending. This scene could've been improved if the scene where he would reconstruct her back to life was done in a more dramatic and slower way with fitting soundtrack and a sad one at the end when her love was alive but not literally.

Despite its small features that could've been replaced with better ones, Invention of Love is a really successful animation that appeals to many kinds of audience. no matter the fantasy theme, is still a story of love, love conquers all.