By Evan Roney

“If anything happens I love you” is a Netflix short film about a girl’s parents and their journey through an emotional void as they grieve for the loss of their daughter to a school shooter. The movie begins with the parents’ grief followed by the rediscovery of lost memories with their daughter which helps them begin to accept the loss, then finally ending with a scene of the daughter entering the school followed by a series of gunshots. 

As a viewer, it was sad to see the impact that the loss of a child had on parents, but other than that, the film was quite uneventful. After watching it many times, I could not understand the purpose of the shadow characters. The three characters being the parents and daughter, had shadows which were also characters and interacted with each other in their own world. But the use of these shadows failed to display new emotions already seen by the main characters and did not add any sort of depth, they did not have a reason to be there and made the film considerably worse.

As the parents recall their memories, they remember how their daughter once kicked a ball into a wall in the back yard and broke some of the stone. She covered up the accident with blue paint, this did not help to fix the issue but instead made the parents feel better and less angry. I think this symbolizes how the daughter would help make her parents happy in times of despair, but without her there the parents fall into a deep sadness and helplessness. Losing an only child can be detrimental to a parents mental state, the film did an amazing job showing the spiral of negative emotions that leaves the parents lost. But what brings them back to reality is the memories of their daughter, these memories can last forever and the parents realize they still have pieces of their precious child. The love between family is stronger than the sinfulness of others and cannot be lost even with death, that’s what I believe the theme of the film is.

The film had a unique style of animation which made it easier to watch, there was also no dialogue which put emphasis on actions and expressions of the characters to project emotion. Though some of the themes were repetitive, the film still evokes emotion in the viewer through a  serious subject and very well put together.