According to Carl Jung, the Anima and the Animus are two dueling concepts that are part of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. The Anima is the essence of a man’s personality (his female spirit), while the Animus is the complementary male spirit that resides and acts within a woman’s psyche. The Anima and the animus are spontaneously produced by the unconscious and are archetypes common to all people. A woman or man usually only expresses his/her dormant qualities unconsciously by projecting them onto men or woman they meet.
This idea, that personhood consists of the male and female spirit, is certainly heterosexually binary now, but there are elements of it that I think apply quite obviously to Anima, which falls somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, with moments of deep bleakness and heart-swelling love.
When Anima begins, a group of people, all dressed in the same shades of grey and blue mercantile outfits that seem suitable for factory workers, in unison in a train car. Their heads move side to side, rested upon hands and forearms, as if they are all fighting off sleep. No one makes eye contact with each other. Everyone is struggling to stay asleep or to wake up; only Yorke seems to have any semblance of self-awareness. “Who are these people?” he wonders in the lyrics of “Not the News,” but he does notice a woman, who is sitting in another part of the train car. When she leaves her black metal lunchbox in the train, he struggles to break against the monotonous movements forced upon him to get to her, weaving around bodies on an escalator and trying to walk through the turnstile.
Finally, Yorke takes the turnstile at a running leap, flying over it and gliding forward into a series of caves, structures of rock and sand, all in strict contrast to the utilitarian natures of the workers that move among them. Yorke is an individual in a sea of otherness, and as he flails forward and struggles to find the woman from the train, others pursue him with bad intentions.
He can still see the lunchbox, and he can still see the woman, but he still can’t entirely make his body do what he wants. As he strides past other workers, they fall like dominos. They collapse as he moves uphill until he too is trapped in what seems like a whirlwind, surrounded by whirling bodies, all of them encircled by a tornado of trash. Newspapers. Plastic bags. Coffee cups. The only thing for Yorke to do is submit, to let the minutia of life envelop him, and this moment is one of the film’s most beautiful; the idea that sometimes survival is tied to letting go.
This was a central theme in Anima that has really stuck with me: that sometimes survival is tied to letting go, and then when you do acquiesce, you become fully in charge. The moment Yorke does acquiesce is the moment he becomes in charge of himself fully, waking up now face-down in a city street. He gets up and brushes the trash off. He finds the woman from the train, and they dance.
Then because of that ethereal dance with the woman still sitting opposite him, he has something to hold on to, something to remember, and even something to wake up for.
These final minutes are quite beautiful, and take us into a dream space. Up against a wall covered in graffiti, Yorke and the woman push and pull against each other, rushing into the street, jumping onto each other’s bodies, first in a twirl and then in a dance. Their attachment to each other attracts others, now also broken out of their regimented rhythm; they too embrace each other, dance in a grassy field, and couple into pairs. Each of these pairs is shot from below to see their grasping hands and from above to see their faces aligned with each other, these individuals choosing to seek each other out – filling the void that Jung had described all those years ago.
Another train appears, punctuated with windows and filled with light, and this time Yorke and the woman board it together. They sit across from each other, their fingers once clasped. And as we hear birds singing and see the shadows of leaves upon Yorke’s face, he falls asleep once more.
And the question we’re left after Anima concludes is where that train will go. Does it return to that same dark and dank tunnel where the film began? Will Yorke and the woman and all the other people on the train do this all over again, or will they remember what they’ve already done, the bonds they’ve already created? Has this already happened? The idea that to work and to live is a tedious, sometimes soulless endeavor isn’t a particularly unique one, and has been explored by countless others already.
But the little glimmer of hope in Anima is what sets it apart, and together with Paul Thomas Anderson and Darius Khondji, Yorke has crafted a short film that draws its power from both unsettling and invigorating us.
Through it all, I thought, most surprisingly, of Forky from Toy Story 4, of the suggestion that to truly know yourself is to accept that we are all inherently trash in the universe, but that it is our individual choice to attempt to become more, to do more, to mean more. It’s an eternal question. Can we be more than we were originally built for? And it is one that Anima considers with moments both uncanny and beautiful.
Jennifer Kim 