Never On Sunday

Looking for something else entirely, I found the film short “Chocolate Hare” featured at the Gkids website. (It’s also currently available on Youtube, where it may be more permanent.) It’s nothing more than the melting of three chocolate bunnies, frst with a hot iron, then a heat lamp, and finally a blowdryer. Just chocolate melting, but context is everything.

Go and watch it. Eerie, huh?

Chocolate shaped like a living creature already tickles our tendency to anthropomorphize; there’s a naughty pleasure in the act of biting off a chocolate bunny’s head. The soundtrack though (“Aviva Pastoral”), makes a simple melting seem like the execution of a martyr, or rather three martyrs. The spatter of chocolate that accompanies the third bunny’s decapitation is a little too much like blood, and the blowdryer a little too much like a pistol—which I’m sure is the creator’s intent. Knowing that it featured at a children’s film festival, Eileene found it deeply disturbing when I made her watch it.

But watch it again, with the sound turned off. Imagine, or better yet play in a different window, an upbeat soundtrack…say, “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” or “Yakety Sax.” Just good clean fun. Or even more, imagine it with the original sound: the whir of the blowdryer, the light clunk of the chocolate head hitting the table, reminding us that it’s just chocolate. Now it’s not even a particularly fun exercise, just humdrum and rather slow. The best demonstration I’ve seen that we see what the media wants us to see since that satirical trailer of The Shining as a goofball comedy—which I’m a lot less sure was the creator’s intent in “Chocolate Hare.”