Nathan Otano, Remy Clarke, Leila Courtillon, “Quand j’ai remplace Camille” (2017)
A deftly made short animated film, notable for its use of bright red and shades of green to create and maintain tension in its terse plot, “Quand j’ai remplace Camille”, like some other films I have seen made by students of the Gobelins animation school in France, focuses on a character striving for perfection or control to an extreme obsessive extent so as to risk life and limb. Laure is a competitive freestyle swimmer aiming to break a former swimmer Camille’s record in the pool. Everyone in Laure’s training group knows Camille, knows her perfectionism and knows that she died during a swimming session. During training and even in her spare time, and when there is no-one else at the training pool, Laure pushes herself to reach Camille’s record, with the aim of surpassing it in competition and reaching the national team. This leads to a situation in which Laure ends up falling unconscious in the swimming pool; she is rescued but her health appears to have been seriously compromised.
The animation has a distinct bold style with an emphasis on bright reds that represent Death’s presence, and the greens of the water, the pool tiles and the general surroundings, even the shadows in dark green. When green and red are paired together, as in some scenes, the tension shoots up alarmingly as Laure confronts the apparent ghost of Camille in the pool. Camille’s red hair may signify that she is dead, not that she is a natural redhead. She seems to want to warn Laure of the consequences of pursuing the dangerous and risky path she took. Electronic beat-oriented music is used in some scenes in a way that stresses the intense urgency of Laure’s self-imposed mission.
The simple and straightforward plot sustains a running time of about five to six minutes but if the student animators had had more time, experience and money, they could have invested some effort into creating a backstory for Laure to explain something of her obsession with beating Camille’s record, and the relationship that may have existed between the two. Had they been friends or jealous rivals? Did Laure ever look up to Camille as a role model? Is there something in Laure’s past or family background that explains her fierce competitiveness? All this and more could have made Laure a character for viewers to identify and sympathise with, if not admire.