I still exercise some choice, so I picture a bear’: stuck in her friend’s shower for hours, a woman finds calm in repetition.

Director: Tom Schroeder (https://www.einausanimation.com/)
Composer: Jonathan Zorn

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In his brief animation The Bear in the Shower, the US artist and animator Tom Schroeder finds a bit of existential poetry in a peculiar, somewhat low-stakes crisis his wife encountered when she accidentally locked herself in a friend’s shower for some six hours. With the ordeal set in an Amsterdam apartment, a female voice recalls the experience of becoming trapped in her friend’s bathroom naked, realising the prospect of escape was slim and having to pass the time knowing that her friend wasn’t returning until much later in the day. In an evocative narration that blurs the border between poetry and prose, the woman details how she summoned a bit of stoic calm by imagining a bear’s paces in the zoo, and walking back and forth in ‘cycles of monastic discipline’. Pairing the narrator’s gentle voice with a sparse, jazz-tinged original soundtrack and enchanting visuals, Schroeder, like the character at the centre of his piece, builds a mood that, rather counterintuitively, becomes a meditative exercise in relaxation.

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