Pulse – An Animated Short About Whaling, Tradition and Change

Traditions change.  This is transparently obvious as otherwise we’d still all be sitting around campfires telling stories. Wait, bad example.  We do, though, often take for granted that while our traditions may change, others are simply not questions by those who adhere to them.  So, the annual culling of whales, for example, had to be stopped by external forces rather than from decisions made within a community.  Perhaps that is the modern way of doing things, but I would have to question that acceptance of cultural calcification.  It often takes a single person to take a step in another direction for things to begin to change.

Perhaps that might be the case in Pulse, an animated short beautifully created by students at Rubika in Valenciennes, France.  It tells the story of Jonas (and perhaps this would have been too blithely titled, had it been called Jonas and the Whale), who discovers the carcass of a whale on a beach.  Shaken by the experience, he feels the terror that the dead creature must have felt and his empathy for the whale creates a schism between how he now perceives his village’s tradition and the slaughter that it (read we) leave in our wake.  Directed by Sarah Forest, Cécile Floucat, Pauline Javelot, Thibaut Wambre, Juliette Gales, and Kevin De Garidel with music by Kévin Bardin, watch Pulse below.