When the protagonist of Florian Grolig’s “Friends” brings home a giant, a sizable chunk of hell breaks loose.
The world of Florian Grolig’s new animated short film, “Friends,” bears more than a passing resemblance to our own. Cruelty is more common than kindness; rocks are thrown; knives are drawn; a mob in pointy hoods carries torches, which, following Chekhov’s rule about guns, are soon put to use. It is a world marked by death, pain, and vomit. As in our world, the only safe place to be is atop the hairy torso of a giant who is resting in a lake of his own tears.
Wait, what?
Grolig, who lives and works in Berlin, didn’t set out to make a dark film. He started thinking of a single image, that of a small person sweetly hugging the toe of a giant. “From there,” he told me recently by e-mail, “I wrote the script very fast and intuitive, imagined possible situations and how they would probably play out. . . . Someone else might have turned it into a happy story, but I guess I don’t have that in me.”
Or maybe the world doesn’t have it in it. There is nothing gratuitous about the violence that propels the plot of “Friends”; the brutality proceeds from the logic of self-preservation. If your grandson brought home a giant whose thunderous footsteps caused your house to start crumbling, mightn’t you throw a rock at the dear boy to tell him to get lost, at least until he got some sense in his head? If a giant were tottering about your village, crushing people, wouldn’t you gather your neighbors together (though perhaps not in pointy hoods) to try to drive the thing away? And if you were a lonely giant wouldn’t you lift a colossal finger to protect your only friend from his tormentors? The viewer’s sympathies may lie with the boy and the giant against the villagers, but both sides in this conflict are relatable.
“Friends” won the award for Best Animated Short at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, whose jury praised the film’s “gorgeous, sparse, monochromatic animation.” (The in-person festival was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, but prizes were still awarded.) And there is indeed a spare beauty to the film. Like Grolig’s previous short film, “In the Distance,” from 2015, which is set in a war zone, “Friends” finds a strange poise, an undercurrent of quiet, amid the mayhem. “In animation I really enjoy the ‘hold,’ ” Grolig told me. “The time between actions when nothing moves or happens.” “Friends” is full of such taut moments, as we wait for the other giant foot to drop. Eventually, the film comes to rest in an extended moment of stillness, as the boy, after nearly drowning in his friend’s tears, finds himself sprawled on the giant’s torso as it rises and falls—a touching final scene, and Grolig’s favorite in the film. “I just felt that I needed something relaxing after all the drama,” he said. “To calm down. And just breathe.”
In addition to making films, Grolig designs games and puzzles for computers and mobile devices. I tried out his newest puzzle, High Rise, which invites you to arrange colorful cubes to build elegant skyscrapers. High Rise is different from games that involve racing against a clock—something we all do more than enough of already as a non-leisure activity. In Grolig’s game, there is no clock. You may spend as much time as you wish placing your cubes, building your city. It’s quiet, and quietly beautiful. There is, if you like, only the hold.
