Early in the charming and poignant animated film “Yes-People,” by the Icelandic director Gísli Darri Halldórsson, a portly, white-haired woman sits in her kitchen and slurps a bowl of broth with resonant satisfaction. Across the table, her husband looks up from his morning newspaper with annoyance. As she brings another spoonful to her mouth, she catches his glare. Her eyes narrow with resolve. The spoon comes back up. She takes another, equally enthusiastic slurp, not saying a word, but her eyes issue a dare.
If the husband were to say anything at all, it would be a single syllable: já (pronounced “yow”), meaning “yes” in Icelandic—it’s the only word spoken during most of the film. The seed for the project was planted when Halldórsson was describing já to his Irish friends, explaining its capacity to contain myriad meanings depending on tone and expression. “That led me to think about the idea of a semi-silent film, which got me very excited,” Halldórsson said. “To limit dialogue to the primal language that I imagine was spoken by our ancestors, before words came about. And just to see if this format could reach a universal audience.”
The resulting film is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short Film category this year. In it, three households in a humdrum apartment building go about their ingrained routines over the course of a day—acknowledging, ignoring, or annoying both their neighbors and their intimates. “Routines and habits can be a recipe for great achievement and growth but also terrible regret,” Halldórsson said. “So I wrote a story where the characters were all, in their own way, stuck in a loop.”
The sense of being trapped in prescribed patterns is heightened by the use of a single song in the film: “Sveitin Milli Sanda” (“The Country Between the Sands”). Recorded in the nineteen-sixties, the song, like the film, mines surprising depths from a single syllable, an “ah” that the singer Elly Vilhjálms coaxes into a melodic, haunting tune. In “Yes-People,” the song recurs with astonishing range, turning carefree, dramatic, triumphant, and—when a young musician bleats it out tunelessly on his recorder—excruciating.
“Elly Vilhjálms is a legend in Iceland,” Halldórsson said. “Her voice is so rich, and she invites you to feel so many emotions. There is a mysterious sublime truth to the piece that restricts clear meaning. Pure magic.”
Halldórsson began working on the film in 2012, turning to the project in pockets of time between freelance jobs, and finished it with help from a grant from the Icelandic Film Centre. His animation process involved merging computer-generated characters with photographs, most of which belonged to his father. Some of his characters mirror people whom he knows, while others are composites. The playful interactions of the older couple who bookend the film reflect the “positive but grounded energy” shared between his grandparents, who died while he was writing the film.
Halldórsson noted that there is a bleakness to the film, but it’s tempered by what he called “Nordic hope.” Small moments of warmth between characters suggest deeper wells of connection, just as visual details impart special significance—a woman battling alcoholism has a hair style that floats above her head like a dark cloud; a music teacher has a nose like the beak of a songbird. These are figures slightly at odds with the world in which they live but who are searching out their way, day to day.
