THE HURON EMERY | ISSUE 3: DECEMBER
12 | ARTS+ENTERTAINMENT
“If anyt hing happ ens I love you”
Five Things I Learned from this Netflix Short
ALLISON MI COPY EDITOR
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case, the shadows are a truthful representation of negative emotions. In another scene, however, the mother’s shadow is shown comforting her as she cries into her knees, caressing that blue shirt. We all have our own shadows, on the good and bad days, present to show us what cannot be seen, but what is as strongly present in ourselves.
thumbnail. It was by pure chance that my mouse stumbled upon the stale white thumbnail of “If anything happens I love you.” To be fair, I was
I saw that the former was only 12 minutes long, I shrugged and thought, “Why not?”
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Less is more.
around the girl’s cheerful photographs, they start to actually see each other with empathy. In the last scene, the parents start to cry. But this time, they go to each other for comfort. Still seated in their daughter’s room, her memories as potent as ever, they have simply chosen not merely to move on, but to live on.
topic with dialogue. Without verbal cues, I found myself focusing more on the visual nuances, like the few splashes of colors, which only appear when something related to the daughter shows up. Noticing the blue mark on the wall where she had once accidentally kicked a soccer ball, or that the only shirt in the washing machine with color was
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where in a sea of sombre recollections, the only colorful specks belong to their daughter.
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on and living on. We move on from jobs and
breakups. But the loss of a child? In the beginning, the parents are not speaking to each other. There is a solemn fog in their house. There is not much of their child that is displayed. When they both enter her room
written and animated by Michael Govier and Will McCormack has no dialogue and is mostly in black and white. Astoundingly, these simplicities successfully depict the heavy journey of two grieving parents as they mourn the loss of their daughter in a school shooting.
If anything happens, if nothing happens, I love you. One of the most
heartbreaking moments is when I saw the bunny-eared phone case and a projection of her text saying, “If anything happens I
We all have our own “shadow.” There seems to be
mother, father and daughter. But what really adds the layers of emotion to this movie is that with some ambiguity, there may actually be six. Each character has a shadow that represents them and acts as the substitute to their dialogue. In the opening scene, when the parents are eating dinner at opposite ends of the table in silence, heads down and their forks dragging in their plates, the two shadows emphatically are bickering over their heads. In this
parents never knew that she would not be coming home that night. She herself did not even know that. The most frightening part, especially in reality, is that none of us ever knows. As the movie credits began to roll, I ran downstairs and told my parents that I love them. Because if anything happens, or if nothing happens, I want them to know. NETFLIX AND GILBERT FILMS
THE EMERY READS: ASIAN AMERICAN AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT NOTE: These books contain imagery and language that may be triggering to some audiences. teenager growing up in Ohio, and the resulting impact on her family. The book moves between past and present events and is set in the 1970s. Ng brings together suspense and mystery to craft Everything I Never Told You into a perfect book for young
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng is a novel based around the death of Lydia Lee, an Asian American
all kinds. The point of view shifts between each member of the Lee family as they cope and go through the motions of being part of an Asian American family in a predominantly caucasian community.
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
George Takei’s graphic novel centers around his family’s time in Japanese internment camps during World
War II. As a child, Takei didn’t comprehend the injustices he was living through but narrates the experiences of his parents, demonstrating the reality of the situation. The graphic novel explains the history and legislation behind the internment camps, his years of experience living in two internment camps as well as the resulting aftermath on his family and the U.S. as whole. They Called Us Enemy is an informative read on a neglected piece of American history as well as a commentary on the state of the U.S.
Chemistry
by Weike Wang Chemistry follows a woman whose life is falling apart. She’s trying to get her Ph.D. in Chemistry but is
working lab results and is being pressured by her boyfriend of years to get married. The narrator and her parents migrated from China to the United States when the narrator was a baby. Growing up she has lived under constant pressure to be smart by her father and reminders that she isn’t beautiful by her mother. Weike Wang portrays an anxietyjust trying to get her life together and takes the reader through her her place in academia and in a relationship.