Surreal story follows a journey of a fish. Animation talks about interrelations between humans and animals but also deals whit relationships between human beings.

Narrative arc of animation follows the normal mode of dream seeing. Animation break up for four parts. Idea is that every seemingly independent part portrays a REM sleep period. Like during REM sleep we are dealing with the same subject over and over again and trying to perhaps solve some unconsciousness problem, in Fish Lie I’m talking all the time about the same subject, varying point of view just a little in every time.

During shootings of the Fish Lie I was interested especially how my models were presenting emotions to the viewer. I wanted that authentic reactions were coming out. To gain this result I used classical Japanese dance-drama method, Kabuki. I was telling the story to my models at the same time I was shooting them. They didn’t know in advance what was the plot of animation. I asked them to put their soul to the story and act their emotions out like they were experiencing those.

Animation by Karoliina Paappa. Music by Mikko Rantanen. 4:3, 3,00min, 2008.