Danny Boy

A metáfora perfeita da vida sem cabeça de todos os dias. Afinal, o que nos faz perder a cabeça?

Marek Skrobecki's puppet animation Danny Boy shows an individual at odds with the system. His emotions reveal his otherness and need for acceptance. The production is a refined animated film featuring elaborate puppets. According to the director, it was his most difficult piece of work so far given the great number of puppets appearing on set at the same time. This pessimistic animated film refers by its title as well as by some motifs to the famous Irish ballad. 

Skrobecki presents a surprising reality. A seemingly ordinary city is inhabited by people suffering from a serious condition strangely enough, their headlessness does not seem to bother them much. Headless individuals walk in haste and chaos around the town, stumbling and falling all the time. The blindness of the city inhabitants is in fact a kind of social disease, of a mass stupefaction. Duped by "headlessness", a reference to 20th-century totalitarian ideologies, those people follow an irrational blindness. Together, they create a mindless, intolerant community. It is the protagonist - the only one, colloquially speaking, to have his head screwed on the right way - who seems to feel the most lost and lonely in this "headless" crowd. As he wanders the city streets, Danny Boy is constantly filled by dread and sadness at the sight of its headless, duped and aimlessly hard-pressed inhabitants. In the privacy of his home, he slowly constructs a machine which will help bring his solitude to an end.

A metaphorical and bitterly ironic story about a society suffering from 'a headless existence'. 

It is the power of feeling that brings forward the drastic action of the last rational being: as the main character falls in love, it becomes even more difficult for him to bear the alienation and lack of acceptance. Particularly given that his dissimilarity - which might actually seem elevating - also repels his beloved mate. Paradoxically, the desperate act of decapitation becomes a means of liberation, mainly from the burden of rational thinking. Free from the necessity of reflection or any responsibility and holding his sweetheart in his arms, Danny Boy walks away towards the setting sun.