Retirement Plan

⏱️ Going deep on an animated short

Let’s do something simple: Watch the Oscar-nominated animated short “Retirement Plan”.

Even though it has received many international awards, I still think this counts as underrated, both because it lost (to the stop motion “The Girl Who Cried Pearls”) and because animation itself is underrated.

So let’s watch now: it’s only 7 minutes, and it’s a joyful, easy few minutes. My wife, Alli, still hasn’t watched it, but maybe she will now. Go ahead…

Nice, right? Here are some notes from throughout the piece.

0:20: The short begins with narration from actor Domhnall Gleeson, “When I retire, I will reply to every email I’ve ever flagged.” According to director John Kelly, being confronted by unread emails inspired the piece:

I had what you might term a panic attack on a short-haul flight … Long story short, I opened up my laptop to reply to some emails, and the 72,000 messages staring back at me from my inbox made me instantly aware of all the lists in my life. I was hit by the thought that — now I’m past 40 — I won’t have time for all the things I want to achieve in life.

Relatable, no? This second shot gives us our first look at Ray, the protagonist, drawn in a mostly clean, fixed width line, with dot eyes and simplified forms. There are no details on his ears, but it’s a friendly, regular face. “I liked the challenge of taking this deliberately stripped-back style and trying to make something filmic and emotional,” says Kelly.

0:50: These successive shots have been getting darker, and we are just tip-toeing into how Ray wants to spend his retirement: the sort of basic, first-thought pedestrian ideas that might cross anyone’s mind in the middle of the night, or while day-dreaming at work. Even here, there are some regrets, like not having had a chance to play the video games he wanted to.

1:07: With Ray hugging trees and lying in the grass shirtless, the humor of filmmaker Kelly and his writing partner Tara Lawall is starting to show up. And Ray is beginning to reveal sincerity in his aspirations towards artistic expression in the form of piano and poetry, but just a single piece and one poem.

1:43: I really admire this escalation of pets, culminating in the first of several semi-reversal revisions to Ray’s list, when the cat gets too intense and he switches to a fish, or maybe a terrapin. The score, a piano piece called “Walking Through A House Where A Family Has Lived”, by John Carroll Kirby, does so much work in setting the mood and tone.

1:53: As Ray considers hiking, he’s moving forward through a couple shots, and this left to right motion mirrors the basics of comics composition, moving the reader’s eye the same direction they’re used to from reading text. (Unless they’re used to a language that moves a different direction, like Hebrew or Japanese.) There is a nice contrast between motion and stillness in these next shots, and a great variety of different kinds of motion, even if the piece overall is quite reserved and still.

2:18: Things are speeding up now, as we cut quickly from “patch that hole,” to “replace that button,” and then “learn how to juggle,” in rapid succession. The animators, Marah Curran and Eamonn O’Neill, used MoHo Animation software for “Retirement Plan,” with a combination of 3D rigging and hand-drawn elements. Animation took three of the eight months spent creating the short. It’s cool to see, in some of the behind the scenes content, how this all came together.

3:03: At this point, we’re in new emotional territory — relationships, boundaries, saying yes more, and also no. That transition, from when he snaps awake and suddenly everyone is naked, is really funny and well done! I also really like the handicam-style jostling when Ray is walking away from the kissing couple.

3:33: “The rain that year, my god, you can taste it.” Gleeson is such a good actor, and I thought it was a shame that his character in Star Wars, General Hux, didn’t get that satisfying a conclusion because Rise of Skywalker was so execrable. He said he took the part voicing Ray because “it was funny and it was very poignant without being overly sentimental.”

4:25: I really like this stylish slow rotation of the potato and carrot. Kelly, the filmmaker, says that a superpower of animation is “to highlight really specific, weirdly mundane things.” Too true. In comics, subtle motion is really, really tricky, but often it can shine in animation.

4:26: Emotionally, Kelly says that here we see “Ray enjoying a moment of complete unbridled JOY, before everything unravels.” The airport car in particular, fits into a transitional scene:

For context, this shot arrives halfway through our film. As the pace is ramping up and things are starting to flow, Ray abruptly ages twenty years over the course of five shots. With this run of shots, I want age to sneak up on him the same way it snuck up on me. The feeling of exponential acceleration I’ve felt in myself and also those around me, aging relatives, my kids shooting up.

While storyboarding and editing the animatic, I endlessly tinker with the choreography of this “reveal.” If Ray deteriorates over a couple of shots, it feels too abrupt, and if it happens over ten or so shots, the gut punch is lost. So, I opt for five. And this bit where he drives an airport vehicle is the second clip in that sequence.

The airport car shot, one of over 100 that make up the overall short, is only three seconds long.

4:48: I love the way Gleeson is straining over the volume of the race car in “I WILL FINALLY FIND MY SPORT!”

5:23: When we get to, “I will learn to tell people the way I feel,” and we see the elderly Ray pushing over the food tray, we start to doubt the narrator, and re-consider the distance between the narration and the visuals.

6:03: “I will completely nail my final words” feels both written by a young man, but also, a sincere, maybe secretly-held wish many of us have. It’s tough to end a piece like this, yet I find the final moments gratifying. Kelly has somehow made a midlife crisis funny, and considered the sublime in everyday life, without becoming generic or saccharine. I’m excited to see what he does next:

It’s about the time I woke up 10 years ago with a giant rat on my chest at five in the morning, and then myself and my wife spent the three most intense hours of my life trying to chase it out of our bedroom.