Animation Explains Cold Turkey From An Addict’s POV

bbc

A harrowing heroin tale.

A short animated film commissioned by the BBC, This is what detox really feels like from someone who has lived it takes the brutal experience of detox and animates its torture for a sober audience. The line drawings and simple colors grow bolder and more impactful with their crudeness – boiling our self-image down to rudimentary states like all we can focus on is something outside ourselves.

The interview narration is tight, knowledgeable, and sad in its straightforwardness, but backing up the drawings, it becomes truly wrenching. Explaining the difference between going cold turkey on your own and doing a medically-assisted detox in a facility with drugs and caregivers is immediately moving thanks to control of color palette and brightness.

The short understands how to construct safety and danger with negative space and only a few colors. Mostly, it is bleak and neutral. But when it wants you to feel something, you don’t stand a chance.

Jacob Oller: Jacob Oller writes everywhere (Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Playboy, FSR, Paste, etc.) about everything that matters (film, TV, video games, memes, life).