metramorphosis
writer/director, animator, designer
Metramorphosis is an animator's journey through the metaphysical wilds of pregnancy, motherhood, and her own metamorphosing maternal body, in which Self and Other exist in cosmic superimposition. In this radically co-authored dance of perpetual transformation, can becoming ever arrive at being?
Inspired by my own weird and wild journey into motherhood, Metamorphosis is a deeply personal narrative that captures an urgent universal truth: that our borders are porous, our lives are co-authored, and the Other is interwoven with the very fabric of Ourselves. The narrative unfolds across three scenes that flow continuously from one to the next without cuts or dialogue. Much like a dream, it is a world inhabited by loaded projections, a myriad cast of past, present, and possible selves. Each takes the form of a female figure, all identical to the next, varying only in scale.
Metamorphosis is a labour of love in dialogue with our fraught historical moment. Sexual and reproductive freedoms are being eroded amid a global lurch rightward, propelled by cultural anxieties over gender expression, bodily autonomy, declining birthrates, and economic destabilisation. In the fight for these most basic human rights, motherhood is caught between the historical rock of entrenched misogyny, and the contemporary hard place of our moral imperative to transcend reproductive biology. Complex yet positive representations of motherhood are achingly rare; rarer still are works that embrace motherhood as a source of philosophical inquiry beyond its imposed borders, where it is seen most charitably as “a woman thing” or, as fewer women choose to become mothers, less than even that.
And yet no other human experience so perfectly embodies – both metaphorically and quite literally – this most essential and urgent truth: that our borders are porous, our lives are co-authored, and the Other is interwoven with the very fabric of Ourselves. In an age of deepening political and social divisions, I’m passionately driven to capture this universal core of maternal experience in a way that speaks to viewers of any gender, age, or cultural background, both parents and childfree alike. Here lies the potential and promise to reach an audience that may never otherwise seek out work about motherhood, and who might unexpectedly find themselves not only reflecting on it, but reflected in it.
​
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
The hand-drawn animation of Metramorphosis blends the figural with the abstract in layered loops. The simplified shape language and soft gradient colors are designed to read clearly through complex cycles of motion, and draw inspiration through decades of feminist painters – from Agnes Pelton, to Judy Chicago, to Loie Hollowell.
STORYBOARDS
click arrows to advance
Page 01
Page 02
Page 20
Page 01
ANIMATIC & ROUGH ANIMATION
all sound & music is reference only
ANIMATION TESTS
linework only
EARLY MOTION EXPLORATIONS
​
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
I began work on Metramorphosis soon after becoming a first-time mother, an experience I found to have surprising overlap with my creative process. Much like animation, motherhood is driven by motion, transformation, and the aesthetics of change. Suddenly I could only conceive of myself in radical relation to another being, an ever-evolving creature both born out of me and existing in continual co-creation alongside me. This perpetual process of transformation felt at once utterly awe-inspiring and yet strangely unspeakable. When motherhood has so long been overlooked in critical philosophical, psychological, economic, and cultural dialogues, I found I could only process my experience through pure visual instinct.
Still, Metramorphosis lives in the shadow of an enduring and unfortunate truth: like the feminist and queer film traditions that underpin it, a film by and about motherhood faces a steep uphill climb out of the “demographic genre” ghetto. This is where the unique power of animation – in particular, the fluid transitions and transformations intrinsic to hand-drawn animation – can transmute a deeply personal experience into a universally resonant narrative one. Here, traditional narrative techniques and character animation can comfortably coexist alongside surreal visual spectacle and dreamlike abstraction. In this liminal screenspace, the audience can fully inhabit worlds, feelings, and concepts beyond the intellectual mind.
In some ways, Metramorphosis mirrors aspects of my identity in the world, the shifting borderlines of being multi-ethnic, queer, both born from and joined in a mixed-faith marriage, first generation in my home country and now immigrant in another. It also embodies my life in this unique moment as a new mother, reborn into a sphere of perpetual motion where one must, as in animation, embrace the aesthetics of change.
Outside motherhood, no situations exist in human experience that so radically and so simply bring us face to face with that emergence of the other; I like to think that in our human adventure, we can encounter ‘the other’ – sometimes, rarely – if, and only if, we, men and women, are capable of that maternal experience, which defers eroticism into tenderness and makes an ‘object’ an ‘other me’.
​
Catherine Clement & Julia Kristeva