Graphy Animation Review

PUBLISHED: 17 MAY 2024
WRITER: THANUT RUJITANONT

‘The Last Visit’ (2023)
by Keawalee Warutkomain

Keawalee Warutkomain, a Thai animation director, facilitator, and lecturer at Rangsit University (Department of Digital Art), graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts with her charcoal-on-book animation short. The short film received two awards: the honourable mention award and the Vichitmatra award, which honours films that demonstrate distinctive achievement in filmmaking according to the festival director’s team from the 27th Thai Short Film & Video Festival 2023, the longest running festival in Thailand, her home country. The film continued its success by being selected among 40 films in the Graduation Films competition at the Annecy International Film Festival 2024, one of the largest animation festivals in the world in France.

The multi-language title ‘The Last Visit’ in English, ‘Viimane külastus’ in Estonian, or ‘การพบพาน…ครั้งสุดท้าย’ in Thai, allows and transmits audiences to be sensitive to the director’s transition and in-between mind stages during her 5-year grief journey from Tallinn to Bangkok. This memorial film of her aunt, who had unforeseeably passed way while the director was embarking on her study-journey in Estonia and was unable to attend the funeral in Thailand, served as her personal funeral arrangement. Her private funeral was conducted through her stop-frame animation with charcoal, dry leaves, photographs, oil pastels, and her physical hands on an unfamiliar text-filled book written in Estonian as a process of memorising, lingering, and overcoming.

The section in which Warutkomain’s hand reached her aunt’s hand was at once touching and sorrowing in its honesty. Warutkomain bends time, space and even pause them to stay a second longer. Fleeting moments were created as Warutkomain and her aunt sit side by side, reading each other’s mind, guessing what is each other is doing and asking, “where are you now?” Warutkomain knew that even though she tried to linger her feelings as long as possible, the time to close her book was coming.

The making processes are openly shown through the director’s interactions with the book as the film itself. The film optimally utilises distinctive characteristics of animation medium as exploratory tools for her last visit. “The Last Visit’ does not merely acknowledge the loss and remember the life as a eulogy but searches for traces meaningful places and times, revisits them to say the last goodbye. Warutkomain works as an alchemist who prolongs life through transmutation. The film is her personal memo, which is not genuinely the last as the film title suggests, as she can revisit her last visit as many times as she wants, even they will be not the same visit. The film was touching, melancholy, and compelling.