Marc Craste’s 24-minute animated short Varmints, released in 2008, is grim. Adapted from a picture book of the same name, by Helen Ward, which Craste illustrated, the film is an eco-parable that follows a small, floppy-eared creature as it watches its natural prairie habitat swallowed by the filthy sprawl and smog of a never-endingly expanding urban megalopolis. While nature, in the end, cannot be dominated by “progress,” neither, it seems, can it entirely recover from the damage—even as a stunning exhibition of the quiet power and yearning of flora and fungi unfolds emotionally in the short’s final moments.
And undergirding all this bleak beauty is a sweeping score, deeply mournful at times and industrially eerie or grandly orchestral at others, written by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannson, who died this past weekend at 48.
The score was written near the beginning of Jóhannson’s pivot from electronic chamber and ambient music toward something more cinematic—far before the composer of Englabörn and Virðulegu forsetar became better known for his work with director Denis Villeneuve on Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, or for his score for James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything. Yet it contains the same sort of subtle leitmotifs and atmospheric ambitions that Jóhannson achieves in any of his better-known compositions. (Its album version, entitled And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees, adds an extra fifteen minutes of material and is all the better for it.) And, as with everything Jóhannson has composed, it holds space for both abyssal melancholy and a paper hope bridge above it, achieving a tender, if tenuous, balance over the dark. It is a fitting memorial.
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