Cherry On The Cake

It all starts out funny enough: A little girl called Cherry paints faces on her fingers and acts out her birthday, which by the way is today, and how she expects it to go down with the members of her family, mom, dad, the baby and her bigger sister. The real experience following her fantasy is then halfway between hilariousness and heartbreak: mom needs all her eight arms to prepare dinner, dad mistakes her for the coat hanger, her bigger sister is busy with the cake – no one pays any attention to Cherry. She's deflated and not a symbolic way, but she literally shrinks several inches.

But then, finally, the moment has arrived, there's a cake, there are candles … surely now everyone will notice her, right? Granted, the middle children are often the ones that feel the most forgotten, but the following farce of the girl shrinking to a microscopic size while the parents slowly start to wonder where their daughter has gone, is about something even deeper.

Writer, director and animator Hyebin Lee shows the reduction of a little girl in a Japanese cartoon style, complete with extra-right colours and over-enthusiastic grins that quickly turn sour. People only talk in grunts and sighs. At the heart of this tale there actually lies a bitter family drama it may be a mere coincidence that the open space of the family's house remind the viewer of the setting of an Ozu's bittersweet explorations of family life, but the tonality is there, too, as we gradually find out that this is not the first time Cherry had lacked attention. She's not even on the family snapshots the parent give to the police in order to search the girl.

It's more or less a coincident that the tiny girl doesn't drown in the parent's tears (oh, the symbolism of it all), but is actually found and welcomed back into the family with everybody hopefully having learned a lesson. Her big sister even gives Cherry a hug, thus boosting her size almost back to normal. As an afterthought we hope they won't spoil little Cherry in the future, because this girl might otherwise one day star in her own version of “Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman“. We'll wait and see how her next birthday goes down.

Interview with Hyebin Lee

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