Synopsis

A couple recounts the various animals they have adopted as pets over the course of their marriage, including a paraplegic possum and a fish that couldn't swim. Pickle explores the human capacity to care for all creatures throughout their sometimes greatly protracted lives until their occasionally sudden and unfortumate deaths.

Director

• 

  Amy Nicholson
  

  Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride (2012)
  Muskrat Lovely (2005)
  Beauty School (2002)

  For more than two decades I have been visiting my dad’s farm on the Chesapeake Bay, often returning to New York with anecdotes of one member or another of the menagerie that lived there. I would entertain my friends with tales of cross-eyed cats perpetually on the verge of death and ailing chickens convalescing in the house. Practically all of the
  pets were rescues of some sort with various abnormalities and the ones that didn’t cling to life well past their prime died prematurely.

  In spite of their inherent sadness, the stories were highly entertaining. This is largely due to the unusual array of animals Tom and Debbie Nicholson collected, but also because of the lengths they would go to keeping them alive and comfortable. Once, my husband and I house sat for them and found ourselves lighting three separate wood stoves each
  night so that the baby quail and other critters wouldn’t feel the winter cold.

  I try to find a funny side to everything and tragedy is no exception. Pickle’s unrelenting march of death is intended to entertain, but hopefully between morbid curiosity and chuckling at the sheer volume of casualties, the audience will find a bit of themselves in this film. Pickle examines the depths of one couple’s devotion to their pets and while exploring the complicated relationship that we humans have with all animals.

  One night before I started this project, my husband asked me what I would call it. Reflecting on the creature that impressed and perplexed me the most—the fish that couldn’t swim who spent his entire existence
  propped up in a sponge—I answered without hesitation.

  “Pickle.”

Review

Sitting on a couch, Tom and Debbie stroke a rooster on their knee and starts a story about Pickle, a poor swimmer though it was a fish. The list of adopted animals accidently started when they found a rooster (it was on the way to slaughterhouse probably raised in factory farming) fell from a truck includes many birds like dozens of chickens, ducks, geese, thrushes, blackbirds, dogs and cats, even a possum. Comical animations and songs inserted in every story of these companion animals make the film much more interesting, but the beauty of this film comes from the manner Tom and Debbie show for animals. One day, they manufactured a skateboard for rehabilitation for the possum with an injured leg. They take care of sick animals until they die and hold a small but sincere funeral. Watching them makes us rethink of ‘companionship’ culture in Korean society. We buy a puppy at a mart which was cruelly produced at a dog factory and we abandon them when we got tired of it. Every year, the number of abandoned animals reaches thousands. This adorable short film is just a 15-minute short story but makes us reflect what ‘companionship’ looks like and further, what life and death means. [Hwang Yoon]

Credits

• Director, Producer  Amy Nicholson
• Cinematographer  Jerry Risius
• Editor  John Young
• Sound  Weston Fonger, José Araújo

Contribution & World Sales

• Contribution & World Sales  Cameron Swanagon
• E-mail  cameron@oscilloscope.net