The Living Book

"The Living Book” (80 minute animation by Erin Cosgrove, 2021) is the tale of post-apocalyptic survivors who must scour space to find a new home for their cargo of frozen children. Among their miseries, the ship’s cultural files have become corrupted and the two pilgrims must cobble together a new cultural database from their faulty memories. They resort to ancient methods to replace their lost culture: oral history.

“The Living Book” relates the down time, instead of dramatic moments of long distance space travel, and focuses on the relationship between the characters in a social vacuum. It is an allegory of cultural and historical amnesia, creative destruction, and failure.