Bru & Boegie: METEORITE

Bru's a dumb white guy with dumb ideas and is dumb enough to act on them. Boegie's a smart and sensitive black guy and worries about Bru. They're best friends (well, Boegie is Bru's unwilling best friend) and they live in South Africa. In this film, Bru's failed animation pitch results in a real world disaster, and they need to take responsibility for it to try and save the planet from an unfortunate end. It's laconic / deadpan absurdist comedy semi-roadtrip film, with a South African twist. The objective is humour and entertainment by subverting the hero's journey 'happy ending' Western story stereotype.

I voice Bru & Boegie, and boarded and animated the entire 10-minute short myself! It's the biggest animation project I've completed in my 20-odd year career, a real passion project dream come true. I love the Karoo desert in South Africa and based a lot of the locations on that location. Some of the music by the composer Wayne Simpson reflects the area too. It's a mash of surreal, Bru & Boegie's idiosyncratic style of melancholy South African deadpan humour, and a grand adventure, all rolled into one.

The film's message can be summed up by its ending - though the boys tried their best and were unable to prevent the end of the world, they still had a good time trying, so maybe it wasn't all for nothing. In humanity's current psyche where a lot seems hopeless (with the rise of AI leading many to question whether their efforts are worthwhile, various climate crises being difficult to comprehend of what might come of the world in the years to come), even though the film has an absurdist angle, the feeling and question it poses is prescient - if we're too late to change the outcome, perhaps we can still find value. I suppose it also questions the dominant narrative of how civilians and not large corporations are blamed for our current climate crisis, and the rhetorical idea that individuals can take action to save the planet.