Plastic pollution is a well known issues in these days. However, the ocean is so vast that many of us probably don’t actually feel how bad that is. Swiss filmmaker Pascal Schelbli has created “The Beauty”, a powerful and very relevant animated short that imagines waste as lively sea life: a bubble-wrap fish puffs up; a serpentine tire glides through the water; an entire school of discarded footwear swims in an undulating mass; a smack of plastic bag jellyfish; a pod of plastic bottle whale; plastic straw, pork, spoon seaweeds grow at the bottom of the sea.
What a tragic scene!
As it plumbs the vast expanse of the littered ocean, “The Beauty” magnifies the enduring nature of waste and lays bare the insidious effects of microplastics as they enter the food chain and impact the overall health of the ecosystem. It provides an totally new perspective for us to fully understand the danger of plastic pollution for the ocean.
This powerful short film won a Student Academy Award in 2020. And when asked the motivation behind the film, Schelbli describes:
“Instead of showing another mournful stomach full of plastic bags, I thought, ‘what if plastic could be integrated into the sea life and nature solves the problem?’ The film should take you on a journey, where all our feelings of guilt will disappear. But in the end, we wake up and realize that we need to change something.”
