"Bend Down the Branches"
"Bend Down the Branches"
'Orphans: Bawlers', 2006
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As I’ve mentioned before, as a newly-minted Waits fan when Orphans came out, every track on all three discs was new to me. But “Bend Down the Branches” had quite a life even before that 2006 outtakes collection.
Four years before Orphans, it appeared on a children’s album called For the Kids. And I challenge you to find any actual child who enjoyed Tom Waits groaning “Bend Down the Branches.” The entire track list — Billy Bragg with Wilco! Cake! Ivy! — strikes me as one of those “kids” albums that’s really more of a “parents” album. I mean, tame as the actual band is, are you really going to explain to your five-year old what “Barenaked Ladies” means?
But, to my surprise researching this, even For the Kids was not the first appearance of “Bend Down the Branches.” The song first appeared over the credits of a 1998 animated short film called Bunny, which Waits and his wife and musical partner Kathleen Brennan scored. The short was created as a kind of a proof of concept of new animation technology from the director who was working on the forthcoming children’s feature Ice Age. A report at the time reads:
Written and directed by a founding member of Blue Sky Studios, "Bunny" began as an effort to stretch the limits of a proprietary lighting software. What makes it unique is a warm, photorealistic style that belies the technology that made it possible. Using an advanced computer rendering technique that mimics the most subtle properties of natural light, Wedge and his crew were able to create a dimensionality and realism never before seen in computer-animation.
The short is a melancholy children’s movie about an elderly widowed rabbit in the kitchen fighting off a moth. It leads to a sad but beautiful ending. Think Ratatouille in subject matter, Up in tone. It won Best Animated Short at the 1999 Oscars.
You can hear a number of clearly Waits-ian soundscapes in the film, though the only proper song is “Branches.” It turns out to be a good fit for the tone of the short film. “Bend Down the Branches” is only debatable a children’s song, and, as some of the top comments on YouTube indicate — Bunny boasts one of the most honest and wrenching YouTube comments section I’ve ever seen — is only debatably a children’s film:
I find it funny how this terrified me as a child but seeing it now, it's very profound and almost comforting.
I find it so strange that even as a child when I watched this, I understood what it was all about and I even cried because of it…watching it again I still get emotional.
I've never cried more upon seeing this as a kid, i believe it was attached to ice age, and you got this one with it. Now seeing this as a 4-5 years old boy, it was scary. I think it might have been the first time i encountered "Death", which is the reason i cried that much.. Now the thing is, ever since i've seen it, this is the thing i associate with death.
As nicely done as this short is, I kind of wish it hadn't been included in material for a film franchise for kids lol. I watched it alone bc my parents didn't think it needed supervision and it haunted me and I've never been able to convince anyone it was real because I couldn't remember the name or where I saw it.
This was the first animation that really moved me as a kid. I used to use this as a way to comfort myself after my grandma died. I'm 20 now and thinking of getting a moth tattoo because of how much this short animation gave me comfort.
This comment section is a section of people traumatized by this short and I'm included
I remember this made me bawl my eyes out as a kid, now I'm sitting here watching like "what did I just watch". I mean I understand it but for some reason I accepted the whole weird and beautiful side of this better as a young child.
That last comment made me rethink the assumption I made up top. Maybe some kids would understand the equally “weird and beautiful” “Bend Down the Branches” more than I was giving them credit for.
Here’s Bunny: