Whole nine yards

In a nutshell

Life, what is it good for?

To say “in a nutshell” is to use the fewest possible words. It’s a saying typically used in order to be concise, direct, and/or hyperbolic. However, things are always more complicated than just a few words. Luckily for filmmaker and animator Fabio Friedli, pictures are worth a thousand of them.

In this week’s Staff Pick Premiere, “In A Nutshell,” Friedli uses 3,000 pictures in a montage that distills the story of human existence in just under five minutes and delivers a profound and moving thesis on this thing we call life.

To capture existence, Friedli first pared down global themes and subjects into recognizable objects. It was deeply important to him that each object reflect something beyond the literal. The first image in the film is that of a seed, which can be seen as the seed of an idea and also, of life. From there, Friedli takes us into “the birth of human consciousness, leading to the discovery of mathematics, languages, architecture and art.”

The more nuanced subjects of industrialization, war, and technology required careful planning, precise props and extreme ingenuity.