Saturdays now seem to be my day to scroll through Netflix to find something of interest. Today, I found an Oscar winner. It came out in 2020. It won an Oscar in early 2021. I watched IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU and it put tears in my eyes. Get this -- it runs only 12 minutes long. The Oscar it won was in the Best Animated Feature category.
The story opens with the sound of birds chirping. We see an overhead shot of the illustration of a suburban neighborhood. We go inside one house. A couple is at a long table eating. The husband at one end. The wife at the other. We see immediately that there is not just physical distance, but emotional distance between them.
The couple is grappling with unspeakable grief. Their little girl is dead. The wife breaks down in the laundry room when she realizes that her daughter's shirt was one of the items she put in the washing machine. Now the trace of her daughter's scent in the shirt is gone. Eventually, memories of the joy she brought into her parents' lives come forth.
This feature is a plea for gun safety. The little girl was killed in a school shooting. This feature was released in 2020 and won Hollywood gold in the spring of 2021.
Columbine. Sandy Hook. Parkland. The evil committed at those schools was already dark American history when IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU was released. Then this year, evil struck Uvalde, Texas and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
Something must be done about gun safety here in America. The evil of assault rifles must be stopped.
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