The Sad Whale In A Toxic Sea

On revisiting a film from early childhood.

A few months ago, I published a list of my animation obsessions: the things that fascinate me in this world that I write about. This was one of them: “The sad whale in a toxic sea in a film from my childhood whose title I’ve forgotten.” At the time of writing, that was all I remembered of the film, which I hadn’t seen since primary school. I included it to acknowledge the power of a work that could leave me with a vivid image for 30 years, even as the context faded from my mind.

Shortly afterward, I was contacted by one of my most diligent readers, an expert in the kids’ VHS scene of the 1990s: my mum. “Is this the one?” she asked, linking me to a page about the film Samson & Sally. The poster image—two sperm whales frolicking in the water—rang a loud bell. The title was unfamiliar, but I was told that my family had never used it, referring to the film instead as La petite baleine blanche: the little white whale.

It turned out that Samson & Sally was released in 1984 and directed by Jannik Hastrup, a filmmaker who has been called “Denmark’s grand master of animation.”¹ The film, an hour-long hand-drawn feature, came out on VHS in various territories, including France (this was the version we’d owned). It appears to have since developed a cult following, with YouTube reviewers picking up on its strangeness. Intrigued, I rewatched it.

The whales of the title live in an ocean bristling with danger and haunted by loss. Sally joins Samson’s pod after her own family are killed by whalers. Romance blossoms, but only up to a point: Samson is more interested in the legend of Moby Dick, who will supposedly return one day “to protect all whales.” Protection? Well, as Samson swims south in search of his messiah, he runs into one threat after another: more whalers, killer whales, oil slicks, barrels of radioactive waste. The few humans we see are viciously predatory.

As I watched, memories emerged from my mind’s depths, like the detritus from the murk of the ocean floor in the film. Of course, that shipwreck! That grimace the whale pulls! I noted with interest that Samson & Sally is, in a sense, about forgetting: the whales live among the discarded junk of a human civilisation that appears unreflecting in its violent assault on nature. Toward the end, legends mix as Samson finds Moby Dick in the ruins of a kind of Atlantis which turns out to be New York, submerged after a cataclysm. The sea is littered with our past mistakes, but we haven’t learnt our lesson.

The film is dark. I mean that literally: we spend a lot of time in the deep-water gloom. Barring bursts of expressionistic red—the sun, a love-heart, fire on the water—the colours are remarkably subdued. Black and white animals against leaden greens and blues: to a child used to the brilliant palettes of Disney, this must have been quite something.

Disney is, in fact, a kind of lodestar for Samson & Sally, which nods to its movies several times. There is a noodle-kiss à la Lady and the Tramp (1955) and a surreal boogie-woogie number featuring a pair of goofy walruses that channels The Aristocats (1970) and the like (watch it below). But it is another reference that best captures the tenor of the film: when Samson’s mother is slaughtered off-screen by the whalers, we think of nothing other than Bambi (1942). Here, in keeping with the overall starkness, the father spells out what’s happened: “She’s gone forever, little Samson.”

I’d entirely forgotten the humans and the sunken city; even as I watched now, I recognised none of it. But I remembered the whales. For animated characters, they look unusual: large monochrome rectangles with no limbs to speak of. I remembered their environment, an ocean that is boundless yet still oppressive. I have a slight fear of large bodies of water, and found myself wondering whether this film contributed to that. And I remembered the dancing walruses, who embody a kind of mad vitality in this otherwise forlorn world. Diving to the seabed, they play with human skeletons, toxic waste, a V-2 missile and a bomb, taking a delirious pleasure in this spectacle of violence.

All this made a big impression on the little me. My parents report that I loved the film. To back this up, my mum unearthed a story I wrote aged seven with my cousin, about a lonely whale: a kind of fan fiction, apparently. Another memory comes to me: I’m standing in front of my class at primary school, next to a TV. We’re about to play the film and I’m introducing it. I must have brought the tape in (my first programming gig). I wish there was a record of what I said, partly because I’m fascinated by children’s interpretations of things: they make associations that are surprising yet intuitive, like the ones that happen in dreams.² But also because I want to know why, exactly, I loved the film.

I’ve had a few guesses here. After all, Samson & Sally is an unusual kids’ film in a number of ways. Ultimately, though, I can only relate what strikes me now and speculate about whether the seven-year-old me felt the same way. I am not that boy anymore; I can no longer see the film as he did. And I can’t explain the ways in which time, experience and my shifting neural pathways conspired to banish most of the film from my active memory, leaving but a ghostly image.

These things are on my mind, I think, because my wife and I welcomed our first child three weeks ago. Since long before he was born, I’ve been mentally curating the animation I’ll show him once he’s old enough to take it in. I have ideals: the stuff I pick will be good and beautiful and educational. I’ll know why I chose them. Yet I’m aware, more and more, that I can’t predict what he’ll like and dislike, and why; which images or sounds or characters or plot points will harden into memories, to be retrieved one day as he reflects on his past, and which will fade.

For now, though, he is three weeks old, and all that is in the future.

1. According to Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Animation: A World History, volume 2, Hastrup became influenced by Marxism in the 1970s, and made a couple of historical films that “were controversial for their time and caused a lot of debate in political and educational circles.” The book goes on: “From the mid-1980s, he began collaborating with novelist Bent Haller (born 1946), a rather radical, left-wing author of children’s books, with a view to turning Haller’s books into films. Haller himself scripted [Samson & Sally], based on his children’s book Kaskelotternes sang (The Song of the Kaskelots). Samson & Sally was a great hit and became a classic.”

2. I’ll never forget a tweet I read in which a parent wrote that their young child, pointing to a turkey slice, had asked, “If we put that in the DVD player, will it play a film of the turkey’s life?”