Abuela Grillo

Abuela Grillo, Grandma Cricket, tells the folktale of the Ayoreo people, who live in Gran Chaco, alongside rivers that stretch both Bolivia and Paraguay. In this animation, when the grandmother in the farm village sings, it rains, allowing for the harvests to grow. However, she comes to sing a great deal too much and the villagers are angered. She is forced to leave and walks into the big city, where she is used for commercial collection of water by the “men in black.”

This is very symbolic for many reasons, but there are two obvious ones that I thought about when I watched it.

1. The struggles to maintain water a public domain in many countries in the world, where private ownership extends into the very water that falls from the sky. Let alone the waste that is produced in water bottles each year (also, I’m seriously not impressed with this new Evian campaign with people wearing pictures of babies on their shirts – “live young” and die young?--, although, admittedly, you’d have to have the brain of a 3 year-old to continue to purchase toxic-seeping water bottles...)

And

2. The grandmother as key to the community, for all the women that we take for granted because of their age. Perhaps, her purpose has become less obvious to us or maybe because we’ve relinquished her purpose, an untapped source of wealth for the community.

Abuela Grillo from Denis Chapon on Vimeo.

From a team of 8 Bolvians animators (Alejandro Salazar, Cecilia Delgado, Joaquí¬n Cuevas, Mauricio Sejas, Miguel Mealla, Román Nina, Salvador Pomar and Susana Villegas) with guidance from their French teacher, Denis Chapon, at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark.
Song sung by Luzmila Carpio.
Abuela Grillo Blog