The Burial of Natty Bumppo

Animated Short

What if one night the story of America as “The New World” was thoroughly interrupted? What if that story was retold as a viscerally emotional experience using aggressive imagery and a lush soundtrack keyed to the inspired music of George Winston? “The Burial of Natty Bumppo” draws on 19th-century cultural images of American innocence to reveal their grotesque outcomes: the enslavement of human beings and enslavement of the land, the genocide that accompanied colonization, and the environmental degradation resulting from industrialization. “The Burial of Natty Bumppo” conveys these themes subtly and emotionally. The film makes no attempt to narrate American history. It reimagines it visually. The viewer is propelled into a visionary landscape where American myths of the New Land shrivel and decay before our eyes. We watch as the persistent dream of American innocence embodied in Nathaniel Bumppo, the lead character in James F. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, crashes visually under its own terrible weight.

The Burial of Natty Bumppo begins with a flame on the horizon, suggesting the presence of Indigenous people who long preceded the so called “discovery” of America. From there, an overture of windblown trees in a cemetery introduces a dreamy mood where an enormous comet looms over the landscape. Out of this comet emerges a turn-of the century train belching smoke as it arcs across the celestial sphere. In the cemetery below, a sinister antique slide camera observes the approach of the train as anxious travelers scurry to catch it. Their path is blocked by the cataclysmic eruption of a gigantic mechanical flower that blooms into a monstrous factory. Onlookers stand in awe as a bud opens to create a Hiroshima-like blast that incinerates the people and captures their image in a vintage photographic representation. By this time the enormous flower has generated a grotesque cast-iron version of the Garden of Eden or the Virgin Land of America. A battle ensues between the voracious machine and the hopes of the bereft travelers.

In a surprising finale, the train magically takes off, leaving the earth and the destroyed monster behind. But the flame on the horizon persists.

The hand of the animator is present in the images that make up this film. The original art, done with pencil on paper, was transferred to a digital format using contemporary tools.