We all have those moments of inspiration where we declare that we are going finally do all the things we swore to ourselves that we’d do. We’re going to read that stack of books. We will fix that chair that’s sitting in the garage. We will talk to our parents more. We will take that dream vacation. Drink more water. As we make that list through our life, we assume that we have all the time in the world. Is time ticking by faster than we assume? In John Kelly’s universally relatable animated short, Retirement Plan, one man’s dreams and aspirations come up against a ticking clock. It’s one of the most moving pieces of animation that you will ever see.
**We have linked Retirement Plan below. Since we talk about the entire film, consider watching it and then scrolling up to read our chat with John Kelly.
The beginnings of Kelly’s film came from an unlikely place: he had a panic attack on a plane when he thought about all the things he had on lists that he wanted to accomplish. He reveals that he didn’t know that that emotional outburst would lead to one of the most critically-lauded shorts of the season.
“I don’t think that I immediately knew that it was going to be a film, but this was definitely implanted in me and I couldn’t shake it,” Kelly admits. “It sort of began as a list about lists, and I am a very listy person. I’m not very good at solving life’s emotional problems, but if I have a to-do list, I’ll feel like I’m moving forward. That was certainly one of those things that happened during the deepest, darkest moments of COVID when we couldn’t leave the house that helped me. If I could mow the lawn today or fix a chair tomorrow, I could get through things just by doing them.
I kept wondering about this person who is “doing” constantly, and then, at a certain point, you realize that there’s other emotional things that you may not be paying attention to, like aging or connecting with people.”
Audiences may notice that Kelly’s film is simply structured and plotted, but that makes it more effective. If Ray’s life has this much untapped desire and want, just imagine what the next person might be feeling. If you add up all the unfinished business that we have all accumulated over our lives, we might realize that we spend more time dreaming than doing. Keeping it simple was key.
“I have spent my career working in advertising, and I’ve made short films before,” he says. “It felt like I would always choose the most difficult path possible, but that might be an Irish thing. With this, I allowed it to be easy. With animation, you kind of do the edit before you make the film, and what’s nice about this was that it was just my drawings and my voice. Then it was about reordering, reordering, rerecording and rerecording. I didn’t even show it to Tara, a brilliant copywriter that I know, at one point so I wasn’t raising the stakes on myself. Because it wasn’t stop-motion and it wasn’t live action, I was drawing the designs myself, and I didn’t have to rely on anyone else.
Any time I do a project like this, I’ll use it as an excuse to read a load more film books and creativity books. I know that Rick Rubin’s book isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and it’s in every museum and gallery, but there was a bit in that that I read at exactly the moment I needed to when I was hitting a wall with a storyboard. I was drawing it in order, and it’s over 100 shots with about 130 frames. It’s a bit of a beast. There was a moment where I didn’t touch it for about two or three weeks, because I was paralyzed by it. I read the part in his book about when you build a bridge, you build both sides first so the middle is easier. Or when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle, you start with the edge. These things we may have heard a million times, but when you hear it at the exact moment you need to hear it, then you allow yourself to be open.”
Retirement‘s palette is rather soothing. The pinks, found in Ray’s polo shirt, aren’t too bright, and the frame is filled with greys and greens. Perhaps we allow ourselves to feel that serenity when we watch Ray’s introspective journey, and it allows us to think about our own in a deeper way.
“I remember going to a men’s club that my dad belonged to, and when I went there, there were all these men in their seventies and eighties all wearing the exactly same clothes,” Kelly says. “These salmon shirts or they would be big runners, so they would dress like that. They were a tribe in uniform, so that guided that choice. Even though it is very simple style-wise, I wanted to borrow from cinema in terms of coloring and lighting. During COVID, the Roger Deakins podcast was something that kept be going, and he would always talk about how lighting can reflect the mood of a scene and how it can progress. The color journey can kind of augment the mood but also the lens choice. We start with a long lens kind of far away, but as the film progresses, it’s kind of wider. You’re slightly closer to the character as you’re getting into his head.”
As Ray’s life progresses and he crosses more and more items off of his list, he only appears older towards the end. There is a great shot of him sitting down in a chair, but the sudden change in the shape of his face alerts something within us. If we are lucky, we will also reach this point in our lives. For Kelly, that slow progression was difficult to achieve.
“When the idea first hit me, I did wonder if it could be live action,” he says. “One of the reasons that it couldn’t was because of how the character gets incrementally older over a series of match cuts. You could do aging with makeup, but not on a short film budget. It was a tricky thing to thread because you want people to notice but then equally you want it to creep up on people as well. It’s a really slow rug pull, so there was a lot of adjustment and readjustment in the edit to just try and get that to work as well as it could. Because we animated it in order, we built up quite an attachment to this character. We really grew to love him as he’s going through this journey. In a way, I think it would’ve been too agonizing if we see Ray’s end if it was live action.”
Most audience members will create their ultimate or dream list as they watch Kelly’s film. I joked that hiking is nowhere near the top of my list, but the director admits that he would like to try something more daredevil-like. We should all strive to want to better our lives emotionally as well as physically.
“I would like to paraglide,” he admits. “Truthfully, it would probably more in the line of having that conversation. As you get older, you care less what people think, but you also allow yourself to, as a result of that, go a little deeper with people. You get realer a bit quicker, so there’s less BS. That is one of the things that I aspire to do, in all honesty.”
Ray will haunt Deirdre Hogan–he’s even got things to do after he passes. What did she do to deserve such ire?
“What Deirdre did to Ray dies with Ray,” he says, with a laugh.
Retirement Plan is available through The New Yorker’s YouTube page.
