“Love should be reduced to a simple, unbalanced equation: put the days of exquisite happiness in the beginning against the inevitable hell at the end.” 

Patricia Highsmith

It’s perhaps not the greatest reflection on human nature, but there is no doubt that watching the inevitable decline of a romantic relationship often makes for compelling art. Witnessing a couple’s idyllic happiness at the outset of love, all the while knowing the pair are destined for failure, lends added poignancy to every adoring gaze and tender moment. Films that have excelled at chronicling this downward spiral are too many to mention, but Blue Valentine, Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are a few fine examples. Recently Aziz Ansari and Noël Wells skillfully showed a relationship go from “I can’t get enough of you” to “get the hell out of my face” in one thirty minute episode of Master of None.

“Being a one woman crew and filming two puppets on a ‘date’ tends to make passersby pity you.”

How to Abandon Ship takes an even leaner ten minute time frame to relay a very funny but still highly emotionally affecting tale of a relationship from inception to (literal) dumping. By using live action faces composited on to bulbous puppet heads, and then removing all but their eyes and mouths, Robin McKay creates uncanny hybrid creatures that register melancholy and irony more effectively than most actors. The story is told in a strangely detached, anecdotal manner, from the perspectives of both participants. The couple meet on a train – she is drunkenly eating a hot dog, he tries to stare at her breasts without being noticed. Soon they are sleeping in together every day – he knows that she turns off his alarm at night, but he just doesn’t care. 

Without giving too much away, the second half of the film offers a series of powerful metaphors for that point where both lovers have arrived at the sad realization that the relationship’s days are numbered, but they are loathe to admit it to each other, or even to themselves. Perhaps the greatest stab in the heart is when he begins to hide from her around their apartment, until “before I knew it, if I kept very still, I could hide in plain sight.”

Robin McKay says of the production: 

 “Sometimes I would just take the puppets out on the town to film them in real environments. This is when I realized that being a one woman crew and filming two puppets on a ‘date’ tends to make passersby pity you. Overall, I think the process produced a fairly unsettling – but hard to look away from – aesthetic that reinforces the tone of the story.”

McKay is currently working on another tale of strange romance, concerning a couple who meet when they purchase separate (front and back) parts of a two person donkey costume from a yard sale.