Skywhales

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Skywhales
Directed by	Phil Austin and Derek Hayes
Produced by	Channel 4
Written by	Phil Austin and Derek Hayes
Starring	Robert Llewellyn
Music by	Dirk Higgins
Editing by	Lesley Manning
Release date(s)	1983
Running time	11 min.
Country	United Kingdom
Language	fictional
IMDb profile

Skywhales is a 1983 animated short film that depicts a fictional society of alien creatures dwelling in the atmosphere of a gas giant. The film is notable for the completeness of its depiction of a fictitious society, including alien language, flora, fauna, and social structures and practices.

It was released at the cinema in the UK in 1984, showing before the film Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is one of a number of animated shorts that feature on the British Animation Collection Volume 1 DVD.

[edit] Plot

The story concerns a tribal society of mohawked green skinned creatures, who speak in a complex language of hoots. The hoots are not subtitled, leaving the viewer to determine the meaning from visual context alone. One significant tribal custom introduced early on is the appearance of a subset of the population with dead white skin color, encountering them causes the protagonist to shield his eyes from viewing them and allow them to pass. It soon becomes apparent that the society lives in the atmosphere on flying islands, and use paddled, flying wooden craft to hunt large winged creatures, the skywhales of the title. After a particularly dramatic hunt, the protagonist hiccups, and acquires the same dead white pallor seen before. His distraught companions react with disbelief, then adopt the convention of shielding their eyes. They follow him on his journey to an open pit, and watch him pitch himself forward. Unseen by them, he falls all night, as a cocoon forms around him. At daybreak, having fallen out of the floating island, he hatches from the cocoon as a juvenile skywhale, and flies off.