This bitter-sweet animation charts a unique kind of grief: the loss of naivety

What happens when the world doesn’t match up to what you once believed it to be? Ether Cheung’s animated short film, Detours Ahead, grieves the loss of childhood innocence through the narrative of a cross-country roadtrip. Set across Canada, its dreamy landscapes are inspired by Esther’s own drives between Vancouver and Toronto: “From tidepools and oceanview drives, to the towering mountains of the Rockies, to the vast plains and open skies of the prairies – the film follows the geography that I experienced on a solo drive,” she says.

It begins with Esther as a child in the backseat of her father’s car. He swerves and nearly hits a deer. As it leaps away across a milky landscape, a dandellion blooms, and Esther’s own journey as an adult begins. She rattles along in a tiny yellow car, through seasons marked by emotional shifts in music and colour. As she reaches Autumn the car breaks down, and melancholic interludes follow – all alluding to the process of coming to terms with adulthood. This premise was triggered by a realisation in her 20s: “I witnessed the pandemic bring out some of the worst in people,” Esther says. “This film attempts to capture the mixed emotions that come with growing up and moving across the country, and some of the hard experiences that are necessary, even if it means the loss of innocence.”

Soft and tactile, the entire animation is hand-drawn, like her previous film In Passing – featured on It’s Nice That in 2019. But this time, Esther was craving a challenge, so she decided to animate everything in one pass. Instead of the typical three passes of animation in a traditional pipeline – rough, tiedown, and ink and paint – she did all the linework in a single pass on TVpaint.

The result is a film that feels fluid, instinctive, and alive – fitting to the narrative behind the film. Pathetic fallacy – the attribution of human feelings to inanimate things – also plays a key role in the emotion behind the film. “I built a colour script around the transition of seasons and the escalation of weather,” Esther explains. “The coast was captured with blue and warm tones to represent the most idyllic of places during the summer. The mountains transitioned into a red theme dominated by the falling leaves that mark autumn. The plains were coloured with shades of brown and grey to foreshadow the bleak event to take place.”

This “bleak event” is referring to Esther hitting the deer at the end of the film – a final representation of the loss of naivety. “The film grieves the loss of my childish, idealistic perceptions of the world and its workings,” she says. “Creating the film in and of itself was an act of processing that grief. Acceptance is very much a process in which I am in the throes of.”