Tim Minchin's Storm the Animated Movie

The Canberra Times

(Language warning) The animated short film of Tim Minchin's beat poem Storm. Directed by DC Turner and produced by Tracy King.

Transcript

00:00In a North London top floor flat, all white walls, white carpet, white cat, rice paper

00:21partitions, modern art and ambition.

00:23The host's a physician, bright bloke, has his own practice, his girlfriend's an actress,

00:28an old mate of ours from home, and they're always great fun, so to dinner we've come.

00:35The fifth guest is an unknown, the hosts have just thrown us together for a favour, cause

00:39this girl's just arrived from Australia and she's moved to North London and she's the

00:43sister of someone or has some connection.

00:46As we make introductions I'm struck by her beauty, she's irrefutably fair, with dark

00:52eyes and dark hair, but as she sits I admit I'm a little bit wary, cause I notice the

00:57tip of the wing of a fairy tattooed on that popular area just above the derriere, and

01:03when she says, I'm Sagittarian, I confess a pigeon hole starts to form, and is immediately

01:09filled with pigeon when she says her name is Storm.

01:15Conversation is initially bright and light hearted, but it's not long before Storm gets

01:20started.

01:21You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion, she opines over her Cabernet Sauvignon

01:27vis-a-vis some unhippily empirical comment made by me.

01:32Not a good start I think, we're only on pre-dinner drinks and across the room my wife widens

01:36her eyes, silently begs me be nice, a matrimonial warning not worth ignoring, so I resist the

01:43urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose weave of a morning, when deciding whether

01:48to leave her apartment by the front door, or the window on her second floor.

01:55The food is delicious and Storm, whilst avoiding all meat, happily sits and eats, as the good

02:00doctor, slightly pissedly, holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history,

02:06when Storm suddenly insists, but the human body is a mystery, science just falls in a

02:13hole when it tries to explain the nature of the soul.

02:16My hostess throws me a glance, she, like my wife, knows there's a chance I'll be off on

02:21one of my rare but fun rants, but I shan't, my lips are sealed, I just want to enjoy the

02:26meal, and although Storm is starting to get my goat, I have no intention of rocking the

02:30boat, although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle, because like her meteorological namesake,

02:35Storm has no such concerns for our vessel.

02:38Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy, they promote drug dependency at the cost of the

02:43natural remedies that all our bodies need, they are immoral and driven by greed, why

02:48take drugs when herbs can solve it, why use chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve

02:53it, I think it's time we all returned to live with natural medical alternatives, and try

02:59as I like, a small crack appears in my diplomacy dike.

03:06By definition, I begin, alternative medicine, I continue, has either not been proved to

03:11work, or been proved not to work, do you know what they call alternative medicine that's

03:16been proved to work?

03:19Medicine.

03:20So you don't believe in any natural remedies?

03:23On the contrary Storm, actually, before I came to tea, I took a remedy derived from

03:28the bark of a willow tree, a painkiller that's virtually side effect free, it's got a weird

03:33name, darling what was it again, masprin, basprin, oh yes, aspirin, which I paid about

03:39a buck for down at the local drug store.

03:42The debate briefly abates as my hosts collect plates, but when they return with desserts,

03:47Storm pertly asserts, Shakespeare said it first, there are more things in heaven and

03:51earth than exist in your philosophy, science is just how we're trained to look at reality,

03:57it doesn't explain love or spirituality, how does science explain psychics, auras, the

04:03afterlife, the power of prayer, I'm becoming aware that I'm staring, I'm like a rabbit

04:09suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap, maybe it's the hamlet she

04:14just misquothed or the fifth glass of wine I just quothed, but my diplomacy diet groans

04:19and the arsehole held back by its stones can be held back no more.

04:23Look Storm, sorry I don't mean to bore you, but there's no such thing as an aura, reading

04:28auras is like reading minds or tea leaves or star signs or meridian lines, these people

04:33aren't applying a skill, they're either lying or mentally ill, same goes for people

04:38who claim they can hear God's demands or spiritual healers who think they've got magic hands,

04:43by the way, why do we think it's okay for people to pretend they can talk to the dead,

04:47isn't that totally fucked in the head, lying to some crying woman whose child has died

04:53and telling her you're in touch with the other side, I think that's fundamentally sick,

04:57do we need to clarify here that there's no such thing as a psychic, what are we fucking

05:02to, do we actually think that Horton heard a who, do we still believe that Santa brings

05:07us gifts, that Michael Jackson didn't have facelifts, are we still so stunned by circus

05:12tricks that we think the dead would want to talk to pricks like John Edward?

05:18Storm, to her credit, despite my derision, keeps firing off cliches with startling precision,

05:24like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition, you're so sure of your position but you're

05:29just closed minded, I think you'll find that your faith in science and tests is just as

05:35blind as the faith of any fundamentalist, wow, that's a good point, let me think for a bit,

05:41oh wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit, science adjusts its views based on what's

05:49observed, faith is the denial of observations so that belief can be preserved, if you show me that

05:55say homeopathy works then I will change my mind, I will spin on a fucking dime, I'll be as embarrassed

06:02as hell yet I will run through the streets yelling it's a miracle, take physics and bin it,

06:07water has memory and whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow

06:14forgets all the poo it's had in it, you show me that it works and how it works and when I've

06:18recovered from the shock I will take a compass and car fancy that on the side of my cock,

06:24everyone's just staring now but I'm pretty pissed and I've dug this far down so I figure in for a

06:30penny in for a pound, life is full of mysteries yeah but there are answers out there and they

06:37won't be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying isn't life mysterious, let's

06:43sit here and hope, let's call up the fucking pope, let's go watch Oprah interview Deepak Chopra,

06:49if you want to watch telly you should watch Scooby-Doo, that show was so cool because every

06:54time there was a church with a ghoul or a ghost in a school they looked beneath the mask and what

07:00was inside the fucking janitor or the dude who ran the water slide because throughout history

07:07every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic, does the idea that there might be

07:15knowledge frighten you, does the idea that one afternoon on wikifuckingpedia might enlighten you

07:21frighten you, does the notion that there might not be a supernatural so blow your

07:26hippie noodle that you'd rather just stand in the fog of your inability to google, isn't this enough

07:35just this world, just this beautiful complex wonderfully unfathomable natural world

07:51how does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of

07:56cheap man-made myths and monsters, if you're so into your Shakespeare lend me your ear

08:07to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet is just fucking silly

08:16or something like that, or what about Satchmo, I'll see trees of green, red roses too, and fine

08:24if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu in a post-colonial condescending bottled up and

08:30labeled kind of way then whatever that's okay but here's what gives me a hard-on, I am a tiny

08:38insignificant ignorant bit of carbon, I have one life and it is short and unimportant

08:47but thanks to recent scientific advances I get to live twice as long as my great great

08:54great great uncles and aunts, twice as long to live this life of mine, twice as long to

09:04love this wife of mine, twice as many years of friends and wine of sharing curries and

09:13getting shitty at good-looking hippies with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties

09:22and if perchance I have offended, think but this and all is mended,

09:29we'd as well be 10 minutes back in time for all the chance you'll change your mind

10:34you

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