A Single Life is a 2014 animated short film (very short, clocking in at 2:17) from The Netherlands, directed by Marieke Blaauw, Joris Oprins and Job Roggeveen.
A young woman is sitting in her tiny apartment eating pizza when an envelope arrives at her door. It contains a vinyl single of a song called "A Single Life". As it happens the young woman has a record player, so she puts the single on the turntable. The song plays, the record skips a bit—and the woman notices that the slice of pizza she has in her hand instantly disappears, mostly eaten. She sets the record needle backwards, and the slide of pizza reappears. She quickly realizes that she can travel backward and forward through her own life by skipping forward and backward on the record. But is hopping through time like that a good idea?
The short can be watched here
.
Tropes:
- All-CGI Cartoon: CGI animation throughout.
- Black Comedy: The end. The woman skips forward to a point in her life where she is an old woman on a walker. She realizes the danger she's in, slowly (because she's old) moves to the record player—and then the record player skips to the end of the song. The woman turns into an urn of ashes that falls to the ground, and the cartoon ends.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The woman is very briefly trapped in about a three-second loop, when the record gets stuck in a backward skip and she is too far away to grab it, because at that point in time she's in a wheelchair with a broken leg. She only escapes when she falls backwards out of the wheelchair.
- Match Cut: The woman is now a young mother, holding a baby. She moves the record back—and now she's a small child, holding a doll, in the same position.
- Nameless Narrative: Supplementary materials name the woman as "Pia" but that name does not appear in the cartoon; there isn't even a label on the envelope.
- The Noseless: The animation style renders the woman without a nose.
- Repetitive Audio Glitch: A variation on this trope. The record winds up in a repetitive audio glitch, constantly skipping backwards, and thus trapping the woman in what might have been a never-ending time loop. She only breaks out of it when she falls out of the chair she's sitting in.
- Silence Is Golden: The song plays over the cartoon, but there is no dialogue (and there's only one character).
- Time Is Dangerous: The woman winds up blinking herself out of existence, and missing out on 60 years or so of life, because of her carelessness and the use of a clunky old record player. It skips forward to the end of her song, and her life, and she turns into an urn of ashes.
- Time Machine: A record player, playing a particular song, allows a woman to skip back and forth between different stages in her life.
- Time Skip: In-Universe. The woman skips back and forth to different points in her life, becoming whatever age she is at that time—changing to a pregnant woman, an old lady, a very old lady, a child. When she finds herself pregnant at one stop, she plays with the record player to make her baby bump disappear and reappear.
- Time Travel: A young woman skips back and forth through her own life by fiddling with a record on a turntable.
- Title Drop: "A Single Life" is the name of the song as shown on the record, which also acts as the opening title card.
