The Last Bullet: Poetry, Hope, and Pain in Animated Short

Geoffrey Bennett Ulrich’s The Last Bullet is a spoken word animation that looks and sounds like Fiona Apple’s “Shameika” and its official music video. Narrated by the writer Jon Kinney, the performance has a similar charge. 

The title appears as a refrain in the poem as the screen ceaselessly shifts and reforms into bullets, the bodies they pierce, and the graves those bodies must be covered up in. It is an industry, and so a market must be had. Targets must be lined up, as sure as numbers need to end up on that bottomline. And so rows upon rows of graves must be filled up, neat and obedient. The typeface and graphic art drill this into the viewer through repeating patterns that follow the poem’s rhythmic structure. The repetitiveness is reinforced with the simplicity of the art—all plain, solid shapes and minimalist outlines. 

Like the entire Fiona Apple album, Kinney’s performance is also marked by a rawness in the recording, which makes the plea contained within the poem feel more urgent, more earnest. And yet, there is also a kind of teasing trickery in the voice, as though it is the voice of a creature who speaks only in riddles, or a genie waiting for you to mess up the exact wording of a wish. Instead, it is the kind of mirth that is born of wounds and disillusionment. For obvious reasons, this voice is foregrounded to take the film’s centre stage and it works. Kinney’s voice stays with you, cynicism and hope, all. 

The Last Bullet exhorts you to give yourself over to the idealist fantasy that senseless deaths might cease to exist someday, that we might run out—that maybe we will choose to run out—of bullets, before we run out of bodies to put them in. 

Watch The Last Bullet Animated Short Film