In this eerie animation, a nuclear bomb hits a California town, and only one house is left standing, an automated house with robots. The people did not survive, but the robots who cook, clean, and take care of everything continue with their daily routines long after the humans are gone. Finally, the robots are also destroyed, by a fire.
In a haunting final scene, a bird comes along and plays a song on a record player in the remains of the house, and a narrator reads “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale, which was written as a reference to World War I. In the original short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury, we know that Sara Teasdale was “a favorite” poet of one of the homeowners, Mrs. McClellan.
“There Will Come Soft Rains”
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
The Ray Bradbury story “There Will Come Soft Rains” was first published in the May 6, 1950 issue of Collier’s, and in The Martian Chronicles later the same year. The film was directed by Tulyahodzhayev Nazim, and it won the “Golden Dove” Award at the Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animated Films in 1984.
Here is “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Click CC for subs.
