In the Flesh: Barber Westchester

In her second feature film, animator Jonni Phillips creates a faintly Seussian alternate America in which an awkward and repressed young trans person — the titular Barber Westchester (Chris Kim) — struggles to come of age while dealing with cult conditioning, intense social, sexual, and religious anxiety, and the collapse of their own understanding of the world. It’s more whimsical than Phillips’ debut, The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, full of bloodthirsty parrots and talking moles, and its symbolic language is looser, more interpretative. At NASA Barber discovers that space — their lifelong passion — does not exist, and that the sky is a dome onto which NASA projects blue fields and clouds. Near the film’s end their hometown collapses into a massive sinkhole caused by parrots eating away at the deposits of red clay under the city, a strange coincidence which seems at first to align with the doomsday predictions of their father’s cult.

Phillips’ animation is tenderly detailed, and it possesses real character in its Sally Cruikshank-esque roughness. Characters drip and bounce and shiver. Their facial expressions shrink and explode. The film’s voice cast is phenomenal, in particular Chris Kim’s charming lisp and hesitant delivery as Barber, which give the character a sense of youth and promise even as they struggle with depression, alienation, and depersonalization. They struggle to touch or be touched, envisioning the bodies of others as drippy heaps of semen-like substance molded into roughly humanoid shape. They often display a low emotional affect, but the vulnerability inherent to Kim’s performance makes their small daily hurts and victories painfully immediate.

While Barber Westchester bears many surface similarities to The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, its tone is overall more hopeful and open to change. Its final few scenes of Barber taking their first steps into forming close relationships and learning to live without hiding behind the deadening weight of their own trauma are heart-wrenchingly earnest without ever veering into cheesiness. Likewise, a scene in which Barber finally sees their father for the weak, blinkered man he is walks a fine line between devastating and trite, but Phillips’ inventive shot composition and the film’s strong sound design transform the experience into something more than the sum of its parts. With Barber Westchester, Phillips has cemented her position as one of the foremost independent animators in the industry.

You can watch Barber Westchester by subscribing to Phillips' patreon here for $2 a month.