On the day his sister, a med student at Chicago’s Northwestern University, had to perform her first autopsy, Jonah Ansell wrote a little whimsical poem to lighten her mood and celebrate that important moment on her path to becoming a doctor.
“My sister successfully cut open her cadaver. I successfully moved onto other projects. A year passed. But something in the poem kept prying me back to it. Beneath the rhyme that tickled the ear lurked a text that tackled a truth“, he recalls.

That is the genesis of Cadaver (2013), an animated award-winning short movie, longlisted for the Academy Awards and featuring the voices of great actors Christopher Lloyd and Kathy Bates. It’s a humorous, melancholic story with a peculiar charm: a man, convinced that love is stronger than death, is ready for a desperate quest to offer his heart to the most important person. But several revelations await, because in death one may discover things he ignored in life… and even a happy ending could really hide new painful illusions.

That is why Jonah Ansell is willing to share his work “with anyone who has had their heart broken – and with anyone who has broken a heart. It is a story for the hopeful romantics. It is a story for the harshest cynics“.

The short movie has also been published in the form of a picture book (Cadaver: A Bittersweet Love Story) and, if everything goes well, could even become a feature-lenght musical. Here is the film’s official website.