The animator and art therapist Tony Gammidge was sent from his family home to a boarding school at the age of seven. It’s a centuries-old tradition among well-heeled British families, but one that, as Gammidge recalls in his autobiographical work Norton Grim and Me, felt more like a harrowing kidnapping that he was expected to endure with a stiff upper lip. Mixing claymation, shadow puppetry and photos from his childhood, he recalls how, to deal with the traumatic experience of being forced from home, he invented a fictional friend – the titular, occasionally masochistic Norton Grim – to keep him company. Rendered in Gammidge’s imagination and drawings, Grim offered a comforting hand on his creator’s shoulder while also suffering violent injuries to help absorb his pain and confusion.
Raw and haunting, Gammidge’s short film makes a forceful case that concerns about these early-age separations aren’t just the ‘complaints of the privileged’, as he had once told himself, but a genuine social ill. The piece also serves as something of an origin story for Gammidge’s career as an art therapist, helping incarcerated people, patients dealing with severe mental health issues and asylum seekers process traumatic experiences through storytelling.
