Diyala Muir’s animated short Red Shoes explores the entrapments of femininity

If you’ve seen Diyala Muir’s incredible 2019 animated short Blue Hands, you’ll know that its main character is left stranded and alone in the woods at its finish. Since the film, Diyala’s had the desire to resolve this character’s lonely journey and “help her find her way back home”, and she mulled over a sequel for a few years — but nothing ever really stuck. Until, she came across Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ version of the fairy tale The Red Shoes in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves. The themes that unfold in Estés take on the story “deeply resonated with issues I was ruminating over at the time”, Diyala says, “and so my new film became a sequel in a spiritual sense rather than literal”. She explains: “Blue Hands is about the numbness of grief, Red Shoes is about transformation and gaining one’s agency.”

Red Shoes is an animated allegory that explores the experience of femininity and the entrapment of its performance; it traces the journey of Zindy, a character who lives in a secluded society, on what seems to be a faraway planet. This universe is “disrupted by the sudden arrival of a mysterious object”: a pair of red high heeled shoes. Ensnared by this prototypical symbol of femininity, the character has to “dive down to wrestle with inner complications — a representation of a default patriarchal capitalist structure, deeply rooted and insidious”, Diyala explains.

Initially interpreted as a gift, the shoes are worn by Zindy only to find them developing a life of their own – carrying the character away from everything they know. Once they are finally able to free themselves from the grip of the shoes (or the structures of patriarchy), the protagonist is “free to play with constructing a new outer identity”, says Diyala, “they are only finally able to defeat the enemy and weaken the shoes once they remember their unique power”.

A stark metaphor for the personal process of relinquishing control over even the most internalised effects of patriarchy and heteronormativity, Diyala’s “strange genderless humanoid characters” play out a journey of reclamation over their identity. Through the help of animators Rosanna Wan and Lydia Reid each frame of the film was animated digitally, printed out and then scanned back in to achieve the films grainy texture. On top of this, With Hollie Buhagiar’s mysterious soundscape, that is both “ethereal and sinister at the same time”, Diyala’s otherworldly visuals slowly become all the more alien.

The sense that everything is taking place in another time or place — somewhere at first prehistoric then possibly extraterrestrial — was a way for Diyala to tackle a personal, lived experience in a way that many of us might not quite be able to explain in simple terms. The director shares: “I hope that anyone who has either chosen or been forced to perform femininity can relate to the character’s journey in some way. I think the film presents questions rather than messages, on subjects as complex as gender expression and identity it’s hard to pin down a concrete message as it’s so personal to the individual. It’s really about questioning the status quo, how rigid concepts may have unconsciously shaped or limited our perceptions, and how that plays out on both a personal and a societal level.”