It’s not a phase! Laura Jayne Hodkin’s new animated short is a moody love story between Yorkshire goths

Animator Laura Jayne Hodkin’s characters are typically eccentric – Hot And Tasty chronicles two awfully drunk girls creating a massive nuisance in a chicken shop, Welcome To Foggy Hell Town sees two posh girls who get lost in Silent Hill and her newest short Wuthering Hearts sees the introduction of a new abrasive but endearing female lead: an unbelievably moody Yorkshire goth called Helena. It mainly takes place over one night, where Helena applies heavy eyeliner and puts an agitated rat in her hair to create a Robert Smith-esque barnet, all whilst her nagging mother tells her to turn down the morose music tumbling out of Helena’s gramophone. “I’ve got the morbs again, just let me sink into darkness!” Helena says, as she escapes out of the window to secretly meet her doomy soulmate, Bernard.

Studying Edinburgh College of Art and Royal College of Art in London, Laura studied animation with a focus on an artistic, filmmaker perspective rather than a technical one. It’s no surprise that her animations have featured commercially as well as in collaboration with Adult Swim and Netflix. Originally four commissioned episodes for A Studio Digital, a TikTok channel belonging to the animation studio Bento Box, Wuthering Hearts became a three-and-a-half minute short film all about Yorkshire goths. Pitched as an “emo-Bridgerton”, the concept began when Laura left London last year and moved back North. “ I started remembering my teenage years as an emo kid in a small town. Long walks across fields to meet friends, hours waiting for the next bus, blasting angsty music like every tiny bit of drama was the end of the world,” says Laura. “Looking back now it’s funny, but it also had this intensity that I wanted to capture.”

Animated inside of Photoshop with some background painting made in Procreate, Laura’s rough, Squigglevision inspired style holds a ton of personality. “I’m not a super technical animator, but I like that. The slight roughness gives the work its own personality which I think makes it feel more alive,” says Laura. “I’m also someone who likes to get ideas down quickly. If I spend too long on it, I either get bored or start to lose faith in the idea.” When it came to the unique voice acting in the short, Laura put it plainly: “I got bored of hearing the same voices in cartoons! Why not throw in a Yorkshire accent?” Embracing a resurgence of 2000s fashion and emo aesthetics with Barbican’s I’m Not Okay exhibition or My Chemical Romance’s new tour, Laura didn’t just want to use the aesthetic but more so capture the “feeling” that was communicated through style, music, and blogs at the time.

“It’s definitely inspired by my emo teen years and my group of friends back then. The Helena and Bernard romance is somewhat inspired by me and my friends dating these alternative guys,” says Laura. “Everyone was obsessed with them because they had the perfect emo hair or the coolest Drop Dead hoodie. And of course they all thought they would be in a band forever.” If anything is to be taken away from this hilarious, crude, and moody short, Laura says: “If you’re young and feeling awkward, dramatic or cringe, lean into it.” With Emerald Fennell’s upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation this year too, maybe everyone will get the “morbs”.