Finding Meaning in the Mundane: Kate Renshaw-Lewis on Busy Bodies and the Hidden Lives of Everyday Objects | Sundance

In a world built on convenience, repetition, and invisible labor, animator Kate Renshaw-Lewis asks a quiet but powerful question: Where do the things we use every day come from and what do they carry with them?

Her hand-drawn animated short Busy Bodies, selected for the Sundance Film Festival Animated Shorts Program, explores the unseen systems of labor, movement, and power that exist beneath the surface of ordinary objects. Through tactile animation and surreal imagery, Renshaw-Lewis transforms the familiar into something strange, poetic, and deeply human.

A Tactile Path to Animation

Now based in Los Angeles, Renshaw-Lewis studied experimental animation at CalArts, where she began shaping a style rooted in physical process and curiosity. Busy Bodies marks her first independently produced film since graduating.

“So much of making films feels like sending things into a void,” she says. “You put time, money, and yourself into it, and you don’t know if anything will come back.”

When Sundance did come calling, it felt less like validation and more like surprise. An unexpected opening for a film that resists easy categorization.

Where Busy Bodies Began

The initial spark for Busy Bodies didn’t come from a grand concept, but from repetition and routine.

Renshaw-Lewis had been screen-printing extensively—experimenting with process-heavy, step-by-step methods—when she began thinking about how animation itself could mirror labor. Around the same time, a mundane grocery store visit prompted deeper reflection.

“I started thinking about how many replicas of the same object exist,” she explains. “How far they’ve traveled. What they were before they ended up here.”

A pre-packaged tuna wrap became a catalyst. So did fish specifically, the surreal systems humans have built around them, from salmon transport cannons to grunion fish that emerge from the sand during full moons to mate along the California coast.

“There’s something absurd and beautiful about it,” she says. “Pulling a fish from the ground like a vegetable.”

That became central to the film’s visual language.

Dream Logic and Hand-Drawn Worlds

Visually, Busy Bodies feels like a dream—fluid, uncanny, and grounded by the physical texture of ink on paper. Renshaw-Lewis works primarily with hand-drawn animation, favoring pens over pencils and resisting the ease of digital erasure.

“The ability to erase can make me freeze,” she admits. “If I can’t delete something, I’m forced to move forward.”

That philosophy extends beyond technique. The film’s surreal tone is influenced by childhood media that left lasting impressions E.T., Gremlins, the Muppets. As well as experimental animation classics like Fantastic Planet and Asparagus. Rather than imitate those works, Renshaw-Lewis channels how they felt: strange, unsettling, and oddly comforting.

Animation Without Limits

For Renshaw-Lewis, animation is not a genre, it’s a medium without boundaries.

“One of my biggest hopes is that audiences realize animation isn’t just for kids or big studios,” she says. “It can be anything. It can talk about labor, systems, power, things we don’t usually associate with animation.”

Busy Bodies doesn’t explain itself. It invites viewers to sit with discomfort, curiosity, and recognition. It’s less about answers and more about awareness about noticing the invisible networks that sustain everyday life.

Place, Memory, and Worldbuilding

Renshaw-Lewis’s work is also shaped by geography. Born in England, raised in New Jersey, and now living in Los Angeles, she pulls visual inspiration from each place—laundry lines swaying in the wind, densely packed apartment buildings, and century-old houses filled with architectural oddities.

“Every place adds something,” she reflects. “You start realizing how memory and environment sneak into your work.”

Those influences quietly populate Busy Bodies, grounding its abstract ideas in lived experience.

Sundance and Looking Ahead

Premiering Busy Bodies at Sundance, especially during the festival’s final year in Park City feels surreal for Renshaw-Lewis. It’s a reminder that deeply personal, process-driven work can still find a global audience. Looking forward, she remains committed to animation as a space of exploration rather than expectation.

“I just want to keep pushing what animation can be,” she says.

Like Busy Bodies itself, her approach is patient, tactile, and attentive. Proof that sometimes the most powerful stories are hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone to slow down and really look.

Busy Bodies screens as part of the Sundance Animated Shorts Program.

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