“We wanted to imbue the house with a feeling of time,” Struever said. This is evident in the textures: the lady’s face is composed of papier-mâché newspapers, the dog is woven from yarn, and all of the wallpapers are antique William Morris prints. films is a “pet peeve,” and their film attempts to push the boundaries of the technology, by working with objects and staging processes that they might have used in real life. “And yet we still have so many films that look very similar.” For the directors, the sameness of many C.G.I. “It’s a medium where you can do literally anything,” Bailey said, of C.G.I. “Death and the Lady” is fully animated with computer-generated imagery Bailey taught himself the techniques. Even if it’s not consciously noticed, the accumulation of detail establishes the homely atmosphere.

“We built a whole life for them,” Bailey said, in which the lady and Jackson picnic, play Frisbee, and embark on coastal vacations, but “we don’t expect you to zoom in,” Struever noted. The room evokes the hazy ambience of history: the photographs appear blurred in the background, but the directors imagined and curated every memory for the woman and her dog, Jackson, who soon proves to be a central character. The melancholic French song “Les Feuilles Mortes,” or “Autumn Leaves,” plays on a gramophone. A scene of comfort emerges in which a woman sits, knitting, in a living room illuminated with warm lamplight, walls filled from floor to ceiling with picture frames. The film begins with sound: a patter of rain, a crash of thunder. The husband-and-wife duo told me that “fighting versus accepting” such storytelling tropes is a central conceit of the film. The first scene of the short animated film “Death and the Lady,” directed by Geoff Bailey and Lucy York Struever, uses this cliché-one that has been denounced, resurrected, and satirized by authors for nearly two centuries. It was a dark and stormy night when an old woman opened her door to a stranger.

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