Why is ‘If Anything Happens I Love You’ trending on Netflix again?

If Anything Happens, I Love You is a short, animated film released on Netflix last year, and it’s gaining traction again. The twelve-minute short film is a crier, and many YouTubers, TikTokers, and other social media influencers have posted their reactions to the Netflix film. 

Leading us to ask: why is a year-old short film starting to get more Netflix ratings? Most likely, it’s not just because the film is poignant and will make you cry buckets during its tiny runtime. It’s because it focuses on a news subject that way too often makes its way onto our radars: school shootings. 

Since this film is a crier, grab your tissues, and let’s get right into why If Anything Happens, I Love You is trending again. 

What’s it about? 

If Anything Happens, I Love You showcases grieving parents who lost their daughter in a school shooting. The film has no dialogue, but the actions and the soundtrack move viewers through the nameless parents as they try to pick up the pieces after such a massive loss. 

The parents each have shadows, signaling the parents’ hidden feelings of anger, bitterness, and resentment that often build after tragedies, leaving survivors and victims’ families with the unanswered question of “why”?  However, another shadow exists – their child’s. As they remember her after a soccer ball opens the door to her room, the shadow becomes the memories. 

These memories are happy at first, featuring birthday parties, road trips, and playing in the yard. Then, the memories turn to the day their daughter is killed at school. The last text their daughter sends her parents is the title of the film. If Anything Happens, I Love You doesn’t delve into the “why”, just the hollow & gritty aftermath of losing a loved one in a tragic and often highly publicized manner. 

Schools reopening

Around the world, schools are reopening, and in the U.S., a place where school shootings have frequently appeared in the news cycle, the public appears to be bracing themselves. In the U.S., CNN reported from the GVA, a nonprofit in Washington DC, there have been 147 mass shootings in 2021, defined by CNN & GVA as “an incident where four or more people are shot, wounded, or killed, excluding the gunman.” 

Of these 147 mass shootings, forty-five were reported in the last month, including three on April 15th. On that same day, in Indianapolis, a gunman opened fire in a FedEx building; eight people were killed, and several others were wounded. 

So far, Education Week reported only three school shootings have taken place this year, plus an incident in Tennessee on April 12th they redacted from their data. They further reported that school shooting numbers have halved in 2020 due to remote learning, going from twenty-seven in 2019 to ten in 2020. 

Education Week stated they only track incidents: “where a firearm was discharged, where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident, that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus, and that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event.” They began documenting school shootings just before the Parkland shooting in 2018. 

However, Everytown for Gun Safety reported eighteen incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in five incidents where death occurred and five incidents where only injury occurred. “Everytown tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds, as documented by the press”, they explained about their statistics. 

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If Anything Happens, I Love You is available to stream right now on Netflix.