The short opens on a platoon of soldiers awaiting their sergeant's instructions at the top of a ramshackle tower. When the order is given from below, he calls up a single soldier, proudly awards him a medal, and then pushes him off the edge to fall in a particular position onto an asphalt square. A photograph of the corpse is then brought to the leader of the operation; a retired musician, revealed to be commissioning the macabre photographs as individual frames of a deranged stop-motion project depicting a soldier dancing to one of his songs. He runs the unfinished animation in front of an empty theatre, tearfully reliving his glory days before sobering up and giving the go-ahead for the next "frame" to be produced.