Originally released on 2011's 50 Words for Snow and partially sung by her son Albert, who was still a child at the time, Kate Bush's "Snowflake" has been given a new lease of life today with an animated video conceived by Bush "to draw attention to the children caught up in war."

In a long post on her website, Bush writes:

"Although I’d initially thought to make the character a human child – a little girl – I settled on the idea of a Caucasian pygmy shrew (Ukrainian shrew): a tiny, fragile little creature. I felt that people might have more empathy for a vulnerable little animal than a human… This little shrew would take a journey on a moonlit, winter’s night through a war-torn city, initially unaware of what was going on around her in this land of the giants. She can sense that she’s being called by a kind of spiritual presence… HOPE. She starts to search for HOPE. Sometimes hope is all there is to hang on to."

Bush also pays tribute to Ukrainian photographer and videographer Maksim Levin, "a brave man" whose aerial photo of bombed-out buildings appears as the only real-world image in the video. Levin was sadly killed by Russian soldiers not long after publishing the photo. As Bush explains:

"I wanted to use his powerful photograph as part of a sequence that would step outside of the drawn animation, to open a door into reality for just that brief moment, before returning to the world of animation. We’re very grateful that we’ve been given permission to use this photo and I really hope that Maksim Levin would’ve been happy with how it’s been featured."

Although the war in Ukraine was the catalyst for starting the project in 2022, Bush emphasizes that "all wars leave horrific scars" and asks that people watching the video make a donation to War Child "or to another charity that aids children in war."

Read her full post here and watch the video, made in collaboration with animation studio Inkubus, below:

A radio edit version of the track has also been newly released to streaming platforms.

In other Kate Bush news, a new interview aired on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning in which she confirmed that there will be a new album to follow 50 Words for Snow at some point, saying:

“I’ve been caught up doing a lot of archive work over the last few years, redesigning our website, putting a lyric book together. And I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished. I’ve got lots of ideas and I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space, it’s been a long time... Particularly [in] the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.”