Katerina Athanasopoulou has tracked Argonauts through outer space, turned a gasworks plant into an infanticidal mother, and even shaped a love story between a merman and a woman trapped in a twisted fairytale.

In her latest work the London-based animation artist more or less stays in our world. She wrote and directed a short film called Rupture, a throwback to 1871, when smallpox ravaged Europe.

The film is part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation‘s new art initiative, The Art of Saving a Life, which commissioned more than 30 artists to explore the importance of vaccines in their medium of choice.

“Vaccines are science’s gift to humankind,” she tells Mashable. “The impact of smallpox in the Franco-Prussian War is an amazing example of the difference vaccinating has had in the course of history.”

The deadly numbers drew her to the topic. The Prussian soldiers were mandatorily vaccinated, and 459 of them died from smallpox in the years the war lasted. But more than 23,000 French soldiers died because they did not receive the vaccine.

Rupture focuses on the transport of infected French prisoners of war in Prussia, where the general population was not as well vaccinated. Prussia and Germany’s embrace of the railway system in warfare helped lead them to victory, but it was also an efficient means of carrying smallpox. This ended up triggering a five-year European pandemic, when the infectious disease claimed 500,000 lives.

“It just shows that a lack of vaccinations has aftereffects that go far beyond the individual who doesn’t get vaccinated. When you look at smallpox, which is a disease we have managed to eradicate through vaccinations, it really made me feel that we should never allow this to happen again,” Athanasopoulou says.

During a month of intense research on smallpox and the Franco-Prussian War, she was particularly moved by images of smallpox victims. If you survived, you were left with horrible marks and sometimes blindness. This made her think of the parallel between the literal battle in the war and the health battle.

“It’s such an unnecessary horror, really,” she says. “It takes a moment to be vaccinated, but then the benefits are enormous … If we can help it, we should definitely continue the good battle.”

Watch Rupture above, and be sure to check out the other works we featured from The Art of Saving a Life. Visual storyteller Christoph Niemann’s animated GIFs teach the world about safe vaccine transport, and artist Deborah Kelly’s collage portraits show the value of girls’ health and the importance of the HPV vaccine.

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