In September 2022, you may have seen the news of Hadis Najafi, who died after being struck by gunfire during the Iranian protests. The death of the 22-year old Azerbaijani Turk woman was widely reported around the world, and following her death she has been “turned into a symbol and rallying point for the protests after her death”, and is seen as a symbol of Azerbaijani resistance and ethnic struggle.

This event in turn, led to the fledgling Azerbaijani animation studio, ANIMAFILM Studio, producing and dedicating their short film Hadis to the memory of Hadis Najafi, and all those fighting against gender, ethnic and cultural discrimination in Iran.

Hadis © ANIMAFILM Studio

The short film has already garnered early festival success, having been selected for competition at this year’s Annecy animation festival, which is not only an honour for the studio, but is seen as an important achievement for the Azerbaijani film industry as a whole.

At the helm of the film (and also of ANIMAFILM Studio) are Nazrin Aghamaliyeva (Director) and Rashid Aghamaliyev (Producer), who we spoke to about the film’s production and the landscape of Azerbaijani animation.

Rashid Aghamaliyev, Producer (left) and Nazrin Aghamaliyeva, Director (right). © ANIMAFILM Studio

Before we discuss the film, could you both tell us a little about how you met and came to work together, and what led you to set up your own studio?

Nazrin: We first met in Baku at the ANIMAFILM International Animation Festival. Over time, we became close friends and eventually got married. From the beginning, we shared a passion for filmmaking. However, working together as a filmmaker couple is both amazing and challenging at the same time.

Rashid: We started making animation organically when we needed animated trailers for our ANIMAFILM festival. Making the trailers was so satisfying that we decided to start an animation studio. Hadis is our debut animated film. However, even before that, I had extensive experience in the film industry. For example, I worked as a production assistant on a feature stop-motion animated film called Even Mice Belong in Heaven (2021) and as an assistant director for a feature documentary titled Saz: The Key of Trust (2018). In 2019, I directed my own short documentary, Dialogues with Zuleyha (2019). All this experience gave me enough confidence to launch our own studio.

The film describes itself as a dedication ‘to the memory of 22-year-old Azerbaijani Turk Hadis Najafi,’ but aside from Hadis’ heritage, what compelled you to tell this story, and who did the initial idea for this film come from?

Nazrin: The idea to make a film about Hadis Najafi belongs to the Azerbaijan Cultural Society of Northern California, the organization that funded the film and also offered me a scholarship to study animation in FAMU (Czech Republic). We were deeply moved by the story of Hadis Najafi and agreed to make this film. For research, I conducted interviews with Azerbaijani Turks who lived under the dictatorial regime in Iran. Their personal stories were invaluable in shaping our narrative.

Rashid: Nazrin co-wrote the screenplay with talented dramaturg Ismail Iman, who contributed great ideas to the story, such as Hadis’s brooch being stolen by a crow. Masud Panachi, a consultant for the film, who himself was born in Iran and has made more than 60 animated films in Azerbaijan and Germany, offered valuable advice on storyboarding and directing.

Hadis © ANIMAFILM Studio

Judging by the timeline of events, from Hadis’ death in September 2022 to your submission of the film to Annecy in February 2023, it is remarkable that you have assembled a team, gained support, and produced the film in a little over 4 months. Could you give us a breakdown of how you achieved this and any problems you encountered?

Nazrin: I still find it unbelievable that we were able to make this film in such a short timeframe. We were fortunate to have the financial support of ASCN, but also our team, who were passionate about the film’s theme and produced amazing results. However, we did encounter difficulties in finding voice actors. I wanted to find an Azerbaijani voice actress from Iran because I needed a specific accent. It was a miracle when we found Zohre, who had just arrived in Prague from Iran one month ago, where she had participated in the protests herself. She also had a powerful story of her own. Initially, I thought of keeping her name secret for her safety, as she could be arrested in Iran for participating in our film. But she wanted to be credited in the project. I am happy that we found her, as she represented Hadis’ soul perfectly. She is one of the strongest and most amazing Azerbaijani women I have ever met.

Rashid: We started in November 2022 and exported the DCP in April 2023. The trick is that, according to Annecy’s regulations, the festival can consider a work-in-progress version. So, we took advantage of this. But honestly, it was super hard to deliver a WIP version in time and make sure that it was advanced enough to be judged. I would love to give credit to our lead animator, Andrea Szelesová, and editor, Jorge Sánchez Calderón. I don’t think we could have made it in time without their hard work and dedication.

What are your hopes for the film, and what would you ultimately like the film to achieve?

Nazrin: In the film, the main character not only represents Hadis Najafi’s bravery but also symbolizes the struggles of Azerbaijani Turks in Iran. We want the whole world to know that the Azerbaijani minority in Iran faces systematic discrimination.

Rashid: I absolutely agree with Nazrin. While Iran is infamous for its authoritarian regime, death penalties, religious extremism, and unjust treatment of women, it is often overlooked that minorities in Iran also face discrimination. There are around 30 million Azerbaijani Turks living in Iran. Like many other minorities in Iran, such as Baluchis, Kurds, and Turkmen, Azerbaijani Turks face severe racism. Our film is an attempt to spread awareness about the unjust treatment that face Azerbaijani Turks in Iran. Participating in the Annecy festival is already a big step towards spreading our message. The next goal is to offer our film to the international audience through festivals, television, and VOD platforms.

Hadis © ANIMAFILM Studio

Our readers at Skwigly may not have a deep knowledge of the Azerbaijan animation landscape, so could you give us your thoughts on its current shape and where it is heading? Also, could you tell us how the industry helped you access funding or support partners to complete Hadis?

Rashid: After the rich Soviet Azerbaijan period, the animation industry struggled with a lack of funding and talent. The presidential decree establishing ARKA (the Cinema Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan) on April 20, 2022, truly marks the beginning of a new era not only for Azerbaijani animation but also for Azerbaijani cinema in general. In 2022, we also established the NGO Azerbaijan Animation Association with the goal of contributing to the industry. We believe that very soon the world will hear more about Azerbaijan!

I should also mention that Hadis is a co-production of Azerbaijan, the USA, and the Czech Republic. I produced this film through a company in the Czech Republic. It makes me proud because this country has given me so much in terms of my personal and professional development.

Rashid, aside from producing this film and heading up ANIMAFILM Studio, you are a key figure within the Azerbaijan animation industry, and founder of ANIMAFILM animation festival. Can you tell our readers a little about the festival, and how you find the time for everything!

Rashid: We established the ANIMAFILM festival in 2018, and this year we will celebrate its 6th edition. We are a small festival with big ambitions to become an important player in the Caucasus region and Eastern Europe, but we do accept films from all around the world! This year’s theme will be dedicated to women’s rights, and we will organize a pitching competition for local animation artists. I guess the secret to our productivity is that we do all these projects together with Nazrin.

Hadis © ANIMAFILM Studio

Can you tell me what’s next for both of you and ANIMAFILM Studio? What projects do you currently have in development?

Nazrin: As a filmmaker, I am passionate about addressing topics that are relevant to women. We are currently working on a short animated documentary (anidoc) that explores women’s health issues called vaginismus.

Rashid: Together with Masud Panahi, we are also developing a short film for children called Nargis. After the recent Karabakh war, Azerbaijan’s territories are highly contaminated with landmines. We aim to address this issue in a creative manner and create a film that will be relevant not only for Azerbaijani children but also for all children affected by war.

Hadis will be screening as part of the Short Films in Competition – Perspectives 1  at Annecy on 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th June 2023. For more information about that film, visit: animafilm.studio/hadis

The post Interview: Nazrin Aghamaliyeva & Rashid Aghamaliyev on Their Azerbaijan Short ‘Hadis’ appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

As a little girl in Vietnam, Thao’s mother would rescue ants from bowls of sugar water. The tiny creatures would later return the favour, leading her desperate family through darkness—and pointing the way to safety.

Adapted from illustrator and author Thao Lam’s book The Paper Boat, the film draws upon her own family’s dramatic and turbulent journey as refugees fleeing the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Boat People harnesses the talents of  animator Kjell Boersma in retaining the hand-crafted look of the original illustrations in service to a compelling narrative that both parallels and contrasts human survival with the instinctual behaviour of ants. Narrated by Thao herself, the short features music by respectfulchild and is produced by Justine Pimlott and Jelena Popović of the NFB.

In anticipation of Boat People‘s world premiere this week at ITFS Stuttgart, Skwigly spoke with directors Thao Lam and Kjell Boersma to learn more about the film’s journey.

To start with, it would be great to hear about the source material and how the original book The Paper Boat came about – what were the circumstances/influences that brought the project to life?

Thao: I never envisioned this story as a picture book. To me the migration of people and ants was always told through movement. The act of fleeing is a movement. The journey across the South China Sea, the motions of the waves as it rages during a storm, the bodies of people moving about in a refugee camp like scurrying ants—all forms of movement. When I first began to think of the story, I actually pictured it as a film. While we were developing the idea, my publisher became interested in doing it as a picture book, and the book moved a lot faster than the film.

What drew you to ants and ant behaviour as a throughline for the story?

Thao: Ants have always been part of the story my mother tells. She saved the ants—and they saved her in return. I’ve always liked that idea of karma. We did a tonne of research, on both the Vietnam War and ant behaviour, and we began seeing all kinds of connections, how ants have an instinct not simply to survive but also to protect each other. The script went through many stages, but I think we’ve found a nice balance between the two stories.

Can you tell us a bit about your respective backgrounds in the arts and what ultimately led you to animation?

Thao: I graduated from Sheridan College [in Ontario, Canada] with an Illustration diploma and I am now an author and illustrator of children’s books. Though I don’t have any experience or training in animation, I do have an understanding and passion for storytelling. This process has taught me that filmmaking is just a different medium of storytelling.

Kjell: From an early age I have been obsessed with animation. My uncle would tape episodes of the program Long Ago and Far Away on PBS and mail them to me, and I would watch the animated shorts over and over again. While attending film school, I just became increasingly drawn to animation and taught myself the techniques I needed to animate my thesis project. After that, I worked as a compositor in stop-motion for television, and then moved to New Mexico for several years, where I directed my film Monster Slayer, which was a combination of live action and Ray Harryhausen-style creatures. After returning to Toronto, I was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to create a kids’ film that would be performed live with the orchestra. That production filled in a lot of the missing pieces for me, and I built off those techniques when developing the animation process for Boat People.

How did the two of you come to be paired together for this project? Had you worked together before?

Kjell: Thao and I had worked together once before on an animated trailer for her first book, Skunk on a String. I was drawn to the graphic quality and textures of her work, and that project really made me wish we could do something that was imagined as animation from the start. A year or so later, I had just released my film DAM!, and Thao approached me with the idea that eventually became Boat People. I was hooked right away by the story of the ants in the grass, and it is exactly the sort of complex subject that first drew me to animation.

The overall look of the film carries across the cutout style of the picture book very effectively; it would be great to have a breakdown of the animation process. Did you use digital and analogue processes – or a combination of both – to achieve this look? 

Kjell: For me it was very important that Thao’s style come through in the animation, but once we started testing different approaches, it turned out to be quite a complicated thing to do. We started with a physical process that tried to replicate how Thao creates each panel of her books. This led us to individually laser-cutting each layer of each frame from different papers, assembling them by hand, and then animating them in stop-motion. While it achieved the look we wanted, it was a very cumbersome and rigid process. We decided to develop a digital workflow using those laser-cut tests as a blueprint, while still using Thao’s ink-on-paper textures. The end result is a combination of traditional hand-drawn animation in TV Paint, digital cutout in Harmony, 3D rendering in C4D, and compositing in After Effects.

When dealing with the heavy themes of this type of story, what are the primary advantages of animation (and, at its core, illustration/design) in a film such as this?

Thao: As a children’s book author and illustrator, I have always found that picture books often act as portals into issues kids have a hard time expressing, because I can package heavy themes in a style relatable and accessible to kids. I feel like animation is similar but has fewer restraints, because it can reach a wider audience and age range and therefore we can tackle more complicated themes like family dynamics, resilience and sacrifice. This lack of restriction also allows for more creative freedom when I am making a film compared to when I am creating a children’s book, like the subtle changes in facial expressions as characters interact with each other.

Thao’s family and other refugees crossing the precarious waters of South China Sea by boat (Image from Film, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada, 2023)

From a storytelling perspective, what advantages – or challenges – does animation have when it comes to this type of adaptation?

Kjell: The big advantage with animation is that the only limitation is your imagination. This can also be a challenge in that, sometimes, limits can be helpful. Thao and I imagined many different versions of this story; I lost count of how many versions our animatic went through. Like Thao said, animation can also be a way to deal with dark material in an accessible way—I thought a lot about films like Grave of the Fireflies and Watership Down while working on Boat People. In a more basic sense, animation allows us into points of view that would otherwise be impossible.

How did working with the NFB benefit the production of Boat People? Had you hoped to bring them on board from the outset?

Kjell: The simplest answer is that the film wouldn’t exist without the NFB. Thao and I had tried for about a year to find funding for the film (unsuccessfully) before our executive producer, Anita Lee, saw something in our project. I can’t think of many other places that would have had the resources and the patience to go on this journey with us. The film required a lot of research and development to achieve the style we wanted, and that’s something the NFB has a unique commitment to supporting. We were also lucky to get to work with very talented and supportive producers. Justine Pimlott, from the NFB’s Toronto studio, brought a wealth of experience from the documentary world that was instrumental in helping us find the story and craft the narrative, and Jelena Popović, from the Montreal studio, has a real passion for animation as a medium and pushed us to be more ambitious in our imaginations.

Noting that you (Thao) provided the narration from the film, were there aspects of the story that drew from your own lived experience, or is it more of an observational piece?

Thao: Most families have stories that are told and retold. For the longest time, all I knew about the war and our escape was a story told by my mother, a lesson in kindness and karma. Long before the war, when the only invasions were of ants looking for food, her mother would set out bowls of sugar water to rid the house of pests. As a child, my mother would spend carefree afternoons fishing ants out of these bowls. On the night of our escape we got turned around in the tall grass. By the light of the moon, my mother spotted a trail of ants; lost and desperate, she decided to follow them, which led us to the riverbank where our escape boat waited. The ants she rescued as a little girl saved her in return that night. This story with the ants and the sugar water became the cornerstone for the film, making it an animated documentary.

Congratulations on your upcoming world premiere at ITFS Stuttgart. What are your feelings about being involved in such a highly regarded event, and do you feel that in-person festivals are an important part of a film (and filmmaker’s) journey?

Kjell: We are, of course, very excited to have our premiere at ITFS. It’s an incredibly valuable experience as an individual, as well as for the film and the filmmaking community. It’s wonderful to see your film with an audience, to meet people from all over the world and see projects that would have never crossed your path. Visiting Germany has also been a real treat; it’s no wonder so many artists end up here (including two of our animation team).

Do you have any plans to work together again in future?

Thao: This is my first time as a film director and working in animation. There is still so much for me to learn about this different medium of storytelling, but the possibilities are endless and I am excited to see where this will lead. I would love another opportunity to work with Kjell and the NFB. Halfway through the making of Boat People, I did pitch another project to Kjell, so we are in the very early stages of that film, and I am currently working on a script of another idea I have.

Boat People will premiere at ITFS Stuttgart April 27th at 9pm in International Competition 3. The screening is repeated at 11:30am on April 28th.

The post Boat People | Q&A with Thao Lam and Kjell Boersma appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

While many would have undoubtedly heard of Pablo, the preschool animated series about an autistic child and his imaginary friends, some may not be aware that it also features writers and voice artists on the spectrum themselves. Sumita Majumdar is one of those people, having written many episodes and even provided the voice of Wren. She joins us to celebrate this extraordinary month as she discusses her involvement in the series and her studies and career since joining this celebrated production.

Sumita Majumdar
(Source: Sumita Majumdar ©)

Could you share with us your autistic journey before you worked as a writer in animation?

I approached a school, for advice on finding something creative to do for work, and ended up doing some after-school assistant stuff there. After that, I did supply teaching, leading music art and drama sessions at various schools. Creativity really helped me at that time – art, music writing and performance. I wanted to find a way to help others use creativity in the way it had helped me. I tried to train as an art therapist at one point which didn’t work out – but I did a lot of volunteering with art and drama groups, making soundtracks for Partners Theatre Company and Reach Inclusive Arts… I assisted in a few stop-motion workshops with disabled young people and an art project with young people who were being supported for mental unwellness.

Before being diagnosed, I think I had sort of tried to push myself through what I thought the system of life was, and I didn’t know how everyone else was doing it without getting ill – or how people even knew what to do! It was difficult to manage without support, but also I was very resistant to social labels of any kind, so it was difficult to be able to be in the mind frame of accepting support if I couldn’t allow myself to identify in those ways. when I did eventually seek a diagnosis, I did it without telling anyone – I told myself it was for the documentation, to use for accessing support, rather than something I wanted to adapt my identity around – but the process I went through during that time allowed me to think more about society-frameworks, to learn more about autistic experiencing, and to understand myself alongside other autistic people whose brains and bodies did similar things to mine. Becoming involved with Pablo magically happened not too long after that, which not only further helped me to accept and embrace being autistic, but also to communicate to others about being autistic (definitely not in the way I expected to do so!)

Pablo and Friends (Image: Paper Owl ©)

What was your favourite episode to write and/or provide the voice of Wren?

I am terrible at choosing favourites – so I don’t know… when I was recording the voice parts, we all recorded them individually in the voice booth – it wasn’t like we were all together in a group – so I would be going through a list of Wren’s lines, rather than hearing all of the other lines in between – and it was often several scripts at once, so I think I processed it as one merged experience… it was a lot of fun, though…, particularly where I just had to laugh for a few minutes! In the first batch of episodes, we hadn’t met the other voice actors or writers yet – so it was really exciting to look through other people’s scripts and to relate my own experiences to things that they had written, and then for us to meet each other and find out about our similarities and differences.

Writing the episodes was fun – I co-wrote the scripts I wrote with Andrew Brenner mostly over video calls. I liked writing ‘The Super Place,’ which was one of the first ones… and ‘Everything Pineapple’ (at the time of writing, everything DID taste like pineapple – the ghost memory of drinking too much fruit juice…) The writing process of all of the stories I wrote with Andrew is memorable as the stories often related to things that were happening at the time. For example, I liked writing ‘Magic Postbox’ as I was working nightshifts sorting letters and parcels, which I loved doing, so it reminds me of that – but these immediate experiences were also combined with talking about how this links with memories and experiences of being a young child – what I remembered about that, how that related to what other autistic people’s experiences were, and what Pablo’s perspective of that could be. We would have a lot of conversations about autisticness, humanness, and sensing… – and characters would emerge (like ‘The Aroma’, or the Shouty Walls in the ‘Swimming Pool’ episode) – sometimes the characters would just say things that would make us laugh, so we’d put them in the scripts.

Since working on the show you have appeared as a speaker at the Children’s Media Conference and PARC Critical Autism Studies Conference. What was the message you hoped to achieve when you addressed these crowds? 

Since working on the show, I’ve spoken at various events, and each event I did had different purposes, with different types of people at them: some spaces were audiences of people who work in Children’s TV, and other spaces were academics, researchers, mental health professionals, and creative practitioners. It’s important to remember that people often don’t fit into just one category of people – I don’t – which is why ‘interdisciplinary’ spaces are important to me: being able to combine the arts with research and allowing myself to appear in whatever form is most comfortable for the moment. I have shared about ‘Pablo’ in most of my presentations for various purposes: to share more about the show, to share about Paper Owl Films’ process of creating the show, and to express autistic imagination and inner-world processing. I did a study on the creative process of Pablo as a psychoeducational tool, as part of the course I did (MSc Creative Arts & Mental Health), which is what I was presenting about at the PARC conference, whereas the Children’s Media Conference thing was more about my personal experience…

I hope that by speaking at these things and turning up as myself, I might encourage others to explore their communication styles to express themselves through writing, arts-making, speaking, or however, they want. There are lots of ways to do a presentation, and they can be a great way of sharing something you’re interested in.

And it’s great to be able to share about Pablo with different types of people – it’s a preschool show, so not everyone would have watched it – and even the people who have watched it might not be aware of the process behind the show, or the ways it might be particularly useful to explain certain things – perhaps in an accessible way, due to being a pre-school animation. I also hope that by sharing about Pablo, more people might think about inner-mind multiplicity (having different parts of you trying to figure things out – like Pablo and his Book Animal friends) – to help people realise, or remember, that is a part of processing – and how that relates to the performance of our selves (how we express, as our outer-body – which can be different depending on the scenario or who we are with)… it is okay to have conflicting parts of us, it’s about how we co-exist with them (and each other).

For your dissertation towards the MSc, you explored psycho-education and what you learned when working on Pablo. What was the biggest takeaway from this research that you hope to continue working on, whether towards another show or another new project?

My dissertation was about the creative process behind Pablo being a psychoeducational tool, for self-awareness, social understanding and mental wellness. It also unjumbled some things about autistic imagination, and how there are misperceptions about this (e.g. reading a bus timetable can be a social, creative activity – it’s not necessarily less imaginative than reading fiction). It also recognised thinking through inner-worlds / inner-mind characters not just being ‘dissociation’, but also being ‘association’, which I think is important in de-pathologising some imaginative processing styles (such as Pablo’s!) There was so much I wanted to write about that wouldn’t fit in the word count, so I’d love to continue the research – alongside making practical, useable, accessible imagination tools for mental wellness, and to continue creating spaces that offer Permission to Be.

One significant result of the study was how the show helped autistic people to better understand other autistic people, as well as themselves. Before it was made, Pablo was initially intended to help people who aren’t autistic to better understand and empathise with autistic people, to hopefully lead to autistic people having a better experience in the world; but the study highlighted the show’s potential to help autistic people better understand and empathise with other autistic people, similar and different to themselves. It’s a reminder of people’s contradicting and conflicting access needs, differing autistic presentation styles – and the diversity of people’s processing styles in general, whether autistic or not. I’m excited to continue observing the Pablo process as it unfolds – but I’m also excited about immersing myself into other inner-world story-play animation spaces, and to keep observing things through different lenses.

Pablo Series Three (Image: Paper Owl ©)

How do you feel the current slate of animation productions has represented these neurodivergent and mental health conditions and what more do you think could be done?

I really like going to things like the London International Animation Festival – I like watching things which feels like people taking stuff out of their brains and putting them onto a screen, and get that “my brain does that, too!” feeling. I’m interested in more work that combines research and personal experiences, from multi-angles – things that offer some sort of reframing, and questioning such as the work Alex Widdowson has been doing with his films Drawing on Autism and Divergent Minds, for example. Animation has a certain kind of flavour of communication in comparison with other films, which can be a step towards possible solutions in the shared outer world.

Maybe I don’t watch enough to know about ‘the current slate,’ but I do really value animation as a way of expressing, explaining, and learning about your inner-mind. I think this makes animation a great tool from all sides of the screen (making it, watching it, sharing it), and I think more people could be encouraged to try it out – even if it’s not for TV. I think there could be more pathways for neurodivergent people, including people with ‘mental health conditions’, to enter and explore animation, as it’s a great communication tool, and I think a lot of people would appreciate its immersion. Paper Owl Films launched the Pablo Academy, which aimed to recruit neurodivergent people for a placement, and I became a supporting Neurodivergent Mentor as a part of that – I think more things like that would be great… but I’m also interested in providing more opportunities, such as workshops, or creative toolkits, for people who haven’t been exposed to animation or who might not have given themselves a go. I’ve assisted on a few animation workshops with disabled young people, and I’ve got some coming up with Can’t Sit Still Theatre’s ‘Being Me’ project (aimed at autistic young girls and non-binary people.) But how do people find a way of continuing that after one-off projects like it – and how they get into doing that for work, if they want to? Perhaps studios could team up with these sorts of projects to help to bridge that.

The post Autism Awareness Month: Interview with ‘Pablo’ Writer and Voice Talent Sumita Majumdar appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Missouri-based Tracy Butler studied Biology in college before embracing her true path in the visual arts, and went on to work for a small game development studio as an illustrator and concept artist, her roles eventually spanning 3D character artist, animation and art directing. It was her comic Lackadaisy, inspired by the history surrounding the century-old home she’d recently moved into, as well as her appreciation for cats, that garnered her international attention in the mid-to-late naughties. A story of bootlegging jazz cats that would ultimately get itself an Eisner award in 2011, its most recent iteration is a phenomenally successful animated adaptation. Bringing on board Fable Siegel, an incredible artist whose body of work includes animation for Titmouse, Starburns, Hazbin Hotel, Game Grumps as well as storyboarding for shows including F is For Family, Ben 10, Adam Ruins Everything: Reanimated History and Wacky Races, the highly anticipated, 27-minute film was released at the end of March to much excitement, following a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020.

Joining forces with Spike Trotman of Iron Circus Comics, the team massively exceeded their initial crowdfunding goal of $85,000 grand, eventually raising over $330,000, ultimately allowing them to realise the dream of many an indie artist and filmmaker and create a 27 minute film on their own terms and true to their vision.

Upon its release, Lackadaisy became an online phenomenon, with over 3.5 million views in its first week. Boasting an enormous roster of fantastic artistic talent, a solid cast and engaging music by Sepiatonic, the film has also caught the attention of prominent figures such as indie legend Ralph Bakshi, illustrator Tyson Hesse and director Lilly Wachowski.

Stream the podcast below or direct download here.

For more on the project visit the official Lackadaisy site.

The post Lackadaisy | Podcast interview with Tracy Butler and Fable Siegel appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

The creators behind PBS Kids’ Hero Elementary, Carol-Lynn Parente and Christine Ferraro, join us to discuss their careers in Sesame Street and how they created an animated series featuring young superheroes in training. But throughout their work in children’s television, they have also made a couple of celebrated autistic characters that have connected with young audiences.

Carol-Lynn Parente and Christine Ferraro
(Image: Carol-Lynn Parente ©)

I was really impressed that you both started your careers on one of the biggest children’s television shows of all time, Sesame Street. How did you both land your first jobs on a property filled with iconic characters and what was it like to progress through your careers there?

CLP: I started at what was then called, Children’s Television Workshop in 1988, in the Talent Payment department.  It was a finance job and only my 2nd job out of school.  I graduated with a double major in Economics/Marketing, but I did an internship at NBC in Manhattan in my senior year and was hooked on wanting to work in television after that.  I applied for every open job on the production staff of Sesame Street, and one year after joining the company,  there was an opening as the assistant to the Post Production Supervisor.  I steadily rose through the ranks over my 30-year career, going from Production Assistant to Associate Producer, to Producer and finally, Executive Producer and SVP of Creative before leaving in 2016 to pursue other interests. We were very lucky to begin our careers on such a special show that continues to be the gold standard in children’s content.  The show was already in season 18 when I joined, and well established.  The hardest part about the job over the years was working to evolve the iconic show, to keep it relevant and fresh for the current pre-schoolers, without disappointing the large adult fan base that had a real affectionate relationship with the show and characters they grew up with.

CF: I started working on the show as an administrative assistant, right out of college. I was lucky enough to have a teacher at my school who needed an assistant, and the timing was right. I grew familiar with the show and the scripts, and when they were auditioning new writers, I decided to give it a try. I’ve been writing for the show for 30 years now, and still going!

You were both also part of the team who helped to create Julia, the first autistic character on Sesame Street. How and why was she made for the show?

CF: Sesame Workshop had a nationwide initiative, See Amazing in All Children, aimed at communities with children ages 2 to 5.  Julia was a character created to be on the autism spectrum, to help introduce the topic to young children and their families.  The focus of the initiative was to reduce stigmas around autism and build understanding and acceptance.  Julia was created for a digital storybook.  But the response was so favourable to Julia that we decided she should be part of the Sesame Street show for all audiences.

Julia from Sesame Street (Image: Sesame Workshop ©)

How did you both come up with the idea of Hero Elementary and for those who may not have seen it, could you explain it in your own words?

CLP/CF: Hero Elementary is about a school for budding superheroes, where the students are learning how to master their powers, like teleportation or flying, while also discovering the most critical problem-solving abilities, the Superpowers of Science.  The series aims to give children 4-7 the tools to solve problems by thinking and acting like scientists to save the day.

The show was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready To Learn grant, awarded to Twin Cities Public Television.  The proposal sought to use a book, Superhero School, to inspire the STEM-focused initiative.  We were brought on to develop the TV show as part of the project. The book had a math focus, so we really had to start from scratch to build a show idea around a STEM curriculum.  But coming from Sesame Street, we were so excited about the hook of superheroes to engage kids.  We spent our careers learning how to embed all kinds of the curriculum into content using the tools of lovable characters and humour, as how superheroes should make our jobs easy, right?

Well, it was a blessing and a curse.  The minute kids in our formative testing groups found out the show was about superheroes, they went off on wild tangents imagining all sorts of superhero powers that weren’t even in our stories.  It became clear that if we had any hopes of teaching the science practices, we needed to embed them more into the lore of our superhero world.  That’s when the “Superpowers of Science” were born as the foundation of the science curriculum for the show.

Out of your diverse cast of protagonists is AJ, an autistic character with a love for gadgets and who can project his thoughts. How did you both come up with the character and why did you write him specifically as an autistic person?

CLP/CF: Interestingly, AJ wasn’t initially written as a character with autism.  We knew we wanted a show led by a team of kids working together.  And when you are creating a show you want to create a cast of characters whose personalities work well for stories. These kids had to be friends, but also have different personalities that might clash or cause tension to make the stories interesting and authentic.

We had just come off of creating a character for Sesame Street with autism, so we were well-informed on the subject.  AJ was a character that had a deep passion for all things superhero and as we described him to others, it occurred to us that we had created a character that could have autism.  We were thrilled when everyone on the project supported our thinking.

The cast of Hero Elementary (Image: Portfolio_Entertainment ©)

What type of research did you do to make AJ and how did this mould him from concept to the final product?

CLP/CF: We were well-versed on the subject of autism, but once we confirmed AJ was a character with autism we did a lot of new research and hired expert advisors to guide us.  Having created a female character for Sesame Street, with the intention of breaking the male stereotype around autism, we were happy to have a male character on the spectrum in AJ, to differentiate the characters.

In addition to expert advisors, we also had a young man with autism as an advisor.  Dennis Taylor was someone that Christine knew was a young, black man with autism who helped inform who AJ became. We had further support from our expert advisors on AJ as a black character because of the statistics around the delayed diagnosis of autism in the black community.

When developing these young superheroes and their specific powers, what made you both give AJ his certain superpowers? 

CLP/CF: When deciding what powers each character had, we wanted them to have powers the audience would think were cool, but also powers that fit their personalities.

Sara Snap is impulsive, so teleportation fits her personality well. She is also tiny but tough and resilient, so she has the power of super strength.  With AJ, we wanted to give him powers that tied to his interests. Having a deep passion for all things superheroes, AJ has the power to build superhero gadgets as his favourite superheroes have. AJ also has the power of thought projection. This enabled us to give the audience some insight into how AJ might think a little differently about things because of his autism. And it was also super helpful in stories when you want a little flashback to what just happened.

PBS Kids have included a few key characters on the spectrum, including Julia from Sesame Street, Temple Grandin and Ben in Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, and Max from Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood. What is it about the channel that makes it stand out when representing neurodiversity and what was it like to have worked on shows that were part of that?

CLP/CF: This is the second character on the spectrum we have created for PBS, having shared that we created Julia as well. The wonderful thing about working on shows for PBS is that they care about representation across their audience and all of their content has positive messages of hope and kindness at their core. Having a character on the spectrum is not only to represent other kids or people on the spectrum, but also to break down any fear or stigma about autism to promote understanding and acceptance when you encounter someone that might think or behave differently than you do.

AJ Gadgets from Hero Elementary (Image: Portfolio_Entertainment ©)

The post Autism Awareness Month: Interview with ‘Hero Elementary’ Creators Carol-Lynn Parente and Christine Ferraro appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

One of the people who have joined us for this year’s celebration is Charles Johnston, an Emmy award-winning writer in children’s television whose credits include Paw Patrol, Odd Squad, and Detentionaire. But he was also part of the writing team behind Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, where he wrote a special episode on a particularly important figure.

Charles Johnston
(Source: Charles Johnston ©)

Before becoming an Emmy award-winning writer, how did you start your career in children’s television?

My very first writing job was at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) writing for two hosts (and a couple of sock puppets) who introduced television programs aimed at preschool kids in the morning. After that, there was just so much work in children’s TV animation where I lived in Toronto (they made Paw Patrol here!) that over the years it turned into a speciality.

While US readers may be familiar with Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum on PBS Kids, could you explain in your own words what the show is about for those who may not have seen it? 

Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum is about three kids – Xavier, Yadina, and Brad – who have access to a time machine. They use it to visit the past in every episode and have playdates with historical figures back when they were kids. On every outing, they learn a lesson from who they meet. They take that lesson back to the present to solve a problem one is facing, like learning how to stand up for others or get better at playing an instrument. This way, in each episode, a world-changing individual is introduced to a new generation. And if they could grow up to change the world, anyone can, because these renowned heroes were once kids, too.

Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum
(© 9 Story Media Group)

And how did you get involved as one of the writers on the show? 

I knew a producer named Tanya Green who helped develop the show and she suggested I’d be a good fit. And Meghan Read, the amazing head writer, agreed to hire me. We’d worked together previously on a show called Dot. We creatively clicked and enjoyed working together.

You’ve written about several key historical figures for Xavier Riddle, including Florence Nightingale, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ella Fitzgerald. How did you become involved with writing the episode on Temple Grandin, an autistic professor and speaker on autism and the behaviour of animals?

The short answer is I lucked out! If I remember correctly, I actually asked the head writer if I could do it. I took part in story summits where we would figure out stories to go along with already approved subjects. Meghan said to let her know if we felt a connection to any particular one. My mom had recently recommended the movie Temple Grandin to me and I honestly thought she’d be proud if I told her I was working on an episode about Grandin.

What were the biggest challenges when writing about Temple Grandin and Ben, the other autistic character featured in the same episode?

I knew I had the sensitivity to approach both characters but what I lacked was knowledge about autism and how to phrase everything appropriately when talking about the subject. I had quite a bit to learn there.

I Am Temple Grandin
(© 9 Story Media Group)

How much did you learn about autism during the writing process and what was your biggest takeaway from the experience?

We worked directly with Temple Grandin and also had a consulting firm help us with the subject of autism. It proved not only helpful but enlightening. I remember one time phrasing something in a first draft where I said that “an autistic person may do something that a non-autistic person might find odd” and the consultants advised me to tweak the wording to “an autistic person may do something that a non-autistic person had never thought of before.” I found these kinds of insights profound. Sometimes we get hung up on being tolerant instead of just being appreciative. We should be thankful that everyone thinks and sees the world differently.

Did you know how Temple Grandin herself thought about the episode with both her portrayal and how autism was represented?

I heard she was pleased. She agreed to let us profile her if she could weigh in at every stage of the process. We pitched her a few scenarios, but she insisted she just wanted to teach kids how to make and fly a kite. It all fell into place so elegantly. It was like she was ten steps ahead of us in how she saw what the episode could be, which of course is rather apt. Everyone involved with the show loved how the episode turned out. It’s definitely one of my favourites.

Last year, ‘I am Temple Grandin’ was nominated for a WGC (Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting) Award in the Children’s Category, competing with major titles like The Snoopy Show. What was it like to have your work on this particular episode recognised by the guild?

It was an honour. It was also nominated for a Canadian Screen Award the same year. I was proud of being rewarded for exploring new ground. I was especially delighted that through this kind of recognition, we could reach more people with the episode’s message: that everyone thinks differently. That’s the only way that innovations can happen.

The post Autism Awareness Month: Interview with Children’s TV Writer Charles Johnston appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman © Modern Films

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collision of these two ideas of disaster. Some disasters are communal, perhaps national, much like the earthquake and tsunami which underscores every scene in this film set in 2011 Japan. But disaster can be personal, too. It may not leave an imprint on the earth itself, but for one person it is an apocalyptic event.

Pierre Földes’ adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short stories follows characters trying to make sense of disaster. Whether they’re an ageing, balding, lonely banker who daydreams about being recruited by an off-puttingly anthropomorphic frog asking him to save Japan, or a middle aged divorcee, living life on auto-pilot, trying to find a cure for his emptiness. Abstract, quiet and reflective, the film is a character study of people looking for meaning.

In this sense, the film is a departure from the source material. Murakami’s stories are segregated, often being pulled from different books to forge the narrative Földes looked to tell. The director himself has had a rather scenic career. Having grown up wanting to be a painter, Földes shifted into music composition before finding his way to making films. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman marks his feature directorial debut.

Wanting to innovate from the start, Földes implemented an experimental cousin of rotoscoping for this film. The entire film was shot in live action, but instead of being traced into animation, the footage was used as a reference for animators to study the subtleties of human facial expressions and mannerisms. 

Földes talked to Skwigly about the look of the film, finding his way to animation and the mechanics of adapting Murakami’s work. Here is that conversation, lightly edited for clarity. 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman © Modern Films

How have you gauged the reaction to the film?

The reception has been really fantastic. One thing that makes me very happy is that the reception from the younger generation, late teenagers until about 28, they seem to really get the film and embrace it and understand it in the way it’s supposed to be understood. That means they just take it all in, and it inspires them in some way. They’re not too analytical, trying to make sense of everything. The film actually does make sense, it’s just not that easy to understand. But they accept it like that, maybe, because they’re used to seeing all kinds of confusing images, and they just take it all in.

Your journey is quite interesting, from being a visual artist, to a composer, to now a director. Was this the plan?

It was planned, but sort of a delayed plan. My father was an artist, painter, and animator. And so for me, it was obvious that I wanted to be an artist. I was always drawing and then something weird happened. I just switched and went into music for some odd reason, and I was quite good at it. And so, I just went into classical training for composition and orchestration and I sort of let go of the visual arts, but never completely. I started working as a composer, I was moving between New York and Paris, then I moved again and I went to Hungary where I went back into painting, suddenly. That was fantastic because, at that point, I thought, “Wow, this is unquestionably what I should have done all my life.” So I had some kind of regret, I must say. I just love it. I love oil painting, I love the smell of it. I love the brushes, I am really passionate about it. It’s amazing.

I also started making films and when I was very young, I acted in theatre and did some stage direction. I’m a little all over the place. The odd thing is that I started making short films really late [in life]. I just found myself suddenly going back into drawing and really finding interest in pencil drawing. Then little by little I got into animation, but developed my own technique. I had no training in animation which was really wonderful. It made me much more eager to create stuff, to create a style, and to always look for something new. 

Do you think having not a firm basis in animation helped you innovate on the animation style we see in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman?

Completely. I get lots of questions from students and young animators and artists [about animation] but it’s not like I have massive experience. But I would be almost tempted to say the only thing that’s interesting is finding your way. This depends on, are you trying to be an animator working for this or that studio? Or are you trying to be a musician working here and there? Or is your aim to be an artist? I mean an artist, somebody who is doing something absolutely unique, that nobody [can do] by recreating something. I’m only interested in that, but I totally understand that many people can be interested in being the best Disney Style animator or great jazz pianist. It’s fine, it’s just not my thing. 

I found it really interesting that some characters and some objects were drawn with white outlines instead of black outlines, as would be traditional. What was the thinking behind that?

So, there’s many ways to answer. The first one would be to say that it’s just my stylistic approach, my style that I’ve developed for this film. To go a little bit more in detail, I could say that it’s an interpretation of my perception of things. So as opposed to, let’s say, photography, live action, where you take a camera, and you print what the lens is seeing. You’re getting a 2D image that’s more or less realistic. When I think of the way I see things, my brain is working all the time which is affecting the way I perceive things. My aim, when I’m making a film, is trying to reproduce my vision. So the way this works is, I have a character who’s focusing on this other character, but then there’s something in the background which is not very important, and so it’s  [shown to be] blurry. Or maybe I’m not paying attention to that person, but I still know that it’s this shape, and this far away. It’s a sort of enhanced reality, but totally subjective.

Reality is a really important aspect of the film because there’s so much shifting between dreams and reality. What were the challenges of depicting those transitions?

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman © Modern Films

I remember really paying attention to that even when I was beginning to write the script. I’m writing the script, and then I’m doing the storyboards and I’m thinking, “How am I going to be able to shift here and there?” I wanted to avoid these moments where [the audience] thinks, “This is real and now I’m in a dream.” In order to do that, my approach was to always keep reality a little bit off, and always keep the “dreams”, somewhat connected with reality. That way, it makes it smoother, and you’re not going from one to another, it’s always there. 

What were the most difficult visuals to pull off in the film?

If something is difficult, I don’t see it as difficult. I see it as something I don’t know how I’m going to do, and this is exactly what I’m interested in. I’m only interested in diving into a world that I’m attracted to, without being able to define it. If I can define things beforehand, then it’s just a job and I know how to do it. Everybody can do it. What’s interesting is if you feel that there’s something attractive here, some emotion or some relationship, you dive in and you think, “How am I going to find my way out? How am I going to transcribe this?”

Did you have the idea to tie Murakami’s short stories into one large narrative from the start?

No, to be honest, it wasn’t from the start. In the beginning, it was going to be segmented, there was going to be four or five stories. Then little by little, I started thinking that this character could actually exist in this other story. And when you start mixing them up, things get tangled and you have to find solutions. This was my solution and it made sense. In the end, it made a sort of full circle, because when I put everything together, I needed to separate it again, that’s why I created chapters. It was nice for me to give a little separation, a little breathing room in between, like you’d normally put a book down at the end of a chapter.

How much of yourself did you want to put into the film versus respecting the source?

I don’t know. I mean, I had no plan, it just happened. Let’s say you’re an actor, you’re playing a written part, but at the same time, you’re the one who’s doing it, you are the one incarnating that character. So you read these lines by Murakami, of course, it’s his words, but at the same time, the way these words impact you, that’s you, that’s yours, it’s not Murakami anymore. If these words touch you, they touch you because of what you are, because of your life, because of your knowledge, your experience, who you are. So then, if you decide to use this to express something the way you feel it, it’s yours. It’s completely inspired by you.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman © Modern Films

The stories you pull from are set in such a specific time in Japanese history. Did you have any apprehension about tackling this real life event?

I just love those stories and I thought there was some humour in it also. I was never trying to be faithful to anything, I didn’t try to recreate a real Tokyo or real Japan, it was my vision of it. I’m always pointing out the fact that I’m just an artist, I’m not trying to be authentic, it’s fiction. 

What was the biggest lesson you learned from making this film?

Don’t do animation. Forget it, it hurts. You have to be truly of masochistic nature to go into making a feature animation. 

Are you a masochist?

I guess so! But I’m cured. Not anymore. I mean, it’s wonderful, it was just a bit too long… well, much too long. I thought it would take me two years from beginning to end, but it took so much longer. It’s completely crazy to make a film at all is nuts. Now I have many more projects. One is live action with a little animation, then I have another one that’s full animation. But I’ll cross my fingers, I hope I’m going to manage to pull it off a bit faster.

Do you think he could have pulled this film off in live action?

Yeah, I think so. I have no idea how I could have done it, but it’s possible. The Frog would have been an issue, but not really, he might have not not been a frog, it could have been just a weird character.

Have you made your dream film, composition or work of art?

I am only interested in making stuff, so there’s no such thing. I mean, I’m super happy to be making films, [this] was just far too long. In the world of the film industry, the problem is it’s an industry. Finding funding for a film and then releasing it, there’s all that work around it. I’m only interested in making stuff! If somebody wants to hire me tomorrow to direct actors, I’m there. I’m interested in the creative path. That’s it. And if I could go from one creative activity to another one, I’d be happy.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman  by Pierre Földes will be released in UK and Irish cinemas by Modern Films on 31 March 2023.

The post Pierre Földes on ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’, an Animated Adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Short Stories appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

2022 saw critics and audiences underwhelmed by theatrical Disney projects such as Lightyear and Strange World, but it was their straight-to-streaming release that captured the hearts of the public. Domee Shi’s semi-autobiographical tale of Mei Lee, a 13 year old Chinese-Canadian girl who turns into a giant red panda when emotionally overwhelmed, finds universal relatability in the specificity of its protagonist.

Turning Red is as exaggerated, cartoonish and hilarious as Pixar has ever been all while breaking ground in mainstream animation. This is the first time that a Pixar film has been spearheaded by an almost entirely female team and also showcases the studio’s first Asian protagonist. By tackling subjects like periods and puberty, Turning Red has become a landmark of progression from the most celebrated studio in Oscars history. 

On the day of the nomination announcement, Domee took some time to talk to Skwigly about the importance of Turning Red and how it has been embraced by the animation community since its release. Here is that conversation, lightly edited for clarity. 

What was your reaction to the nomination? 

Well, I didn’t want to wake up early to watch it live because I was too nervous. So I slept through the nominations and then I woke up to a bunch of texts congratulating me and people on the crew and I was like, ‘Oh, good. We got it.’ That’s my way of being able to handle it. I can’t handle watching it live, the anticipation and anxiety as they read off the names.

I don’t blame you. Even watching it myself, I was waiting for Turning Red to pop up, and it was the last one they said in the category.

I didn’t know it was the last one, that’s crazy. I’m glad I didn’t watch it, I would have freaked out.

Does this feel different from campaigning in 2019 with Bao?

I mean, it’s the same but it’s different. With Turning Red, it’s a feature film and it’s just so much bigger, and the audience is bigger, and I feel like there’s more eyeballs on and more pressure on the film to be nominated, to be recognised. The studio and the crew put so much work behind it. Whereas for Bao it was a short film, so in some way the pressure was a little bit less. And, that was before COVID. And everything just feels so different now.

Do you feel that some of that pressure comes from the fact that Turning Red is an extremely personal story?

Sort of. It’s a personal story, but also it’s a film that has so many firsts. So that’s why it has a lot of pressure on it. It’s the first [Pixar] film to be helmed by a majority female leadership. It’s the first film from Pixar with an Asian, female lead. I think it’s the first animated feature film to really deal with puberty and all of the ugliness and clinginess and awkwardness that comes with it. And, but then it’s just a relief to just see a film that is so bold, and so different embraced by audiences all over the world and now by members of The Academy and people within the film community. It really shows that if you take chances on these specific films that celebrate different kinds of stories that are universal, you know? That a universal story can look like this and deal with subject matter like this.

What’s something that audiences have taken from the movie that you didn’t expect?

So many things. What I love most is lurking on Twitter, because I don’t account, but looking at all the memes that are created from the movie, and how people resonate and connect with the film in different ways. There was this one meme that was created where it’s that scene where Mei is under her bed, and she’s sketching in her sketchbook and they turn it into a three panel comic where the first panel is her laughing goofily, and then she draws something, and you reveal what she’s drawing and people have added their own embarrassing drawings from middle school, they add something really specific to their fandom, or to what they are embarrassed to it like. We’ve all been underneath our beds, sketching things in our sketchbooks. So that’s one of my favourite things to come out of the movie.

Fan art is so core to your journey as an artist and is baked into Mei’s character too. Has there been a favourite piece of fan art that you’ve come across?

Ah, gosh, there’s so many. There’s really creative ones out there. Like, I saw fan art comics of Mei’s mother and her dad, when they were young and how they met. It’s super specific. I’ve seen interesting, creative fan art where people create their own Panda-sonas like their own version of what their magical red panda would look like. And it’d be a different colour and a different design. And then, of course, all of the super amazing 4Town fan art. Seeing people attach themselves to this fictional boy band and get as into them as Mei and her friends are in the movie is just amazing. It’s just so cool to see how this movie has really touched everyone’s 13 year old nerdy selves in a really fun way.

Was it a big challenge for you to make sure that each character’s panda was distinct? 

Yeah, we worked closely with Rona Liu, our production designer, and the art team in making sure that there were characteristics that we carried through from each of the human designs and put them into the panda designs. We still wanted the pandas to be like pandas. But for Ming’s character, for example, in act three, when she transforms into a Godzilla red panda that design actually went through a couple of iterations. So, the first design that we approved was a much scarier version of panda Ming.

My initial instinct for shooting that whole sequence at the boyband concert was like, ‘Oh man, we just gotta make this feel as scary as possible. Mei is terrified her mom’s gonna wreck everything and kill her favourite boyband.’ And it seemed funnier in my head but then when we watched it, with that really scary panda Ming design, it didn’t read like it. It read way too scary. And I was losing the metaphor of ‘This is just an exaggerated mother-teen daughter fight in the living room on a massive scale.’ We went back to the drawing board, we redesigned panda Ming to give her more characteristics of a human being. 

We gave her that really funny looking hair swoop, we gave her a mole on her eye and then we also worked with the animators on her behaviour. In the first pass, she had more of this animalistic bear kind of animation and she didn’t really feel like a human in there at all. She felt like she was crazy and out of control. But then, in the second pass, the animators took a lot of Ming’s mannerisms. Hands on her hips, a finger wagging, just her overall sassiness, they carried that through. That really helped her read. She’s a giant, angry mom, not a giant, angry monster.

I’ve never visited Toronto, but this film made me nostalgic for a place I’ve never been. Could you talk about developing that nostalgic feel?

So I grew up in Toronto, in the 2000s and I thought it’d be a really cool opportunity to set this movie during that time. Toronto is always in movies, but it’s always disguised as New York or Chicago or another American city. It’s never really celebrated or seen as Toronto. I just really wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate just the diversity and the unique architecture and that small town in a big city kind of feeling that Toronto has that I remember growing up.

And I really just wanted to celebrate the people that I grew up with. I wanted to highlight the Chinatown that me and my parents would shop at every weekend when we first immigrated to Toronto. Even though my parents and I are not Cantonese, that was the closest thing we had to home in the West. And I wanted to celebrate all the diverse classmates that I had growing up. I was lucky that I lived in Toronto where I never felt like an other for being Chinese. I felt othered in that I was a total anime nerd and I was vice president of the anime club, that’s how I was othered. I wasn’t othered for who I was, which was nice.

Mei’s friends are definitely a representation of the types of kids that I hung out with that I befriended. There’s a large Asian population in Toronto, South Asian population, as well. It’s funny because we will always get comments saying ‘wow, you made your movie so diverse. How did you do that? Why did you do that?’ And I’d be like, well, that’s just reality. Right? Like, that’s just what Toronto is. And a lot of people don’t realise that because when they think of Canada, they think of snow, French Canadian lumberjacks and stuff, but the Canada that I know is really multicultural. It’s really cool that this movie is redefining what it means to be Canadian.

WE’VE GOT YOUR (FLUFFY) BACK – In Disney and Pixar’s all-new original feature film “Turning Red,” everything is going great for 13-year-old Mei—until she begins to “poof” into a giant panda when she gets too excited. Fortunately, her tightknit group of friends have her fantastically fluffy red panda back. Featuring the voices of Rosalie Chiang, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Hyein Park as Mei, Miriam, Priya and Abby, “Turning Red” will debut exclusively on Disney+ (where Disney+ is available) on March 11, 2022. © 2022 Disney/Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

I appreciated seeing some South Asian people in the movie, shout out to Priya. For my final question I have to ask about boba tea. Your go-to order is a Fresh Taro Milk Tea, can you help me understand the appeal of Fresh Taro as a topping?

It’s so great because it’s like a dessert, it’s a solid and a liquid at the same time and it feels like you’re drinking and eating a beverage. Some people don’t like that mealy texture of Fresh Taro in their drink, but I love it. I love the ability to do multiple things when you’re drinking. It feels like a good deal. It’s like a two on one thing. You get a drink and you get a little snack.

THE 95TH ACADEMY AWARDS will take place at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood Sunday, March 12, 2023. Hear more from Domee Shi in episode 12 of our podcast series Animation One-To-Ones:

The post ‘Turning Red’ | Q&A with Domee Shi appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

To boil The Last Wish down to a film taking the “Spider-verse art style” would be reductive. Of course, it blends 2D and 3D styles and varies the frame rates of characters (referred to as ‘stepped’ animation), but this is done in service of the painterly, fairytale feel the movie aims for. Despite the undeniable inspiration from Spider-verse, The Last Wish feels like its own beast and acts as a statement from DreamWorks about where they see animation going. These films do not have to look the same anymore.

At the centre of this innovation is director Joel Crawford and producer Mark Swift. Both have been at DreamWorks since the 2000s, Crawford as a story artist on movies such as Bee Movie, Rise of the Guardians and the Kung Fu Panda franchise before being given the chance to direct 2020’s The Croods: A New Age. Swift has produced 10 previous projects with DreamWorks, starting with 2004’s Shark Tale all the way up to Crawford’s The Croods sequel.

Joel and Mark spoke to Skwigly about the success of the film, the challenges with establishing its style and tone as well as the state of the animation industry as a whole. Below is that conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Ryan: You guys look very excited for two people have been doing a continuous press tour for the last six months or so.

Mark Swift: The movie is so joyful, honestly, seeing its reaction and how people around the world have really embraced this film. You work on these movies for years and finally your baby goes out and we’re so happy and joyful to see how people have been receiving it.

Joel Crawford: That’s exactly what I was feeling too where it’s like, we are now feeding off the enthusiasm of the critics, of audiences and it’s so fun. It’s very rewarding to get this embrace from the world.

Oscar nomination morning must have been a fun morning as well, I imagine. What were your reactions when you got that news?

MS: I was a little groggy because it was very early in the morning and we were hopeful of an Oscar nomination. So I slept on and off, checking my phone. Eventually, I started seeing the texts come through and I was like, “yeah!” I quickly woke up at that stage.

JC: It was big news, but then it was so immediate where I gotta get my three kids ready for school. They don’t care that dad got nominated, so back to real life. No, it’s been so exciting.

One of the reasons the film has been embraced is because of the animation style. Did the existence of movies like The Bad Guys and Spider-verse act as guidelines for you?

JC: Yes and no. It’s wonderful what’s happened to the animation industry post-Spider-verse, where animated movies don’t have to be full CG, especially for the Western audience. Then with The Bad Guys innovating their own style was helpful as we’re developing the right look for Puss In Boots, being a fairytale painting. There’s still a lot of finding its unique look, but it definitely helps to have partners within the studio, who have been developing software and things to push the 2D Look.

Joel has mentioned in other interviews that, for a lot of the animators, this was their first time working on stepped animation. Mark, as the producer, how do you manage the time it takes for so many people to learn something new while making deadlines?

MS: The thing with artists and animators is that they’re excited to try something new. So there was an immediate embrace at the studio. Most of the animators that come from animation school, they’ve done lots of different styles over the years and to get the chance to actually work on some of that on a film, I think they were so enthusiastic. But it didn’t become an issue. The animators were so with us on every step of the way that it never felt like it was a huge challenge. There were challenges but we kind of got through them all in all, on time on budget, moving forward.

What were those challenges that are unique to this film?

MS: When we were trying to find our look, we had to find the right balance of CGI and 2D. Because we’re a sequel, we’re not brand new, people have an expectation of the Shrek and the Puss In Boots world. They know what Puss In Boots looks like, they want to pick him up and put him in their lap. And so, when you put a completely CG character in a completely 2D world, where do you switch on and switch off? He’s on a desk that’s 2D and he’s looking completely CG, it starts to look weird. A lot of our experimentations were like, “what’s the foreground look? What’s the background look? We get more painterly as you go off into the background. So, that was a little bit of a challenge finding the right balance in terms of the look.

Can you see this becoming the dominant animation style, the way that Pixar and DreamWorks established that CG realistic style in the 2000s?

JC: I would hope that it doesn’t, that it’s one of many styles. I think what’s so exciting is that DreamWorks has given this premise of, “the filmmaker should find the style and the tools to tell their story specifically.” You look at The Bad Guys and it’s innovative, it’s pushed this 2D, anime feel. And then [The Last Wish] being a fairy tale painting. I think it’s exciting to go, “can we keep, you know, finding new inspirations that are specific to the filmmakers?” But it is really great that we’re not chasing photorealism, or the CG look anymore. Some movies fully deserved to be that, but it’s nice when we can have so many animated movies in a year, and they can all feel different. That’d be wonderful.

MS: I think one of the big advantages of us, and Spider-verse, and The Bad Guys is that all these movies did well. And so from a studio perspective, it gives you, gives our studio, our executives, our team at Universal, a little bit more ability to go “Yeah, try something. Let’s give it a go.” I mean, we’ve constantly seen the short films and more independently minded animated movies taking risks and I think what we’re seeing is bigger movies now embracing that, and Joel says, being able to use whatever style suits the story best, rather than saying, “Oh, it has to look like CG, because that’s what makes them money. And if you do something differently, you know, you’re running a financial risk.” I think that’s loosening for sure, and in the next three, four years, I think we’re going to be really pleasantly surprised by how the animation industry is moving.

Could you talk about the rhythm that the action in this film possesses?

JC: I think first of all, with the style that we’re pushing, on one hand, there’s CG, traditional style, which is 24 frames a second and each image is held for one frame. It’s nice and smooth and grounded. And then in the action scenes, we lean more toward what might be considered an anime style, which is a traditional hand drawn animation, which we call ‘stepped,’ where you have certain images that are held, not for one frame, but maybe 2, 3, 4. What the effect is, you’re getting to see poses that are extreme, that catch your eye longer, and it feels hyper fantastical, it doesn’t feel like reality, it feels pushed, and superhero like.

We really wanted to make sure we weren’t just doing it because it was cool, that we had a concept behind it. It all boiled down to the story being about a superhero, Puss In Boots, who is this larger than life icon who doesn’t realise he’s mortal. We were able to use action scenes that feel so fun and turned up in the stepped animation, and then contrast it with moments where Puss is feeling anxiety, and feeling connections, and this grounded kind of reality. Using CG in a way that the audience, whether they know the technique or not, experiences that ride, because there’s two different styles.

You say you don’t do it just because it’s cool, but it’s really freaking cool. 

MS: The ideal is when you have something that works and fits, and then it’s also cool.

Did you have anything where it has that cool factor, but breaks the immersion a little too much?

JC: I think for us we’re telling the story in an authentic way where we’re making sure the story works for the characters. I’ll take the moment where Puss is in the bar, and he gets cut. You could say, Is that too shocking? But Puss is this larger than life character who has this big ego. He sings in the opening song that he’s never been touched by a blade. We needed Puss to wake up and feel something he had never felt before, fear, in this case. There’s this shocking red background in that moment, which is very stylized, but I think the audience feels a new tone. They feel fear for the first time, not only in this movie, but also in the previous Puss In Boots movie or the Shrek world. It was important that the audience almost get shocked awake, with Puss In Boots. I think as long as we are sincere to the character in these moments, we weren’t questioning whether it was too far because it just needed to work authentically for the story.

MS: And it needed to be like that because this movie up to that point is a riot. He’s defeating everyone, he has a laugh at the doctor’s office explaining all these previous lives. Everything is fun. But the journey of Puss being down to his last life, we needed a 180 spin, not just for Puss, but as Joel said, for the audience. That’s really when our movie starts, this new adventure for purpose. We joke about this [bar scene], it was one of the first sequences we did and we had to show it to our executives. Obviously, we’re making what we think is correct, but we have tiers of approval at the studio. But immediately our execs were on board, they were like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what it needs to be.” It was great that everyone could see it.

JC: I think that they understood the movie as a whole was going to be a joyful, comedic adventure. But without this moment of feeling the actual stakes, without feeling fear and vulnerability, the audience could never come away from this movie feeling joy and appreciation. Because you have to go dark to go to light. What we’re happy about is that the studio and us, we all saw the same movie. What’s really cool is seeing how that experience is resonating with audiences of all ages now.

It is that bar scene that makes you think “Oh, they’re really going for this.” It’s a great feeling to have when you’re sitting in a cinema, it’s such an adrenaline rush.

MS: So many user reviews on Letterboxd or wherever are like, “They didn’t need to go this hard, why did they go this hard?” And that’s awesome. People are picking up on that and are excited by that.

2023 has already been a tough year for animation with studios and streaming services cancelling so many animated projects. What’s your perspective on that?

MS: Look, we’re super lucky. We’re at DreamWorks so we’re a little sheltered from that because we’re very well supported. At Universal particularly, we’re huge believers in the feature animation wing. For me, personally, I think there’s been an explosion in animation over the last five, six years, where so many projects are getting made at all the streaming sites. It was an incredible time, but I think there was a part of us always asking, “Is this gonna last?” 

I’ve been in animation now for 30 years and there’s peaks and valleys in animation all the time. There’s moments where it’s like going so well, and then drops down a little bit. We had this when 2D animation started to fade away around the 2000s. So I’ve been around a few of these peaks and valleys and I think the animation industry is in a really healthy position. We may not be making quite as many movies or TV shows we made a year ago, but compared to where I started off, it’s a really healthy industry.

JC: We are in our own little bubble here at DreamWorks because the point of view of Dreamworks and Universal has maintained. We’re making big, sophisticated, nuanced movies for the theatre experience. Obviously, the movies can be viewed in any format possible, but the biggest, grandest animation deserves to be on the big screen. It’s so beautiful. It’s such a wonderful art. Universal have continued to push for the theatrical experience, as opposed to some other studios that have gone straight to streaming. I think when you send something straight to streaming, it’s fine but I’m appreciative that we’re making these movies for an audience experience. 

When we’re talking about this movie, not only is it worth seeing on the big screen for the painterly style of it and the animation, but also the range of emotions that a group of people are sitting in the theatre, experiencing laughter and joy together. Maybe there’s some tears. A whole audience, kind of like a migration of birds, feeling these emotions, synchronised, it’s a beautiful thing. That’s something I’m grateful for that we continue to be able to do here at DreamWorks.

PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH is out in cinemas now

The post Joel Crawford and Mark Swift on ‘Puss In Boots: The Last Wish’ appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

The book was devised after author & illustrator Mackesy began filling his instagram account with feel good drawings that promoted, peace, empathy and introspection. The world has undergone a fair amount of emotional turbulence in previous years so it is clear to see why a book that promotes hope and compassion would strike a chord with readers worldwide.

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse. Image Courtesy of Apple TV+

Among the millions of readers was producer Cara Speller, the Oscar nominated producer behind Pear Cider & Cigarettes. After convincing the author that the book would be in safe hands with the seasoned producer viewers will now get the chance to experience the message of the tome in animated form through the lens of Mackesy, who finds himself in the directors chair for the first time with co-director Peter Baynton. Baynton is no stranger to animating kind characters and turning well loved books into treasured tv adaptations having storyboarded the brilliant Sarah & Duck, supervised story for Paddington 2 and directed animation on Lupus Films’ The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Starring Tom Hollander, Idris Elba, Gabriel Byrne and newcomer Jude Coward Nicoll, the short has all the right ingredients to joining the pantheon of classic Christmas short films of a timeless quality that can be rewatched by generations. The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse is available in the UK on Christmas Eve on the BBC and iPlayer and then worldwide from the 25th December on Apple TV+. We caught up with Charlie Mackesy, Peter Baynton and Cara Speller.

Like the book, the film focuses on overt kindness and empathy, it seems important that these messages are heard in the world we live in now in books and on screen.

Charlie Mackesy – I think you’re right. We’ve had we’ve had different forms of hardness, you know, whether it’s pandemic and isolation or whether it’s economic I think everyone’s just feeling exhausted. It seems to me that if we’ve ever needed kindness, we need it now. And I don’t think there’s any human on Earth who couldn’t use a bit more kindness or comfort or hope or a healing. It was lovely to read from people’s messages during the pandemic about the book and I hope that film can do something similar in this time.

Image Courtesy of Apple TV+

Did the themes of the book make it an easy choice for you to jump on board as a producer Cara?

Cara Speller – Yes, absolutely. I was initially drawn in just by the beauty of Charlie’s artwork and wanting to see that moving but then of course, you know the the messages and themes within it have kindness and gentleness and a messages about allowing yourself to be vulnerable and the power of friendship which are all things that we all value and that we all need a bit more of and the chance to to make something like that and put something like that out into the world is is a wonderful thing

Cara Speller

Peter, you’re no stranger to directing stories with compassion and warmth to them, did the story attract you in a similar way.

Peter Baynton – Absolutely. It has heart you know, there’s so much heart in the characters and in the in the story which comes from the drawings in the book. That’s what gets me you know. Yeah, I love making things with heart, I guess. Yeah.

Image Courtesy of Apple TV+

This is your first film as a Director Charlie, were there mindset challenges for you going from the page to the screen? There are moments in the book where the pages themselves play a role, such as The Mole interacting with a tea stain, these things are difficult to recreate on screen I imagine.

CM – It’s a great point. In the early days the tea stain was there and the idea of having a fourth wall was there. We wanted to somehow show the messiness of production. I was quite keen on having the odd blotch and the odd imperfection, but for an animator that’s a hard thing to hear. I think what the film does is it brings in a vulnerability of its own. In my introduction to the book I had to bring in a degree of honesty, and I think that was important for the book but in retrospect it wasn’t important for the film, because the film has its own fragility, its own vulnerability, its own imperfections within itself. This is my first book, I’ve illustrated a lot of books for other people and one of the things that always frustrated me was they never seemed to be quite honest enough, they were never quite messy enough. And I always wanted to make a book that was honest at the outset.

Charlie Mackesy

(In the film), there were so many ideas that we were ruminating over to try to see if we could, bring a bit of our own fragility into it. But then, in essence, that would have been the wrong thing, because it would have detracted from the very characters themselves and we wanted to bring their world in immediately, rather than show ours, so all that vulnerability and connection we wanted to sort of inculcate into the film itself, rather than arrogantly show that we were making it in some way. We wanted them people to enter their existence straightaway without any suggestion that anything existed beyond it. So that was our sort of trajectory, let’s not have anything like tea stains let’s just have their world existing in its own right.

PB – I think there was a point where we were searching for lots of blotches and things that would feel like they spoke to those moments in the book. But we realised there was almost a sort of disingenuous quality to adding stuff that would say, this is a messy process. Whereas you know, so it didn’t feel honest I guess.

Image Courtesy of Apple TV+

Being a producer is not just looking at spreadsheets, it’s making sure that directors are happy, and that everyone’s able to tell the story that they want to tell. How did you facilitate these conversations and ensure that the story fed through properly?

CS – It was a very creatively collaborative process, I’m delighted to say. We had a small team of incredibly involved people in various departments and we would have at meetings. We would start the day with our daily reviews every morning, with everyone on Zoom and we would we, as a team thrash out these creative issues when they arose. And that’s why I think that everything, when you watch it, feels like those things have been creatively resolved.

I put that down to, to just how collaborative that process was, because everything was debated and there was no tiny detail that wasn’t actively discussed and argued one way or another until we found a resolution that felt true to the group. It was a really beautiful way of working actually.

There are moments in the book which cannot be translated into animation. A moment in this film is when the boy falls off the horse, and there’s an obvious effort to create that with step by step illustrated motion. Was there thinking here to stay loyal to the book?

PB – From the very start project we’re trying to honour not just the feel of the book and the spirit of the book, but also specific moments through storyboarding. We’re trying to match the way Charlie draws, the way he composes the characters in relation to each other and so all of that stuff that goes into the storyboarding. It is informed by a desire to do an adaptation of the book that feels true to its spirits and also its look. There are emblematic images from the book, like when you see the boy and the mole sitting on the branch from behind, where we just knew we needed to have that moment in it.

Peter Baynton

I think it’s a pastel or a charcoal moment in the book where the horse comes down into the water, and it’s a backlit image and the horse says, “you fell, but I got you.” So then moments where visually we wanted to hit, I hit them. And I think that moment when they jumped over the ditch was one of them. There’s just a series of very powerful images that Charlie drew in the book that we wanted to hit. It came about actually, through Daniel, our editor just cut the storyboard drawings that way and created this moment of heightened drama and it lived on like that all the way through the project. And then at some point Cara I think had this wonderful idea that Charlie could actually ink the drawings for that moment.

Image Courtesy of Apple TV+

The film is released at Christmas but has no ‘jingle bells’ or Santa Claus in it. How do you ensure that a film is for everyone, for the ages and timeless? What are the magical ingredients?

CS – I think having Charlie Mackesy involved is probably the first magic ingredient that you need!

CM – It’s not how it looks. It’s what the messages are. And I think the messages are about being human. And I think that there are issues that we’ve struggled with for thousands of years that we’re the same, the human condition is the same and I think always will be. It’s dealing with whatever we have, like fear or disconnection, or, or hope or a sense of isolation or being lost, or all the things I think all of us go through – the things it tries to connect with and raise it within the conversation. And I suppose in that respect, it’s timeless, because you know, they were talking about this and Roman times, and they’ll be talking about this until, you know, something terrible happens to the planet. But yeah, so that’s my answer. Even if it looks like it was made a long time ago, I think the issues discussed will always be the same, don’t you?

PB – I think for me, there’s a gentleness and warmth, watching it, and that I think makes it. I mean, I know now watched it hundreds of times, and I have to admit I do enjoy it. Normally I don’t enjoy my work for a long time, but you know, I think there’s a way it deals with drama I feel very proud, like proud of and sort of, you know, I think is particular to it that, you know, there were there were moments when we were when the script is being written and we were developing the storyboard where there were bigger, dramatic options and avenues to explore and I think there’s something about just holding back on that slightly and just keeping some of this quiet. It’s quite a warm journey, I don’t know if that gives a timeless quality of what but I for me it’s something that’s gives it its character that makes me want to watch it on repeat rather than see it once, feel something and not bother again.

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse is available in the UK on Christmas Eve on the BBC and iPlayer and then worldwide from the 25th December on Apple TV+.

The post Interview – The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

In a year populated with exciting, vibrant new stop-motion projects, many of which having found a home on Netflix, 2022 may have very well saved the best for last. This would be no mean feat, especially in contemplation of such captivating endeavours as January’s The House and the eagerly anticipated return of Henry Selick this past Autumn with Wendell & Wild. In spite of this, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio remains an astonishing year-end capper and well worth the hype that has surrounded its turbulent development. While Carlo Collodi’s classic tale may have been at the receiving end of more than one ignominious adaptation in recent months, Guillermo (along with co-director Mark Gustafson and co-screenwriter Patrick McHale)’s take is their antithesis; a strong, emotionally intelligent and visually devourable success that perfectly captures the sometimes incommunicable magic that animation, specifically stop-motion, can hold over us.

Guillermo del Toro on set (Image via Netflix)

This vision of Pinocchio very nearly went unrealised altogether, however. Beginning its life rooted in illustrator Gris Grimly’s striking reimagining of the character for a 2002 edition of Collodi’s original book (for which the Jim Henson Company had obtained the rights), in the decades that followed the project endured several dormant phases and an inscrutable lack of interest throughout the industry in spite of a filmmaker as celebrated as Guillermo del Toro’s attachment to it. During this lengthy period of stutter-starts and extensive story development Mark Gustafson, a noteworthy name in the stop-motion arena, came on board. 

“I came in around 2010-2011, pretty early on,” recalls Mark, “It was just a phone call from Guillermo, he said ‘Mark, I’m doing this project-’ and I said ‘I’m in!’ before he’d told me what it was.” 

As the final film clearly demonstrates, the coming together of Guillermo and Mark as joint directors would prove an ideal pairing, Guillermo having long admired Mark’s body of work that included a long stretch with Will Vinton Studios on such joyously nightmarish projects as The Adventures of Mark Twain and Return to Oz alongside its lighter fare that included The California Raisins and The PJs. 

“Animation has always been something I not only study and collect but try to practice,” Guillermo enthuses, “Particularly in the last fifteen years or so. I started to come back to it through DreamWorks.

“As Mark says, clay or stop-motion is the one form of animation that you can do basically alone in your room. For some reason stop-motion attracts all those weirdos more than other forms of animation, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely.” Agrees Mark, “I remember probably my first experience with it wasn’t really stop-motion, but we would strap M-80s to the neighbour’s Barbie dolls and blow them up to see if we could get a picture at the moment that they were exploding.”

With this healthy bond established, the team would continue to develop the concept and, in turn, continue to be told ‘no’ in pitch meeting after pitch meeting. At the precipice of considering international financing, Guillermo would turn to a newer relationship he had established along the way in a final push to get their vision for Pinocchio off the ground.

“I, quite pointedly, said ‘Let’s try with Netflix’, because I had a great experience with them on Tales of Arcadia, and all the Troll Hunters, 3Below, Wizards – we did over eighty episodes, and it was really, creatively, very free.” With an ally in Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, the team finally achieved the seemingly unachievable and got the film the green light that had eluded it for so long. “We pitched it to Ted and he said ‘yes’ in the room! It was very, very easy, because he knew from the designs and the pitch that this was going to be something special. It was a fantastic experience as expected and, creatively, we had complete autonomy.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (L-R) Gepetto (voiced by David Bradley) and Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022

Of the many reasons this iteration stands apart (out of three film adaptations of what is ostensibly the same story this year alone), the one that shouts at the audience the loudest is its unflinching exploration of the subject of death, a theme that children’s films and literature has increasingly shied away from in more recent decades. This may ring familiar with those who have followed Guillermo’s prior forays into animation and the body count they have racked up.

“When I was at DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg called me the harbinger of death, because the mortality rate on the characters tripled since I joined! We had Puss in Boots, the first one, in which we essentially kill Humpty Dumpty. The second Puss in Boots, which I started developing with the team, deals precisely with mortality, it was Puss losing all his lives and making do with one – basically the philosophy I believe in. And, of course, the killing of the father in How to Train Your Dragon.” This impulse to confront such heavier themes rather than evade them or replace them with arbitrarily happy endings speaks to Guillermo’s respect for his audience and the full knowledge that children will likely be among them.

“When we were pitching the movie or presenting the movie, I would always get asked ‘Is it for kids?’ And I’d say ‘It’s not made just for kids, but kids can watch it.’ The world is very complex right now. Kids don’t want simple answers to a complex world, they want complex answers to understand a complex world. The other day in San Francisco, Quentin Tarantino said on stage that the most violent, scary movie he’d ever seen was Bambi. And he’s not wrong. Even Disney’s earlier Pinocchio, the reason I was attracted to it is because it was one film in my childhood that showed me somebody who understood how scary and fraught with danger childhood felt. It’s only in the later decades that animation became pasteurised and homogenised into something that doesn’t even have the elements of danger that fairytales traditionally have.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (L-R) Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz) and Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Cr: Netflix © 2022

In some respects the film plays a little lighter than its source material, or at least it seems to; while Collodi’s Talking Cricket is smashed to death by a mallet early on in the novel, subsequently appearing as a ghost, del Toro and scriptwriting partner Patrick McHale (of Over the Garden Wall fame)’s Sebastian J. Cricket survives, only to endure a ceaseless, grimly comedic parade of pain and suffering in his efforts to steer Pinocchio right. Other deviations of note reframe the tale as a brutal and razor-sharp satire on fascism, relocating the time period to roughly a century later to take place during the rise of Mussolini, as well as thoughtful ruminations on fraught relationships between fathers and their sons and a fundamental eschewing of the notion that Pinocchio’s main driving force should be to become a ‘real’ boy. Instead he is imbued with an immortality that sees him dipping in and out of a beautifully-realised death realm occupied by bored, lagomorphic bureaucrats and the regal spectre of Death itself. The unique charm of this world’s Pinocchio himself is in his unfiltered nature that simultaneously exudes a happy-go-lucky passion for a world so new to him alongside a penchant for creating chaos and panic wherever he goes and a contrarian impulse he cannot curb in spite of his developing knowledge of right and wrong.

“The theme of disobedience being a virtue, which is counter to all the Pinocchios I knew as a kid, was there from the start.” Recalls Guillermo, “Then when I saw the Gris Grimly drawings, a whole world came with it – everything precipitated, setting it in fascist Italy…very quickly, it sort of just poured out, you know? I think the design unlocked all of that. I’d say, without Gris Grimly and his design, there would not be this movie.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – (L-R) Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) and Gepetto (voiced by David Bradley). Cr: Netflix © 2022

Although the original film concept based on Gris’s take on Pinocchio would ultimately go unmade, the artist remained a crucial presence in the subsequent pitches and overall development of the film. “Gris and I have a very good relationship; those who know Gris know he’s a really reasonable, noble guy. We had a very harmonious relationship when I was producing, and he, very harmoniously, understood that it was not going to happen with the version that existed then. For example, the political themes were not that present, the grief was not present, the loss, the realm of death, the idea that whatever happens, happens – and then we’re gone; none of that was there. From the moment I took the reins, I wanted it to be a piece with Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. It started to be shaped by that, by the fact that it now belonged to a different universe, and it sort of follows that precept.”

Crucial to adapting Gris’s initial designs to a real-life, 3D space was production designer Guy Davis (The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley), with UK studio Mackinnon and Saunders stepping up and creating the puppets with the incomparable quality previously established in their work on such films as The Corpse Bride, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Mars Attacks! on top of a plethora of celebrated series and commercials. While not responsible for fabricating the entire cast of characters, the Manchester-based team cemented the film’s style with the key players including Pinocchio, Geppetto and Sebastian J. Cricket, as well as the villainous Volpe, his beaten-down monkey Spazzatura and the brutal Podestà intent on harnessing Pinocchio’s immortality for military purposes. Combining several established approaches to stop-motion puppet fabrication with Guillermo’s own specifications for how the characters should be animated, the team developed an intricate system of gears and paddles that allowed animators control over facial animation that reduced the reliance on rapid prototyping – save for Pinocchio himself, for whom the process of 3D printed replacement animation best suited his wooden aesthetic. Crucial to striking the right note when it came to the look and performance abilities of the puppets, as well as their overall development, was Director of Character Fabrication Georgina Hayns, a veteran not just of Mackinnon & Saunders but Laika Studios, whose dedication to stop-motion film production has been significant in keeping interest in the medium alive.

Guillermo del Toro pictured with Pinocchio (Cr. mandraketheblack.de/NETFLIX ©2020)

“MacKinnon and Saunders are the best puppet makers in the world,” enthuses Mark,  “and Georgina worked with them, trained with them, so that was a really natural relationship. We handled about half the puppets in Portland at ShadowMachine and Mackinnon and Saunders did the bulk of the rest of them, and then some of the puppets were done in Guadalajara, the team down there who did the black rabbit sequence, which was really pretty cool.”

The combination of studios and teams make for a curiously diverse yet consistent overall aesthetic, one that builds on Gris’s original vision rather than outright replacing it. This seamless bringing together of design sensibilities that might perceivably be at odds with one another in a way that comes across as satisfying to the viewer is something stop-motion is uniquely tailored to.

“Talking the other day with Henry Selick, we were agreeing on the fact that nothing expresses the weird, the odd and ‘slanted’ like stop-motion.” Says Guillermo, “It really has that quality to bring things that are off-kilter to life.”

“Yeah, there’s a kind of ‘broken’ quality to it that I think attracts broken people – not to get too dramatic!” Adds Mark, “But you know, we’ve all got a little of that in us.”

To the palpable appreciation of the animation community at large, Guillermo himself has been a vocal advocate of animation and stop-motion being invaluable in filmmaking whilst not being dismissed or mislabeled as a ‘genre’. While the world at large seems to continue to grapple with that notion, the director is optimistic for how audiences and the wider industry will engage with animation as time goes on.

“It doesn’t matter if it happens this year, or in ten years, but it will happen.” Guillermo insists, “This is a battle that has been waged for a long, long time. The fact is, in the animation medium stop-motion most closely resembles live-action in terms of complexity, shooting with real sets, real actors, real props, real cinematography, there’s a lot of analogue things – but they’re even more complex because you do it frame-by-frame and in miniature.”

“I still think that what’s important is less the technique and more that real storytellers are getting ahold of this technique and starting to use it.” Mark adds, “I think that’s how it becomes legitimate and how people start recognising it as just another form of filmmaking and not some sort of oddity.

“As Guillermo likes to say, stop-motion is pronounced ‘dead’ every five years or so, people go ‘Well, that’s not coming back’ – and then somebody does something new or interesting with it. I mean, this year, we had (Henry Selick’s) Wendell & Wild, which is great, and (Phil Tippett’s) Mad God, and our film. I think it’s a vibrant forum right now and it has a bright future. The technology just enables us to hone it a little bit more, it makes it easier to actually do than it used to be, more people have access to that technology now, which is great.”

Pinocchio is out now on Netflix. Hear more from Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson in episode 108 of the Skwigly Animation Podcast (direct download link) and to learn more about the film’s puppet fabrication read our interview with Puppet Supervisor Georgina Hayns and Production Designer Guy Davis.

The post Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson on bringing ‘Pinocchio’ to life | Interview + Review appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

The story focuses on two aliens named Janet and Bill, whose families, the red Smeds and the blue Smoos, dislike one another, but they see past the prejudices and grow to love one another. After waking up to find the lovers have gone missing, their families go on a space-filled adventure to find them while slowly learning to accept one another.

Recently, Skwigly was invited to attend a press event where not also did we have an opportunity to see the film early, but we also had the opportunity to interview producer Barney Goodland and executive producer Michael Rose. From discussing what went on behind the scenes to tips and tricks of being a producer, to even sharing some love for Aardman, it was both a pleasure and honour to sit down with these gentlemen for what could arguably be one of the best Magic Light Pictures productions to date.

Barney Goodland and Michael Rose. Photo provided by Faber & Bishopp PR

Why did the team pick The Smeds and the Smoos as the tenth Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler adaptation?

Barney Goodland: Well, it’s a lovely book. It has a wonderful, timeless theme with fantastic rhyming from Julia, and rich, imaginative illustrations from Axel that explore an absolutely incredible universe, so it was actually quite an easy decision.

Michael Rose: I think it was just a beautiful book. When it came out, in 2019, we immediately thought “this is something that could make a really lovely film”, because there’s this great story and characters at its heart, underpinned by a wonderful message that is appropriate for our times.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

As well as co-director Daniel Snaddon, who co-directed The Snail and the Whale, animator Samantha Cutler also joined him in the director’s chair. What was it like to have these two directors with different experiences between them?

BG: It was great. We often have two directors on the films who work together really well. Daniel previously co-directed Stick Man and Zog for us; and Samantha has worked on many of the previous films – I think pretty much all of them from Stick Man – as a character animator, and she’s tremendously talented. She’s developed into a fantastic storyteller in the last few years. We just went and asked her if she was interested in directing. They’re very good friends and it was quite an easy partnership to put in place. They did a tremendous job and really complement each other’s skills.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

In comparison to the book, there are some new characters introduced for the animated adaptation, such as Aunt Smed and Uncle Smoo. Why were these characters created for this particular film?

BG: This is a story about families and so when we were developing the script, we wanted to make it more so. It wasn’t just about Grandmother Smoo and Bill, Grandfather Smed and Janet. We wanted to add some characters to the extended family, so we created Uncle Smoo and brought forward other characters which Axel illustrated. By giving them lines, we made them a more active part of the story which helped add a kind of richness and texture.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

What was your favourite scene to work on as the producers of the film?

MR: Well, one scene I absolutely love is a moment where Grandmother Smoo drinks the pink milk. She recognises that it’s good and it’s time to put aside animosities. Conveyed without words, she just keeps looking straight ahead, then moves her bag off the seat next to her as a signal to Grandfather Smed that he can now take his place alongside. I think it’s a beautiful moment and an important one in the film,  conveyed through pure character acting.

BG: Another sequence I love is when we see Janet and Bill sneak off to the woods, when we see this montage that shows their relationship developing as they get older over a series of time jumps.  There’s a rich detail to the animation, the lighting, the compositing – and it’s got an absolutely tremendous music cue from our composer, René Aubry, that just gives me goosebumps, even now. It still just carries me away, beautifully.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

When families sit down to watch The Smed and The Smoos for Christmas, what is the big thing you hope they will learn from it?

MR: We don’t set out to teach or educate; our aim is to entertain, really. But if they enjoy watching it, which we hope they will and have a great time, one hopes they’ll take away a sense of the underlying message of the story – which is that life’s too short to live in disharmony – and to respect our differences and that we’re all human beings who can all live together in harmony. I think that’s a wonderful thing, but most of all I just hope they have a great time watching it.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

What advice would you give someone who wants to work within the animation industry, wherever it’s working as an animator or perhaps wanting to become a producer such as yourselves?

MR: If you want to be an animator, there are plenty of diverse art colleges, courses, training areas and so forth. If you want to be a producer, there are many different routes these days. I think you have to have real excitement and passion for it and come at it with a can-do, make-it-happen attitude.

BG: Wanting to tell stories to audiences is so important.  I would say to just study stories that you enjoy, see why they’re working, why they’re not working. That’s the cool thing. Most of the crew we work with want to be storytellers and enjoy telling stories.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

Michael, everyone at Skwigly are huge fans of Aardman. What was it like to have worked as an executive producer on Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit?

MR: It was a fantastic privilege, really. It was tremendous because Aardman  was much smaller in those days than it is now. With Chicken Run we set out to make the first stop-motion feature film for many years in the UK, and to make a family film that would play to the world. I’ve always admired Aardman’s art,  their commitment to quality and doing the very best work.

When Martin Pope and I started Magic Light in 2003, we imported that idea of wanting to give family audiences the very highest quality we could. That’s something we’ve kept doing, year-in, year-out ever since. So now we’re on our tenth special and I think we all feel really proud of these beautiful films that audiences watch again and again, not just in the UK but all around the world.

I loved Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I think it’s not just a great parody of stories like The Wolf Man, it’s just great for kids on Halloween. It was just great to see Wallace and Gromit on the big screen rather than on television sets.

MR: It was a long held dream of Aardman to make a Wallace and Gromit feature film  – and, of course, it’s rooted in the genius of Nick Park. His early short film,  Creature Comforts, is one of my all-time favourites.

Oh, really? Why Creature Comforts just out of interest?

MR: I think it’s sublime, how Nick used the technique of animation to subvert or invert a documentary style of filmmaking and create stories and meanings that have so much resonance about the human condition. To me, it’s the perfect short film.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

So after working together for years now, what are the big things you learned from one another when producing these animated films?

BG: I think one thing I’ve learned is that films are really about collaboration and so it’s being open to the views of everyone on the team, and taking those on board. Everyone on the crew is immensely talented and I’ve learned the real benefit of tapping into that. Quality underpins our films and we’ve worked very hard on making the stories work and we’re also always thinking about our audience. That’s the main thing I take away – quality, story and audience are always in my mind.

 And Michael, what have you learned from Barney from all these years?

MR: Whether it’s a small group or  the wider teams we put together, everyone sets off with a common, clear vision and, as Barney said, a clear view of the audience who we’re making it for. I think that’s something that we’ve collectively done well over the years – to pull that vision through the long process of making any animated film.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

What was the biggest takeaway from your previous work like Superworm last year, when producing this film?

BG: One of the great things about Julia’s stories is that they’re all different and have a slightly different feel. Superworm was tremendous fun with a bombastic hero and a really delicious villain.

With Smeds and the Smoos we’ve had to balance the humour with the emotional elements in the story. It’s quite finely balanced, and there’s a theme of division without going too over the top.

I really liked the small touches with that, like the picture of Bill and Grandmother Smoo, because it’s clearly a drawing from Axel.

BG: He did that for us. It’s tremendous. It’s not in the book, but you feel it. And I think it’s a good example of how the books and films interrelate. It doesn’t feel out of place, it’s wonderfully natural.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

With such different locations compared to your previous productions, what creative challenges and opportunities were there when making them?

BG: The challenge is always realising Axel’s worlds and converting them into CGI and 3D. But that’s also an opportunity we love because he has such a specific style. There’s just so much detail that we can explore, alongside Julia’s texts and how they flow together.

That’s why elements like the Smoos’ pet and the little spacecraft that Grandfather Smed made appear in the background. Even the boundary line is actually quite a major element of the film, becoming a key visual motif. It’s actually quite liberating having this amazing source material to start working from.

The Smeds and the Smoos (Magic Light Pictures)

Alongside the returning cast member, Rob Brydon, are other familiar big named actors and comedians. What was it like to collaborate with them on this upcoming production?

BG: It was wonderful. They bring so much to the characters in the story. We filmed their recording sessions for lip sync, and the animators take so much inspiration from little movements or expressions that they make. They bring such rich emotion, and then a wonderful delivery of Julia’s words. Sally Hawkins’ narration is beautiful, warm and comforting. It sort of developed the story as well, which is an absolute treat, and helps gently move the narrative along.

Janet is played by Ashna Rabberu and Bill is played by Daniel Ezra. They are both tremendously talented young actors who are really going places quickly, and had absolutely wonderful voices for these two characters. They feel young and charming, it’s really engaging and quite sweet. So we feel very lucky to continue to work with such big names. These are some of absolute top British acting talents and we’re very grateful for their work in the projects and the fantastic elements they add to the story.

MR: It’s the quality of their voices and their ability to create the character through the words that is just invaluable, which is why we’ve been very lucky with these amazing casts in all our films over the years. They elevate the films and provide real inspiration for the animators to respond to as well.

The Smeds and The Smoos will be released on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Christmas Day.

The post The Smeds and The Smoos – Producers Barney Goodland & Michael Rose Talk Latest Magic Light Pictures Christmas Special appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

From the delightfully wicked minds of Henry Selick and Jordan Peele, comes Wendell & Wild, an animated tale about scheming demon brothers Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele) – who enlist the aid of 13-year-old Kat Elliot – a tough teen with a load of guilt – to summon them to the Land of the Living. But what Kat demands in return leads to a brilliantly bizarre and comedic adventure like no other, an animated fantasy that defies the law of life and death, all told through the handmade artistry of stop motion.

With music by Academy Award ®-nominee Bruno Coulais, the film also stars Lyric Ross (This Is Us) as Kat, Angela Bassett (Black Panther) as Sister Helley, James Hong (Kung Fu Panda) as Father Bests, Sam Zelaya as Raul, Tamara Smart (A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting) as Siobhan, Ramona Young (Never Have I Ever) as Sweetie, Seema Virdi as Sloane, Natalie Martinez (The Twilight Zone) and Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction) as Buffalo Belzer. Also among the cast in will be Tantoo Cardinal (Dances with Wolves), Gabrielle Dennis, Igal Naor, David Harewood, Maxine Peake and Gary Gatewood.

Also discussed: MAF buzz, new trailers for upcoming animated features My Father’s Dragon and Super Mario Bros., continued excitement for Guillermo del Toro‘s upcoming stop-motion take on Pinocchio, Tonko House‘s new series Oni: Thunder God’s Tale, the mixed fates of Netflix’s animation slate and the online release of Don Hertzfeldt‘s modern classic World of Tomorrow.

Stream below or direct download.

Presented by Ben Mitchell and Steve Henderson
Interview conducted by Laura-Beth Cowley
Edited and produced by Ben Mitchell
Music by Ben Mitchell

The post Henry Selick (Wendell & Wild) Podcast Interview appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Boasting the masterful puppetmaking of Mackinnon and Saunders (Corpse Bride), the film is directed by del Toro and Mark Gustafson (Fantastic Mr. Fox) with a script by del Toro, Patrick McHale, Matthew Robbins and Gris Grimly (who also created the original design for the Pinocchio character) and produced by The Jim Henson Company and ShadowMachine in co-production with Necropia Entertainment.

Having worked in animation production since the early nineties, Georgina’s credits include Bob the Builder, Postman Pat and the Laika features Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, with Guy having previously worked on other del Toro productions including Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and the upcoming Cabinet of Curiosities as well as TV series such as Steven Universe, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

The film represents such a strong new look for this story, which has as much to do with del Toro’s vision as the puppets and the design. Can I ask what do you both individually think is the most unique element of the film?

Guy Davis: It’s hard to narrow down as one element because there’s so many things that play off each other, from design to story.

Georgina Hayns: There is, isn’t there? To me, it’s very much Guillermo’s look and take on Pinocchio. And very much his vision of a stop-motion film. But yeah, I don’t feel like there’s one particular character that stands out any more than any other character. What I think is really interesting is the fusion of styles. You have quite humanoid characters and you’ve got animals talking, insects talking to humans, but it all works in the context of the story.

GD: They flow together, they inhabit the same world but not in a fanciful way that stands out. Cricket seems to fit next Geppetto as much as some of the other, more fanciful characters we haven’t seen yet. [They all] feel like they could exist in this world because the world itself is almost a caricature. I mean, it’s very detailed and realistic in texture and tone, but in structure it fits the characters that have to live in it.

So Guy, you’ve worked with Del Toro previously, correct?

GD: Yeah, we collaborate on a lot of concept design. It started before Pacific Rim, since then, we’ve worked on a lot of projects that didn’t come out and a lot of projects that did, like Crimson Peak and Shape of Water and other projects. It’s always been a really inspiring collaboration working with him.

And what was different this time?

GD: Well, for one, this was my first job as Production Designer, so that was a new role for me. And of course, I was usually doing live action, so this is my first foray into stop-motion. I did the Super 8 films when I was in junior high, moving clay around and growing up on Ray Harryhausen, but learning the ins and outs of stop-motion in the business from everyone at ShadowMachine and from Curt (Enderle) and Rob (DeSue), who have a history of working in stop-motion, it was incredible to just discover it all these years later again.

Guy Davis

Gris Grimly’s original book design was a strong inspiration for the main character of Pinocchio, could you explain how and why he felt like such a good fit for this vision of the film?

GD: Well, I think Guillermo would have to answer [for] what he saw in the [Grimly’s] design. I know we started with that and we then elaborated a little bit more, influencing it with more of Guillermo’s vision, as far as limbs being different and less of a cartoon, an abstract in the shapes and a little bit more of a caricature. So it was less angular and stuff. But I know we did do a lot of revisions in the proportions, which gave him a different stance. The unfinished head was a great idea from Guillermo, because that’s Geppetto carving him, being very careful on one side, and then as the night went on, and he was in his grief and a little bit drunk, it got a little sloppier as it went. So he was sort of this unfinished design by morning.

GH: It was interesting to see the arc of Pinocchio’s design from early days, from Gris’s original to the actual final, approved design, and be a part of that, hear Guillermo’s thoughts, hear Guillermo working with Guy through it. And then of course, getting it into MacKinnon and Saunders’ hands, because I didn’t really touch much of Pinocchio on site here. It went straight to MacKinnon and Saunders and this amazing puppet maker that I’ve worked with for years, Richard Pickersgill, he was the main tech wizard on it. Richard trained as an armature maker and came and worked out in Portland with me on several of the Laika projects. Through that he learned a little bit about 3D printing, and just took on that whole world, went back to Manchester and did things with the 3D printing world and making Pinocchio that we’ve never seen before, and I think really brought that character to life.

Georgina Hayns

Could you talk a little bit more about Pinocchio’s construction?

GH: One of the wonderful things about working on Pinocchio – there weren’t secrets. Stop-motion is an age-old art form and one thing that I was trained in my early years, by Pete Saunders and Ian MacKinnon, was you can only improve the art form if you share your knowledge. I think it’s also the timing that Pinocchio came about in 3D printing, because the technology has changed enough that the different metals can be used for printing now, which lend themselves more for puppet skeletons than the metals that they started off printing with. So it was just the perfect moment in time in 3D printing, and Richard’s brilliance and understanding of armature making and 3D printing came together to make Pinocchio. We had a wonderful little moment in Portland when myself and Brian, the Head of Animation, were trying to figure out how we were going to solve the eyes. Traditionally with 3D printed faces, we split the face in half to get all of the expressions of eyebrows and eyes and everything. So Pinocchio doesn’t really have eyes, he has holes, and he also has woodgrain. So the idea of splitting a face with woodgrain was going to be a nightmare in post to fix that. So I had this mad idea, I was like, “Well look at the design, his eyes are the knots in the wood, can we just work those a little more perfectly into circular knots and take the entire eye and use that as a replacements, so it’s the eye that is the replacement part?” And by changing the eye shape, we were able to also create a brow, so the brow became a void between the eye sockets. That was just a bit of problem solving with car body filler, a hard head, and then “What do you think Guillermo? Do you like it?”

GD: That’s the thing that I love, is that there’s this communication between all the different departments, between design and building and how those feed on each other. It’s great that we can always say “Well, this is why something works in a design way” and they can say “Well, this needs to change for practical ways to work” and sometimes it brings everything back again. Now all of a sudden, this brings back to the design of his eyes being like knots, which is a very beautiful detail for the character, and it’s also a problem-solve.

It’s just perfect elegancy, when the problem-solving feeds back into the design in such a symbiotic way.

GH: They’re really special moments in puppet making when that happens.

GD: That worked out that way through the whole film, I can’t think of any character that we were disappointed with. There are difficult characters and designs that couldn’t be exactly as their concept was, for mechanics, or this or that. But the changes made it better, so it was never a frustration. It was more like “Wow, this solved the problem and made it better”.

You’ve both summarised this in a much more elegant way than I could have. But for me stop-motion has always been the art of problem-solving, and I was just wondering if there were any unique challenges that you found on the project that you’d like to talk about?

GH: For me, the eyes for the characters were the most challenging of all aspects. So with the human characters, especially, we wanted ball and socket eyes. But then we wanted silicone mechanical skins and the inherent problem with that is the minute you move an eyebrow up, it pulls a skin away from the edge of the eye, and you’ve suddenly got a big gap. So the tiniest part of all of the human designs was the biggest headache for all of us. We’ve got MacKinnon and Saunders working on it, we were working on it in Portland, we’ve got the best of the best trying to problem-solve how we could get a blink, an eye movement and an eyebrow movement without gaps appearing here, there and everywhere. And between us, we all came up with solutions but it took until the end of the movie for us all to go “Can we make the movie again? Because now we know exactly how to solve it!” (Laughs) But we all did actually say “Please can we never do ball and socket eyes in silicon skins ever again?” (Laughs) But yeah, in a weird way that was the most challenging thing, I think, from a puppet making standpoint.

It’s generally eyes and hands, are historically the hardest bit in stop-motion because they’re both so small but also completely eye catching and every human on Earth knows what those two things should move and act like.

GH: Yep!

(Netflix)

You have quite a legacy behind you, in terms of where you’ve worked and what you’ve worked on. What was the most enjoyable or interesting part of working on this project for you?

GD: I mean, it was an incredible experience. And it was unique in that, coming from live action, you’re on a production maybe a year, or year and a half, and you’re like, “Wow, that was a long production”. I started this originally back in 2012 and then, you know, we started again in 2019, and now here we are, and it’s being done. It’s a different pace and I think just seeing that passion, no one ever lost that drive or that interest over all these years about this story. And this project, it was always inspiring, it was always something that people were totally devoted to making special, it never felt like “Okay, let’s get this done”. It was like “Let’s definitely put everything we can into this”. And that was every aspect of the hundreds of people who worked on it, problem-solving, creating, and just spending the time and love to put into it. So that definitely speaks to the inspiration and talents that Guillermo brings, and Mark too, and everybody in every department. It’s just one of those things that you’re excited when you see it on screen and things are brought to life. But then all of a sudden, you think, “Wow, I was a much younger person when this started”!

GH: The fact that we all were there wanting to work together with two leaders, Mark and Guillermo, who wanted to give us all the information we needed to make a beautiful film. It was just this very special movie for me, because stop-motion films are always hard, with some crazy deadlines. We knew that the expectations were beyond some of the realms of the budget and the schedule, but we all had a wealth of experience. A lot of the crew had worked together for 15-20 years, on and off through different projects, and what we had learned over those 15-20 years is that the most important thing about puppet making and stop-motion movies as a whole is trust, communication, and information. If you haven’t got all of those three things, then it falls apart. You’ve got to trust the person next to you, you’ve got to trust in your team, you’ve got to trust in your boss. What was very apparent from the word go on Pinocchio is that we had a secure environment set up by ShadowMachine. And Mel Coombs, who is an amazing producer – I mean, at times she was a dictator, but it was brilliant, we knew she had our back all the way through. And whenever a problem arose, if things were getting too big, if things were running long, somebody would bring us together to talk about how we can solve the problem, how we can move forward as a team together. There was no blame, it was just this beautiful team effort to make something that was brought to us with love, and gave us love and we gave love back to it. There’s so much love, happiness and passion in this movie.

Pinocchio is set to be released in select theatres November 2022 and on Netflix December 2022

The post Pinocchio: Interview with Puppet Supervisor Georgina Hayns & Production Designer Guy Davis appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Gaïa Grandin-Mendzylewski is a director who enjoys making films about social conventions, communication, love and vulnerability. Already in her 2020 film, Internship Report, she was commenting on the fear of not being adequate for work-related things. This element of self-reflection has continued in her latest short, Hi! How are you?, making it a perfect choice for the I’m FINE! programme.

As a collaboration between Skwigly and Ukraine’s LINOLEUM festival, I’M FINE! is a project that focuses on the ways to maintain mental health and stay motivated and productive in a world that changes every minute.

The programme itself is a reflection on the emotional burnout from the best independent animation creators. In addition to animation film screenings, Skwigly will be featuring a series of interviews and podcasts with artists who share their experiences of going through emotional burnout. Today we present a conversation with Gaïa about her recent short film Hi! How are You?

Could you introduce yourself and briefly describe the circumstances of how the film was made and where the concept came from?

My name is Gaïa Grandin Mendzylewski and I’m a young director and animator based in Lille.

Hi how are you? is the sequel of my previous short-movie Internship Report. Both films were made in the exact same aesthetic, based on a series of sketches my best-friend used to draw of me during our studies to depict my sweet clumsiness.

I was so moved and amused by the authenticity of those representations, I decided to turn them into a full animated speaking character. The emptiness of those tiny black eyes, lost into a non-efficient body ready to dismantle at every move, was the perfect set-up to express my shaky-self.

It gave me the distance and humour I like to have when trying to communicate my thoughts and doubts.

Concerning this short specifically, the movie emerged from an uncomfortable impression of feeling out of phase with the active world. The one where people say while walking “Hi, how are you?” to say hello because they are polite but don’t expect a genuine answer from you. One day I decided to stop replying “Fine, and you?” because this protocol was becoming too hollow and therefore too painful for me. Making this movie was for me the best way to communicate my confusion and therefore relieve me from a part of my anxieties.

When it comes to filmmaking and time management, do you find that the process of animation has any therapeutic value? Does it help you put your thoughts in order, or help you cope with life in general?

For a long time, it has. When making movies I allow myself to improvise a lot. I get surprised by my own animations. I also tend to draw very slow and gentle movements, making the process repetitive and automatic. Those conditions allow me to turn off my lovely ongoing anxious brain for a few hours.

BUT recently my relation to my art became more of a struggle.

As I’m currently lacking of stability and projections in the other fields of my life, I’m relying more and more on my art. It became urgent to achieve meaningful stuff that could help me and others. Quickly.

Animation is too long and did not match with my feeling of emergency. I was obsessed by the result and wanted to skip the process so bad. Therefore, a few months ago I started to post autobiographic comics on my Instagram account. It was fun to make; spontaneous, but most of all, it allowed me in a short amount of time to cover a large number of topics dear to my heart.

I’m so proud of what I did; it actually may have given me the energy to go back to animation, motivated by the idea of adapting those strips into a TV show.

Do you find that working to deadlines has a positive or negative impact on how you structure your time in approaching a creative project? Do you find that you work better under the pressure of a deadline?

I’m quite sure I don’t work better under the pressure of a deadline because I don’t need it to start to work and I hate being in a rush at the end. All I want is to dedicate as much time as I have to do stuff very, very slowly. Working all day while feeling like doing nothing.

Also I’m very preoccupied by the idea of bothering or disappointing people I work with if I’m not precisely on time. Deadlines are just another cause of anxiety for me!

Hi! How are You?

Did the lockdown situation – or other times of crisis you have experienced – present any personal challenges with regards to mood, mental health, or staying motivated? And if so, what kind of thing helped you overcome that?

The lockdown was actually a cool period for me. I had the comfort, space and time I needed to work peacefully. I could stay at home playing video games, eating and drawing; without fear of missing anything that could occur outside.

Living like the entire world has stopped, with the idea that I couldn’t be in a better place than in my own home creating stuff, was a very sweet and secure feeling for me.

Also my movies are very introspective so all I need to be inspired is my own intimacy and the close environment I’m evolving in.

An issue that I’m seeing come up a lot, especially with animators coming into the industry now, is grappling with burnout. I was wondering if that’s something you had ever experienced and if so, what sort of self-maintenance did you undergo to move through it and carry on?

I might be experiencing one of the most anxious period of my life right now but it’s not a burnout so I don’t know if my answer will be relevant.

The animation industry is stressing me out but I see this stress more as a consequence of my own shakiness. I think I have the chance to evolve professionally in workplaces that always encouraged me to leave on time, to do nothing more than what I’m officially paid for.

Also the more I’m growing up, the more I’m surrounded by my friends and old classmates at work. I feel very lucky about that!

However, if I had to give advice to people undergoing burnout, I would tell them exactly what I’m currently trying to tell myself everyday (and not yet applying of course). I wish I’ll communicate better my sorrow to the people I love, I wish I’ll feel less afraid of being a burden when doing so, wish I’ll stop comparing myself to others, wish I’ll realize I’m strong enough to take care of me and make myself happy, wish I’ll love me more, and most of all : I wish us all to meet great therapists

Hi! How are You?

Gaïa Grandin-Mendzylewsk’si film Hi! How are You? is part of the I’m FINE! animation screening that will be taking place at:

• MEGOGO screening – 10-30 October (Online, geo-blocked to UK and Ukraine)

I’M FINE! is a project by the LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival and Skwigly Animation Magazine. It is implemented with the support of the British Council within the framework of the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture.

The post Hi! How are You? – Gaïa Grandin-Mendzylewski Interview | I’M FINE! – UK/Ukraine Season appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

On the last day of their workshop in Plymouth, I got the opportunity to speak with Dani in person as well as Sandy Vielma, the Social Media Director of DaniMation, and Joe Westlake, founder of DaniMation UK, to discuss what made them want to expand their classes outside of the US and how the week-long workshop has impacted their students.

Joe, would you mind just telling everyone a bit about yourself and how you got involved with DaniMation Entertainment?

Joe: It originally started out when I was working within the autism community for advocacy. I ran a host of online radio shows and that’s how Dani found me and we kind of grew a connection. Dani was doing animation when she established DaniMation in 2009 in the US, so that was quite a bit of time before we actually established it here with DaniMation UK.

I really liked the model of DaniMation. It’s helping individuals on the spectrum with animation which is such a niche area and I realised that what’s happening in America is fantastic, but it’s not something that we really appear to have in the UK. There’s a lack of opportunities for people on the spectrum to pursue the skills for animation and to go into a career of animation or digital arts. I was a student here and we came up with a great partnership with the Plymouth Institute of Education, and Dr. Suanne Gibson, who was one of my lead lecturers. She’s really been great and piloting this whole project with us.

We held our first camp here at the University of Plymouth in August 2019 and we had 14 students. We had some come from as far as London and Manchester, as well as the surrounding area. We tought the basic principles of animation. We did storyboarding, voiceovers, learning the Toon Boom software, and the basic principles of animation and in view of them having 15 to 30 seconds of animation, there’s so much work that goes into animating.

Dani: They could become voice actors if they can, or they can be storyboard artists or people who do visual development like backgrounds or somebody who’s good with computers and CGI animation and programming. They can work on that, so it’s not just the art side of animation.

Sandy: This week’s an introduction for youth on the autism spectrum to learn about all the different areas of animation, but it’s being presented and shown in a way to create a future for themselves by a peer. Because Dani is on the autism spectrum, just like them, they are shown that she’s doing it so therefore, they could do it too. And that is the main message that we try to instil upon all the students is that it doesn’t matter how young they are, because she started when she was 11. No matter what people tell you if “you can’t do this, or you can’t do that,” don’t listen to them, you could do anything you want. And because somebody just like her was doing it, you could do it too.

One of Dani’s students she had from the camp in 2019 is now here as an intern, working with us and teaching the other students right now. She started off as a student and now she’s decided to get her degree in animation. But this is just one example here in the UK. We have the same exact scenario happening all over the US. It’s more than just a fun camp.

Joe Westlake and Dani with their students. Photo provided by DaniMation.

Dani, with your success with the workshops in the US, why did you turn your attention to the UK?

Dani: It was all thanks to Joe Westlake’s idea of wanting to start the UK branch and because he wanted to start the UK branch for DaniMation, I felt so invited and I felt so eager about doing this offer for Joe.

Joe: I think the key thing is that we’ve been really lucky because having the partnership with the University really helped us because it also goes hand in hand with what goes on in the Institute of Education here because a lot of research and work goes on around autism as well. So we’re able to establish a number of partnerships which benefits not only animation, but also the university and the outreach work that goes on in a community of families with children with autism or young adults. Whether or not they live on their own or they’re on the spectrum, it’s all about advocating and helping them to pursue their passions because of limited opportunities.

Dani: I’ve always wanted to teach animation to us on the autism spectrum to different parts of the world, not just in person, but online as well. I think that helped open doors.

Dani, why do you teach your students Toon Boom Harmony?

Dani: Toon Boom Harmony has been my sponsor when I started my animation company in 2009 and it was all thanks to Patrick’s (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder) relationship with them. He was searching for professional software for me to use. At first when Patrick put me on the software, I was a little confused and not so sure what to do. But over time, when I got used to it, I liked doing all the animations on it.

Sandy: It’s accessible to us because they’re her sponsor, and all animation studios actually use it. It’s not just a game to play with. It’s pretty amazing the way that in five days, they learned how to tell a story, how to do a storyboard, they learn the software and how to put their stories into a little animation. They create the animation, they add sound, they add music.

Dani: It can be really fun. You’re not here to be watching cartoons. You are here to learn the animation production pipeline from development, pre production, production to post production and seeing the results from the audience. This year, we do have an assistant who was a previous student and we have seen her development from when she first attended our camp and we looked at her and saw a big improvement.

Photo of Dani and her students, provided by DaniMation

According to a poll conducted by Respect Ability, just 12% of employees in animation and visual effects in 2019 had a disability of some form or another. How do you think Danimation or other animation studios and companies in the UK could change this?

Joe: What I would say is yes, up until now, there is a low level of people with autism working in industries, particularly animation. However, there is a clear shift in that happening. I would say that in animation, we strive to make that change. But we also realised the importance of working with other large organisations in terms of this question and changing patterns in this.

Sandy: It’s always been really, really low, historically. But we’re really excited to see companies opening up more to the possibilities of working with us and helping out our community and other abilities, but especially our community, because that’s what we focus on to accept and understand.

Joe: You can imagine, for somebody on the autism spectrum, who may have varying sensory issues or a whole host of things, is immediately more accessible to them as well because they can do it from their own home on Zoom. So it’s actually becoming more friendly that way as well. Whilst we foster in our in person camps, the importance of working on social skills, we’ve got that hybrid which is great because we’ve kind of got the best of both worlds and supporting them. If this doesn’t work for you, let’s start with this and then work towards something in the middle. That’s our main aim is that they envision the spectrum that can be done in motion are progressing, we’re teaching them the basic skills but also pointing them in the right direction of companies or further study to actually pursue what they want to do in the animation industry.

This year’s students from the Plymouth workshop with their certificates. Photo provided by DaniMation.

What impact do you hope the workshop will have on your students after this week?

Dani: I’ve thought the impact I will always want for my students is to feel that they can do animation. And they feel like they’re motivated, they’re able to do it. They could be able to finish the job and finish the deadline, they should feel that they’re accomplished and wanted to do more. It’s only the beginning after they finish the camp and if they want to do more, they’re more willing to do it.

After the interview, I was invited to meet the students who showed me their work and discussed their projects. Seeing their work on the big screen and meeting with the parents and guardians, it was clear that everyone in the room was behind Dani and what she was bringing to the UK. And hopefully, we will both meet again to discuss more about her work and the growth of the animation industry.

Below are all of the students’ work as well as the people who contributed to this year’s workshop in Plymouth for everyone to enjoy.

The post DaniMation Returns for Animation Camp for Autistic Students to UK: Interview with Dani Bowman, Joe Westlake, Sandy Vielma appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

The 52 x 11’ series follows the adventures of Lloyd B Fly, a housefly who lives with his family – including 224 maggot siblings – inside a compost bin they call home. As the middle child of 451, Lloyd is a young fly with plenty to prove. With his best friend Abacus Woodlouse, his little sister PB, and eccentric tagalong Cornea Butterfly at his side, Lloyd is all set for misadventure in a family comedy of entomology. The series draws inspiration from the weird, wonderful, and bizarre world of insects and shines a light on what they get up to when we’re not paying attention.

Lloyd of the Flies is created and directed by Matt Walker, joined by Co-director and Voice Director Jane Davies with Aardman’s Sarah Cox acting as Executive Creative Director. Having previously appeared on the Skwigly Animation Podcast for their work on the animated adaptation of Graham Chapman’s satirical memoir A Liar’s Autobiography, Matt and Jane return for our latest episode to discuss the development and production of the new series (stream below or direct download).

The show’s cast is headed up by Tom Rosenthal (Friday Night Dinner) as Lloyd, alongside Alex Lawther (The End of the F***ing World, Black Mirror), Lauren Patel (Everybody’s Talking About Jamie), Jamie-Lee O’Donnell (Derry Girls) and Callum Scott Howells (It’s A Sin) as Lloyd’s nemesis Berry.

Catch Lloyd of the Flies weekdays on CITV at 5pm

The post Aardman’s ‘Lloyd of the Flies’ – new trailer + podcast interview! appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

In the words of Yen Liang Chen, his 4-minute short film AM I ORIGHT was made to ‘indicate the author’s actual experience of getting lost, growing, and transforming in the process of the creation journey’, which made it a perfect addition to the I’m FINE! programme.

As a collaboration between Skwigly and Ukraine’s LINOLEUM festival, I’M FINE! is a project that focuses on the ways to maintain mental health and stay motivated and productive in a world that changes every minute.

The programme itself is a reflection on the emotional burnout from the best independent animation creators. In addition to animation film screenings, Skwigly will be featuring a series of interviews and podcasts with artists who share their experiences of going through emotional burnout. Today we present a conversation with Yen Liang Chen about his 2017 experimental short, AM I ORIGHT.

Could you introduce yourself and briefly describe the circumstances of how the film was made and where the concept came from?

I am the director of AM I ORIGHT, a 2D film which was made by digital hand drawn animation. [The film] is an abstract animation and it is talking about myself in three parts: the childhood, the chaos, and the last part where I become a better person.

It was based on sound [and] music. For the sound part, I recorded, edited it together, and listened to this whole sound; and then began to draw the visual arts for the film. So the beginning is the sound. I was reading this paper about how music creates a very unique feeling for everyone. Even when we both listen to the same music or sound, we got different feelings, because we have different experience in our lives. So we can have different stories. So this idea is coming up, and I was thinking that maybe I can just translate this sound to have a different visual.

I didn’t draw any kind of classic animation storyboard, because this film doesn’t have that process – I just listened to the sound and drew one by one, day by day, sound by sound.

When it comes to filmmaking and time management, do you find that the process of animation or filmmaking has any therapeutic value? Does it help you put your thoughts in order, or help you cope with life in general?

It was very enjoyable making this film. Maybe the first part of this animation is the [about] happiness as a childhood, and then I put myself into the chaos, and then after that it was about growing up.

But the whole animation process was very enjoyable, I have to say, because there’s no stress of time. I was [able] to put myself into a playground and because the sound was based on my feelings, I just put my imagination into this film. So I was just like a child, who is playing with the animation, the artwork!

I didn’t have any kind of bad feeling about how the storyboard was, or that I have to draw [a certain way] –  I just followed my heart and my feelings at the time when I was drawing the clip. So every day drawing like this was very fun, interesting and enjoyable. It was a journey to learn how to feel the sound, how to open up my mind to the new landscape of my imagination. So, yes, it was a very happy journey!

It’s usual to work to deadlines, either for clients and employers; or if you’re working on your own projects you may have a self-imposed deadline. Do deadlines have a positive or negative impact on how you structure your time in approaching a creative project?

[The film did] have a deadline! I had a schedule, and I just followed my schedule day by day, month by month, and just try to reach the goal I have. Maybe [I was] a little bit stressed about the deadline, but not very much, because I know that I was trying to do my best. And, every time I showed it to my professor, he didn’t have any kind of negative opinion – he knew that it was an experimental animation and it was based on [my] feelings. He just gave me courage and said ‘keep going, keep going’.

There was a little bit of stress about the ending of this film! My professor gave me this homework: you have to add a recording about how you made this film, then the audience will know what are you doing, how you did it, how you made it. So this little bit of the last clip of my film was kind of a different thing. My friend helped me to re-record this sound, and I was very awkward at the time, because I had already recorded it in the beginning of the animation, but I had to just act like I was making it [for the first time]. So it gave me some kind of stress, yeah!

AM I ORIGHT

Burnout – the point where you feel like you’ve worked so hard on something you just can’t carry on, or you’re emotionally exhausted – have you ever experienced this? If so, how were you able to overcome it?

I think two years ago, there was a project which I had as a freelance. My friend introduced me to this project and, I have to say, I was very foolish that I wanted to [do the project] on my own; because I wanted to finish this project and earn all this money.

I call myself is foolish because I didn’t know the ability that I had at the time. After I finished the proposal for the project, I had to do the animation. And then I figured out ‘oh no, I don’t have the time or ability to finish this all on my own’. So it was a very stressful situation that time, and I blame myself partly and I say to myself ‘You’re a selfish person. You’re foolish. Why did you want to earn this whole money on your own? Why didn’t you think about this situation in the future?’

So I asked my very good friend and was pleased he could help me out on this project; he helped me a lot. And then I didn’t care about money, how much I earned. I just wanted to quickly finish all these projects and let the customer be happy. I didn’t want to care about how much money I have.

But this kind of a situation gave me a lesson that before I choose [a project] I have to think very clearly about if I have the ability, do I have the time, do I have another path if this doesn’t happen? If this doesn’t happen I won’t do it, because I know that it will make me very stressed out.

AM I ORIGHT

Yen Liang Chen’s film AM I ORIGHT is part of the I’m FINE! animation screening that will be taking place at:

• Bolton International Film Festival – 7 October (UK)
• MEGOGO screening – 10-30 October (Online, geo-blocked to UK and Ukraine)

I’M FINE! is a project by the LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival and Skwigly Animation Magazine. It is implemented with the support of the British Council within the framework of the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture.

The post AM I ORIGHT – Yen Liang Chen Interview | I’M FINE! – UK/Ukraine Season appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.