Animation Interviews | Directors, Animators, Studios

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Following a premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and a festival run including screenings at Clermont-Ferrand and Ottawa International Animation Festival with major award wins at Anima Brussels, Cardiff Animation Festival and SXSW among others, Nina Gantz‘s incredible stop-motion short Wander to Wonder has gone from strength to strength and is presently nominated for both an Oscar® and BAFTA.

Produced by Circe Films, Kaap Holland Film, Beast Animation, Les Productions de Milou, Blink Industries, Pictanovo, Netherlands and distributed by MIYU (whose short film roster includes fellow Oscar®-nominees Beautiful Men and Yuck!), Wander to Wonder brings us into a fantastical yet curiously nostalgic world where miniature performers Mary, Billybud and Fumbleton are left rudderless on the set of a children’s television show whose creator has passed away. As the futility of their existence becomes all the more apparent, building to an inevitably bleak conclusion, Mary remains determined that the show must go on.

The film marks Nina’s first short film since her acclaimed NFTS student film Edmond and brilliantly combines live-action and stop-motion to create a bizarre yet authentic piece that interweaves 80s culture with elements of comedy, folk and analogue horror. Ahead of this year’s BAFTA ceremony which takes place on February 16th, Skwigly were thrilled to catch up with the director and dive deep into the film’s backstory and production.

The film seems to show a darker side to nostalgia and explores feelings of grief. Where did the original idea for the film come from?

Since discovering the work of Ray Harryhausen in films such as Jason and the Argonauts and Attack of the Puppet People, I’ve had a fascination with combining live-action and stop-motion. I started thinking about what kind of world I could create if I combined these two mediums together, then after graduating from the National Film and Television School, I came up with the idea for a short film about a kids TV show with Simon Cartwright. We got very interested in where the story would go if we went behind the scenes and treated it like a family drama, with actual little humans inside the puppets. Uncle Gilly, the presenter, played a much bigger role in early versions of the script.

During seven years of development, trying to get the money together and COVID happening, Simon went on to another project. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on it and I gravitated to a much more personal version of the story. I also got the Dutch screen writer Daan Bakker involved, because I had already been working with the story for so long in my head that I needed someone to shake it up a little bit. I also got way more interested in the world of the little people in the studio and how they would survive on their own in a space like th at. During the time of the last rewrite, me and my husband also were taking care of someone who needed palliative care and when he passed away I saw how differently everyone deals with loss. And this is something that found its way into the three characters in Wander To Wonder. Mary clings on to the past and tries to keep the legacy going. Fumbleton feels kind of freed. He finally can show off his skills as a serious Shakespearean actor, while Billybud buries his head in the sand and focuses on what he knows best, which is juggling.

So this puzzle of development took 8 years but that did mean the story grew with me. I kept changing it to make it fit with my own journey as a filmmaker. And although 8 years was really too long, it did make the story rich and gave the characters depth. I guess that’s the bonus of working on something for so long!

Your films often play with a paradoxical feeling of whimsy and darkness, which, to me, always feels completely in keeping with the medium of stop-motion. As simultaneously cute, but also creepy. Where do you feel this desire to play with these two things, in this medium, comes from?

You can’t tell a heavy story like this without a little lightness. I think it also helps to hit the viewer even harder – or rather, it will hit them in an unexpected way, which is always interesting. And that’s also what I find interesting when I watch films. The two combined work best to convey the message.

This is your first independent film since Edmond, and as we’ve discussed above this took a long time to be made and from my understanding, it had quite a complex funding situation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the journey you went on to get the film made?

Edmond was my graduation film and I now realize how much easier it is to make a film in film school because you have your crew available for advice and they’re your friends and they’re there for you all year. It doesn’t really happen like that outside of film school. You first need to find a good team and then you need to put your trust in them, which can be a bit daunting. For Wander to Wonder we had to work in a co-production between four countries, which is really insane for a short animated film. I learnt that a lot more people want to say something about the film and you also have to work with people in all four countries.

I made the animatic in the UK, where I live and I made the puppets in the Netherlands. We had to film in a certain part of Belgium, with people from that region and the post-production had to be in the South of France, which is where the money came from.

Altogether it had its pros and cons. The communication was a challenge, however, I got to know loads of amazing people in other countries that love making stop-motion films.

Was the production quite tight then, after the lengthy pre-production stage?

Yes! it took about a year in total to make. That included making the puppets, constructing the sets and then five months of filming on two sets with three months in post-production.

The performance in the puppets is so nuanced. Could you talk a little about how you achieved this as a director?

Fortunately we were able to film the voice recording session with Toby Jones and Amanda Lawrence so we had a lot of wonderful reference footage. In addition to this, I made a lot of detailed videos of myself and my DOP (or my husband!) acting stuff out to give to the animators a reference for expression and body movement. I love giving reference footage because it makes it really clear how I see the shot as a director and it helps with timing. I had a number of animators working on the film who each worked in different ways. Most of them used the reference footage and then added personality to it whereas some work from experience and intuition, which can also result in beautiful performances.

Image courtesy of Nina Gantz

I was lucky enough to see the puppets in real life, and they’re really beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about the choices you made when it came to the look of the puppets and the overall film?

The size of the sets really informed the size of the puppets. The character design had to fit with the Uncle Gilly character (live action) and I wanted to work with real props and life-size sets, which meant we had to make them much smaller than normal stop-motion puppets. Also, because there is dialogue in the film and we needed quite a lot of expression in their faces, the most suitable option was to work with replaceable 3D-printed faces.

I had never worked with 3D printing before, and I had to find a look that I was happy with, which resulted in a very long research period. It was quite interesting because I knew they had to be fairly realistic, but then I also wanted it to clearly feel like stop-motion. A tricky balance to get right! I decided to sculpt them by hand first with some help from AMC FOK (my art teacher since I was 5) and Eve Shepherd, who is an amazing figurative sculptor. She did a few tweaks to make them a little bit less caricatured. I sculpted the puppets twice as big as the final puppets to get all the detail I needed. These sculpts were then 3D scanned and scaled down in the computer, then we started the modeling process of the facial animation. We created a library of facial expressions, for this we got the help of BlinkInk, as I had no previous experience with 3d modeling programs. They put a whole team of really brilliant people on it that helped me to make them. Then finding the right printer for the little facial replacements was an issue. I talked to Erik Van Schaaik (The Smile, Under the Apple Tree) as he worked with the same puppet maker as I did (Pedri Animation , and he used a certain kind of printer, but because my characters were so much smaller, the surface of the faces looked very textured and powdery and the gray material of the print would shine through. It also didn’t have the translucency that real skin has. Luckily, we found another printer in Belgium that just printed factory parts and asked them to print the faces. They had never done anything like this before, so that was a challenge, but they were brilliant and super keen to make it work.

As everything on set was life-sized, we were able to source all the props from secondhand shops which was amazing, however, it also meant that our sets were huge. We had to put the whole structure on animation tables, so our animators could reach the puppets, which made it 4 meters tall.

The set was divided into 3 parts so we could have two animators, animating simultaneously, to save time. We shot around 4 seconds a day per animator so that sped the process up a bit.

Was the pigeon a taxidermied real pigeon?

Rosie Tonkin, our wonderful set designer, bought the pigeon online. You can buy real taxidermy pigeons, although it had to have a certificate stating it died of natural causes. She hollowed it out in order to put a wire rig in it. She also re-made the feet because they had to be able to move. She did an incredible job but it was strange to work with! We had considered loads of different ways of making it (including using a live pigeon), however, this is where we ended up. True Jan Švankmajer style!

Did you also say previously that Rosie also made the flies?

She made tiny little flies, a few different versions, they were all animatable as well. So we actually animated them on greenscreen and we did little turnarounds with them, so we could place them in any shot that we wanted. We also chose to animate the water and the fire. I think these sorts of details help create a believable world where everything feels like it belongs together, so as a viewer you don’t question it. It’s quite a tricky thing to get right.

Image courtesy of Nina Gantz

So was the intention with the characters for them to read as small, human-like creatures, rather than puppets?

As I mentioned before, I really wanted them to fit with the (live-action) Uncle Gilly character, but I also wanted them to feel like stop-motion puppets, which is why I didn’t use too many facial replacements. The animators did such an incredible job because we really didn’t have a full library of faces, we just had what we needed. At the end of the film, you see some subtle print lines on the close up of Mary. I really don’t mind that, because at that point in the film you are in the story, hopefully, and you believe it. I wanted the audience to forget about how the puppets were made so I didn’t want the technique to override the story. That was important to me. They actually turned out differently to how I expected them to be, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I think when your not familiar with the technique, I feel it’s important to stay malleable so you can adapt along the way.

I understand the film was filmed chronologically due to the spectacular ending. Can you tell us more about some of the practical solutions that had to be developed to capture those final shots?

I don’t want to give too much away, but at some point we had to destroy everything, including the costumes, the puppets and the sets – and we had to do that for real so there was absolutely no way back. It was a really frightening thing to do. We had to make some things look burnt and we did that by literally burning them. Obviously, we took them out of the studio and burned them outside but it meant that the whole studio smelt like a barbecue for two weeks!

One night I woke up at three o’clock in the morning with this immense anxiety that I hadn’t checked that everything had stopped smoldering. I know about smoldering, because my house pretty much burnt down when I was a kid – it’s really scary. You can see a block of wood that looks fine from the outside, but inside it’s still alight. I could see my name in the newspapers already, “DUTCH ANIMATOR SETS BELGIUM STUDIO ON FIRE” ! I knew I had to go back to the studio so I got a cab in the middle of the night because it was quite far away. Luckily, when I arrived I saw that the place hadn’t burned down. But I still had to go in and touch everything to double check. We had been using water to extinguish it, but you just never know.

Also, in order to feel the passage of time, we had to age the puppets and their costumes and make Fumbleton’s beard and Mary’s hair longer. They started off pristine, but at some point, the costumes had to be cut and broken to show more of their bodies, bit by bit. This meant that they had to be taken back to the puppet maker quite regularly which was a challenge because he was in the Netherlands. We had to coordinate carefully so that he had his team in place ready to work. We had four different stages of destruction: intact, dirty, broken and then burnt, so it was important that we didn’t destroy something that we would need later on.

Image courtesy of Nina Gantz

So the voice talent in the film was very integral to the film, as the characters very much drive our understanding of the world and the plot of the film and as you mentioned earlier, dialogue was something you were really keen on exploring in this film. How did you decide upon the casting?

Mary is quite a sensitive person. She is trying to cling on to the past and has a nervousness about her, but I also didn’t want to make her too fragile because she is the one making things happen and driving the others to keep going with the show. I listened to a lot of voices from casting agencies and I loved Amanda Lawrence because she is very characteristic and was actually the first one I contacted, so I was very happy that she said yes.

For Fumbleton, who for most of the time is quoting Shakespeare, I really wanted someone that came from a theatre background and understood Shakespeare but could also understand the humorous tone of the film. I already had Toby Jones in my head when I sculpted the puppets because I think he looks really amazing and I felt he would be perfect for it as he also comes from a theatre background. It was a dream to have him in the film. When I contacted him, I didn’t expect him to say yes to it but he did, which was really wonderful and he nailed it in the voice recording. It was really fun seeing Toby and Amanda performing together.

Uncle Gilly was the really difficult one to find. I wanted him to be a kind and gentle sort of man, like Matthew Corbett, the original presenter of Sooty and Sweep. A man that acts a bit silly but is also an educator and father figure in some ways. I had been struggling to find anyone and it was two weeks before the shoot. I was taking the sets over to Belgium in a van with Rosie Tonkin (our production designer) and I said I didn’t have an Uncle Billy character yet. I asked if she knew anyone, and she actually said ‘oh, yeah, the dad of an old school friend of mine is an actor and fits your character description really well’. It turned out to be Neil Salvage and he was the perfect fit. Two weeks later, he was in Belgium! He was such a lovely guy to work with and he really understood the references.

https://www.skwigly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ACTORS.mp4How have you found the response so far? And what are your hopes for the film going forward?

It’s really nerve wracking the first time you release it into the world, because you’re so close to it, so the fact that people come up to me and tell me that they are moved and that they really understand the idea behind it, is wonderful.

The success the film has had has been crazy especially now with the Annie Award and the Oscar Nomination!

The awards and festival selections just make you feel that people want to see your work, and that keeps you going, which is very nice.

Do you have any future plans for the film?

I do see a longer film in it. I didn’t make it as a proof of concept, but I think in those eight years of production I’ve done so much work on the character development and all the different versions I had of this film that it makes me feel like there is definitely more to get out of it. I’m not saying it will look exactly the same, but the world of it still intrigues me. I didn’t have that with Edmond, for instance; that was a nice story from beginning to end and it felt finished, but with this one I feel there are possibilities.

And for yourself?

When I was making this film, it was so intense that I called some of my friends and said ‘if I ever have an idea for a short film again, tell me not to do it’ ! although, like giving birth, you quickly forget about the pain! I am currently working on a family feature film, together with a writer and production company in the Netherlands, which is going to be a stop-motion homage to the pigeons of Amsterdam made from garbage and recycled stuff, which is really exciting. Alongside that, I’m developing another feature film together with the producers from WtW and will be more for adults and will use a mix of live action and stop-motion like in Wander to Wonder.

The 2025 EE BAFTA Film Awards will take place on Sunday, February 16th. For more on the work of Nina Gantz visit ninagantz.com

The post Wander to Wonder | Interview with Nina Gantz appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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Long-time fans of Skwigly may be familiar with the name Tania Vincent, who was a contributor for the magazine back in 2012. After all these years, Tania didn’t just become a successful animator, but became a successful director and writer, having been a co-director on animated films such as Scary Girl and Combat Wombat: Back 2 Back.

Her latest project, The Sloth Lane, saw her become the first female director for an animated feature in the Australian film industry. After appearing at multiple international film festivals last year, it will finally be available to UK cinemagoers this year from 14th February. The film tells the story of the energetic and excitable sloth Laura and her slowpoke family who move into the busy and fast-paced Sanctuary City from their once quiet lives to open up a new restaurant, all while confronting personal obstacles as a family.

I had the privilege to speak with Tania and, not just learn about how her life has changed since writing for Skwigly, but also about what it’s been like to be a part of the Australian animation industry during its peak these past few years and writing a story that contains hard-hitting themes not usually explored in animated films aimed for families.

Tania Vincent

Seasoned Skwigly readers may be familiar with your contributions as a writer as far back as 2012. From those early days of your career to writing and directing your first feature, could you tell us about your journey?

It’s so surreal to talk to you because I was obsessed with Skwigly at university. We had the magazines on the table so when I started writing for them all those years ago it was so exciting because I was just obsessed with everything animation. I think the reason I loved working with you all at Skwigly is because you could just immerse yourself in animation and movies and meet all these incredible creators. One of the interviews I got to do was with Peter Ramsey, who had just directed Rise of the Guardians, and he was so kind to me and so lovely and it was just so inspiring.

I got very lucky. This might be the same for a lot of people, but I was obsessed with making videos for animation and all the directors back then were animators, so I was like “that’s how you do it. That’s how you get there.” I took the very long road of animating and getting into a lead position and I just got really lucky. I was working on a film and I was doing comics outside of work and the owners of the company saw those comics and asked me if I ever considered directing.

I got to co-direct a small movie called Scary Girl based on a graphic novel, which was in the UK cinemas last year. Outside of work, I was writing scripts with my writing partner Ryan Greaves and we got super lucky as Ron Howard picked one of our scripts in a contest and from that we sold our script to Netflix in the US and because of that, combined with my co-directing, I got asked to write and direct The Sloth Lane. All of these tiny pieces of work that I done throughout the years came together for this one film. It was incredible. It was crazy.

The Sloth Lane is the fifth entry in The Tales from Sanctuary City franchise from Like a Photon Creative. What makes this film stand out from the previous instalments?

They do them in sets of three so I think they wanted to make the next set, which The Sloth Lane was included in, to bring in some new creators and really give the reigns to me and my co-writer Ryan Greaves and, because I worked on so many films, the trust they put in me to make something that spoke to me and the crew, it was something really special. The other films we made had Australian animals in it but this one had some South American and Central American animals, too, so I think it had a much wider perspective that people could come in and we talked a lot more about some deeper issues.

I feel really happy that they supported me in this idea that animated films just don’t have to be aimed at kids and don’t have to dumb it down for kids at all. I think you can tell really big themes and stories and I think that’s all the films we grew up loving so they put a lot of trust in me to do that and I’m very appreciative for it. We touch on the themes of Alzheimers in the film and me and Ryan had been touched by that in our families. It was lovely to dive into that and try to find a hopeful story on such a sad and touching subject.

This film is notable for the fact that it made you the first woman in Australia to write and direct an animated feature film. What is the landscape like in Australia for women filmmakers; especially within animation?

It was so surreal when I found out. It’s exciting but terrifying all at the same time. I’m originally from Wales in the UK, I’ve been in Australia for about ten years now and my whole career began in the UK. When I started, I think I worked in a company with three hundred people and there was only like five woman and now I look around the studio and it’s fifty fifty; if not more sometimes. What I love about that is it just brings so many new voices and stories into the room and so many new perspectives.

In Australia right now I think they’re going through a bit of an animation golden age with things like Bluey, which is so beautifully written. The Lost Tiger is directed by Shantelle Murray and she’s the first indigenous woman to direct a movie and I think it’s an exciting time to see all these people get a chance to do what they love. I’m really excited to see what the future of animation is going to look like in Australia, but also everywhere. I think it’s starting to happen all over the world which is richly exciting.

What was it like to share the director’s chair with co-director Ricard Cussó, who has directed most of Like a Photon Creative’s other films?

I’ve known Ricard for many years; since I was an animator on his first film. It was really surreal to be his lead animator for a few years and then join him to be his co-director for Scary Girl and kind of flip it and he came on as my co-director for my movie. What I love about that was that we had such a rhythm and we knew each other so well by that point that it was such a great relationship. The director can’t be everywhere and having that partner in crime always with you from start to finish; seeing your vision for the film and helping you through, it is incredible.

The beauty of this film is that there’s a lot of Spanish speaking dialogue and Ricard has that Mexican heritage that we wanted to put on the screen. It was a kind of marriage of me being able to tell this beautiful mother and daughter story and him also making this film that he can take his little girl to when she’s older and see her Mexican and Australian heritage on the screen too. It was an absolute wonder. I’ve done lots of films with him and I absolutely love it.

You touched on it briefly already, but this appears to be a more mature film at times compared to some other animated feature films in the past couple of years, especially with the mother figure and her struggles with memories and the family adapting to a new home. What were the biggest challenges to portraying those moments, not just as the film’s director, but its writer too?

It was really hard. It’s such a painful subject for so many people including myself and I think we wanted to tell this hopeful story. What is the hopeful side of Alzheimers or for anyone going through this, what can you possibly give? For us, the theme of the film is appreciating the moments you have – really seeing what’s right in front of you.

It was really important for us to put that message out in the world as things are awful, but if you can, take time to enjoy those special little moments you get with the people you love. It’s a message that’s very close to me and my writing partner and I think sloths were such a good animal to use for that message because we didn’t want to tell a story about a kid who wants to go fast while their family is going slow. We didn’t want that to be the theme of the film so delving deeper into that and what is slowness and really, it’s about time, it’s about getting somewhere. My mum would always say when I was a kid “you just don’t look into the future, you stare at it” and I was missing out on the now with her and all my family. It was nice to tell a story that was more centered in that slowing down, especially when everyone goes fast all the time.

Do you think there are more stories to tell with the sloth family for a potential sequel?

It’s hard because you leave them in such a hopeful place that I think if we went back, we would have to go back to the beginning. We have this tiny crew of forty people who threw absolutely everything into this film and I think everyone kind of fell in love with the sloth parents. I think if we were going to tell another story we would have to go back to the beginning and see how they met and how these two opposite people came together. I think that would probably be where you go, look backwards instead of forwards.

Like a Photon Creative, Flying Bark Productions, and Ludo Studios have become recognisable names with their films and television shows, especially with the latter with Bluey, internationally. How have they impacted the Australian animation industry domestically from your perspective?

Like a Photon is a production studio, so what they do is find all these creatives and find this funding, which is famously so hard, and find a studio to work with. The studio I work at is called Cosmic Dino Studio and they do all the animation for the movies and that studio was only created because Like a Photon had this story to tell and needed someone to animate it. The studio has been going now for about three years and it’s been so amazing to see it’s journey grow and keep growing and been working with people from Ludo as well.

They’ve started a small company and they’ve just grown and grown and grown because I think what they care about in Australia, and it’s so similar in the UK, is creator’s work. It’s not just creating something on an assembly line. It’s kind of creating something that the whole team is invested in. It’s been nice to see how much talent there is in so many countries and all these small companies are growing so big because they’re putting all that creativity on the screen. The UK and Australia have a lot to offer to the animation world.

The past few years appear to have been very busy for you – are you taking a break anytime soon, or do you have any other projects lined up that you can talk to us about?

Now that I’ve talked to you about it I kind of want to make the prequel (laughs.) I’m taking a little break as I’m doing the scariest thing ever which is becoming a Mum, but writing and directing is just so much of who I am and I’m excited to get back into it. I currently have two animated films that I’m writing with some partners. I can’t talk too much about them right now, but I’m really, really excited to be working with them. My dream is to make an animated sci-fi and an animated fantasy film so they’re kind of the two routes I’m going down at the moment.

The Sloth Lane will be released in UK cinemas on 14th February 2025.

The post The Sloth Lane: Interview with Director and Writer Tania Vincent appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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Naoko Yamada’s ‘The Colors Within’ (Credit Gkids)

Ever since making her major directorial breakthrough with anime sensation K-On! in 2009, Naoko Yamada has repeatedly proven herself one of the most singular and distinct voices in Japanese animation today. One of the few women directors to have successfully forged a career within Japan’s traditionally testosterone-filled anime industry, Yamada has garnered a reputation for her musically dynamic, aesthetically vibrant, intensely character-focused work over the past decade and a half. From Tamako Market to A Silent Voice, and from Liz And The Blue Bird through The Heike Story to Garden Of Remembrance, Yamada’s oeuvre has always been tantalisingly touched by the magical, whilst simultaneously remaining steeped at every turn in the kind of slice-of-life vérité that shoots straight for the heart.

With Yamada’s latest movie, The Colours Within, the filmmaker’s zest for life and love of music has never been more apparent — and nor has her mastery of her craft. Set at an all-girl Catholic high school, Yamada’s film — her first feature for anime outfit Science SARU — centres around Totsuko Higurashi (Sayu Suzukawa), a teenage girl with a sort-of synesthetic condition that enables her to see, well, the colours within those around her. Among those colours is the azure blue of Kimi Sakunaga (Akari Takaishi), whose arrival in Totsuko’s life — along with soft-spoken thereminist Rui Kagehira (Taisei Kido) — sparks a flame that quickly leads to the impromptu formation of a band, and of bonds between the trio that will prove life-changing in more ways than one.

As much a tender exploration of identity and self-discovery as an impassioned paean to the power of music and its capacity to say all the things that words alone can’t quite reach, The Colors Within, with its deeply expressive use of colour, beautifully realised characters, and ambitious, earworm-filled soundtrack, perfectly encapsulates all of that which has made Naoko Yamada such a major name in the world of Japanese animation. It’s also the latest product of a maverick director-composer collaboration between Yamada and multi-instrumentalist Kensuke Ushio that stretches all the way back to A Silent Voice.

Ahead of The Colors Within’s UK release on 31 January, 2025, Skwigly sat down with Naoko Yamada and her long-time composer Kensuke Ushio to discuss the duo’s latest collaboration, their formative moments as artists, and the filmmakers and musicians who inspire their work.

Watching The Colors Within, I was really struck by both how personal and specific Totsuko’s story feels. Where did this story come from, Naoko, and how early in the process did you know you wanted Kensuke to return as your composer?

Naoko Yamada: This was an original film, and when I was thinking about what kind of story I wanted to tell, what kind of atmosphere I wanted to create, I knew that I didn’t want to restrict meaning by using words. I wanted to give the audience the opportunity to use their imagination as much as possible. I also knew that I wanted to make a film that people would be able to feel. And when I was thinking about how to do that, I thought firstly of sound, and secondly, of colour — and then the story grew from there. The films that I tend to work with Ushio-san on are ones where feeling is important, where I want to express something beyond words. That was the case with A Silent Voice, and that was the case again here. So yeah, I thought he would be perfect.

Kensuke Ushio: And I do my best to get her to want to work with me on everything!

The interplay of sound and image here is a real joy to behold: it feels like this film is a perfect embodiment of animation at its purest. What does your collaborative process look like on a project like this? Does the music come first? Or the imagery? Maybe a bit of both even?

NY: I always try to have the images first, but usually I start with the scenario and then move on to the storyboard. That being said, before the storyboard, I will meet with Ushio-san, and he will often start to write the music based on what he has felt and the inspiration that he’s taken out of that meeting. So although the visuals start to move quite quickly, it often feels like the music is happening in parallel.

As we’ve touched upon, you guys have worked together across several projects now. How has working together influenced, or perhaps even changed, the way each of you approaches your own art?

NY: Well, Ushio-san is a musician in his own right. He uses the name Agraph, and I was already a fan of his music before we met. So when I was directing, when I was writing scenarios, drawing storyboards, I often felt that the way that I expressed myself was kind of similar to the way he structured his music. I felt this resonance, which I guess is why I reached out to him to work together in first place. Now, we obviously collaborate, but it wasn’t so much that my way of working ever changed… rather, I think there was this sense of relief working with Ushio-san. I always thought that my methods, my storytelling grammar, was a bit unusual, but it was a relief to discover that someone else worked in a similar way. This collaboration has helped me to accept that individuality, and it has given me the courage to keep working In that way — and I still experience that now.

KU: interestingly, I was also a fan of Naoko before we worked together. And I too felt that shared sensibility. What’s interesting is she comes across as this genius, but actually she has worked really hard to produce everything that she produces. She really gets her hands dirty and suffers for her craft, and it’s the same for me as I’m working through each millisecond of sound. I am hating every second, but I’m still going, and I keep going, and I keep crawling forward. And I sympathize with that, because that’s Naoko’s way of working as well. And like she said, it’s not so much that I’ve changed my way of working because of my collaboration with her so much as it’s given me a sense of affirmation for the way that I already am… and it’s working with her that makes it easier to take the first step. I don’t need to hesitate with Naoko, and I know that we both put our all into it, and that’s the way that we’ve continued to work together. And it’s great.

Naoko Yamada’s ‘The Colors Within’ (Credit Gkids)

That’s beautiful to hear, thank you both for sharing. Something else we should discuss is the verisimilitude you bring to your work, Naoko, the human, life-like flourishes in your animation. There are all these beautifully heightened sequences in The Colors Within and fantastical flourishes, but often the way that your films move and the way that your characters convey emotion feels like live action cinema. You’ve spoken before about being a big fan of the Czech filmmaker, Jan Švankmajer, who brings similar qualities to his stop motion films. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with Švankmajer’s filmography and how that has impacted your own approach to animation?

NY: I love, love, love Švankmajer! And when I first saw his work, I was struck by the rawness of the interior world that it depicted. I discovered him when I was young, when I was starting to think that I wanted to create, and so it had a really big impact on me. Nowadays, you may not see much of his influence there directly in the images that I create, but I think the way that he shows people’s feelings, thoughts, individual problems, is something that continues to influence and guide me. And his style… gosh! My favourite of his work is Conspirators Of Pleasure, a film that feels really personal, and it’s something that has helped me hugely as an individual. I’ve always felt that as long as he is working, as long as he is creating, then I want to create as well.

One of the things that really lingers long after watching The Colors Within is how it serves as this really wonderful testament to that formative moment in adolescence where you discover your passion in life, whether that’s as an artist, as a person, or — as is the case here — both. Can you both recall that moment of electricity in your own early years that made you realise your passion as an animator Naoko? As a musician, Kensuke?

NY: Honestly, it was seeing the work of Jan Švankmajer… he had such a profound impact on me. His work showed me the breadth of techniques that there are in animation and made me inspired me to want to create animation myself.

KU: I decided that I was going to be a musician in the fourth year of primary school. And there was a guy in Japan, [Vampire Hunter D composer] Tetsuya Komoro, who was big at the time and surrounded by all these cool synthesizers. He was like a Japanese version of Stock Aitken Waterman! [Laughs] That was my source of passion.

Before we let you both go, we couldn’t miss the chance to ask about something that came up in an interview you did a couple of years ago, Naoko, where you were asked about the filmmakers who inspire you and you named John Carney. For fans of your work and Carney’s, there are definite parallels between the way that you both explore human stories using music, and how you incorporate song in a way that feels very true to life. Is there a connection there between you both as filmmakers? And do you have a favourite Carney film?

NY: I always talk about Once when I talk about John Carney. For me, his love of music and affinity for music spills over from his films, and you can feel the love that there is in the way that he looks at his characters, too. He’s someone that I do feel I have things in common with as well, as a filmmaker and in the way we look at things.

And have you shown Kensuke the joys of John Carney yet?

NY: He’s seen Sing Street, and I’ve still got to introduce him to Once yet. But then I’ve not seen Begin Again. So there’s those, and I think they’re the main three you can really get in Japan. But yes, I’m working on it!

And one very last thing before you leave us, we’d like to think that this isn’t the last time we’ll see Naoko Yamada and Kensuke Ushio’s names together on a project. Your collaborations have always been so fruitful and you clearly work so well together. Do you have any plans already for your next team-up?

KU: Of course we have! [Laughs all round] You just need to make sure you push that question more to her.

So, Naoko? Plans?

NY: [Extended laughter] There’s always plans…

The Colors Within will be in UK cinemas from 31st January 2025.

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Image: BBC/Aardman/Netflix

In our last Skwigly Animation Podcast of 2024 we discuss the history, legacy and impact of the incredible world of Wallace & Gromit – and are delighted to welcome back creator Nick Park alongside co-director Merlin Crossingham to discuss their hotly-anticipated new feature-length Aardman outing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will premiere on BBC One and iPlayer at 6.10pm on Christmas Day.

Stream the episode below or direct download here.

Also joining us in this episode is Wallace voice actor Ben Whitehead, who discusses his history with Aardman and how he came to fill the shoes of the late Peter Sallis.

In anticipation of the film’s imminent broadcast, Skwigly have put together a special Aardman-centric playlist of episodes from our various podcast strands including a roster of such top animation talents as

Peter Lord
David Sproxton
Richard Starzak
Will Becher
Jackie Cockle
Jane Davies
Sam Fell
Jay Grace
Leyla Hobart
Dan Ojari
Magdalena Osinska
Mikey Please
Barry Purves
Matthew Walker

Also included in the playlist are two episodes of our lockdown series Skwigly Film Club in which the Skwigly team watch through the Aardman feature films Chicken Run and Arthur Christmas!

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl premieres on BBC One and iPlayer at 6.10pm on Christmas Day with an international Netflix release to follow on January 3rd

The post Wallace & Gromit | Podcast Special featuring Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham & Ben Whitehead appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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Marking the feature debut of Peter Baynton, The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland sees the award winning director helm a festive feature with a twist at perhaps the UK’s premier 2D animation studio Lupus Films.

Based on the bestselling book written by Carys Bexington, illustrated by Kate Hindley both book and film, as the title might suggest, is a mixture of the mistletoed merriment of ‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ and the mirth and madness of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, putting jolly Saint Nick up against the decapitation delirious Queen of Hearts.

Bringing together a stellar cast including Gerard Butler (Saint Nick), Emilia Clarke (The Queen of Hearts) and Simone Ashley (Alice) the film sees our Christmas champion and his team of Reindeer take a dive into Wonderland where they have the enormous task of converting the mad monarch from a scrooge-like tinsel hater to a heartfelt christmas lover in order to save Christmas for everyone.

Staying faithful to the books (as Lupus is known for), the design of the film delivers a unique Santa and coupled with Gerard Butler’s enthusiastic vocal boisterousness. As he should Santa really shines in this feature and paired with the ferocious Queen of Hearts, delivered with mischievous, brattish energy from Emilia Clarke, the film makes for an entertaining tale, full of ingenuity, and enough twists and turns to stand out from the slew of Santa centric adventures that fight for our attention every year. From a technical point of view the animation is great too and though clearly rigged – a departure from the crayon heavy stylings we have grown used to from the studio, it faithfully fits the source material and allows the lavishly detailed character designs to move as they should.

Packed with all the ingredients that make a festive film memorable and endearing the film is a yummy yuletide treat for the whole family and is available to stream now on Sky Cinema in the UK, Now TV in Canada as well as Amazon and Hulu. We caught up with Director Peter Baynton and Producer Ruth Feilding to discuss The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland.

Ruth, When I came to the studio when you were making Mog I was told that there was a top secret project happening upstairs in the studio – this was clearly that project! How did this film end up at Lups Films?

Ruth Fielding – We started working on this about four or five years ago while making other projects. Helen McAleer, then at Macmillan, brought us the book, saying it had a bit of a Christmas special feel. Camilla and I looked at it, loved Kate Hindley’s illustrations, and appreciated how Carys cleverly mashed The Night Before Christmas and Alice in Wonderland together. It felt like a no-brainer. We optioned the book, developed it as a half-hour Christmas special, and later showed it to Universal. They loved it and suggested developing it into a feature.

Once we got the green light—which takes forever, with lots of development work—we commissioned Guy Chambers and Amy to write songs, as it was going to be a musical. We expanded the story with Sarah Daddy’s screenplay; she’d just written the first Puffin Rock feature, so we knew she could write a feature, but we didn’t realize how amazing she’d be at rhyming couplets. The book, like The Gruffalo, is all in rhyming couplets, and while we doubted it could work in a feature, once we committed to that rule, there was no turning back.

By the time we were greenlit, Peter had started The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. We really wanted him to direct, so we waited, storyboarding with him remotely—a process that took about nine months. Once the animatic was signed off, Peter was free, and he came back to direct it.

Director Peter Baynton and Producer Ruth Fielding of Lupus Films

You must be sick of animating snow Peter?

Peter Baynton – (Laughs) You want to get into specifics? Animating snow is harder than you think. There’s the falling snow and then the snow on the ground—do characters leave footprints? What’s the snow’s characteristic? In The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, we made all the footprints, but for this film, we decided early on not to because it’s essentially a whole additional department you need.

We also had to decide which sequences would have falling snow and which would just show snow on the ground. We picked the moments that needed to feel the most Christmassy for falling snow, as even that’s tricky. You need to maintain consistency in speed and density from shot to shot, especially when moving from a wide shot to a close-up. Sometimes, even if it’s technically consistent, it can suddenly look faster or denser. It’s a pain!

Lupus Films have delivered Father Christmas in animated form before, how do you make him unique every time?

RF – Our Saint Nick is entirely made by Gerard Butler—he did such an amazing job, I can’t imagine anyone else playing him. The great thing about this mash-up is that there could be others—Saint Nick venturing into another fairy tale, perhaps.

Gerard was a real find. We shot for the moon, thinking, Who do we really want? I never thought he’d say yes. Through a friend of a friend of Camilla’s—a Scottish connection in LA—we got the script and songs to him. As soon as he read it, he was all in: ‘I’ve got to do this.’

It wasn’t easy. The actors’ strike hit, and at one point, we thought it wouldn’t happen. He was devastated but pleaded, ‘Please wait for me.’ And we did. He truly is our Saint Nick, and I can’t imagine anyone else in the role.

PB – Gerard has so much energy and such a huge heart—he’s kind, gentle, and playful, like a kid. All of that went into Saint Nick, making it a perfect match.

What really struck me about this mash-up of Wonderland and Saint Nick is the contrast between organisation and chaos. Wonderland is unpredictable, chaotic, and nonsensical, while Saint Nick’s Christmas operation is probably the most logistically complex mission imaginable—putting DHL or FedEx to shame. He’s a man on a mission, thrown into a world that’s the complete antithesis of that.

What’s lovely is that, while Saint Nick is focused and determined, he also has a fun-loving side. He’s happy to pause, relax, have a cup of tea, and share a laugh. That combination was very appealing as a story.

The film captures the design of the book with a rigged animation style. Can you tell us about the design process?

PB – Early on—almost in our first or second meeting—we decided the film should look like the book. It felt important and, honestly, obvious. Kate Hindley, the illustrator, visited the studio early in the process and assumed we’d take her designs, toss them out, and start fresh. But that never occurred to us—her illustrations are gorgeous, full of charm, texture, patterns, and lovely detail. It would’ve been a waste not to use them as a strong basis for the film.

We chose rigged cel animation because it was more practical given the level of detail. Saint Nick’s beard is scribbly, his fur trim has intricate shading, everyone has freckles, and their cheeks are hatched in. If we’d drawn it in 2D, we’d either lose much of that detail or spend decades making the film. Rigged cel animation let us keep Kate’s beautiful designs and bring them to life.

RF – It feels like a cut-out pop-up book, with that aesthetic of opening pages. It suited cel animation well—almost like a proscenium arch stage where characters move side to side. But designing for a feature film meant we had to consider the detail, texture, and depth needed to make it feel like a movie, not just a TV episode or a book.

The idea of not using Kate Hindley’s illustrations never crossed our minds. She’s so lovely and assumed we’d redesign everything, but instead, she became a kind of associate art director. She contributed many character and location designs, working closely with our art director, Anna Stevens. It was a very collaborative process, which was really nice.

You’ve worked on music videos, short films, specials and now features, is there more room to play with a feature?

PB – I’m not sure if it’s a difference between shorts and features, but I’m always looking to play—probably to the production team’s annoyance! Especially with sequences on the roof, in the bedroom, and other set pieces, we loved figuring them out and finding bits of humour to add.

It was great collaborating with Sarah, our writer. For example, there’s a moment on the roof where we storyboarded it and thought, This could use a few lines. We’d send it to Sarah, she’d write some, send them back, and we’d go back and forth. It was a really rewarding process. I suppose that’s where having a bit more time on a feature film becomes a luxury—you can develop those moments more fully.

The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland is available to stream now on Sky Cinema in the UK. You can hear the full interview with Peter and Ruth on the Skwigly Animation Podcast.

Animation Podcasts | Skwigly · Skwigly Podcast 116 (13/12/2024) – Seasonal AnimationsThe post The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland – Interview with Director Peter Baynton and Producer Ruth Fielding appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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Landing like a sleigh full of gifts with a thump onto your Netflix algorithm is That Christmas. The festive feature film from Locksmith Animation, the British CG studio behind Ron’s Gone Wrong.

This film marks the directorial debut of Simon Otto, previously head of character animation at DreamWorks Animation and sees the original premise taken from Richard Curtis’s trilogy of books woven into an animated adventure in time for the holiday season.

L-R, Richard Curtis (Writer), Simon Otto (Director), Nicole P. Hearon (Producer)

Curtis and Christmas have become synonymous with one another with thanks to his live action rom com offerings such as Love Actually but through Locksmith this film marks his entrance into the animated feature world. The premise of the film fits the modus operandi of Curtis as a star studded cast of national treasures and comedy legends come together to deliver interweaving tales all set in the fictional Suffolk town of Wellington-on-Sea. Certain to indulge the seasonal senses of those warmed by the cozy familiarity of a comedy-drama Christmassy tales with more than enough animated excellence on display, you can read the full Skwigly review of the film here and catch That Christmas for yourself on Netflix now.

We caught up with Writer Richard Curtis, Producer Nicole P. Hearon and Director Simon Otto to find out more about the film.

You’re all from different backgrounds so I’ll start by asking what Christmas means to you all

Nicole P. Hearon – Well, it’s family. It’s about being together. I mean, that’s me, my biggest memories of opening the presents and just being together Christmas morning, running down the stairs into the living room, and then having your parents watch proudly as you see what Santa had chosen for us.

Simon Otto – Well, I’m from Switzerland, so Christmas works a little bit different in Switzerland, for me, it was anticipation. We would celebrate in Christmas Eve, looking out the window and see if it snowed overnight, because I came up from mountains my entire childhood was a White Christmas! I would go skiing first and then ski home, see the tree decorated and see how many gifts were under the under the tree that I get to open that night. So we had a 12 hour advantage over the British and the American kids!

Richard Curtis – Well, actually, we were a traveling family, lived in lots of countries, so it was very much about my small family. But Christmas for the last 25 years has become about lots of families. We celebrate it up in Suffolk, and there are about five families who live in the same little village, which is very much what this film is about, not only my family, but see what’s happening with all the others, and then trying to think of a good excuse not to do the Christmas morning swim, which everyone else in the village does!

The film is based on the books by yourself and Rebecca Cobb – was the intention to eventually turn them into an animated feature?

RC – No, but it’s such a joy to move them all together. It’s like when we started Mr. Bean, it was originally three stage sketches that Rowan and I did it with three different characters. And then when we thought we were going to adapt them for TV, we thought, let’s make it the same guy in each of the situations, and that’s what’s happened here. There were three different worlds, and we just said, let’s shove them all in the same town.

Did adapting the short stories to feature offer additional challenges?

RC – I think we realised pretty quickly that all the stories needed to be doubled and made so they were all one incident, without looking much at the past and future the characters. I’ve done adaptations before, and actually, all you’re doing is shrinking. You take a 400 page book and you’re trying to squeeze it into 120 minute film. But in this case, it was all about expanding and interweaving the universes. So that made it a lot of fun to think through every character and what their extra story might be.

Simon, as head of character at DreamWorks, you get the ideal opportunity as director to play with the characters. The Twins present an amazing chance to take the same designs and rigs and have fun with them.

SO – I’m a strong believer in the power of performance. It’s reflected in the way people hold themselves, walk, or gesture. One of my favourite things to do is sit in a train station and observe people going about their day, assigning personalities to them in my mind. Sometimes, I’ll sit with friends—like my niece—or others I love sharing this with, and we’ll throw dialogue at these passersby, imagining what might be going through their heads. It’s hilarious because it reveals how we interpret someone’s appearance, their body shape, and especially their movements and mannerisms.
Finding those idiosyncrasies in a broader context is fascinating. For instance, if you’re working with just two characters, it’s easier to distinguish them. But with a group of five kids, it becomes more complex. We had so much fun exploring that. From the outset, what drew me to Richard’s films is his love for action and his multi-threaded storytelling, where various characters intersect. His ability to craft sketch comedy blends seamlessly with the opportunity to create a rich palette of characters, which was immediately appealing to me.
I was drawn to the fact that this story doesn’t rely on a big, fantastical idea or a traditional villain. The blizzard itself is the antagonist. While some characters are initially ambiguous, their layers unfold as the story progresses. It’s unusual for animation, and that uniqueness is what excited me. I always root for animated films that take risks, offering something fresh and different. I hope audiences who watch our film will feel the same spark I did while creating it.

Nicole, with a background working on Frozen you’re not stranger to putting snow in a film! In terms of technological advances in animation, would you read a huge blizzard in the script as a challenge?

NH – It’s a challenge that I want to accept. As soon as we get a script we sat with Visual Effect Supervisor Doug Eichler to look where the snow is, and then we immediately get together our tech team and figure out the most efficient way to do that. I remember the tech team created a box of snow so when we never would have falling snow, you’d have a box of snow around the camera. And that technology was created before we started production, so that when we could hit the ground running, when we go, okay, falling snow, and it wasn’t a big deal. So a lot of it is just in the planning of it, putting our heads together, and then also working with Simon in terms of snow interaction with feet. There’s some we’d have to pick and choose, what shots we’d have that in, but that was a conversation among us, what are the most important shots to see that in? It’s a constant collaboration.

SO – It was also an opportunity. We didn’t know how much emotion was connected to just falling snow. You think, ‘Okay, well, there’s a shot, and there’s falling snow’ and all of a sudden, you change the way the snow falls, and you add a bit of atmosphere. It was playful and seductive at one point, all of a sudden it was threatening, and that was a huge opportunity. From the first Frozen film to today, like there’s a lot more that is straight out of the box, so I think that’s why we survived it.

Coming from live-action, these conversations must just boggle the mind Richard?

RC – Yeah I was just thinking that! And I was thinking how, in the way the snow is almost like a second score, isn’t it? It’s a visual score, so that all the way through, you can try and work out, as it were, the music. Has the snow music gone scary?
The great thing is, I trust everybody, I don’t understand most of it, but almost everything has been a good revelation. We were focusing so much at the start with such simple drawings and on the story and the jokes and the dialog all the time. And it’s so wonderful to think there’s another group of people who’ve got this huge gift they’re going to give you, which is, the snow and the design, and particularly for me, the final stage. I hadn’t realised the emotional delicacy, in a way, of the characterisation and how much that was going to move on in the last 25%.
I thought, well, there are the sketches, and then there’s the horrible stage when they all turn into sort of Minecraft, and then the last, I didn’t realise is that the gap between the first proper animation and the finished product was so large, it was almost like you’ve got your performance from an actor, and then you can just make it twice as intense. Just by the way that the characters can express four emotions in two seconds. You know that the finished shot suddenly has shock, relief, panic, but all done in seconds was so exciting to me.

Being able to control the talent or creating Wellington-on-Sea rather than going to Suffolk and asking the council to close streets must have it’s benefits.

SO – We visited Suffolk multiple times since it wasn’t far, bringing the art team along to deeply study it. We aimed to distill the town’s essence—what makes it both recognisable and authentic, yet slightly caricatured. The goal was to create a storybook feel, a place you’d want to visit and linger in, without it becoming overly picturesque. Suffolk’s natural beauty made this easier, but we wanted it to feel like a real town where real people live simple, meaningful lives. Unlike animation’s usual fantastical worlds, we focused on capturing a sense of authenticity that evokes emotion—a task that was both challenging and rewarding.

Animation offers limitless possibilities, would you consider using it to finally silence the people wanting more from your back catalogue of film or TV Richard? Would you bring back an animated Vicar of Dibley or Blackadder?

RC – I might have given a different answer 20 years ago, but it’s takes quite a long time to do animation, and I’m getting quite old. I mean, strangely, we did do it on Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean was a very interesting thing where there’s kind of a limit how much we can do when we turn that into an animated show, where we’ve been able to do so many of them. That’s a very sweet idea – can I do a sequel to one of my movies, at last, without having to work with Hugh Grant! (laughs) Because that’s the main thing stopping me. I don’t know, I’ll have to put my mind to that.

SO – An animated Vicar of Dibley, I’m in! You all heard him right? He said he’s going to do it, are we going to do an animated sequel to the Vicar of Dibley?

Who needs journalists when you’ve got Simon Otto pushing your buttons! The cast bring so much to the movie, was it an easy process to cast them?

SO – When you approach a big-name actor and mention it’s an animated Richard Curtis movie, there’s an instant willingness to listen. The rare times we couldn’t secure someone were mostly due to scheduling conflicts.

RC – We used Rachel Frack, who is my favourite casting person, who did the Office – one of the great triumphs of casting. She’s brilliant with quirky British talent, and casting, for me, is 65% of making a live-action movie. Here, the process was different but similar: the actors didn’t need to look the part, just capture the essence. Since you can’t really audition for animation, we compiled “voice maps” of actors we admired. Listening to their voices without their faces often surprised us—someone with a gentle face might have a harsh or monotonous voice. At least we didn’t have to make those judgments in front of them!

SO -That’s true. I see voice casting as the final step of character design, while Richard focuses on the essence of performance. We’d test voices against the character drawings, where the timbre of a voice conveys so much. I cared less about accents or initial performance details because you only really know an actor’s range once they’re in the booth. We aimed high, bringing in talents like Bill Nighy, Brian Cox, Jodie Whittaker, and Fiona Shaw, who reliably deliver greatness. The key question was whether their voice completed the character’s essence. Many great actors don’t naturally fit a caricatured style, so their voices might not fully embody the character until combined with the animation.

That Christmas from Locksmith Animation is streaming on Netflix now. You can hear the full interview on an upcoming Skwigly Animation Podcast.

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2024’s holiday offering from Disney Animation Studios sees them dig into their beloved bag of modern fairytales, pulling out a sequel to 2016’s Moana. Moana 2 had an unconventional route to the screen in more ways than one. Firstly, the project was initially announced as a Disney+ TV series before being reworked into a feature. Secondly, a large chunk of the production took place at Disney’s Vancouver location, making it a landmark title for Disney – the first theatrical film to bear their name and not be a purely Burbank-ian endeavor.

Change is afoot on the executive level at DAS too, with Jared Bush taking the role of Chief Creative Officer from Jennifer Lee, who is now hard at work on Frozen’s upcoming sequels. Bush has been at Disney for over a decade now, working as a screenwriter on almost all of the company’s modern hits including titles like Zootopia, Encanto and the first Moana.

We chatted to Bush on the week of Moana 2’s release to dig into the new challenges facing the studio, Moana’s new journey and Disney’s dedication to on and off screen diversity.

What’s it like to have the first film released under your tenure as CCO?

I’m immensely proud. It took hundreds and hundreds of people to make this film, it is breathtakingly gorgeous, I think it’s the most beautiful movie I’ve ever worked on. I’ve been at Disney animation for 13 years, and I’m just blown away by every single frame of this. But on top of that, this is a story of connecting with others and that together we’re stronger, and our crew had to show that for this movie to be in theaters. So more than anything, I’m immensely proud and very grateful to all of the hard work and the heart and the care that the crew put into this.

Animation fans have a tendency to assign a certain style to each studio. As a writer, what would you say is the Disney style?

I think the biggest adjustment that I typically make is, “Is this a musical, or is this not a musical?” Because if you take a movie like Zootopia, it’s heavily comedy-forward versus a musical where music is in charge, and you’re always writing in service of making sure that the music is really going to pop. It’s really fun to bounce back and forth between them because it is a different muscle. Beyond that, our stories are stories that people want to go back and see again. So from a writing standpoint, you’re trying to write in a way that is universal, that hopefully will resonate with people around the world of all ages. I also find that heavily character-forward stories do the best, people will want to go back to spend time with those characters.

Moana is a very competent character who is beloved by her community and has her head screwed on tight. How do you give her something to learn?

In this story, she’s going up against things that she’s never experienced before by design. In the first film, she was 16, she thought she understood what her identity was, like many of us do at that age, you go “I know who I am forever,” and then life changes and you have to reassess. So it was very important to us in this story to constantly throw obstacles in her way that she had never faced before, on a scale that she had never come up against. Specifically, she comes across the Kakamora from the first movie. We wanted her to see something she knows, and if you watch the film, we flip what happens there. I’d say that the only way for a character who is so competent and brave and will always go up against the hard thing is just to throw obstacles at her that are more difficult, and to let her acknowledge that they are difficult. It’s important that she doesn’t go up against these things and says, “I got it. No problem,” but instead “This is really scary, I don’t know how I’m gonna defeat this thing.” It’s critical to make sure that she’s always human, even while she’s brave.

Maui has the biggest arc from the first film, how do you push that further in a sequel?

In the first film, he was a guy that got wound up thinking about himself and his own glory and needing to find his self worth through the adulation he’s received, specifically from humans. At his very lowest moment in the first film, Moana is the one that buoyed him and allowed him to see that he could derive that self worth elsewhere, that he had intrinsic value. Coming into this story, we wanted to show that what Moana gave him mattered. As he begins his journey he is again trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. And then as Moana gets into trouble and she hits a low, he’s the one that’s there to buoy her spirits. We wanted to shift Maui into slightly more of a mentor relationship with Moana in this story. He’s still a goofball, he still doesn’t always give the best advice, he’d still really like to eat Hei Hei, so he’s got some things to work on.

How did you go about adapting the script from the TV show format to a feature film?

I think it’s a lot like Moana’s journey in this story. It was an exciting but daunting task, and something that I’d never attempted to do before. Moana’s arc didn’t change between the series and the feature, the culmination of that story is the same. I think the biggest difficulty was her crew. In the series version, each episode was focused on a specific crew member and they would have an individual arc. But in a feature, you want everyone to arc at the same time, which is at the end of the movie. [Co-director] Dana Ledoux Miller, who is my writing partner in this, and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get everyone to line up at the end of the story. Ultimately, that turned out to be a wonderful thing, because I think we never would have been able to deliver this epic scale and scope that we have in our third act and have all the characters culminate at the same time.

How did the pipeline differ due to working with the Vancouver studio?

There’s a lot more crossover [between Burbank and Vancouver], than people may understand. Our process for any film is one of constantly trying things. We are building characters and assets and locations and pressure testing that and putting up screenings constantly and so yes, while originally full production was slated for our location in Vancouver, there was always going to be a ton of crossover.

Moana 2 is one of just two 2024 theatrical animated films from major studios to star a character of colour as the lead. How much of a priority is diversity for you?

It’s so critical for audiences to see themselves represented on screen. At the same time, I think our stories have to resonate worldwide. Audiences are constantly looking for things that feel fresh or are outside of their direct knowledge base. I think for many reasons, a story like Moana is something that people gravitate towards because most people worldwide aren’t as familiar with the cultures of the Pacific Islands. In the future, continuing these stories is important and it’s not just what is shown in front of the camera, it’s also making sure that behind the camera we are hopefully bringing people together in a way to tell these stories that feels right, and then getting a lot of help from the community itself. Our oceanic story trust is a great example of that.

How do you provide a strong support structure for people of colour coming into the studio?

Our films are always difficult, no matter who you are. Across the board, it is a massive undertaking. Our movies typically have a crew of at least 700 if not more, but it’s also hyper collaborative. Every movie I’ve worked on here, if you’re a writer, if you’re a director, any role you play in that film, you are getting help and support constantly. I had nothing but help and support when I first joined Disney Animation. The first couple years, I was just being mentored on how to do my job at Disney animation. Knowing that our films have to resonate worldwide, that there’s no version of this being easy for anybody, and making it a normal thing to get help, to lean on others, and then also to share that knowledge moving forward.

How do you measure the success of a film?

It’s really difficult to measure it, but I think asking, “Does it resonate with people? Does it matter to people?” is key. That’s not always a box office number or critical response, it’s a gut feeling on how that went. I think that is a big part of it. I have three boys and they are truth tellers. I have a sense of how it’s going from them and whether it’s resonating for them or not. They’ll tell me whether something stinks or not.. But more than anything else it takes years and years of hundreds of people’s lives to make a film like this and whether that is the crew at Burbank, whether that is the amazing cast, not only the English speaking cast, but its casts around the world who have to come together, our amazing songwriters and composers, if they would watch their work and be proud of it, that’s the highest metric.

Moana 2 is out in cinemas now

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Get in the mood for Halloween as Cardiff Animation Festival presents a Q&A with Robert Morgan, hosted by Skwigly Editor in Chief Ben Mitchell and recorded December 19th following a special presentation of his chilling debut feature film Stopmotion at Chapter.

The film follows Ella Blake, a stop-motion animator struggling to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother, who embarks upon the creation of a film that becomes the battleground for her sanity. As Ella’s mind starts to fracture, the characters in her project take on a life of their own.

Stopmotion is available on Bluray from Acorn Media and to stream in the UK on Shudder, Apple TV and Amazon Prime. For more on the film check out our interviews with Robert Morgan in episode 113 of the Skwigly Animation Podcast and Stop Motion: A Skwigly Podcast Special with the BFI.

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From the talented mind behind The Eagleman Stag, Robin Robin, and Alan The Infinite, long-time pal of Skwigly Mikey Please has unleashed his new children’s book The Café at the Edge of the Woods. A beautifully crafted tale of café owner Rene, who opens up her dream establishment on the border of a magical forest full of folkloric creatures, her desire to serve up the most delicious food is scuppered somewhat by her less-than-refined new clientele, but with the help of newly recruited co-worker Glumfoot a thriving business seems possible.

Book Cover The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

Inspired by a game Mikey and his wife played with their son Rex over lockdown, the characters have a warmth that comes from living in their creator’s mind, growing over time until they are ready to be released into the hands of others to make their own. There’s a sense of fun and energy to the illustrations, that deliver deliciously textured designs, drenched in autumnal colours. The story has all the hallmarks of a children’s favourite, with cheeky humour and rhythmic storytelling, whilst for adults it holds a contemporary charm that hearkens back to those fantasy-filled games of childhood. Page from The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

The book brings together the talented visual and conceptual skills of this BAFTA award-winning storyteller and takes his passion for the sequential arts into children’s literature. Similar to animated short films, the art of picture books brings together the most nuanced and efficient form of storytelling, and whether through paper or screen, Please can turn his distinct talent to create a wholly intriguing original narrative both succinct and utterly captivating. We were fortunate enough to grab some time with Mikey to learn more about his new foray into visual storytelling.Page from The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

The story of the book is centred around mythical creatures and food, which are my favourite things in graphic novels and illustrations, so it’s totally up my alley. But what was the inspiration for you for the characters and the story?

So the the story grew out of this game that, over lockdown, me, my wife and my son would play in the park. My wife would play this pretentious chef who only wanted to serve caviar and frangipanes, and my son would be the downtrodden waiter, like Manuel from Fawlty Towers, while I would play a variety of disgusting or mythical creatures – sometimes a fairy demanding a thimble of morning dew from the grass, or a witch requesting moonlight trapped inside a vase, or sometimes an ogre. It was just a really fun little game that we would play – or a fun game that they would play, and I would interrupt. But that dynamic of pomposity and grotesqueness, and someone trying to communicate between the two was really fun, and there was something really rich there. Then, over quite a long period of time, this little poem grew and grew. It got sort of ridiculously long, so then I kind of chopped it all down and just focused on one customer, who seemed the most fun, or most extreme, which was the ogre. Then I built it up again to really get Rene’s reactions and dig into who she was and why she would feel this way, and treat it more like how I’d create a scripted story. So that’s how it grew over a very, very long period of time of about three years of chewing over it, from playing the game to making a dummy copy (pictured below) which looks pretty similar and the bones of it are there. I sent this out to a bunch of literary agents, and then it was about another year or so before officially working with HarperCollins and then another year of making it. I finished it last summer, so it’s been almost a year between me actually finishing the book and it coming out.

What drew you to want to write a children’s book? Because this isn’t your first children’s book, is it?

No, Dan [Ojari], I and Briony May Smith made the Robin, Robin picture book adaptation. But that was a different thing. It’s a lovely book, which came out of a story that Dan and I had written, but because it was tied into the film and it was something else already, there was a very different journey with it. I’ve been wanting, trying and failing to write books for probably longer than I’ve been trying to make animation. The Eagleman Stag was a book, it was like a little diary with someone’s last diary entry, that had been scribbled over by what you think is a child, but at the end you realise that it’s actually the main character after he’s had the operation. I did that as a book when I was about 20 or something, so a long time ago, and I thought that’s what I’d be going on to do. Then I realised that animation is a really fun way to translate those stories. But I’ve had lots of various stop-start projects. Dan and I were working on a graphic novel called Dead Rock for a really long time, which we still want to do, we just haven’t finished it. Things have just got in the way, which is madness, because it’s like 300 full A4 coloured pages, which is just an insane volume of work. We’ve just never fully finished it to the point where we could submit it anywhere. But for some reason, I think because of the simplicity and directness of The Café At The Edge Of The Woods, it’s just kind of cut through in a way that the others didn’t. Perhaps because there’s a really clear audience for it as well, whereas lots of my other book projects are a little more idiosyncratic.

The book that was the basis for The Eagleman Stag [Image Mikey Please]

Do you think that was because the idea came first and then you realised it would make a good children’s book? Rather than starting with “I want to write a children’s book”?

Maybe. I think it did come about in a very natural way. I wasn’t necessarily hunting for a children’s book idea. It was just a nice situation. But I do really love children’s books and there’s something about them that is very akin to making a short film, in that they’ve got to be really economically put together, there’s no fat on them and there’s no room for waffling. You’ve just got to go straight to the meat of the thing, you’ve got to get your idea across really quickly, like in a short film. There’s a beautiful succinctness about children’s books when they’re good.

The book is for Axel and Jessica, who are your son and wife. And they were a big influence on on the idea, what do they think of the book?

I think they like it. It’s a lovely thing because, at the moment, Axel is seven and is just the right age to appreciate it. So, I’ve gone to his school to read it to his class which has been really nice. I have wondered, what he’ll think about it when he’s, like, 17, and this depiction of him as Glumfoot. He might not appreciate it so much then! But for now, I think it’s going down well.

The style of the book is unmistakably you. But can you tell me a little bit about how the style has developed and some inspirations that have affected that over the years?

I didn’t really know how I was going to do it, to be honest. Even after I’d signed the deal with HarperCollins, I’d done this rough version, which was just pencil on paper, and then coloured digitally. But I thought, ‘Oh, well, I won’t do it like that. For the final thing, I’ll do paintings’. And I did lots of painting tests, and I did various ink things. I did half a dozen finished style explorations. Then the one I liked best was my rough one, the first sort of scrappy one that I did because it had this direct rawness to it that I loved. It was very important for me that I had an analogue process in there, I knew that I definitely wasn’t going to do it all digitally. I wanted it to have a strong grounding in painting or collage or drawing. Drawing is my favourite thing, so I guess that is why it is in pencil.

So the roughs were all done in these sketchbooks, and by doing everything in a sketchbook it meant that I could just take it anywhere and do it. As an activity, there was something really attractive about doing that. Recently I’ve come to the opinion that I want to really enjoy the actual minutiae of making the work; I’ve done a lot of projects where I’m like, ‘It’s okay, go through the suffering of this project with the idea that I’ll really be happy at the end of it’. And that’s not a very good way to spend the hours of your life. So it was really important to actually enjoy the process of doing it. That’s why I didn’t do paintings. I would need so many paints, I’d have to set myself up, and there’d be this time stress of the paints drying. It might have looked better, but I wouldn’t have liked doing it as much. I might have gotten very precious or been afraid to make a mistake, whereas having a process that was really direct meant that I could throw it away if I didn’t like it.

There are some great testimonials for the book from Jon Klassen and Daniel Kwan, what was it like to receive these compliments from such talented colleagues?

Those were great. Jon also gave me a brilliant breakdown of the book early on, probably around the draft stage when I made the dummy version of the book. We’d been in communication a little bit about something else, and I was like, ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m doing this children’s book’. He said ‘Oh, cool send it and I’ll have a look’. And I thought he’d just say something nice, but then he sent me this huge breakdown of every page and how to sort of restructure it so it kind of works a bit better, and I followed some of his advice. It was wonderful, such a kind thing of him to do, and somewhere along the way he said that nice thing and let me put it on the back of the book, which is great. Daniel Kwan’s quote is actually from an article in a Netherlands newspaper, which was based on a bunch of talks we and some other friends did for a festival called Playground. Within that was this very lovely thing that Daniel said. I was very touched and he was very happy for me to put it on the back of this book.

Page from The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

As is often the case with children’s books, it’s quite open, which lets kids sort of build their own stories and ideas about the characters. But as someone who is used to creating these quite expansive worlds for characters to live in through animation, do you feel you have more to tell from Rene and Glumfoot’s point of view, or in a potential sequel or a spin-off project?

Yes, I do. The sequel to the book has already been announced. It’s called The Cave Downwind of the Café. My summer this year has been spent making it, I’m still a little away from completing it, but it’s not a sequel. It’s an equal. So it runs alongside the first, kind of like a companion piece. There are a bunch of other stories involved with them, but so far this second one is confirmed with a release next year. It’s fun doing a second one because I get to correct and improve upon all the lessons I learned in the first one. There’s quite a varying degree of design in the first one, and now having done that book I understand the rules of the characters. So I hope it’ll be a bit more cohesive in this next one.

The Cafe at the Edge of the Woods is available now from all good bookstores. Mikey Please’s next book The Cave Downwind from the Cafe is due for release in 2025.

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This week on Skwigly we’re excited to bring you an interview with Maral Mohammadian, Producer at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB)’s English Animation Studio in Montreal. From a background in the arts, Maral would work at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) for several years before being brought on board as an Associate Producer at the NFB in 2006, where she would work on their popular Hothouse apprenticeship initiative among other branches of the organisation.

Since becoming Producer at their English Animation Studio in 2014, her work with the NFB has included producing such acclaimed short films as I Am Here (Dir. Eoin Duffy), Freaks of Nurture (Dir. Alexandra Lemay), Shannon Amen (Dir. Chris Dainty), The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer (Dir. Randall Okita), HIDE (Dir. Daniel Gray) and Impossible Figures and Other Stories I (Dir. Marta Pajek) as well as the VR story-game Museum of Symmetry (Paloma Dawkins) among others.

This month sees the North American premiere (following its world premiere at Annecy) of recent projects Maybe Elephants by acclaimed director Torill Kove at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as well as its inclusion in OIAF, while Amanda Strong’s Inkwo for When the Starving Return will get a world premiere at TIFF and also screen at OIAF later this month. Ahead of these exciting outings Skwigly were privileged to speak with Maral Mohammadian and learn more about her journey into the world of animation.

Can you tell us about the work you’ve done prior to becoming part of the NFB, and what steered you to the position you currently hold there?

I got my start in the Ottawa arts scene, making films with friends and working at an artist- run centre called SAW Video. Animation was not on my radar at all, apart from experimental films bordering animation. In that scene I discovered the Ottawa International Animation Festival and my mind was blown. I ended up working at the festival for four years, programming their artist talks and then as the director of their new industry conference, called TAC (now known as the Television Animation Conference). It was to be a hub for the industry, but the hidden agenda was to bring the art and industry closer together. So I was steeped in a wide range of animation, from experimental to commercial. The NFB was a great supporter of the festival, and I was working with producer Michael Fukushima on programming ideas when Michael essentially recruited me. I started as associate producer for Hothouse 4 and my role expanded to other productions, including the Stereoscopic 3D lab. I had an influential couple of years in the documentary studio and the French Program’s interactive studio before being hired full time as a producer in the English Animation Studio in 2014, together with my colleague Jelena Popović, who is currently the animation producer in the French Animation Unit. It felt firmly as though I was home again but with expanded horizons.

©Maral Mohammadian

As a producer, what is the main appeal to you of animation as a filmmaking tool?

I love animation for its power to express the inexplicable. If it was a language, it would have a huge alphabet. Its grammar is versatile. And in a way, each technique is a different dialect. So that makes it incredibly dynamic for creative expression. It’s also a craft—you have to make everything. So it can’t be neutral. Everything is a choice. I am in awe of animation filmmakers—they have the ability to operate on another temporal level than most of us.

The films you have worked on make use of a variety of different techniques; do any pose any particular challenges or have advantages over another?

The beauty of the NFB is that it’s technique-agnostic. Anything goes, as long as it’s cohesive to the intention and feasible. The advantage of 2D is that it’s more or less the same material from start to finish, whereas stop motion and 3D have to evolve from something graphic to something constructed or volumetric. With stop motion, you have to build it before you understand how it will work, and of course that feeds back into the storytelling. So you really need to develop the writing and visuals in parallel. But the advantage of stop motion is that there’s more room for serendipity because you’re dealing with something physical. It’s intimate in a unique way.

In recent years the NFB has cultivated relationships with international co- producers for some fantastic films. How does the relationship tend to work with these collaborations? Is there a system in place or does it vary from film to film?

International co-productions with non-Canadian directors are a very small percentage of what we do. But a model we’ve embraced in recent years involves a deeper relationship. The NFB is not a funding agency, which means we make all decisions together. Each producer is responsible for their share of the work and budget, which is decided at the very beginning, in careful consideration with the director. Who do they want to work with? What is the dream scenario? What are the strengths and limitations of each partner? This kind of custom-designed production unifies everyone under a common vision and builds trust. It allows for honest discussions later on when challenges invariably arise. We also try to have the director spend time at our Montreal studio. A highlight for me was our co-production with Poland’s Animoon on the final film of Marta Pajek’s Impossible Figures and other stories trilogy. Marta was based in Warsaw, but she spent almost three months in Montreal working with the animators and getting steeped in NFB culture and history.

In general, have you found that these international co-productions have been beneficial to the overall end product of the films?

In some cases, the film may not have been possible otherwise. Or joining forces opened opportunities the director didn’t otherwise have. I do feel that the storytelling has been enriched. The films speak to more people, perhaps because there is a multi-cultural perspective. For sure the distribution is stronger because there are more partners.

A significant strand of your work with the NFB has been their fantastic Hothouse initiative. Can you tell us a bit about the history of the scheme and how you came to be involved with it?

Hothouse was thought up in the early 2000s by Michael Fukushima and David Verrall. It was an answer to two problems: how to better support filmmakers struggling with their first NFB film, and how to bring new filmmakers into the NFB. It was designed as a fast track through a full NFB experience, from concept to completion, in 12 intensive weeks. Each edition invites six directors to make a one-minute film based on a theme, with the support of producers, a carefully selected mentoring director, technical experts and the filmmaking community at the NFB. I’ve been involved more or less since the fourth edition in 2007, first as associate producer and then as producer since 2014. I love the speed and constraints. We’ve had a lot of fun playing with the themes and parameters. Some of Canada’s best filmmakers have been mentors—Chris Landreth, Ann Marie Fleming, Jeff Barnaby, Howie Shia, to name a few. It has expanded the sandbox of animation creation and distribution and has rejuvenated the NFB.

We were very enthusiastic to include this year’s Hothouse films in our Showcase section of the site. How did you find working with the 2024 crop and how they interpreted this year’s theme of “Small Things Considered”?

Every cohort has a special dynamic, but this group was all heart: giddy, positive, thoughtful, supportive of each other. We received a jaw-dropping 401 applications. These six were original and self-aware. Their films had roots to family, memory, history, ecology. Maybe it’s the dark times we’re living in, but we were uplifted by their projects. Most of the credit for this edition goes to the mentoring director, Andrea Dorfman, and associate producer Anne Koizumi.

Over the years have you found the Hothouse scheme to be valuable to participants, and have they enjoyed a continuing relationship with the NFB?

At one time about half of our productions were made by Hothouse alumni. At the moment it’s about 30 percent. We also frequently hire Hothousers as crew. On Maybe Elephants, for example, three of the animators were Hothouse alumni: Jo Meuris, Eva Cvijanović and Louis Bodart. Amanda Strong was an associate producer in the Indigenous edition in 2019, which paved the way for the work we would do together as co-producers on her newest film, Inkwo for When the Starving Return, premiering at TIFF this year. Hothouse has hugely expanded our talent pool.

For future applicants who might be interested in applying, what are the criteria the NFB tends to look for?

Hothouse is open to emerging Canadian filmmakers who have some experience with animation, whether self-taught or through post-secondary school. We look for artistic distinction, originality, creative maturity to thrive in a professional environment and a willingness to work within the program constraints. Many of the proposals are too ambitious so feasibility is very important. It’s also wise to come up with a fresh idea inspired by the theme. The program requires agility so it’s not ideal for a high-stakes masterpiece concept.

One of your most recent projects that we featured on the site is Maybe Elephants, which saw the fantastic return of Oscar winner Torill Kove. What were some of the highlights and/or challenges of working on this project to you as a producer?

I adopted this project during development after it had been in the works for some time. It was a bit intimidating, to be honest. I was filling some big shoes from Torill’s previous NFB producers, Marcy Page and Michael Fukushima. Torill is so loved and respected. I wanted to do a good job! The film was also different from her previous work in some significant ways, dealing with delicate personal and political themes. These challenges turned out to be the most rewarding, to see them through in all the intricate ways that producers must work. A big highlight was the music! The score was composed by Luigi Allemano, who turned Torill’s eclectic mix tape of reference music into a vivacious score. He brought on Kenyan musician Daniel Onyango and we did a recording session with Daniel’s band in Sweden, with Luigi directing in real time from Montreal. It was pretty magical. The film is a co-production by Mikrofilm AS and the NFB.

You’ve also worked on interactive projects. What would you say are the main differences (pros/cons or otherwise) between those and standard films from a production standpoint?

The intriguing thing about interactivity is the notion of play. You can carve out a role for the audience, which makes the experience uniquely visceral. When we were in development on Paloma Dawkins’ Museum of Symmetry, she had some wild ideas about how the environment should be alive and aware of the audience. Through development it became clear this was a world you need to step into. That’s how it became a VR story-game. It was role-play—a celebration of childhood wonder. But interactivity does also add exponential complexity. There are so many moving parts.

Can you tell us anything about some of your projects currently in development that you’re excited about?

We’re working on a short called Knowing Gaze by an outstanding animator named Dylan Glynn. It’s an intimate portrait of three gay men confronting their fears, biases and messy ideas about gender. It lifts the curtain on some of the taboo conversations within queer culture, what Dylan calls “the bitchiness, the gossip, the playfulness, the vulnerability, the melancholy, the poetry, the pain.” We’re using TV Paint for 2D animation combined with paint on glass on a multiplane system. Another highlight is Shovelling by Mathias Horhager. It’s a simple metaphor for the thankless, grueling work that is parenting, particularly fatherhood. It’s our first production done entirely in Blender. Being open source, it’s more of an artist’s tool than other 3D programs, so we’ve managed to create a beautifully stylized design and cinematography in a 3D world. We’re working with Seneca Polytechnic, a front-runner college in computer animation. This project has rekindled the relationship between the NFB and Seneca, which spawned three acclaimed Chris Landreth films, including Ryan and Subconscious Password.

Maybe Elephants will screen at TIFF in Shorts Cuts 2024 Programme 1 September 5th & 12th and at OIAF September 26th & 27th in Short Film Competition 3
Inkwo for When the Starving return screens in TIFF’s Short Cuts 2024 Programme 3 September 7th, 8th & 12th and in OIAF’s Canadian Panorama September 26th & 27th

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Skwigly are delighted to present Stop Motion: A Skwigly Podcast Special featuring Osbert Parker, Joseph Wallace, Robert Morgan & Suzie Templeton, to coinside with Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen which takes place at BFI Southbank until 8 October 2024, with the free exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame open now until 1 October 2024.

Joining Ben & Steve for this podcast which takes a deep dive into the art of animation’s oldest form is guest host Justin Johnson, Lead Programmer for the BFI Southbank and one of the brains behind the incredible season showcasing the art of stop motion animation. This special also features a bumper Stop Motion roundtable featuring some of the UK’s finest stop motion talents Osbert Parker (Clothes and Film Noir), Joseph Wallace (Salvation has no Name), Robert Morgan (The Cat with Hands, Bobby Yeah, Stop Motion) & Suzie Templeton (Dog, Peter and the Wolf) who go into detail about their inspirations, love for the medium and heroes as well as speaking about their own work too.

Osbert Parker, Joseph Wallace, Robert Morgan, Suzie Templeton

The perfect podcast for stop motion fans to accompany the perfect season, sit back and listen to the masters of their craft explain what the medium means to them.

Animation Podcasts | Skwigly · Stop Motion: A Skwigly Podcast Special with the BFIThis podcast special has been made possible with thanks to Justin Johnson, Richard Pickard and the team at the BFI.

Presented by Ben Mitchell & Steve Henderson
Guest host Justin Johnson
Edited and produced by Steve Henderson
Music by Ben Mitchell

Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen takes place at BFI Southbank until 8 October 2024, with the free exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame open now until 1 October 2024.

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It’s hard to imagine the comic pulse of children’s television without Butch Hartman’s The Fairly OddParents. Though its legacy often plays second fiddle to the omnipresence of SpongeBob SquarePants, the show’s wildly imaginative world and absurdist, joke-a-minute comedy made it an instant hit for Nickelodeon in the early 2000s and left a spirit that can still be felt in much of the network’s current output. However, a prolonged period of arrested development – including three reviled live-action television specials, Hartman’s unceremonious exit from Nickelodeon, and a failed animated/live-action hybrid reboot – fans weren’t sure where the series stood.

Then, in May, Fairly OddParents went back to basics with a fully animated reboot, subtitled A New Wish. This new take on the classic formula centered itself on a wholly new protagonist: Hazel Wells, a young Black girl whose family moves to the big city of Dimmadelphia after her father lands a new job. Already struggling to acclimate, Hazel’s life is further flipped upside down when she discovers her apartment neighbors, returning characters Cosmo and Wanda, are secretly fairies. Charmed by Hazel’s big heart and even bigger personality, the couple come out of retirement to be Hazel’s fairy godparents proper and, naturally, antics ensue.

The series premiered stateside earlier on Nickelodeon and, though its rating success has thus far been modest, critical and audience response has been very positive, convincing fans old and new that there is still life in this legacy property. Much of it comes from Ashleigh Crystal Hairston, a first-time showrunner who serves as A New Wish’s co-creator, co-writer, co-story editor, and star – Hairston, who is Black, voices Hazel and imbues her with many autobiographical elements. It would be a deep first dive for any creator in animation, let alone a name this fresh with a brand this recognizable, yet it is one Hairson has made with grace.

A New Wish brings Fairly OddParents back to its roots, imbuing valuable coming-of-age lessons with zany and colourful comedy, all anchored by a fresh, 2.5D animation style courtesy of Dublin-based studio Giant Animation. Hairston, alongside co-story editor Lindsay Katai (Infinity Train), have crafted a beautiful protagonist in Hazel, an unabashedly weird kid who is still caring enough to recognize areas where she can grow. In an era where children’s television can prioritize distraction or malaise, Hazel gives Nickelodeon’s programming some much needed nuance. UK viewers will be able to witness it for themselves when the series premieres on Netflix this fall.

We spoke with Hairston all about her experience working on A New Wish, the dance of experimenting with a beloved property, and the challenges that came from working on an animated series with a tight budget and a global audience. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Ashleigh, you are in a unique position. You were asked to come aboard this reboot, The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish, after not having been a superfan of the original series, yet you’re still being asked to deliver a rebranding for one of the network’s most popular IPs that has an ardent fanbase. What were your initial instincts? Are you thinking, “It’s time to rewrite this,” or are you immediately feeling beheld to the source material?

I think it was beneficial to the show that its two story editors – myself and Lindsay Katai – had no ties to the original series. We both are a bit older and did not grow up with the show, but we had an admiration for it and its characters. We also had a background of adventure storytelling. With Lindsay coming off of Infinity Train and then myself coming off of Craig of the Creek, we both came in wanting to tell a great story with a great character. We went and binged the first 5 seasons to catch up and get a firm understanding of what this show was, and it was just joke after joke after joke after joke. That’s fine, but we wanted to get back to the heart of the series, which is what would happen if a kid got unlimited wishes. We knew that Nickelodeon wanted a new godkid, but they wanted to bring back Cosmo and Wanda. That was their initial request but, honestly, some of us were like, “What if we got new godparents?”

See, that’s what I’m curious about. Is there a part of you that really wants to start fresh, even when the network wants something from you?

We were open to the idea of new godparents, but I never want to make fans angry. While voice acting on Tiny Toons Looniversity, I saw all of the commotion when the creative team made Babs and Buster Bunny siblings as opposed to potential love interests. That was a really big choice on their part and the fans just couldn’t get past it. So, I personally was all of the mind of giving people what they want but also changing it to give them something new, fresh, and fun. We ended up bringing back Cosmo and Wanda, which we were very excited about, but with a new godkid in a new location. In a way, it was still starting from scratch, getting back to the heart of the storytelling, getting back to the heart of wish-making and doing it in our own way with our own comedic instincts. Lindsay and I both have a background in improv and sketch comedy. That’s another difference between us and the Butch Hartmans of the world and I think that helped a lot with creating a fresh, new series. I was a little concerned going in, I was like, “How is this going to be received?” It’s the same formula but it is very different, somehow.

Yes, it’s a very different show, in part because of your new lead, Hazel. The early Fairly OddParents episodes were certainly fueled by testosterone. It’s not insignificant that two women were asked to take a new approach to this series and decided to center it on a young girl. It radically shifts the perspective and dynamic of the series.

Absolutely. That’s the fun of it all. We both get to come into the show with our own personal experiences as women. Making her problems more internal as opposed to Timmy’s external problems really helps to change the wish-making and the storytelling. But also, we couldn’t get away with all of that prior humor. I wanted to be vile and aggressive and sarcastic. We would have loved to put more chainsaws in the series and blow people up, but we have to cater to a different audience. Kids are different now than they were in the early 2000s. The way kids watch cartoons, the way kids interact with their parents, and the way they grow up is different. The world is scary now and you don’t want to scare kids. You want it to be an enjoyable experience for them. Standards and Practices were on our tails; there were a lot of jokes that we could not get away with.

The days of The Animaniacs-esque censor-hopping are long over.

Oh my god, long over.

You mentioned this idea of how Hazel’s internal problems versus Timmy’s external problems changed the approach to the show. I’m curious if there were other things you picked up on while watching the original show that you were interested in messing with?

We wanted it to be a little bit slower-paced. We wanted it to be less loud, less screamy. We wanted Hazel to be a little girl and also be weird. Nickelodeon is such a boy-centric network. Even after taking the risk of making a little black girl the lead character, we also wanted to showcase that, yes, little girls can be weird, too. They can be a little offbeat in what they like and what they play with. She loves anime, she collects rocks. Lindsay and I, we’re both big weirdo kids. I remember in my interview for this job I was telling them the story of how I used to collect the reflector lights in the roads while I was a kid growing up in Seattle. I used to collect those off of the ground. [both laugh] I would keep them on my back porch on our deck and I would name them. Those were my pets. We called them turtles in Seattle, so I was like, “These are my pet turtles.” Our pilot episode begins with Hazel talking to her pet rocks; that came from me. We wanted to be able to show a little weirdo — except we can’t even say “weirdo” anymore. We had to call her “quirky.” I didn’t even mention the part about working with Netflix on this.

I was going to ask about that.

That was another learning curve. They have a global audience, so we had to be mindful of the entire world when approaching character and story. There was a time where they asked, “Well, can’t Hazel be more aspirational? She should be—” perfect, is what they were saying, because kids are going to want to be that. “She needs to be a little more put together. She needs to not be so out there.” We were like, “Well, in order for her to get fairy godparents, she has to be a bit miserable.” With Netflix, we had to pull back even more to show that even though she’s quirky and fun, she’s still someone that kids can relate to.

All kids are unhappy.

Yeah, it’s normal, and that’s okay.

I know that when you were approached for the series, they were intent on having the protagonist be someone of colour. Was it at all a dance to let more people of colour be at the center of the show?

It was not. We knew we wanted to make Fairy World more diverseas well. That was a conscious choice by Lindsay and I and [co-executive producers] Dave [Stone] and Daniel [Abramovici] supported it too. We saw initial drawings coming for some of our background fairy characters and there was no diversity. We were like, “This is not going to work for us.” If we’re going to do a new story and tell it from a new point of view, that world is going to look different. I think that’s something that you get when you have people of colour making decisions as part of the producing team. I remember saying, “Fairy World should look like walking into an Apple Store.”

That’s a great way of putting it.

When you walk into an Apple Store, you see all different kinds of people. We went back to the drawing board and they came back with all different kinds of body shapes and colours and hair textures and styles. They did an exceptional job of revamping our fairies and creating a new Fairy World. There wasn’t necessarily a push, but it it took someone to call it out and say, “This is what we want to show.”

Speaking of animation, what role did animation play in your artistic upbringing and what are some of your touchpoints?

That’s a great question. I grew up in the early 90s, which I like to consider the golden age of cartoons. I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons like DuckTales, Looney Tunes, and then Nickelodeon favorites like Rugrats, Doug, Ren and Stimpy. I’ve seen every episode of Tiny Toons, of course, and Tom & Jerry was a big one, too. Every episode’s hijinks – “What are they chasing after? What’s going on?” – I feel like that is what informed my approach to cartoons. That was all formative, but I only watched them for entertainment’s sake. I never watched them thinking, “Someday, I want to go into animation,” or, “I want to be a voice actor.” That was never even a thought. I only started voice acting in 2018 and writing for animation in 2020. This is my first foray into animation as a creator and as a writer. I would consider myself still in the beginning phases of my animation career. There is an awareness of my influences, but I’m just pulling from what I know. I think that is maybe why [A New Wish] is such a different product. As I grow and get asked questions like these, I am having to think, “Oh yeah, I guess I was influenced by the Hanna-Barbera style, and that’s coming out in these new shows.”

When I think about Hanna-Barbera cartoons, I think of families like The Flintstones and The Jetsons. All of the comedy came from family and relationships. The original Fairly OddParents, while it has elements of their relationships, was more about the zaniness of it all. A New Wish feels like it has some of that family element as well.

There’s a reason why those shows went on for so long and those characters are so beloved and feel like real people. I think there’s something really beautiful there that captures the true essence of character and empathy and compassion. I think my theater and acting background has a little bit of an influence there. I like to focus on character and relationships. The dynamics surrounding that are important. I even have a lot of live action influences – The Cosby Show, Family Matters, Step by Step, Full House – those kinds of family stories. That is apparent in a lot of the stuff I’m doing now.

I want to transition to talking about the shift in animation style, specifically from hand-drawn 2D to CGI 2.5D. When you came onboard, did you already know that the show would be attempting this shift?

We always knew that it was going to be CG animation. When I joined, they showed me some test animation passes from different studios just to get a feel of what it was going to look like. Dave and Daniel were really at the helm of creating this new look for Fairly OddParents. They were really influenced by The Peanuts Movie. Lindsay and I had no understanding of CG — the approach, how much it costs, we didn’t know anything. Dave and Daniel were so kind. They were like, “All right. We’ll try to explain this to you.”

Did the new art style excite you? What were some of your initial thoughts learning that you were going to visually reinvent the show?

We were so excited. We knew it was going to look incredible and elevate the show in a really dynamic way. Then, when we got into it, that’s when we were like, “Why are we doing this? Who’s idea was this?” [laughs] We started to realize all of the challenges that come with making a show in CG. Number one, it’s extremely expensive, which means that we have to be very resourceful in how we design each character, prop, and environment. It was challenging for Lindsay and I, story-wise. During the animation prebuild, we had 40 characters, 150 props, and 20 sets to work with. That’s what we went into the show with. For each new episode, we got to make 4 new characters or 8 variants, 20 new props, and one set.

Single-location comedy takes on a whole new meaning. [laughs]

Exactly. We were like, “You’ve asked us to make a show about unlimited wishes with very limited assets.” However, Dave and Daniel were really good at expanding our world just by using different angles, different shots, and reusing things. Another challenge came when we started getting into the design for Hazel. We wanted her to have natural hair and there was a learning curve in approaching how to do natural hair in CG. I was sending our animators pictures of my hair as examples. I was sending them a texture chart for how textures work for Black hair. I would say that she falls somewhere in a 4B, 4C range for curls. Working collaboratively to accomplish a lot of different things in CG was a challenge but also really fun. I think we created a much more interesting and dynamic mixture between 2D and CG, which was also a conscious choice.

Now that you’ve had some time away from working on the series, what are some of the takeaways that you gained from the experience?

I learned so much. The whole process has been a whirlwind. We started development in January of 2022 and finished in March of 2022. The writers’ room started March 2022 and completed the scripts in May 2023. That’s fast.

That’s crazy.

This was my first-time co-executive producing, co-story editing, and being the voice of the world. I did a lot and I couldn’t have done it alone. Dave, Daniel, Lindsay, and I were a four-headed beast working in tandem. Thankfully, Fairly OddParents is also such an easy show to make. Butch Hartman and Fred Seibert [the original show’s executive producers] laid out fantastic groundwork for us and made a beautiful playground for us to play in. I’m really proud of myself, especially for it to be my first time, too. It’s kind of wild. Now that the show has been out, I’ve been on Twitter and have been seeing such a positive reaction. People are like, “Fairly OddParents is actually good again? What?” To see everyone actually enjoying it and saying that it feels like a new, fresh take on the series feels really, really good. I’m very pleased and very happy and very excited for everyone to see the rest of the series, because it gets even better.

Fairly OddParents: A New Wish will premiere on Netflix in the UK this fall at a date yet to be announced.

The post Fairly OddParents: A New Wish | Interview with Co-Creator Ashleigh Crystal Hairston appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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Studio Ponoc, formed by Studio Ghibli staff members after the animation house temporarily closed in 2014, is back with their third feature film. The Imaginary dives into a community of imaginary friends, painting their goals, fears and the connections they build to their human companions. The film picks up on Ghibli’s reputation for beautiful visuals with wonderfully rendered nonsensical worlds that could only be dreamt up by a child, or an animator.

Penning the script and working as a producer on the film is Yoshiaki Nishimura. As founder of the studio, Nishimura follows in the footsteps of industry greats like Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, having absorbed a wealth of lessons from the two during his 10 year stint at Ghibli. During that time, Nishimura accumulated credits on The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There and 2023’s The Boy and the Heron.

Skwigly sat down for a chat with Nishimura to discuss the technical achievements of The Imaginary, his philosophy as a producer and trends in the Japanese industry at large.

What made you fall in love with animation?

I struggle to answer that question right away, because I don’t know if I would say I love animation. I love animation as an art form and I do recognise the power in animation, but first and foremost, I love children and I want them to have a good and rich life. I think animation is a tool that would be able to assist them in that. That’s why I went into the animation world, so yes, maybe I do love animation! But I believe two of my maestro’s, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata probably had a similar mindset. They really believed in animation as a communication tool, a vehicle for stories, so I think it’s the same feeling for me.

The Imaginary is set in the UK, what kinds of research did you do to get the look and feel of the country correct?

We try to be authentic in what we portray and what we capture in animation. The devil is in the details because children as an audience are not very forgiving. If it’s an adult, they would think ‘okay, this is not quite realistic and some details are not correct, but there might be a reason behind it, maybe they didn’t have enough budget’ and they overlook it. Children notice everything so we really wanted to pay attention to every single detail. We did location hunting, it wasn’t possible to travel due to the pandemic, but we had a coordinator based in England who sent videos and photographs for us to use as reference. We also had a consultant who is a UK-based doctor and that person sent footage of British hospitals for us to model on.

What did mixing traditional animation with computer animation enable you to achieve?

For this, we didn’t use that much computer animation, little bits of it were used, for example, in the car scene, but whether we use CG in animation or not depends on the story. So the focus that I would like to encourage the audience to see in the film is not so much the combination of 2D and CG, it’s more about the light and shadow texture within this animation. I would describe the film as hand drawn-hand painted. We have drawn more than 14,000 images and it’s not realistic for us to capture the light and shadow of all the textures in all these drawings. But with the contribution of Poisson Rouge, our French animation studio, we have managed to add more texture in light and shadow, enabling us to add more depth to it.

You were the producer on Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, a long production that had to be delayed. How has that experience affected the way you work with directors? Do you let them loose or give them strict deadlines?

It’s a good question and a difficult topic. Princess Kaguya was an extremely long production, it took eight years, but I don’t think it’s necessarily good or bad whether the production length is long or short. There were challenges [with The Imaginary] because we needed to extend the production period by about a year or so. That posed some challenges both of course budget-wise but also some creators needed to leave the production because they couldn’t stay for that extra length of time. There were a lot of things that we needed to consider. But our ultimate goal is to create something good. As a producer, it’s very important for me to be mindful of different elements, but you need to follow your intuition as well, whether it is necessary to try and retain this concept and the elements in order to create something really good. It’s very difficult to assess and strike that balance.

When establishing Studio Ponoc, what lessons did you learn from Miyazaki, Takahata and Toshio Suzuki?

I was at Studio Ghibli for more than 10 years so there were lots of great things that I learned. Toshio Suzuki is a bit separate because he’s a business person so I’m not going to comment on that side of things. But in regards to Miyazaki and Takahata, definitely, there are lots of great learnings. But one main thing that I would mention is probably this conviction, a strong belief that one film could change someone’s life. They genuinely believe that a film could have a positive influence on somebody’s life going forward, and especially something that they have seen as a child. Those children who were exposed to a great piece of film would become an adult with a better worldview. That’s something I really wanted to take on and is something that, as a studio, we believe in.

Animation from Japan has exploded in popularity in the west over the last decade or so. Have you noticed any shifts in the Japanese industry because of that change? And does it affect the kind of movies that Ponoc wants to make?

It’s great to hear that Japanese animation is highly regarded amongst the world and that there are many more fans, because the industry itself in Japan is very small when you think about it. I know most of the industry personnel, we’re all friends. But one concern that I have is that a lot of the animation that’s created is shifting towards targeting adult audiences rather than children. The number of children in Japan is declining and adults can just spend on whatever they wish. From a business standpoint, it makes sense to create animation for adults but that hinders the opportunity for children to see something great, something that’s newly created. It’s a shame because what we [Ponoc] are trying to do is now seen as non-mainstream, because the mainstream focus has shifted towards adult audiences. But as I’ve explained, we have this conviction to create something great for children, for them to really enjoy and be moved by. We don’t really want to move away from that, no matter how the world will move forward.

The Imaginary is out now on Netflix

The post The Imaginary | Interview with Yoshiaki Nishimura appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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While much by way of new adult animation tends to lean into a comfort zone of rigged 2D brashness, this year has seen one of the more interesting additions to the landscape in the form of the six-part stop-motion series In The Know. Equal parts sendup and love letter to the world of National Public Radio, the series follows NPR host Lauren Caspian, “a well-meaning, hypocritical nimrod, just like you and me”, and the eccentric production team of his radio show (also titled In The Know), wherein live-action celebrity guests are interviewed each episode. With echoes of such conceptually disparate shows as I’m Alan Partridge and Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, the series is created by Zach Woods (who voices Lauren and whose own screen credits include Silicon Valley and The Office), Brandon Gardner and animated sitcom veteran Mike Judge (who also contributes his voice talents to his own creation, ‘culture critic’ Sandy) of Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill and Silicon Valley *fame.*

Joining Woods is a talented cast including Carl Tart (Ground Crew) as overqualified sound engineer Carl, Caitlin Reilly (Loot, Hacks) as put-upon researcher Fabian, Charlie Bushnell (Percy Jackson and The Olympians) as fratboy intern Chase, J. Smith-Cameron (Succession, Rectify*) as widowed boomer and co-exec producer Barb, with Mike Judge himself as the voice of hippie/Port Authority sex worker-turned-culture critic Sandy.*

With this week seeing the show’s fifth episode ‘Yoghurt Week’ screening in competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival as part of the festival’s TV Films programme, Skwigly leapt at the chance to do our best NPR host impersonation and interview co-creators Zach Woods and Brandon Gardner to learn more about this unique and compelling series.

To start at the start, it’d be great to hear how you folks came together having sort of working together came up with the concept for the show.

Zach Woods: I had worked with Mike Judge on Silicon Valley, and he had observed how solidly and deeply I embody the archetype of the obnoxious, over-educated coastal schmuck (he didn’t put it that way, but I could read between the lines). And we’re pals, me and Mike, and he was like “Would you ever want to make a show or you play an NPR host?”, because I also ask people questions a lot, I think because I’m generally curious about people and probably prefer to ask them questions than to be asked questions. So he’d noticed that I have a tendency towards ‘interviewing’ people and that I have the unfortunate affectations of the NPR set, and so he was like “Would you want to do a show where you interview people as an NPR host, and maybe it’s a mix of stop-motion and live-action, because he was a big fan of Space Ghost I know. And so then Brandon and I, who have worked together for a long time, talked about it, and the three of us started fleshing out the world. And that’s that.

I guess for the benefit of our readers outside of the US., can you explain what NPR is, that kind of differentiates it from your common or garden variety of radio?

Brandon Gardner: Yeah, I’d be curious as to what the international comparisons are for it. But in the United States, most media is not public media and it’s very influenced by corporations and profit. And NPR is a sort of magical place in that it’s listener-supported radio. The reputation in the United States, I think, is that it’s sort of a more liberal media source, but also like a gentle, ‘touchy-feely’ way of getting news – but they also have entertainment programs and all sorts of different coverage. And when we were thinking about doing an NPR show and setting it in that world, it’s also sort of a satire, less of NPR itself than of the sort of people who listen to NPR, which is like Zack and myself, and the reputation of people who listen to NPR is often that we’re these sort of progressive do gooders, but at the same time, often in our real lives don’t actually measure up to our professed values.

Yeah, I was sort of curious if the characters were drawing from life experience, people you knew? Is it mostly then just yourselves ,or aspects of yourselves?

ZW: Another characteristic of people of that particular demographic is narcissism. So of course it is populated solely with versions of us!

BG: I think it’s a mix. I think when Zach and Mike and I were first talking about this show, we were telling stories about ourselves and things we’ve done and also things we’ve witnessed in other people. And then the same thing, when we started our writers room, like one thing we talked a lot about with the writers in what ways we all related to the characters, and who in our lives that we knew that were like the characters – and we tried to borrow as much as we could from us and real people so that it didn’t feel like these two-dimensional stereotypes of a type of liberal person.

I definitely felt a certain connection to Lauren. I’ve been doing podcast interviews for about 12 years, and there are certain temptations, I think, to kind of inject yourself into the narrative of the interviewee or put your own agenda on it (a bit like I’m doing now). I think it’s also kind of multigenerational, there are different age groups that are lambasted, it’s not so much boomers taking a pop at Gen Z or vice versa, it takes shots in every direction.

ZW: That’s so kind.

BG: Yeah, that’s nice that that came across.

ZW: There’s a quote that I think about very often from the actress Cherry Jones, where she said that theater is where we confront each other with our shortcomings; I’ll show you mine, you’ll see yours reflected from the stage. And if all goes well, we’ll have a night of laughs and catharsis and go back out into the night feeling, in some way, comforted. I’m paraphrasing, but I really believe that hypocrisy and being disappointing and morally shabby in instances, those are the things that don’t make you a bad person; it just makes you a person who is sometimes bad, which is all people as far as I know! I mean, I have a limited sample size, but I think rather than trying to make jokes to imply a distance between people like that, and people like us, it’s all people like us, I think. So if you’re saying it doesn’t sort of parse out the losers and the winners, that’s nice, because we don’t want to do that.

Yeah, it sort of feels like everyone’s kind of trying to do their best. And it’s a very interesting confluence of things – it’s a sitcom, it’s kind of a radio show in itself, kind of a magazine show with the interview segments, and you’ve got your workplace politics, the social satire aspects. Most apropos for us would be the stop-motion angle, and obviously Mike Judge has a pretty solid track record with animated sitcoms, was that something he brought to it, or were you all into the idea of having it be animated?

BG: It was his initial idea. He told us that he’d always wanted to do a stop-motion show, that he just loves stop-motion and hadn’t been able to do it yet. And so he brought it up to us as an idea of like “Hey, what do you guys think of this? Would you be interested?”, and we thought about it. I think besides the fact that the show – and I feel that, because I’m not responsible for it, I can say this – is so beautiful, like we just we just love how it looks. But also, when we were first thinking about it, we thought “Oh, stop motion. This is also sort of thematically sort of perfect for our show, that the type of characters we have, with these large heads and fragile bodies, are so well-represented by puppets. I also think, at least in the United States, that when people think of stop-motion, maybe because it’s used in Wes Anderson movies sometimes, that there’s a ‘twee’-ness to the form for people that I think also sort of fits the NPR world.

You mentioned Space Ghost before, and yeah, that definitely popped into my mind. I was kind of interested in how you actually go about creating those interview scenes. Were they completely ad-libbed?

ZW: Yes, with the exception of the one where Fabian interviews Jorge Masvidal, the cage fighter. That was scripted because it’s basically a narrative arc in the episode. But even in that one, he improvised, I would say probably 50% of what made it to the screen.

BG: A lot of the specifics, yeah.

ZW: And then the only other thing that we ever asked people to fabricate was at one point we said during Tegan and Sara’s interview, we said “Could you please pretend to be nauseous and leave?” But aside from that, everything was improvised.

BG: The beauty of it is that Zach will speak to them in character, where they’re only seeing a picture of the puppet. They’re hearing his voice and he’ll speak to them for about an hour. We have two great editors, but one of them, Kelly Lyon, she would take that hour and find the best three minutes, and also sort of artfully have it feel like one question is leading into the next one organically, even though they might have been separated by 20 minutes in the actual interview.

In general, how do the guests respond when this concept is pitched to them, being interviewed by an animated puppet and, I guess, having to play it as straight as possible? Was everyone’s game for it or was there some resistance?

BG: Everybody who did it, I think, was very game for it. I was sort of amazed by how well all of them just started acting like this was a real interview and didn’t seem uncomfortable with any part of it. Especially some interviews like Mike Tyson and Roxane Gay, where the Lauren characters is bringing up their personal lives so much, they’re so game to go with that and treat him like he’s a real person with real problems. We were like, looking for certain types of guests, like we were asking all these different athletes, and I think a lot of them were a little nervous about what exactly this was, or if we’d be making fun of them. The thing we tried to tell everybody was that the joke would always be on Lauren, and that we just needed them to be themselves.

The animation as a whole, it’s so strong, and especially considering it’s generally not an action-packed series…

ZW: How dare you, Ben!

BG: It’s not?!

You have so much being communicated with the body language, and they’re really incredible performances, the puppet craftsmanship as well is really nice. It felt, to me, quite different. Was the animation studio Shadow Machine?

ZW: Yeah it was Shadow Machine, and that place is a magic place. If anyone who encounters this interview has a chance to work with Shadow Machine, I highly recommend it. It was all animated in their kind of batcave up in Portland, Oregon, and it’s just all of these people who are such artists, both in the sense that they have cultivated an incredibly difficult technique and craft. And also in terms of their orientation towards the world and their work. No one becomes phenomenally wealthy or famous for being a stop-motion animator, the only reason to do that job is because you love that job. And it requires patience, both in the micro of how animating requires patience, and I have to assume it requires patience in the macro, in terms of finding opportunities where you can actually do it and be solvent in your life. It’s funny, I have friends who are dancers, you know, very talented dancers, and so they remind me of each other in a weird way, the dancers who tour the world doing these incredibly beautiful performances, but are never in pursuit of fame and fortune. It was the same sort of thing with Shadow Machine, and they’re so talented.

Yeah, there are some names in the credits that I was happy to see. The animation director Brian Leif Hansen has an incredible CV – Pinocchio, Laika, My Life as a Courgette was one of my favorite films of the last ten years…

ZW: I’m so glad you brought that up. Truly, I’ve watched that movie like a million times. Céline Sciamma is actually a huge influence on Brandon and me, because she gave this BAFTA talk that really changed the way we write actually. And then they did the American version, which is cool and everything but, at the risk of being like an NPR cliche, it’s like “the French version was better” – but it is! (Laughs).

BG: Yeah, and to just jump off your compliment for Brian, every single shot we talked about with the animator who was animating it, with Brian next to them. We just had so much trust in all the animators, who are all geniuses, and then also in Brian to have ideas that we wouldn’t think of, because we don’t know stop-motion, and sometimes translate what we were going for if we were talking to them as actors. There’s something that, when we first heard it, I was very scared, which is that in stop-motion, you have one take because it’s so time consuming and expensive to reshoot something. You talk to them, they go shoot the scene, then you see it later and that’s the scene, right? Unless something really terrible happened, you have to go with it. And within a few weeks, their work was so consistently amazing I relaxed, and it was like, “Oh, they’ve got it”. A lot of that was how good the individual animators are, but it’s also trusting that Brian’s overseeing everything, and making sure that everything fits together.

ZW: I think this is something that maybe doesn’t get touched on all the time, but it’s so important to shout out when it happens: Brian had such rigorous standards for the quality of the animation, and such passion, but he was also the team leader. And the way he led was so nurturing, where there were the most experienced, seasoned animators, and then there were people who had literally never done it before, professionally. His quiet leadership of people was so humane, and so artistically exciting. I think that is really so important. You know, it’s like a teaching hospital – you’re doing the thing, but you’re also teaching the thing – and he was a great, great leader in that way.

BG: He cares so much about it being as good as possible, but he also has to be the one who has an eye on how quickly they’re moving. I think the one thing when we’ve talked to other animators that do stop-motion and are like “that’s crazy”, is how fast they worked, that they did these six episodes, which I guess is about three hours of of animation, in like eight months. That’s so fast. So he was the one who was both like, nurturing these animators and making sure they’re doing their best work, but also making sure they move quickly and don’t slow down, or else they would run out of money and the show would be over.

Do you plan on doing more with these characters? Another season, maybe, moving forward?

ZW: I don’t know…it takes a long time, it’s the kind of thing where even if we were to start today, it would be a while before they ever appear in any viewable forum. It’s interesting, Brandon and I were talking about it too, that with the election coming, it would be a totally different endeavor. Not a bad one, or a good one necessarily, but different, because it would come out after the election, but you would create it before.

BG: Yes, you’d have to imagine “What will the world look like?” Or what would the United States at least feel like next year? And it’s like, “…I dunno!”

In the Know “Yogurt Week” is screening this week at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in the TV Films in Competition 5 programme:

11/06 2pm, Cinéma Pathé – Pathé 4
13/06 7pm, Cinéma Pathé – Pathé 4
14/06 9am, Cinéma Pathé – Pathé 4 The complete series is currently available to watch in the US on Peacock.

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Mansi Drawing Bunnyhood Characters. Source: National Film and Television School

The 77th Cannes Film Festival kicked off last week and amongst the celebrities and aspiring creatives gathering at Le Palais des Festivals are a group of National Film and Television School graduates. Their surreal animation Bunnyhood, an exploration of a young girl’s anxiety and made during their time training at the renowned film school, has been selected to have its world premiere as part of the festival’s La Cinéfondation category this Thursday.

Skwigly sat down with Bunnyhood Director Mansi Maheshwari and Producer Ashionye Ogene to find out how this extraordinary team of film school students have found themselves at one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world just three months after graduating.

Having never done animation before going to the National Film and Television School, what did it feel like taking your first steps on this journey?

MANSI: Making animation was a wonderful journey of self-discovery. I never thought I could be patient enough to draw for hours yet here I am. Animating for the first time was definitely challenging as I was around brilliant filmmakers and animators. But even a few hours of work feels so rewarding when you watch your drawings come to life which makes the journey really easy.

Ashionye, what were you doing before you applied for the Producing MA at the NFTS?

ASHIONYE: I lived and worked across North and South America, Africa and the Middle East as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Covering a wide range of topics on the ground from global business, arts, entertainment to frontline war reporting and international politics.

Right before applying to the NFTS I was working at the BBC as the launch producer on a global business show in the business unit. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always loved stories and the lockdown and COVID-19 pandemic gave me the push to dive head on back into my creative roots and gain the technical skills I needed to become a creative producer.

Where did the concept for Bunnyhood come from?

MANSI: Creating Bunnyhood was a journey that started with a moment of self-reflection. I realised how we often tell lies to protect the ones we love from the harsh truths of this world. I caught myself in a lie, making me wonder why I did it. This story was a perfect choice as it came from my own experiences and allowed me to have fun with the technique.

What was it about Bunnyhood that made you want to work on this film?

ASHIONYE: I watched Mansi’s films in the first year at the NFTS and I was absolutely blown away by her unique talent. I knew that I wanted to work with her for the graduate animation module and I trusted her vision from the very beginning of development. The film is original, exciting and crazy. With a really fun and talented team. A producer’s dream.

Why did you choose to make the film in this unique animation style?

MANSI: I like drawing with simple ballpoint pens and I wanted to do cel animation as I wanted a vintage flyer look for the film. Like old rock band posters. I chose a frosted cel to draw, acetate to paint, the butter paper that divides each acetate to draw the background layer, and finally paint on white copy paper.

We drew the whole film on A5 sheets and then scanned each frame on a copier at the NFTS. It was a long process of animating, colouring, assembling layers, line testing and then scanning. The layers of each frame were stacked physically and not comped in. This was a lot of work and would have been impossible without Paula Gonzalez, Ryan Power, Elizabeth Fraser, Kathryn Haddow, Beatrice Babbo and Lucas Freun, the brilliant animation assistants that stuck with me throughout production.

Bunnyhood techniques. Source: National Film and Television School

The use of colour throughout was very selective, with some scenes entirely in black and white and others with pops of colour. How did you use this to steer the storytelling?

MANSI: I like to limit the amount of colours that I’m going to use in a drawing. I had 5 major colours and I decided to never use more than 2 in the same shot, excluding black and white. Each location had one colour; yellow for home, blue for the outside world, green for the hospital and red for ‘Appendix World.’

This helped in storytelling as when you leave a dream sequence and come back to real time in the film, the colour immediately reminds you where you were in the story.

What were the challenges of producing this animation?

ASHIONYE: There weren’t many if I’m honest. We were fortunate to have an incredibly hardworking team and the best tutors. Animation is a long process and a short film would take longer to produce outside of the academic structure. So in that regard, the biggest challenge was time, but every producer would like more of that!

Another challenge was finding the film’s soundtrack. NFTS animation films feature student composers and sound designers and we’re very lucky as the talent at the NFTS is incredible. The film is so unique so it took us a while to find a sound to match the animation. But Mansi knew exactly what that sound was and together with the film’s Sound Designer and Dubbing Mixer Alexander Faingold and Composer Marcin Mazurek, we created a really powerful soundtrack and soundscape for the crazy world of Bunnyhood.

The use of sound is very effective in amping up the anxiety level. What were the choices behind using voice, cars, chainsaws and other sounds throughout the film?

MANSI: Sound designing was one of my favourite parts of the process. Alexander and I spoke about the story beats and emotion it conveys, and the rest was left to improvisation.

ALEX: I wanted to see how many beats within a scene could be made through the sound and music: choppy, exciting and unforgiving. Anxious when the intensity peaked and reserved and natural for the emotional moments, while comedy gave it a feeling of light heartedness and unpredictability throughout the mad journey of Bunnyhood. In the mix we had a microphone at hand to quickly record sounds or dialogue with our own voices as we watched through, karaoke-style.

Bunnyhood techniques. Source: National Film and Television School

How did you feel when you found out Bunnyhood had been selected for Cannes Film Festival?

MANSI: I never expected or even dreamt about getting into Cannes as this is my first film ever so getting selected was really special. When I heard the news, I was with my mother sitting in a pub. She had come down to London for my graduation. She hadn’t seen the film yet but the joy and pride on her face when she heard that Bunnyhood had been selected made the moment so much more bigger and emotional.

ASHIONYE: It was the best feeling. Euphoria is the word that comes to mind. It felt incredibly surreal but also like the culmination of hard work and dedication which has resulted in something truly special for the entire team.

You can view the Bunnyhood trailer here.

One of just four animations selected for La Cinéf and featuring the voice talents of Nina Wadia (Goodness Gracious Me, Bend It Like Beckham), Bunnyhood will screen at Cannes Film Festival on Thursday 23 May. This year marks the fourth consecutive selection of a National Film and Television School student-made film at La Cinéf.

The post Interview with Cannes Selected ‘Bunnyhood’ Director & Producer | Mansi Maheshwari & Ashionye Ogene appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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We need more films like Mars Express. Jérémie Périn’s debut feature is an original sci-fi animated feature with a complete view of a future where humanity and technology have begun to fuse into one. Unlike the droplets of original sci-fi we get from Hollywood, Mars Express has a consciousness of the political and existential responsibility of sci-fi storytelling. This dystopian view of a future Martian society is a stone’s throw from our current landscape of human rights infringements and culture wars that are stoked to fuel corporate agendas.

Resting upon the inherently cinematic detective story, Mars Express embeds us in a moral quandary surrounding the freedoms of robots. When a girl known for illegally jailbreaking machines – giving them a chance to overcome their programming – goes missing, it falls on PI Aline Ruby to solve the case. While many detective stories act as a way to reinforce the virtues of the law, Mars Express sees its protagonists forced to question their morality. This is especially true for Ruby’s cyborg partner, Carlos Rivera, a robot with the consciousness of a late human, who has to question a society that represses his own kind.

Skwigly caught up with Périn over Zoom to discuss the political foundation of his film, the technological design of this society and making animation on a budget.

Could you talk about where the idea for Mars Express came from?

I always wanted to do a sci-fi movie one day. I tried to create a sci-fi TV show first and then pitched some movies, but every time it failed. Some producers were interested but in the end it didn’t happen. It was a different time. Adult animation was not a thing in France, it was more difficult to do and it’s still difficult today. But I directed a TV adaptation of comic books called LastMan, which was for teenagers and adults and it became a success in France. This brought me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted after that, so I finally made a sci-fi movie. In the field of science fiction, you have many possibilities and we wanted to do some hard sci-fi, something more logical, more scientific, more pragmatic, more realistic. Sci-fi movies at the time were more focused on something I would call magical sci fi, like, Star Wars or in those Marvel movies and stuff like that.

What I like in sci-fi is the opportunity to talk about our present. To talk about political ideas but in a metaphorical way, to push the boundaries of the technologies to talk about the technologies already around us and what they say about us. At the time there were also those tech billionaires talking about leaving Earth to live on Mars or in a space station. I won’t hide it, I’m on the opposite end of the political spectrum to those tech billionaires. So, I wanted to be a bit satirical about that way of ruling society that they have in mind. I, alongside my co-writer Laurent Sarfati, wanted to imagine what it could be like to live on Mars in a society built by that kind of libertarian billionaire. That’s why in the movie you have no trace of any political people. There’s no mayor, there’s no president, it’s just corporations.

How did you go about designing the technology of the film? There’s laptops and phones but also more unfamiliar pieces of tech.

We wanted to have different kinds of technology living all together. We wanted to express that some robots are older than others, so I hired different designers for the robots, just to feel that it’s not the same person who built everything. Also, when you’re out in the street, every car around you comes from a different company, so we try to replicate that on a smaller scale, of course. All those mixed technologies are also there to express this feeling of a more natural society organised with different companies and possibilities of design. And the fact that Carlos’ head is a hologram comes from that. It was something we had in the script that Carlos’ body is an older model compared to many other robots in the movie, and so I had this idea of making him a standard body and his only originality is in his face. It’s like your profile picture on your Facebook page, you know, all Facebook pages look the same except for your own picture. Also, usually in movies, when you use a hologram, after five seconds the hologram is glitching for the audience to understand, it’s a hologram. And I was like “No, it has to actually work!” There’s no glitch. It’s a little bit transparent, and he has a head separated from his body, it’s like a ghost. So, it’s a way of telling his own story visually.

The film takes in a lot of influences from classic sci-fi and video games and anime. How do you balance absorbing those influences and avoiding tropes?

I try to trust my feelings. Some tropes are really interesting because you can use the expectation of the audience. If you succeed in using a trope, but right after you’re twisting it, it’s okay to me. So it depends on the effect you need to have in your sequence. But sometimes I know I’m in a cliche but I don’t have a better idea. Sometimes you let it go. I try to think about the tropes as an audience member, like, if I watched that in a movie, would I be annoyed by it? It’s more of a feeling.

There’s a warmth from that familiarity and sometimes you rely on those tropes for worldbuilding.

Yes. I don’t really like to wink at the audience, it has to mean something when you do some references. In the movie, there are some quotes, but they are more for the audience to understand the situation.

People often talk about the limits of 2D animation, but Mars Express feels uncompromising in its dynamism. How did you achieve that?

Well, sometimes the background is in 3D, so we mixed the techniques. And in the beginning, it was more to express having, on one side, humans that are hand-drawn, and, on the other, robots that are made by machine. There are still people behind the computer to model them and to animate them, but the rendering is manmade for the humans, and the robots are rendered by machine. I thought that idea was funny. At the same time, I knew we would have cars and robots in 3d, I was like, yeah, sometimes we could have the background in 3d. As an example, in the car crash scene, all the background is in 3D because there were so many cars in it, it was more simple to do it all in 3D, just to have the cars in the right perspectives. As I knew I would have a 3D background, I knew I could do some camera movement and play with depth. I knew while reading the script that a 3D background would be more efficient.

What’s the secret to maximising a small budget to tell a grand story?

We had to cut some scenes, we had to shorten some sequences and stuff like that. In general, animation is expensive, let’s say that the minimum of an animation movie budget is higher than live action movies. But at some level, it’s the same to tell a story in a kitchen as in a spaceship, because it’s just drawings. It’s not exactly true, because you have to design most sci-fi movies, but in live action, the movie would have been way more expensive, especially in France, it would never have been possible to make it. Also, I grew up with Japanese animation which was full of tricks to make it bigger than it is. So I used a lot of the tricks I analysed on those animated features. And also, the way we are making our movies in France, and I guess it’s the same in Japan, but we have this ‘poor people methodology.’ We know that we won’t have a big budget, so we structure our way of making movies differently than you would for DreamWorks or Pixar or Disney movies etc. I think when you have a big budget, I think you can easily throw away some shots or make them twice or three times and go back to script while some shots are already rendered and stuff like that. We can’t do that. We have to be very sure about ourselves before going to the next step.

Mars Express is out in cinemas across the US today, for info and tickets visit gkids.com and keep your eyes on Skwigly for future news of the film’s international distribution.

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In our series of interviews for Autism Awareness Month, I have had the privilege to speak with other autistic people who have worked within the animation industry and neurotypical individuals who have written and created short films and television shows featuring characters on the spectrum. For this year, we are joined by two YouTube animators to discuss their careers on the platform, sharing their experiences as autistic content creators, and how their audiences have reacted to their work since both came out on the spectrum. (You can read our interview with Ilyssa from Illymation here.)

Cy started her YouTube channel, Cypopps, nearly four years ago and turned her childhood and adult stories into short animated videos, some of which have focussed on her autistic experiences and have become popular among her fans. Taking the time to join us and answer our questions, Cy shares with us her journey into animation, collaborations with other content creators on the spectrum, and what her audience can expect to see on Cypopps later this year.

Cy Shocked. Image supplied by Cypopps.

How did you start your career in animation and what made you interested in becoming a YouTube animator?

As a kid on the spectrum, I always loved animated media because it was easier for me to understand. I could not read the facial expressions of the people in live action TV shows, but cartoon characters had exaggerated emotions that made sense to me, and I connected with them. This led me to making my own original characters, stories, and worlds. I always dreamed of creating an animated TV show.

As I grew up, I tried to think more practically, more “realistically,” and I strayed away from art and animation for a while. During the pandemic, life paused and I was able to really think about my direction, and I realized I still wanted to do art deep down. I have also been drawing comics since I was a kid, and I decided that would be how I’d get back into art, which felt scary because I’d been away from it for so long at that point. I decided to talk about my autistic experiences through comics as I retrained my hand to draw and grew new skills at social media and connecting with people. And to my surprise, these comics were very successful online, and some were even published in the comic anthology Sensory: Life on the Spectrum.

The success of my comics really gave me the confidence boost I needed to create animations. While I still have more comics planned down the road, it is not unheard of that a webcomic creator will transition to YouTube animator, so it felt like a natural progression to me. Which lead me to today, eighteen videos later, an animation YouTuber with close to eight hundred thousand views. I consider myself to be very early in my animation journey, and I can’t wait to see how I continue to evolve in the years to come.

Since you came out to your audience as autistic a year ago in your video, I’m Autistic, And Here’s How People React To My Autism, it has been your most popular video to date on your YouTube Channel. What was it like to have a successful video on this subject and how has that impacted your following videos?

Oh yeah, that video is definitely my biggest, I think last I checked it was like at one third of a million views. I can’t even imagine that many people in a room, and it’s like… all of these people heard what I had to say about autism? That is just crazy to me.

It’s amazing to have other autistic people and supporters of autistic people interacting with my channel as a result of the video, so I am super grateful that people have really attached to it the way that they did! It feels like people really connected to the video based on the majority of the comments, and I appreciate that so much!

On the other hand, there can sometimes be pressure to make only autism content because of the demand, and I try not to give into that pressure to make all of my art about autism. I have a lot of other concepts to tell stories about!

Cy In Class. Image supplied by Cy Popps.

In your four years of content creation on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, what has the reaction been like from the audiences when they see a clip from your autistic videos or read one of your comics?

Most people react really well and are super complementary if they have something to say about it! A lot of people have told me that they relate to my depictions of autism in my art. Or they experience something similar to me, but in their own different way.

A lot of the time, people will start telling their own stories about their autistic experiences in the YouTube comments, which I often enjoy reading. People seem to connect most to the YouTube videos I think because they are longer and give more context. It’s hard to get the full picture of someone’s life or experience from a nine second TikTok, you know?

If I ever experience some negative audience reactions, I just consider it a blessing in disguise. I’ve learned this means my art has reached outside of my bubble. The algorithms of social media are an echo chamber, and if my video has broken free of my echo chamber, that means I’m reaching new people. So I have to just appreciate everything that comes with that.

You have collaborated with other autistic content creators like Alienated Anna and Bex Ollerton. What was it like to work with other artists on these different projects? Are there any other animators you would like to work with next?

It’s always amazing to work with other artists! Both Bex Ollerton and Alienated Anna are super kind and talented artists in their mediums!

It’s great to collaborate with other autistic artists because you might have some of the same difficulties and understand each other because of that. For example, I usually prefer to collaborate with people over messaging, rather than calling or video. It gives me time to think through my thoughts and respond, and I don’t have to read expressions or remember to look at faces. I’ve found that a lot of other autistic artists seem to prefer messaging as well. While I am trying to get better at other forms of communication, it’s nice to not necessarily have the pressure to have to do that.

I don’t really have a running list of animators I want to work with… it just seems to happen pretty naturally and organically. I would love to talk with the animator Illymation. She seems pretty cool.

Will you continue to make animations that tell more of your autistic stories? And what can fans expect this year?

People who watch my channel can expect more autistic stories this year! I have a new animation out on YouTube and it is the story of how I came to receive my diagnosis, viewed through the lens of everyone thinking I was just really shy.

Fans can also keep on the lookout for some experimentation on my channel in the later half of the year. I want to try out some different formats and maybe even some new characters.

You can watch Cy’s videos on the Cypopps YouTube channel and follow her on TikTok, Instagram and X.

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Last month saw the announcement of the winners of the 28th British Animation Awards at a ceremony held at London’s BFI Southbank, presented by comedian Henning Wehn. Among the finalists were two graduate animations from Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), Diana Blázquez Martín and Katherine Galley’s Moonseeker and Sena Miyazaki’s Cortex, the latter taking home the coveted prize for Best Undergraduate Film.

Cortex is the story of a desperate man as he undergoes an experimental trial with a new technology called CORTEX, embarking on a journey through his mindscape to reconstruct his memories and modify his past trauma.

Director Sena Miyazaki, now graduated and working in Manchester on a new Disney show due for release this summer, shared his thoughts on the making of Cortex and his BAA win.

On the inspiration behind the animation:

The idea for Cortex originally came out of lockdown. I was alone with my thoughts a lot and my only escape was into creativity. I was thinking about the powers that new technologies can have over us and our reliance on them, especially in countries like Japan.

On his motivation and developing the idea:

I’ve always been super motivated and driven. As well as studying at uni, I also took some additional online courses to really hone my specialist skills.

In 2022, my third year at AUB, I was working on Cortex and had a rough idea of what I wanted the story to be, but I hadn’t quite got it. So, I took a short course in visual storytelling at GOBELINS in France where they mentored me for a couple of weeks to develop the story.

I’ve also taken short courses with the artists that I really admire. A lot of artists run their own courses and it’s a great way to make industry connections while you’re still at uni. It’s also a great way to emulate a specific studio if you’re looking to work there in the future.

I also reached out to artists to ask them for advice. This led me to finding more events that I could go to, more workshops I could join, and more portfolio reviews. Events like the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France are amazing to go to for meeting artists and people in the industry. I recommend everyone goes there if you’re looking for a career in animation. When I went to Annecy, I saw one the artists I really admire and I just went up to him and spoke to him. I just told myself that I’d regret it if I didn’t, so I did!

Sena Miyazaki (Photography by Chris Cooper, Shotaway – image provided by AUB)

On what’s next for the director:

Trying to find a better life-work balance I think. I would love to do more of my own work too and work on more feature films. At university you have the time and creative freedom to produce what you want, that’s not so easy once you’re working.

I feel like this award is an accumulation of all the hard work I’ve been doing over the last few years. I’m just so grateful for everything, the opportunities I’ve had and the support from AUB and from the industry too. I’m still not sure if the news of the award has really sunk in for me yet. I do know that the 2022 me would be really proud of everything that’s happened, and especially proud of this award.

For the full list of this year’s BAA winners click here.

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One of the most prominent and recognisable YouTube animators, Ilyssa Levy from Illymation has created and shared emotional, funny, and hard-hitting stories from her personal life that have attracted millions of viewers. Last year, she shared her first video on autism and her experiences on the spectrum, which not only received over four million views but saw her make a follow-up video on the same subject. Taking the time to join us and answer our questions, Ilyssa shares with us the inspiration behind her videos, how her fans reacted to her coming out as being autistic, and how she thinks representation of neurodiversity on YouTube has changed throughout her career.

Illy Driving. Image supplied by Illymation.

You’ve talked a lot about the many chapters in your life on your YouTube channel. Why did you decide to share your autistic stories?

Growing up, I felt like there was something wrong with me. There were things I struggled with that my peers didn’t. And while “nerdiness” was a label I came to accept for my intense and undying interests, it didn’t quite explain things like my sensitivity to certain fabrics and loud noises. Finding out I was on the spectrum helped me begin to unpack the anxiety and shame I was carrying into every social interaction since grade school. Now that I had this enormous revelation, it made me wonder, how many people in my YouTube audience feel this way too? How many were diagnosed as children, and how many didn’t? Diagnoses aside, there would likely be stories that revealed shared experiences and words of encouragement that I could provide to viewers.

When I first set out to make videos years ago, my intended audience was merely a past version of myself I wished to comfort; but as I’ve learned with every upload discussing a vulnerable topic, there are many people seeking that same comfort, and I’m always looking out for more opportunities in my storytelling to provide that.

Middle School Illy. Image supplied by Illymation.

Since you came out last year as being autistic in one of your videos, how has it impacted your relationship with your audience and the artists you collaborate with?

Thankfully, my audience welcomed me with open arms. Many kind comments from viewers shared they were on the spectrum as well, and they felt less alone knowing a stranger like me, and thousands of others in the comment section, struggle with similar things. Without outing anyone, some content creators I met after my video went up disclosed to me they were also autistic. I’ve been very lucky to have made some new friends.

In your Dating (when you’re autistic) video, I found your segments on Spoon Theory (a metaphor to describe the amount of energy people have for daily tasks) and Masking (a technique where people copy others to blend in) were well executed and educational, especially as an autistic adult, who personally never heard of them before. What is your process towards your research for your videos and how do you implement them into your animations?

Thank you! Because my videos focus on my lived experiences, I make sure my research includes a good mix of facts (so the audience can be directed elsewhere for more information or support), as well as other personal accounts. I, along with every YouTuber I know, will send their video scripts to friends for feedback. But for videos with deeper topics like this one, I make sure to reach out to others who I know have specific knowledge in the topic and can provide very valuable feedback and suggestions. For Dating (when you’re autistic) it made sense to not just ask my boyfriend to look over the script, but to also play a major role sharing his stories in the video!

Illy and Boyfriend. Still supplied by Illymation.

Throughout your career on YouTube, how do you personally feel that representation and inclusion of neurodiversity has changed on the platform from when you started to now?

When I think back on the early “style” of YouTube humour, the r-slur was a commonly used insult, and many skits only featured autistic people or traits in a negative light. I think we have come a long way, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. The new way I’ve seen online bullying against autistic people is to spam the comment section with words that sound similar to the r-slur or the word autistic (“I think they’re restarted.“ or “Are they acoustic?”) and I can only imagine how difficult school must be for autistic kids today. It makes me glad there is a growing community, both online and off, for autistic people to find each other and feel less alone!

While I’m sure fans can expect more videos to come this year, would you like to make another one on autism?

I’m not sure! I didn’t anticipate making a second video discussing autism until I was dating a fellow autistic person for the first time and having new revelations. I think only time will tell!

You can watch Ilyssa’s videos on the Illymation YouTube channel and you can also follow her on Instagram and X.

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Irish-born animator Conor Kehelly, presently living and working in London, has created a remarkable, surreal short film that uses dark humour to discuss what it is to be a human navigating the weird and often unpredictable nature of life. The Final Nail in the Coffin is Conor’s his first film since studying at Manchester School of Art, created independently around his commercial work. Conor also lends his musical talents to the film, crafting a brooding soundtrack that carries the narrative through to its surprisingly hopeful ending.

The almost brutalist minimalism of the design, with its heavy emphasis on block shapes, texture and lack of colour, is in one regard an efficiency measure by Conor to aid in both the storytelling and animation. However, the design also lends the film an elegance that is demonstrated throughout the film, perhaps most succinctly in the opening credits in which every word of the title is connected by a single line, symbolising both the connective tissue of the story and the titular nail. This works in tandem with the humour of the film, which allows the audience to react to its darker and grander themes. Born from a promise made by an artist to themselves to continue to explore their own work after leaving art school, The Final Nail in the Coffin demonstrates a commitment to creative development and pursuing one’s own artistic voice alongside industry work.

https://www.skwigly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/23.02.26-Hammer-Trailer-First-Minute-12.m4vAbove: The opening minute of The Final Nail in the Coffin (Dir. Conor Kehelly)

Having been selected for various animation festivals including Monstra, Pictoplasma, British Shorts Berlin and our own Skwigly Screening at the 2023 Manchester Animation Festival as well as winning the Best Film Award at Singapore’s Cartoons Underground and Best Late Night Bizarre Award at London International Animation Festival, we were able to ask Conor a few questions and get a better insight into the film and the filmmaker himself.

How did you first come to animation?

I watched the typical popular animated shows on Cartoon Network growing up, but the thing that flicked the switch in my head for wanting to actually make it was due to having unsupervised access to the internet during the flash-animation renaissance. I was obsessed with the janky but passionate work made by these outsider artists on websites like Newgrounds and albinoblacksheep. The majority never did it for money or fame. They usually just had an odd idea, a crap drawing pad and a lot of time. I was probably 6 or 7 years old so didn’t have the technical skills to learn how to “acquire” Adobe Flash until I was 14 or 15, but the Flash animation community of the 2000s was definitely the igniting spark.

The narrative follows some pretty bizarre characters that are linked through some equally unusual circumstances, was any of the film based on real events or was it totally fabricated story?

It was completely fabricated. I think the only idea that was loosely inspired by reality was one day walking to work when I first moved to London. I walked past scaffolding and heard a faint noise of someone shouting. I looked up and a cockney guy in a high vis shouted down “Oi mate. Nice socks.” I was wearing bright orange socks.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

Your film has this brilliant surreal wit, where do you feel this humour comes from?

It’s a played-out answer probably but I think being born and raised in Belfast in the North of Ireland has shaped my humour a lot. I think the troubles really damaged a lot of people during the 1960-1980s and in doing so, it damaged their humour a bit. Now their children, my generation, have absorbed that dark biting humour without as much of the traumatic baggage that comes with it. As for it being surreal, I think that is just the result of being terminally online for my whole life. With the advent of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the like, it is so easy to have an unoriginal thought. Every possible idea and joke has been played out, so I guess trying to find things that are still funny or thought-provoking requires us to think of ideas that go against what we think we know. Everything is hidden under so many layers of irony now that humour has become a gut instinct and it is really just hoping that the audience in some way will think like me and “get” it.

Visually you have developed a really clear identity in your work. There’s a graphical sense to your character and environmental design that feels representative of classic modernism but with a very contemporary look, where do you draw inspiration from?

My work is mainly born out of functionality and essentialism. I am one person making work in the tiny gaps of free time I can grab during the 9/5 work week. I really just got into my head that the idea is everything. The visuals are just an aid to help the idea stand up properly as best it can. I wanted to disarm the audience of prejudice before coming into the animation, so I thought if I designed the animation to look raw, sore and broken from the beginning, any small missing details and technical errors would sit in harmony with the style. The stereotype of animation is that it is for children, so to counteract that I just leaned into it with the character and set designs. Wobbly lines, building block bodies and overly expressive key poses. People think the intent of the animation is to make them laugh and hopefully, they believe that until it hits a point where they slowly realise I want to say a little bit more.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

The film was your first after graduating from Manchester School of Art, what prompted you to make a film independently?

I think the only goal I ever set myself after uni was to not make my grad film my last. I find it sad that we only really get one chance to say something with our art, before being thrown into the deep end. My grad film was not what I wanted to use as my short film career gravestone. I hope the shorts I make act as milestones in my life somehow. I have probably jinxed it now and will struggle to make anything ever again. Hopefully not though.

There’s some really strong music and sound design in the film that you also did, could you tell me about that process?

I was a classically trained double-bass player before I swerved into the animator lane. A guilty thought has always sat in the back of my brain telling me that I wasted a lot of time and money in music equipment, training and software over the years. But in starting the process of this film, I realised I could have a lot more control if I built the music alongside the film, swapping out temp tracks for my own scores. I bounced around many many genres. At one point the music was very chaotic and electronic, like synthesized jazz but as I kept building on the ending, I ended up stripping back layers and layers until it became more quietly uplifting and sweet sounding. The final result ended up being heavily inspired by the types of songs you would hear during a funeral march.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

How have you found the response to the film?

People have been very kind to my film. I think I am a very “glass half empty” type of person when it comes to my work but it is heartwarming to see people genuinely laughing and thinking about it. At least, I think they are genuine laughs. Although sometimes I am fighting imposter syndrome when my film is wedged between these big-budget grandiose shorts at film festivals, it is interesting that my film and its small humbling budget and production value seem to garner the same positive responses.

I can see from your various social media platforms that you are working on a new film, can you tell me anything about that?

I don’t know if I would call it a new short film yet. I am not sure what it is at this point. It started off as a 30-second TikTok. But I ended up adding lines and in-betweens and now it has landed somewhere in-between. I don’t want to say much about it at all yet. It may never see the light of day, but I will say that it is a lot more polarising and strange than the Final Nail In The Coffin.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

You can see more of Conor’s work and find out where his film is playing next on his website and his Instagram.

The post The Final Nail In The Coffin | Interview with Conor Kehelly appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

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The Inventor is a stop-motion film that focuses on the complex life of Leonardo da Vinci, probably one of the most well-known artists and inventors of all time. A genius who was a key figure in multiple scientific and visual art practices, da Vinci’s life and work could be told across multiple feature-length biopics. It is, however, his duality (and, ultimately, his humanity) that is at the centre of writer-director Jim Capobianco (Ratatouille, The Lion King)’s retelling of his life.

With his creativity shackled by his benefactors – firstly the pompous pope and then the powerful young French King Francis I – da Vinci finds an unlikely companion and kindred spirit in the King’s sister Marguerite (voiced by Daisy Ridley, Star Wars), a friend and muse to the artist and inventor in the last stages of his life. The film boasts an impressive cast, with British actor Stephen Fry as the titular Leonardo, Marion Cotillard as Louise de Savoy and Matt Berry as Pope Leo XI.

Growing from Capobianco’s previous 2D short film Leonardo, also about da Vinci, the feature makes use of puppet stop-motion characters – reminiscent of the classic American stop-motion works of Rankin and Bass – with 2D animation to capture a body of work spanning various innovations, detailed anatomical diagrams and world-renowned paintings among his other ventures. Created in collaboration with French-based Foliascope Studios and co-directed by the talented Pierre-Luc Granjon (Anatole’s Little Saucepan), a truly passionate team was brought together to create a poignant film full of warmth that seeks to present the necessity of creativity in the pursuit of knowledge and a better world for the many, rather than the wealthy few.

Ahead of next week’s UK theatrical release, Skwigly were able to speak to Jim Capobianco about the long journey that brought the story of Leonardo from the page to the big screen.

Leonardo da Vinci is probably one of the most famous inventors and artists in history. What was it about him, personally, that you felt connected to?

I think for me, it was because we know that he was this famous and amazing person who could do no wrong, who was interested in all these different things, a genius. I wanted to tell the other side of that story, the real human aspect of Leonardo da Vinci. Because he did question himself, and thought he failed. He did fail, sometimes with his ideas, and procrastinated and got distracted. He wrote grocery lists in his writings. You realise that this guy really existed, obviously, and was a real person. So that kind of aspect is really what I wanted to work around because, to me, that’s an interesting character that we can relate to. A character that is just a genius could be boring; not many of us are geniuses, so it’s a little hard to relate to them – and you can even hate them, in a way. So I really wanted to tell the warmer side of him and create that kind of a character.