NEWS
NEW CATS
ON THE BLOCK As the spirited short animation Miisufy prepares to screen at Sundance and Clermont-Ferrand, director Liisi Grünberg and producer Aurelia Aasa reveal how the story of a virtual cat living inside an app that refuses to yield to domestication came to life.
Aurelia: I’d like to add that at the film’s core is how willingly we spend so much time in that space without truly seeing ourselves from the side. This perspective is really interesting. We see how the digital pet sees us.
By Mirjam Mikk/EFI
Liisi, this was your directorial debut. How did you approach the story, what did you especially concentrate on?
H
ow did the idea of Miisufy come about and develop?
Aurelia: I came across Liisi’s drawings on Instagram, fragments from a comic she was working on, and I reached out to her. Liisi’s background in illustration stands out in her work, as animation isn’t usually so detailed. No one typically draws different patterns on the characters’ dresses, for example, so it is quite rare. Regarding the story, what attracted me in Liisi’s illustrations was the complicated apocalyptic
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BALTIC FILM
world, but most importantly, the cats! We began working with the cats and brainstorming an interesting background story for them. Liisi: The comic initially focused on A.I. and a world evolving based on people’s media usage and behaviours. It developed into cats because everyone on the internet loves cats. We then took these characters and started brainstorming story ideas. For me, the film’s story is not so much about A.I., but rather the relationship between a person and their smartphone.
Liisi: Drawing from my experience designing characters in comics, I applied some approaches and techniques into the animation. The story world we created was more extensive than we could fit into the short film. We initially discussed much more about the world the cats live in and the life of the main character. What we couldn’t tell explicitly, we hinted at through background and environments, suggesting there’s more going on than we see in the plot. It was like solving
