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A Brief Life Steeped in Beauty Directors Eric Warin and Tahir Rana discuss the making of their deeply felt and artistic biography, Charlotte.
T
he life and art of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) who was killed in Auschwitz, is the subject of Charlotte, a beautifully animated feature directed by Eric Warin and Tahir Rana. The 2D-animated movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, is getting a limited release in U.S. theaters this month thanks to Good Deed Entertainment. Warin, who also directed the 2016 feature Leap! and was a character designer/assistant animator on The Triplets of Belleville, says he was immediately moved by the story and the central character as soon as he read the script. “The producer Julia Rosenberg came to meet me in Montreal and we talked extensively about the film and cinema in general,” he recalls. “I then went to Toronto with a list of things I would consider important to change; the storyboard was already started, so that was sensitive. Ten days later I moved to Toronto and plunged body and soul into this adventure!” Co-director Tahir Rana, whose many TV credits include Looney Tunes Cartoons, Middlemost Post and Arthur, says he also fell in love with the story and insisted that he’d get a chance to work on the film. “The opportunity to work on drama is just so unique in the North American
‘In this tragic story, animation allows us to touch the soul of the spectator in a unique way and different from live cinema. Above all, it sublimates reality and it adds poetry to the harshest images.’ — Director Eric Warin
market that I jumped at it,” says Rana. “Coupled with the fact that Charlotte Salomon’s story in itself is so beautiful and inspiring, I knew that I’d probably never get the chance to work on something so important and rare again.”
Artistic Shots Warin mentions that he could smell the paint from the very first lines of the script. “My father is a painter and I spent my childhood in his studio watching him work for hours on end on his canvas. I also saw myself in the corridors of the Academy of Fine Arts where I studied. That’s why many elements of the film echoed in me. My grandmother had also left her country during World War II.” He adds, “Beyond animation, I am also a great lover of cinema of all kinds. So I drew on references other than animation and I worked a lot on framing, composition and rhythm (editing). I really wanted to give this film a cinematic
treatment that uses animation as a medium to express itself — a bit like Steven Spielberg used black and white in Schindler’s List.” The directors both feel that animation was the ideal medium to tell the painter’s story. As Rana points out, “Not only were we able to draw inspiration from Charlotte’s own style with regards to our overall art direction, we were able to weave her very own paintings into the film’s transition moments in a way that would just not have worked had we used any other medium.” “In this tragic story, animation allows us to touch the soul of the spectator in a unique way and different from live cinema with actors,” adds Warin. “And above all, it sublimates reality and it adds poetry to the harshest images.” About 100 people worked on the project, with storyboarding done in Toronto and the animation split between Toronto, Brussels and several indie animators working remotely. The
www.animationmagazine.net 14
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may 22
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