Animation Magazine December MIP CANCUN Issue by Animation Magazine, Inc.

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Annual Awards Season Kick-Off Issue

Leo Delivers the Laughs on Netflix Global Cinema Spotlight: Robot Dreams, The Peasants & They Shot the Piano Player Blue Eye Samurai, Curses! & Invincible Season 2

A New Fairy Tale for Our Time: Disney Wishes Upon a Star Again

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VOLUME 37, ISSUE 10, NUMBER 335 FRAME-BY-FRAME

Animation Planner

Animation Lovers’ Holiday Gift Guide

Steampunk Brothers Save the Day!

A Man of Characters

November

A review of the new Fullmetal Alchemist 20th Anniversary Book.

DECEMBER 2023

Local Fauna, the new art book by acclaimed artist Peter de Sève offers an inspiring collection of his work.

WORLD ANIMATION SUMMIT

Welcome to the 2023 World Animation Summit!

Get ready for three days of gala events, panels, screenings and networking parties.

FEATURES

Saving the Magic Kingdom

The creative forces behind Disney’s 62nd animated feature discuss the throwback look and the powerful message of the holiday movie, Wish.

A Valentine to Past Loves and Comic Books 24 Acclaimed Spanish director Pablo Berger discusses his life-long love for animation and the making of his charming new movie, Robot Dreams.

Reptile Dysfunction

Oil and Toil

Animated Notes on a Disappearance

The Return of the Master

Directors Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim give us the scoop on Leo, their hilarious new animated iguana movie. Six years after the release of their Oscar-nominated Loving Vincent, DK and Hugh Welchman return with their second oil-painted masterwork, The Peasants. Fernando Trueba reveals how the mysterious vanishing of a Brazilian musician inspired his new movie, They Shot the Piano Player. Hayao Miyazaki’s surreal ‘final film,’ The Boy and the Heron, leaves a deep impact on both the audience and the animation landscape.

A Spirited Adaptation

Director and producer Robert Chandler charts the journey of bringing Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost to animated life.

Three Cheers for Intergalactic Football!

Space Oddity

Sefi Carmel, CEO of Creation Entertainment Media, hopes to win the animation game with his studio’s new feature, Aliens FC!

René Laloux’s cerebral and surreal cult classic Fantastic Planet turns 50 in December, and there still hasn’t been an animated feature quite like it.

TELEVISION/STREAMING

Facing Demons from the Past

The duo behind DreamWorks’ Curses! takes us behind the scenes of the entertaining and spooky new show.

CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

Euro Students Bask in Oscar’s Glow

Producer Barney Goodland takes us behind the scenes of Magic Light’s The Smeds and the Smoos. Animation schools in France and the U.K. take the top three spots at the Student Academy Awards.

VFX & TECH

Building the Perfectly Lovable Robot

VFX supervisor Jay Cooper tells us about crafting the retrofuturistic world of The Creator.

Meet HAL, Your New Animation Assistant! 90 A few thoughts on embracing or shying away from AI.

Caught Between Two Worlds

The creative forces behind the new Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai discuss the origins and complicated heroine of their show.

SHORTS

Tech Reviews

Updates to Red Giant by Maxon’s Trapcode, Magic Bullet & VFX toolset.

OPPORTUNITIES

Your 2024 Animated Oscar Crossword

The Return of the Complicated Superheroes 50 Creator Robert Kirkman and co-showrunner Simon Racioppa give us an early scoop on the second season of Invincible.

AWARDS SPOTLIGHT

2024 Academy Awards Features Dossier

The Long List Before the Shortlist

Your guide to this year’s award season shorts.

EVENT

Drawn to Big Laughs

Picture This! offers a hilarious mix of stand-up comedy and speedy animation.

DAY IN THE LIFE

A Day In The Life Of

Disney Animation icon John Musker (I’m Hip) shows us a slice of his connected, creative life.

FEATURES

20 SAVING THE MAGIC KINGDOM The creative forces behind Disney’s 62nd animated feature discuss the throwback look and the powerful message of the holiday movie, Wish. TELEVISION/STREAMING

44 CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS The creative forces behind the new Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai discuss the origins and complicated heroine of their show. SHORTS

74 WALT WOULD HAVE LOVED IT! Directors Dan Abraham and Trent Correy reflect on the making of their wonderful 100th anniversary Disney short, Once Upon a Studio.

SHORTS

Walt Would Have Loved It!

Natural Wonder

Like Poetry in Motion

A BRIGHT LIGHT

Directors Dan Abraham and Trent Correy reflect on the making of their wonderful 100th anniversary Disney short, Once Upon a Studio. Andrew Ruhemann takes us behind the scenes of his acclaimed new short, The Day I Became a Bird. Japanese director Ryo Orikasa discusses how the words of Henri Michaux inspired his thought-provoking short, Miserable Miracle.

Director Mitra Shahidi discusses her charming TriBeCa Prizewinning short, Starling

COVER: Wish celebrates the magical legacy of Disney Animation in theaters nationwide November 22. AFM COVER: Magic Frame Animation & Creation Entertainment Media’s Rebellious: Mission Royal Rescue debuts at the market.

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FROM THE EDITOR

Everyone’s a Winner in This Book!

oesn’t it feel like it was only a few weeks ago that Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Charlie Mackesy and Peter Baynton’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse took home the big animation Oscars? And yet, here we are again, kicking off our award season coverage with this special bumper issue which tries to solve the mysteries of this year’s unpredictable road to the Annies, the Oscars and all the other prizes in between. As it turns out, 2023 turned out to be quite a rich year in terms of the wide variety of animated features, both in terms of style, methodology and subject matter. A casual glance at the films whose titles will possibly end on the nomination list proves that once again, both U.S. studios and international toon helmers are embracing an eclectic mix of 2D, CG and stop-motion to tell stories targeting both family audiences and sophisticated adult tastes. Any year that gives us the rich collection that includes Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Disney’s Wish, Netflix’s Nimona, Illumination’s Migration, Aardman’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams has to be considered a watershed one. In this issue’s cover story, our longtime contributor Karen Idelson has done a terrific job of giving us a sneak peek at Disney’s 62nd animated feature, Wish. With its throwback visuals, strong storyline and wonderful songs, this holiday release has the potential of soaring as high as the Frozen movies. It would be a great gift for the studio in its centennial year. If you haven’t seen Dan Abraham and Trent Correy’s beautiful homage to the studio’s animation legacy, Once Upon a Studio, make sure you catch the short on Disney+. If it doesn’t melt your heart, you will need to contact your family cardiologist ASAP. Then, read our interview with the directors to find out how they managed to reunite some of the studio’s brilliant animators and the films’ original voice actors in their charming short. Of course, I have to mention some of the glorious international movies premiering in the next few months in theaters. Tom McLean brings you the fascinating true story of the disappearance of a talented musician in Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s They Shot the Piano Player. Rich Johnson interviews husband-and-wife team Hugh and DK Welchman, who painstakingly used oil paintings to bring the early 20th century Polish novel The Peasants to animated life. Our brilliant anime historian Charles Solomon also gives us his take on The Boy and the Heron. (No, maestro Miyazaki is not doing press, but if he were, I’m sure Charles would be the first to get him on Zoom.) I have to admit that no other movie has moved me the way the Spanish feature Robot Dreams was able to do this year. Berger’s deceptively simple 2D-animated adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel tells the story of a brief but unforgettable friendship between a dog and a robot that is both quite hilarious and profoundly poignant. It was a real honor to speak with the director about his thoughts on animation, inspirations, cinema and why he thinks all of his previous (live-action) films were a prelude to this animated gem. As you may know already, many of the talented people behind this year’s feature and shorts contenders and the best TV and streaming series will be participating at our annual World Animation Summit (Nov. 1-3) at The Garland in N. Hollywood. The G O L D R U S H: (From top) Hayao event has really grown exponentially over the past few years, thanks to the hard work Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron of our amazing event director Kim Derevlany and the efforts of our dynamic founder and Disney’s Wish are two of and publisher, Jean Thoren. You can read all about this year’s honorees, program and the top Best Animated Feature panelists on page 14, and we hope to see many of you at this live event. Oscar contenders of the season. Since this issue will reach your hands in November, I would also like to wish all Guillermo del Toro won for his take on Pinocchio in March. [Photo: of you a peaceful and soul-nourishing Thanksgiving. Our world is in such an awful Richard Harbaugh/AMPAS] shape right now, and it’s so easy to give up on our hopes for a better future. But as Fred Rogers used to say, we just have to keep looking for the helpers. Yes, some days it’s truly difficult to keep your spirits up, but we just have to keep shining our light in the darkness until we chase the demons of war and hatred away.

Ramin Zahed Editor in Chief ramin@animationmagazine.net

DECEMBER 2023

VOL. 37, ISSUE 10, NO. 335 info@animationmagazine.net

President & Publisher: Jean Thoren Accounting: Jan Bayouth

EDITORIAL edit@animationmagazine.net

Editor in Chief: Ramin Zahed Multimedia Editor: Mercedes Milligan Webmaster: Damaso Abrajan Asst. Webmaster: Lucy Abrajan Tech Reviews Editor: Todd Sheridan Perry Contributors: Taylor Freeman, Gillian Glover,

Trevor Hogg, Karen Idelson, Rich Johnson, Glen Keane, Michael Mallory, Myles Mellor, Tom McLean, Devin Nealy, Carl Reed, Charles Solomon, Jeff Spry, Ellen Wolf

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“It’s your responsibility to pursue a wish … And there will be scary times and failure and things won’t work out. I like the idea that it’s OK that it’s hard. Fairy tales teach us how to cope with the tough realities of life. Plus, there’s a goat in pajamas.” — Disney Animation CCO and Wish co-writer Jennifer Lee

TO SUBSCRIBE: For the U.S., the rate is $60 for 1 year or $95 for 2 years. Rates for Canada and Mexico are US$75 for 1 year or US$120 for 2 years delivered by foreign airmail. Foreign rates are US$90 for 1 year or US$145 for 2 years delivered by foreign airmail. Please allow six to eight weeks for initial delivery. Also available in a digital version for $36 for 1 year or $60 for 2 years. Animation Magazine © 2022 Animation Magazine Prior written approval must be obtained to duplicate any and all contents. The copyrights and trademarks of images featured herein are the property of their respective owners. Animation Magazine acknowledges the creators and copyright holders of the materials mentioned herein, and does not seek to infringe on those rights.

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F O R

Y O U R

C O N S I D E R A T I O N

IN ALL CATEGORIES INCLUDING BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

“THE ANIMATION SOARS” KRISTEN PAGE-KIRBY, THE WASHINGTON POST

“EVERY FRAME CRACKLES OVER WITH ENERGY AND COLOR; IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY, IT ACTUALLY LOOKS TEENAGE.” ROBBIE COLLIN, THE TELEGRAPH

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“A LOVE

TO OUR

universalpicturesawards.com

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LETTER ” CHILDHOOD. Jake Hamilton, FOX CHICAGO

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION In All Categories Including

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE Produced By

CHRIS MELEDANDRI p.g.a. SHIGERU MIYAMOTO Directed By

AARON HORVATH MICHAEL JELENIC

BEST ORIGINAL SONG “PEACHES” Written By

JACK BLACK AARON HORVATH MICHAEL JELENIC ERIC OSMOND JOHN SPIKER

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Animation Planner November

Join us at North Hollywood’s historic The Garland hotel for the three-day World Animation Summit, featuring the creative minds and business whizzes behind your favorite projects — capped with the Hall of Fame Awards Gala, hosted by the voice of Bugs Bunny, Eric Bauza! [animationmagazine.net/ summit]

Eric Bauza

The holiday box-office season starts with a bang, DreamWorks style, with the hypercolored musical threequel Trolls Band Together. On streaming, Brian Lee O’Malley’s cult comic hit gets animated in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

Trolls Band Together

The American Film Market (Oct. 31-Nov. 5) brings promising movie projects from all over the world to Santa Monica, Calif. this week. [americanfilmmarket. com]

Blue Eye Samurai

Adam Sandler stars as a jaded classroom lizard who longs to see the world outside his terrarium in Leo, on Netflix today.

Families and Disney fans can enjoy a new, original fairy tale in Wish, bringing the studio’s classic blend of music and magical visuals to theaters in time for Thanksgiving weekend.

It’s a great day for adult animated action lovers as Netflix premieres Blue Eye Samurai and Prime Video powers up Invincible Season Two.

Leo

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

The Oscars countdown begins: General submissions for the 96th Academy Awards close today!

Wish

November Animation Festivals

Students, aspiring artists and professional animators won’t want to miss the CTN Animation eXpo in Burbank this Thursday-Sunday. Masterclasses, special screenings, meet-ups and portfolio reviews are just a few of the highlights. [ctn-events.com]

To get your company’s events and products listed in this monthly calendar, please e-mail edit@animationmagazine.net. www.animationmagazine.net 6

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Animation Lovers’ Holiday Gift Guide

Orange juice is $12 a bottle, but putting smiles on the faces of your favorite toon fans is priceless! (Psst! Prices given are rounded-up SRP, check retailers for the latest discounts.)

he big Disney100 anniversary has inspired a ton of exciting goodies. Topping the list is the limited edition Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection, a three-volume set featuring 100 films from Disney and Pixar, plus a collectible Wish lithograph, poster art booklet and Disney100 crystal Mickey ears hat. Only the very fortunate will unwrap the $1,500 set that’s already selling out [on shelves Nov. 14].

ot enough luxury, you say wealthily? Throw in the anniversary LEGO Disney Castle [$400], vintage Mickey & Minnie Mouse Picnic Dooney & Burke Camera Bag [$230] or the timeless Walt Disney & Mickey Mouse “Partners” Statue Watch by Citizen [$375], all available at shopdisney.com.

or the person on your list who wishes every holiday was Halloween, there are lots of fun items celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas! Our top pick is the OST vinyl set from Walt Disney Records, which features very cool zoetrope artwork on the two LPs packed with Danny Elfman’s iconic songs. [Amazon, $35]

eam bunny also has a packed wish list this year thanks to Warner Bros.’ Celebrating Every Story 100th anniversary campaign! The consumer products department had a lot of fun coming up with new mash-ups of beloved WB properties, like the Funko Looney Tunes x Scooby-Doo line (gotta love the Pop! Ride Mystery Machine with Bugs Bunny [$35] or the WB Shop tees for Looney Tunes X Casablanca [$32] and Tom & Jerry x Singin’ in the Rain [$29]. The celebration also includes DVD collections — notably the six-disc The Looney Tunes Complete Platinum Collection, packed with 150 theatrical shorts [$20]. Partners like Mattel, Monogram, Loungefly, RSVLTS and BoxLunch all have special items inspired by WB faves like The Jetsons, The Flintstones, ThunderCats and more. Look, if the studio’s centennial isn’t the occasion to treat yourself to a Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine Eyeshadow Palette [BoxLunch, $20], what is?

dd to your friends’ libraries with delightful titles for all ages. Little ones can relive Asha’s journey with the Little Golden Book: Disney Wish [Random House Children’s, $6] or Elemental: A City for Everyone [Penguin, $17], while older readers will love any of the beautiful art-of-the-movie books for this year’s hits — recent releases include The Art of Wish [Chronicle, $45, Oct. 24], The Art of DreamWorks Trolls Band Together [Cameron, $50, Nov. 7] and The Art of Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix [Dark Horse, $50, Oct. 31].

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here are also inspiring options for artists of all ages — from Quentin Blake’s kid-focused Start with a Scribble to 3dtotal’s Fundamentals of Character Design and the splurge-worthy double box set of Andrew Loomis’ Drawing the Head and Hands & Figure Drawing for refining technique. Maybe a new skill can hatch with the Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget Im-peckable Crochet guide!

ive ‘em something to Shout! about! The eclectic distributor has a number of new sets fans will be eager to unwrap, including Masaaki Yuasa: Five Films [GKIDS, Blu-ray, $100, available Dec. 19], Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.11 Thrice Upon a Time Collector’s Edition [GKIDS, 4K, $80] and Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Cracking Collection [Blu-ray, $25], to name a few.

Toys & Trinkets Trolls Band Together Fashion Doll Two kinds of hair, 15 accessories, endless possibilities! [Mattel, $25]

Nimona with Wings Plush 8”, also available in Shark form! [geemerch.com, $21]

Spirited Away No-Face Ring Sterling silver & enamel. [rocklove.com, $85]

Wish Star Light-Up Plush 14” of huggable fun! [shopdisney.com, $35]

Elemental Clod Plush 9 ¾”; also available in Gale, Ember and Wade. [shopdisney.com, $25]

Krapopolis Hippocampus Pin Hard enamel, confusing physiognomy. [toddland.com, $12]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Sewer Lair Playset 20+ features and three levels to set battles between turtle and mutant action figures (sold separately) — includes Ooze! [Playmates, $96; action figure prices vary]

Chainsaw Man Pochita Otaku Lamp

Shrek Knit Beanie For the special ogre in your life who already bought the matching Crocs. [aelfriceden. com, $30]

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Marvel Legends Action Figures With premium detail and articulation, The Spot 6” collectible figure includes 5 accessories while Jessica Drew rocks interchangeable hands. [Hasbro, $25 each]

Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures Nubs Backpack An adorable fuzzy pack for any youngling to tote! [shopdisney.com, $35]

The Super Mario Bros. Movie Van Playset with 1.25” Mario Open the 7” x 7” vehicle to uncover a portal to the mushroom kingdom! [Jakks Pacific, $15]

Moomin “House of Disaster” Foldable Water Bottle An eco option for the softcore fashionista, inspired by Tove Jansson. [shop.moomin. com, €26]

Life-Sized Coraline with Button Eyes Make a big, slightly unnerving impression by gifting this five-foot exclusive from Kidrobot. Comes with stand! [$380]

16 colors, USB or battery operated. [store.crunchyroll.com, $35]

ARVERS Ruby Gillman Plush 9” figure. [WalMart, $20]

—Mercedes Milligan Visit animationmagazine.net to find more fun gift options in our monthly Must-Have Lists.

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Steampunk Brothers Save the Day! - By Charles Solomon -

Fullmetal Alchemist 20th Anniversary Book By Hiromu Arakawa and Square Enix [Viz; 240 pages, hardcover: $25]

iromu Arakawa’s fantasy-adventure Fullmetal Alchemist (2001) remains one of the bestloved manga/anime properties of the first decade of the 21st century. The manga has sold more than 80 million books in 25 languages worldwide; it’s been adapted into two animated TV series, OAVs, two animated theatrical features (all animated by Bones), a live-action theatrical feature, juvenile novels and video games. It was also the subject of two touring exhibits of original artwork. Fullmetal Alchemist offers interesting, complex characters who face not only physical obstacles, but moral challenges. Child prodigies Edward and Alphonse Elric violated the greatest taboo of alchemy by attempting to bring their mother back from the dead — and paid a terrible price for their sin. Edward lost his left leg; Al would have died if Ed hadn’t sacrificed his right arm to bond his brother’s soul to an empty suit of armor with a magical seal drawn in his own blood. The complex robotic prostheses Ed wears earned him the title of the Fullmetal Alchemist. Ed is brilliant, hot-tempered — and consumed by guilt over what happened to his brother. The gentle Al seldom complains, but he can neither taste nor touch anything in his armor: When they walk in the rain, he doesn’t feel the drops. It’s a lonely existence for an adolescent. Determined to restore their bodies, Ed focuses all his energy on learning the secret spells that could undo their curse. In Arakawa’s world, alchemical reactions are based on the principle of Equivalent Exchange: Everything taken must be matched by a sacrifice of equal value, much like the way chemical equations must balance. As they wander through cities and towns that look like early 20th century Europe, Ed learns that the Philosopher’s Stone isn’t bound

‘The ethical complexities the characters face and the interesting secondary characters, including several empowered women, helped to break down the barriers between boys’ and girls’ entertainment.’ by the laws of Equivalent Exchange. It could restore their bodies. But, like Tolkien’s One Ring, the power of the Philosopher’s Stone is inherently evil: Human lives must be sacrificed to create one. Which American animated character has had to face a comparable moral dilemma? Or experience the frustration of a prodigy who can use his talent to help everyone but the person he wants most to help — his brother? The ethical complexities the characters face and the interesting secondary characters, including several empowered women, helped to break down the barriers between boys’ and girls’ entertainment. Everyone loved Fullmetal Alchemist. This lavish volume celebrates the 20th anniversary of the manga’s initial publication in the magazine Shonen Monthly Gangan. It includes comments from Arakawa — who caricatures herself as a black-and-white cow, since she grew up in the dairy lands of Hokkaido. There are also comments from directors and actors who worked on the various adaptations of Fullmetal Alchemist. Of special interest to serious fans are the reproductions of the souvenir booklets and

special manga Arakawa created to go with the releases of games and films. A mini-manga drawn as a giveaway with tickets to the live-action feature reveals the backstory of the creepy Shou Tucker, the Sewing-Life Alchemist, whom the Elric brothers later encounter. Other special stories present short adventures for popular secondary characters: the Elrics’ superior, Col. Roy Mustang (the Flame Alchemist); Izumi-Sensei, the brother’s formidable teacher; mechanical wizard Winry Rockbell, who maintains and improves Ed’s prostheses; and the chilling Master Judo, who may have succeeded in human transformation. In addition to the serious stories, there are numerous cartoon strips Arakawa uses to poke good-natured fun at the characters and herself. Some of this material has been reprinted in earlier anthologies, but it’s nice to have it all together. ◆ Fullmetal Alchemist 20th Anniversary Book (VIZ Media, $25) would make an excellent gift choice for any anime fan this holiday season.

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A Man of Characters The new art book by acclaimed artist Peter de Sève offers an inspiring collection of his work for movies such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ratatouille, Ice Age, The Grinch and many more.

he beautiful new book Local Fauna by Peter de Sève (Abrams Books’ Cernunos imprint, $40) offers a rich collection of some of the brilliant artist’s illustrations and character sketches for favorites such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ratatouille and Ice Age, famous New Yorker covers, as well as some rarely seen personal work. The book also includes essays by fellow character designer Carter Goodrich, animator and director Glen Keane and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, as well as an in-depth interview by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Waterson. We can’t think of a better holiday gift for all the animation lovers in your life, and are thrilled to share Keane’s essay, along with a few of the iconic images from the book:

F A M I L I A R F AC E S: Peter de Sève’s new collection Local Fauna features character designs from his amazing animation career, including Brad Bird’s Ratatouille (above) and Mark Osborne’s The Little Prince (left).

In all of Peter de Sève’s work, there is the unmistakable mark of a man who keenly observes life. You see it in the subtle way a character stands, a gesture, a tilt of the head, or the way a wry smile married with a knitted brow speaks volumes without words. You see it in his gentle but wicked wit. To me, there seems to be a certain “Mark Twainess” in Peter’s drawings, a homespun warmth and wisdom coupled with laser-accurate perceptivity. I feel like I know the character of each person or animal he illustrates. I’ve either met them, or I am them. This doesn’t come about by desire alone. There are many learned skills Peter has acquired over the years that he brings to every drawing he makes. In my early days at Disney, I would hear Ward Kimball brag that he could draw anything he could take apart and put back together. That meant one needed a solid understanding of a thing before one could describe it in line. I realized it’s not just setting yourself free to explore your creative muse ... you also have to have your bags packed with the skills you need for that journey. Peter’s bags are packed. He knows his stuff. From the discipline of figure drawing to sketching everyday life around him, he has filled his creative satchels with a keen sense of anatomy, expression, and character. His images have wonderful dimension and volume; I think of them as sculptural drawings. One feels you could reach out and put your hands around the form of his characters in the same way you could place your hands on a Rodin bronze. And these characters want to move! They are not frozen lines but stored kinetic energy. I love the texture of his line; you can almost feel how it felt to draw it. The skin is soft and fleshy. Bony corners jab out in hard angles. Cotton fabric has weight and saggy skin wants to droop down. The expressive lines he makes serve as a seismograph of his soul. His characters scream out to be animated. It’s no wonder he is

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one of the most sought-after character designers in animation today. Perhaps the most singular trademark of Peter’s work is the surprising shape combinations he employs. Again and again I am in awe as he uses a rectangle, a circle, or a square to describe a person’s face or an animal’s head in such a way that feels more like that creature than any exact photo could ever hope to reproduce. Freshness and originality are the goal of every artist. Peter de Sève reminds us that this goal is possible, that we can draw anything our minds can imagine. This is a tremendous gift. Enjoy the creative journey Peter is taking us on and allow yourself to believe that all you dreamed of becoming as an artist is possible. — Glen Keane

D E S È V E’S M U C H - LOV E D I L L U S T RAT I O N S I N C L U D E: (clockwise from top left) Kermit and Yoda in Easy Being Green It Is Not (© Star Wars Visions, 2010), Scrat from Ice Age (Fox/ Blue Sky, 2002), Easter Egg New Yorker cover, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (Illumination, 2019) and A Bug’s Life (Pixar, 1998).

Peter de Sève

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ANIMATION SUMMIT

Welcome to the 2023 World Animation Summit! Get ready for three days of gala events, panels, screenings and networking parties.

am very excited to welcome dear friends in the animation community from around the world and around Los Angeles to the 2023 edition of our World Animation Summit. As we prepare to host this year’s diverse and talented speakers and panelists, I am reminded of the reasons we started this event 11 years ago. The goal was to provide something a little different from the many sales and pitching events we see all over the world. During the summit, we hope you will find the impetus for future projects with new partners and friends. Our special group of awardees this year represent the best of our industry from around the globe. These people are recognized for their tenacity, creativity and passion for the art and the industry of animation. It takes someone very special to accomplish what they have and I hope you will take the opportunity to meet and congratulate them. This year, like many in the past decade, has had its own set of challenges. However, I do believe that “crisis is opportunity.” Each time we are faced with a challenge, our community bands together to work around, and eventually beyond, those events that caused us to pause. It is the collaborative nature of production that allows so many to contribute to the process of moving toward new paradigms. I hope that while you are here, you will reach out to new friends and industry colleagues and build new oppor-

tunities together based on your unique talents and ideas. Perhaps, a few years from now, you can bring your finished animated projects to share with everyone at the future editions of our event. Our dynamic and tireless Events Director Kim Derevlany and Editor in Chief Ramin Zahed have put together an incredible lineup of speakers and events to dazzle and enlighten you. I also want to thank the rest of our staff (Jan Bayouth, Sheri Shelton, Mercedes Milligan, Jan Nagel, Damaso and Lucy Abrajan, Tracey Hollingsworth and Susanne Rector) who contributed many hours behind the scenes to make this event and our magazine run smoothly. Finally, I want to thank our wonderful partners/sponsors who have made all of this happen. Obviously, without their help and support we would not be here. We hope you have a wonderful and productive three days at the Summit. Please let us know which parts you enjoyed and what we can do better in the future.

Jean

Jean Thoren Publisher & Founder World Animation Summit

HALL OF FAME AWARDS

This year’s honorees will be presented with their awards at the opening night gala on Wednesday, November 1. The 2023 honorees are: Hayao Miyazaki. The universally acclaimed and iconic co-founder of Studio Ghibli, artist and director of many animation classics, including My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and this year’s astonishing career-capper The Boy and the Heron. [Lifetime Achievement Award]

Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson. The directors of Sony Pictures Animation’s bold and hugely popular Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse are lauded for upping the ante artistically in this summer’s blockbuster sequel and pushing the medium to new visual heights. [New Vision Award]

specials for DreamWorks Animation, Gina’s many credits include this year’s highly anticipated Trolls Band Together, as well as the first two Trolls movies. She also produced the box-office hit Shrek Forever After, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and co-produced Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one of the first Oscar-nominated CG animated features.

Jennifer Lee. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Chief Creative Officer, who is best known as the writer and one of the directors of Frozen, which won her an Academy Award, and its sequel Frozen II, She is the first female director of a Disney animated feature film, and the first female director of a feature that earned over $1 billion at the box office. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the studio’s 100th anniversary movie, Wish.

Sam Fell. The talented animation director, whose impressive credits include popular films such as Aardman Animations’ Flushed Away and LAIKA’s ParaNorman, returns to Aardman this year with the charming sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which premieres on Netflix this December.

Shuzo John Shiota. The president and CEO of Japan’s innovative animation studio Polygon Pictures for over 20 years, Shuzo has spearheaded efforts to cultivate Polygon’s overseas presence, helping the studio to become a leading developer of TV series and content targeted at the foreign market. Recent projects include Star Wars Resistance, Stillwater, The Very Pulse of the Machine (Love, Death + Robots) and Mech Cadets.

Mediawan Kids & Family. One of the European leaders in animation that produces premium TV shows, high-end feature films, and digital content targeting preschool, kids, tweens, young adults and families. Mediawan Kids & Family houses five production labels: Method Animation, ON Classics, Joann Sfar’s Magical Society, along with the brand-new 2D animation TV label for kids Somewhere Animation, and tweens studio Elliott Studio. [International Studio of the Year]

Floyd Norman. With over 60 years in the industry, Floyd Norman has become an animation legend, working with such giants as Walt Disney, William Hanna, Joe Barbera, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and the creative teams at Sesame Street and Pixar. He has served in nearly every department of animation. From cel painter to story director. Of course, he’s also an animator. Gina Shay. With over 25 years of experience producing animated films, which includes a full decade of films and

Tara Sorensen. As Apple TV+ head of creative development, children’s media, Tara has been instrumental in shepherding a slate of award-winning, enlightening and inspiring shows to audiences worldwide, including Jane, Frog and Toad, El Deafo, Wolfboy and the Everything Factory, Interrupting Chicken, Pinecone & Pony, Shape Island, Slumberkins, Stillwater, The Snoopy Show and several Peanuts specials.

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Agenda at a Glance

Wednesday, Nov. 1

8:30 Registration and Networking Breakfast 10:00 Creative Keynote: Matthew A Cherry 10:25 Creative Keynote: Dan Abraham & Trent Correy 11:00 Meet Today’s Comics-to-Animation Masters Mark Hoffmeier, Steve Loter, Raymond S. Persi, Simon Racioppa, Mike Roth 12 PM Spotlight on Scotland’s Animation Thomas Bryant, Rhona Drummond, Sueann Rochester, Richard Scott, David Smith 1:00 Networking Lunch by Animation Scotland 2:30 Business of Show Business Rachel Artmont, Richard Frankie, Peter McHugh, Troy Underwood 3:30 How to Find the Right Global Partners Matt Berkowitz, Andrew Davies, Robert Jaczczurowski, Tatiana Krokar, Sandrine Nguyễn Tiết, Lindsey Watson 4:30 Awards Feature Contenders, Part 1 Nick Bruno, Kirk DeMicco, Joaquim Dos Santos, Sam Fell, Kemp Powers, Troy Quane, Benjamin Renner, Justin K. Thompson 5:30 Awards Feature Contenders, Part 2 Chris Buck, Walt Dohrn, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Jeff Rowe, Peter Sohn 6:30 Hall of Fame Awards Cocktail Party 8:00 Hall of Fame Awards

Thursday, Nov. 2 9:00

Networking Breakfast by Animation from Spain (ICEX) 10:00 Creative Keynote: Peter Sohn 10:25 Creative Keynote: Jim Capobianco 11:00 AI: Helpful Tool or Dangerous Adversary? Evan Baily, Eric Day, Dirk Hampel, Gordon Midwood, Carl Reed 12 PM What’s Hot & What’s Not: Animation Execs Tell You How to Up Your Game! Dave Jargowski, Kari Kim, Stacy Kim, Julian Malagon, Sander Schwartz 1:00 Networking Lunch 2:30 Making Toons for Tots: Spotlight on New Preschool Shows Rachel Larsen, Olubunmi, Mia Olufemi, Stephanie Simpson, Guy Toubes, Tom Warburton 3:30 Sharing the Best Apple Recipes Mac Barnett, Kelli Bixler, Drew Hodges, Rob Hoegee, J. J. Johnson, Jon Klassen, Raymond S. Persi 4:30 Welcome to the New Age of Adult Animation Sean Buckelew, Michael Cusack, Zach Hadel, Steve Levy, Jennifer Wolfe, Jane Wu 5:30 Shorts Cocktail Party 6:30 Award Season Shorts Screening 8:30 The Year’s Top Shorts in the Spotlight Dan Abraham, Ethan Barrett, Flóra Anna Buda, Trent Correy, Andreas Deja, Tal Kantor, John Musker, Damián Perea, Andrew Ruhemann, Mitra Shahidi

Friday, Nov. 3

9:00 Networking Breakfast 10:00 Creative Keynote: Peter Gal 10:25 Creative Keynote: Vivienne Medrano 11:00 Riding the Wave of the Future: New Animation Trends That Can Boost Your Career John Derevlany, David Levy, Walid Omar, Daisy Wall 12 PM Your 2023-2024 Animation Biz Survival Primer! Adriana Cohen, Frank Falcone, Josh Fisher, Ben Jones, Fred Seibert 1:00 Networking Lunch Screening: The Velveteen Rabbit (Magic Light Pictures/Apple TV+) 2:30 Women In Animation: Redefining Risk & Failure for Equitable Creative Leadership in Animation 3:30 Revisiting the Year of the Comeback Brands Rob David, Erin Gibson, Rob Hudnut, Sadaf Muncy, Claudia Spinelli 4:30 Future Trendwatching: Helpful Tips for Savvy Content Producers Jason Caparaz, Dan Clark, Anthony Leo, Leanne Preston 5:30 Picture This! Improv. comedy and animation hi-jinx with Michael Hollingsworth 6:30 Closing Night Cocktail Party by Mikros Animation

John Musker, Jorge R. Gutierrez, Brad Bird and Kristine Belson at the 2022 World Animaton Summit.

This Year’s Panelists & Speakers Among the distinguished animation and VFX professionals appearing on the panels this year are: Dan Abraham, Co-director, Once Upon a Studio Rachel Artmont, VO Talent Agent, UTA Evan Baily, Producer/Showrunner/Entrepreneur Mac Barnett, Children’s Author Ethan Barrett, Director, Rosemary A.D. Matt Berkowitz, CCO, Atomic Cartoons & Thunderbird Entertainment Kelli Bixler, Founder, Bix Pix Entertainment Nick Bruno, Co-director, Nimona Tom Bryant, Founder/Managing Dir., Interference Pattern Chris Buck, Director, Wish Sean Buckelew, Writer/Co-Exec Prod., Scavengers Reign Flóra Anna Buda, Director, 27 Jason Caparaz, VP, TV Dev., DreamWorks Animation Jim Capobianco, Director, The Inventor Matthew A. Cherry, Director/Writer/Producer, Young Love Dan Clark, Writer/Producer/Director, The Dan Clark Co. Adriana Cohen, SVP, Global Head of Production, Mikros Animation Trent Correy, Co-director, Once Upon a Studio Michael Cusack, Co-creator, Smiling Friends Rob David, VP Creative Content, Mattel Television Andrew Davies, CEO, Studio Moshi Animation Eric Day, Co-founder, seatd.io Andreas Deja, Director, Mushka Kirk DeMicco, Director, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken John Derevlany, Writer/Animator/Showrunner Walt Dohrn, Director, Trolls Band Together Joaquim Dos Santos, Co-director, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Rhona Drummond, Managing Dir/Exec Prod., Eyebolls Ltd. Camille Eden, VP, Nickelodeon Recruiting Talent & Dev. Frank Falcone, President/Exec Creative Dir., Guru Studio Sam Fell, Director, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget Josh Fisher, Kids Media Exec/Content Creator/Producer Richard Frankie, Head of Business Ops., Trustbridge Ent. Peter Gal, CCO TV, DreamWorks Animation Erin Gibson, Co-Exec Producer/Co-showrunner, Tiny Toons Looniversity Zach Hadel, Co-creator, Smiling Friends Dirk Hampel, CEO/Founder, B-Water Studios Drew Hodges, Director/Exec Producer, Shape Island Rob Hoegee, Exec Producer/Head Writer, Stillwater Mark Hoffmeier, Writer, Producer, Creative Consultant Aaron Horvath, Co-director, The Super Mario Bros. Movie Rob Hudnut, Exec Producer Karen Idelson, Animation, Entertainment & Tech Writer Robert Jaczczurowski, Prod./Co-founder, GS Animation Dave Jargowski, VP of Animation Development, FOX Ent. Michael Jelenic, Co-director, The Super Mario Bros. Movie J.J. Johnson, Founding Partner, Sinking Ship Ent. Ben Jones, Creative Director, Bento Box Entertainment Tal Kantor, Director, Letter to a Pig Kari Kim, VP, Animation Development, Nickelodeon Stacy Kim, VP, Series, Warner Bros. Animation

Jon Klassen, Children’s Author, Shape Island Tatiana Krokar, Head of Creative Dev., Superprod Rachel Larsen, Creator/Exec Producer, The Tiny Chef Show Anthony Leo, Co-president, Aircraft Pictures Steve Levy, Exec Producer, Krapopolis David Levy, Head of Studio, Pinkfong USA Steve Loter, Prod., Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Julian Malagon, VP of Dev. Sony Pictures Television–Kids Peter McHugh, Partner/Manager/Prod, The Gotham Group Vivienne Medrano, Creator, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss Gordon Midwood, CEO/Co-founder, Anything World Sadaf Muncy, Head of Dev. & Production, HappyNest Ent. John Musker, Director, I’m Hip Sandrine Nguyễn-Tiết, SVP, Episodic & IP, Mikros Animation Olubunmi Mia Olufemi, Supervising Producer, Alma’s Way Walid Omar, Co-founder, Lil Critter Workshop Damián Perea, Producer, ANIMAYO Raymond S. Persi, Director, Snoopy Presents: One-of-aKind Marcie Kemp Powers, Co-dir., Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Leanne Preston, Development Exec, Moonbug Ent. Troy Quane, Co-director, Nimona Simon Racioppa, Co-exec Prod./Showrunner, Invincible Carl Reed, CEO, Composition Media Benjamin Renner, Director, Migration Sueann Rochester, Co-founder/Managing Director, Wild Child Animation Mike Roth, Director, Merry Little Batman Jeff Rowe, Director, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Andrew Ruhemann, Director, The Day I Became A Bird Frank Saperstein, CEO, Surprise Bag, Inc. Sander Schwartz, Independent Producer Richard Scott, CEO/Co-founder, Axis Studios Fred Seibert, CEO, FredFilms, Inc. Mitra Shahidi, Director, Starling Stephanie Simpson, Exec Prod. Mighty MonsterWheelies David Smith, Director, Screen Scotland Peter Sohn, Director, Elemental Claudia Spinelli, Senior VP of Animation for Big Kids, Nickelodeon Justin Thompson, Co-director, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Guy Toubes, Exec Producer/Showrunner, CoComelon Lane Troy Underwood, Producer/Creative Exec/Consultant & Storyteller Daisy Wall, VP Content, WildBrain Tom Warburton, Exec Producer, Kindergarten, the Musical Lindsey Watson, CEO, CANUK Productions Jennifer Wolfe, Writer/Journalist Jane Wu, Producer/Supervising Director, Blue Eye Samurai Ramin Zahed, Editor in Chief, Animation Magazine ___________________________________________________________ Learn more and purchase full summit or daily passes at animationmagazine.net/summit.

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Saving the Magic Kingdom The creative forces behind Disney’s 62nd animated feature discuss the throwback look and the powerful message of the holiday movie, Wish. - By Karen Idelson -

o other studio in the world is more closely associated with wishes and dreams than Walt Disney Animation Studios. From the moment Cinderella sang, “A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep,” audiences around the world were taken to a place where fixing your eyes on an evening star while thinking of your heart’s desire might just make it come true. So, it seems only natural that Wish, a movie about the power of aspirations, would be the film the studio would make to celebrate its 100-year legacy in 2023. Jennifer Lee, Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios and writer and co-director of Frozen and Frozen II, began developing Wish as an original story in 2018 with Disney’s 100th anniversary in mind. She wanted to tell a new story that celebrated the studio’s contemporary achievements and embraced its legacy. Lee quickly brought on her longtime collaborator, Chris Buck, who co-directed Frozen, Frozen II and Frozen Fever with Lee and co-directed Tarzan and Surf’s Up earlier in his career. As the two of them looked at scenes from Disney classics, they quickly saw the act of wishing and wishing stars themselves as a throughline in the studio’s history. Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn (head of story on Raya and the Last Dragon and story artist on Zootopia and Ralph Breaks the Internet) co-directed the film. This marks Veerasunthorn’s first time as a director. After five years in production at the

Burbank studio with a crew of about 500, the film will be released November 22. Wish also features a powerhouse voice cast of Ariana DeBose (Asha), Chris Pine (King Magnifico), Angelique Cabral (Queen Amaya), Victor Garber (Sabino, Asha’s grandfather), Natasha Rothwell (Sakina, Asha’s mother), Jennifer Kumiyama (Dahlia, Asha’s best friend), Harvey Guillén (Gabo), Niko Vargas (Hal), Evan Peters (Simon), Ramy Youssef (Safi), Jon Rudnitsky (Dario) and Della Saba (Bazeema).

Agent of Change The story follows Asha, an idealistic young woman living in the Kingdom of Rosas (located off the Iberian Peninsula) who is not quite sure of which path she wants to take in life. She tries to become the apprentice of a wish-granting wizard named King Magnifico, but gets a glimpse behind his magical abilities and starts to see things she doesn’t like. From there, she must reimagine how she’ll go forward in her life, and she does so with a little help from a magical character named Star. “Asha is learning about who she is and what she really wants in life,” says Lee. “At the beginning of the story, she doesn’t really have her wish in mind. She thinks that by following Magnifico, and learning from him, she can find her path. So, this is a story about her finding her wish and her voice.”

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‘We’re working in CG but [are] definitely inspired by the hand-drawn history of this place and the emotions you have when you see something hand-drawn.’ — Director Chris Buck

Just as the filmmakers wanted a story invested in Disney’s tradition of wishing, they also aimed to give the film a look that reflected the history of animation at the studio. For inspiration, they turned to studio archives and looked at concept art created over many decades. They imagined a hand-drawn look that would translate into a kind of moving illustration for Wish. “We wanted that look that takes you back a bit to the films that you’ve seen in the past from Disney that are maybe part of your childhood, part of the first animated films you loved,” says Buck. “We’re working in CG but [are] definitely inspired by the hand-drawn history of this place and the emotions you have when you see something hand-drawn.” As production designer Lisa Keane explains, “There’s a watercolor look and a paper texture — it’s a moving illustration. We’ve long had the ability to do watercolor backgrounds, but we couldn’t quite achieve the same look on the character. We are now able to marry all those ideas in CG because of the tools that have been developed. It was exciting to watch it all come together.” Since the film production started before COVID shutdowns, the filmmakers were at home for part of the production time. Coming back to the studio later in the pro-

K I D D I N G A RO U N D: Alan Tudyk voices the pajamawearing goat, Valentino. Director Chris Buck says, “We’d give him a line and he’d give us things we never thought of.” (Visual development art by Meg Park and Griselda Sastrawinata Lemay.)

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Jennifer Lee

Introducing a Cosmic Ball of Energy!

t the center of Walt Disney Animation’s Wish is a character who carries the legacy of just about every animated film to come out of the studio. That character is Star, who glides through scenes leaving a little pixie dust here and there. “The first part of Wish coming together was when Jen [Lee] had whispered in my ear after Frozen II that it was 2018, and 2023, which would be the 100th anniversary of the studio, is coming up,” says Wish co-director Chris Buck. “She asked if I wanted to be involved with a film that would celebrate that history. And the genesis of the idea started with just pinning up a scene from each animated film on one bulletin board, and then looking at the whole sort of legacy of our studio. That led us to the wishing star because we›ve had so many characters wishing on stars, so it seemed like this was our DNA and what should be guiding us is this idea of wishing on a star.” In the spirit of celebrating the history of the studio, Star was initially drawn by hand. They then placed Star next to the main character, Asha. They wanted Star to look a certain way in each scene — it had to make sense next to the other characters and be magical, with a trail of pixie dust. After careful thinking and scheduling, they came up with a plan. “We knew that [it] was going to be difficult to do hand-drawn animation of Star over an entire film with the schedule we had, so we decided on CG done in a style that was inspired by hand-drawn,” says Buck. “We were inspired by the hand-drawn tests, and we found it fits the world that the other characters live in and has the dimension of the same world.” According to Buck, the filmmakers wanted to convey the energy, hope and light in the simplest and purest way. “We also decided that Star shouldn’t talk — it’s so much more effective as a pantomime character. This is something that Disney has done so well throughout its history. Audiences fall in love with these visual characters — they can give them their own voice. We all need a little Star in our life.”

WAT E RCO LO R WO N D E R S: The innovative visual style of the film evokes watercolor paintings that inspired the studios’ earliest films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio. Production designer Michael Giaimo was also inspired by artists like Gustav Tenggren.

cess meant they were able to work together more easily again.

Made for the Big Screen “For me, working on this film — it was a time where we just started to come back from being on Zoom,” says Veerasunthorn. “We were able to be together to see and review scenes from the movie in the theater with the big screen. I think that’s what led to the decision to use the 2.55:1 aspect ratio, because we understand the importance of being immersed in a film, not just on your monitor or your TV. So, there are a lot of choices we made in how we frame this movie [and] how we use the technology of 3D stereo. We put a lot of emphasis on that. We want the audience to see this big, in a theater.” The film’s VFX supervisor, Kyle Odermatt, who has also worked on Raya and the Last Dragon and Moana, adds, “This aspect ratio is part of our tradition, which harkens back to some of our classics. It’s something we wanted to do, and what we’re trying to do is have this feeling that pays tribute to our legacy. We also really wanted to control our camera and composition in ways that made sense for the story. That’s always part of developing the cinematography plan.” Odermatt and his team also worked to bring the filmmakers’ vision of moving illustrations to life. The process was challenging since the look they wanted hadn’t been created yet. “We created [a texture that looks like watercolor on paper]” says Odermatt. “It works great on something that’s still, but it’s a very challenging thing to do with moving imagery, because it’s very likely that that pat-

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FEATURES ‘We worked with cultural consultants on the clothing to represent what the fashion of the time might be to ensure the crossing of cultural influences that took place in the region during the Middle Ages was well represented.’ — Director Dawn Veerasunthorn

E L E G A N T E V I L: Production designer David Womersley says Eyvind Earle’s Sleeping Beauty designs were a big influence on the film’s style. From top: Visdev of hillside hamlets by Brian Woods; visdev for King Magnifico by Griselda Sastrawinata Lemay.

tern stays static. The innovation we came up with to create this look is called dynamic screen space texturing.”

Memorable Melodies In true Disney tradition, songs play an essential role in the storytelling of Wish. Lee wanted to find a songwriter who could give the film the kind of timeless songs that would become standards in the studio’s catalog. Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice became their go-to team. Michaels, who has written songs for Dua Lipa, Pink and Selena Gomez, among others, and Rice crafted seven original songs for the film. “Julia Michaels is an extraordinary talent, and Julia, along with her writing partner Benjamin Rice, have created original songs that inspired all of us working on the film,” says Lee. “Her collaborative process was so special, really sitting down with us and talking about the motivations of our characters.” Veerasunthorn found the idea of wishes and dreams very powerful and wants the people who see Wish to see

themselves in the characters. “To me, it’s kind of rooted in the songs that are in the movie,” says Veerasunthorn. “The notion that there’s a power within you to wish and to dream and that’s something that’s yours. My hope is that people feel that when they see this movie that they recognize what’s within them. I hope that they know they can always be active and take action, and even if you’re going to fail at something that you’re not going to fail overall because life is richer and better when you follow your dreams.” For Buck, it’s also about dreams: “In my mind is that someone in the audience, who is perhaps an older person, someone who has either forgotten their dream or given up on their dream, or life got in the way and they put their dream on hold — I hope they decide they’re just going to do it, because it’s their passion and that’s what they’ve always wanted to do, and why not now?” ◆ Wish opens in theaters nationwide on November 22.

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A Valentine to Past Loves and Comic Books Acclaimed Spanish director Pablo Berger discusses his life-long love for animation and the making of his charming new movie, Robot Dreams. - By Ramin Zahed -

ne of the best reviewed animated movies of the year follows the beautiful friendship between an anthropomorphic New York City pooch and his mail-order robot. Directed by acclaimed Spanish helmer Pablo Berger (Torremolinos 73, Blancanieves), the touching, funny and deceptively simple Robot Dreams is based on a 2007 graphic novel by Chicago-based artist Sara Varon. We had the good fortune to chat with Berger about his new movie, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, won the Contrechamp grand prize at Annecy and is generating lots of award season buzz around town. Here is what he told us: Animation Magazine: First of all, congrats on creating such a poignant and beautiful movie. Can you tell us how you became interested in Sara Varon’s book? Pablo Berger: I’ve always been a collector of graphic novels and illustrated children’s books. About 13 years ago, I ordered Sara’s book, and I was quite engaged with the story. I thought it was funny and was quite moved when I reached the end of the book. Then, I made my two live-action movies, Abracadabra and Blancanieves. (We directors always procrastinate between projects!) Then, I went back

and went through the pages of Robot Dreams, and it brought tears to my eyes as I was able to see the film as I was reading it. So, I sat down and began to write it. Then, I got a request to be on the jury for the Chicago International Film Festival. I had a layover in New York, so I met with Sara there in 2018. It was perfect timing! I never thought I would make an animated movie, but this story really moved me, so I knew I had to do it. Fortunately, my producers were able to finance the film pretty quickly, and I worked with the art director, storyboard artists and did the animatic for one year. It took us a couple of years of animation production and then one more year of post. So, for an animated movie, it all kind of moved quickly. How did you put the animation team together and find the right studio for your project? My art director, who is like a brother to me, is Jose Luis Agreda; I’m Dog and he is Robot. So as soon as I

got the rights to the book, I decided that he was going to be my companion on this project. He went to Cartoon Saloon, while we financed this film. We met with [Cartoon Saloon principals] Paul Young and Tomm Moore and we were moving forward with the plan, and then what happened next was COVID. Paul said, “Pablo, I’m sorry, we love this project, but we cannot get on board.” So, my producer and I decided to just create a studio to make this film. We needed a great animation director, and we found Benoît Feroumont in Brussels, who had worked on The Secret of Kells and The Triplets of Belleville. The idea was to get animators from all over the world to come to Madrid and Pamplona, and we managed to put a team of about a hundred together. Can you talk about the 2D style of animation you were looking for and how you were able to achieve it? We used Toon Boom Harmony and Storyboard Pro.

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Pablo Berger

TWO A M I G O S: Pablo Berger, who is best known for live-action movies such a Torremolinos 73 and Blancanieves, hits a homerun with his first animated movie, Robot Dreams, which offers a humorous and tender look at friendship.

What we did, [which] was unusual, was that my art director, Jose Luis, and our great storyboard artist, Maca Gil, [and I] … were doing thumbnails and giving [them] to our storyboard artist. Just the three of us. The animatic has the same feeling as the film. After one year, we felt that as a live-action director, I could see the film thanks to the animatic. What were some of the things that inspired the look? I don’t draw myself, but I’ve always loved comic books and they have always been a big influence on my films. My art director is also a comic-book artist and our animation director, Benoît, is an extremely well-known comic-book artist in France and Belgium. So, for me, this movie is a love letter to comic books. We wanted everything to be in focus. The line has to be alive, and the colors have to be flat. We were always looking for clean graphic lines, a style that was pioneered by the likes of Tintin creator Hergé. The great thing was that Sara gave me carte blanche from the beginning. She said, “I love your work and [have] seen your films.” So she was not involved in that process, and was very supportive of our movie. As a writer, that allowed me to add new things. For example, the first page of six drawings in the book could be 10 minutes in the movie.

It was really important for me that people would get the same feelings they got from the book from the movie.

gether, and each of them taking different things from the movie and completing it in their own way.

What would you say was your biggest challenge in adapting the book to an animated movie? To be honest, I feel that all my previous live-action movies had led me to Robot Dreams, and it was a really natural transition for me. I like to storyboard all the shots of my movies. The biggest difference was that producing animation takes a lot longer than shooting live action, and because the film has no dialog, I worked with animators instead of actors. I also had to learn about the animation pipeline.

Which animated movies or TV shows left a big impression on you growing up? When I was a kid, Japanese animation had a big impact on me. Shows like Speed Racer, Mazinger Z and Heidi and Marco were huge in Europe back then; of course, Merrie Melodies, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Popeye. Consuming animation on TV was big for me. Like everyone else in the world, I grew up with Disney films — Snow White, of course, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Robin Hood. Then I discovered Studio Ghibli — Porco Rosso, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away. Most people talk about Miyazaki, but I also have to mention Isao Takahata: Films like Grave of the Fireflies and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya are in my top list. Also, Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children. Japanese animation deals a lot with emotion; it’s not only about action or comedy. Then, when I think of animation in Europe, I need to mention Persepolis, Ernest & Celestine, I Lost My Body, and I love stop-motion [such as] Mary and Max and My Life as a Zucchini. Before being a director I am a cinema lover, and I have always loved

The movie has generated such a warm response from festival audiences and critics. That must have been very gratifying. It has been such an amazing rollercoaster ride. We had such a wonderful reception at the Toronto International Film Festival. We had lots of hugs after the screening. Teenagers tell me how the movie made them remember a friend who moved to a different city, while older people talk about an old boyfriend or girlfriend. I think the film is for everybody. Maybe it’s very ambitious, but I really like the idea of three generations sharing the experience to-

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animation. Guillermo del Toro — his Pinocchio is also a recent favorite of mine — insisted that animation is not a genre, but it’s a medium. Animation has opened my animation in a different way. I hope I will continue to make more animated films. Robot Dreams captures the vibe and look of New York City in the ’80s beautifully. Tell us how you were able to achieve that. I visited New York many times in the ’70s and ’80s, and I lived there in the ’90s when I studied at New York University to get my master’s in film. This is a love letter from me and my wife, [associate producer] Yuko Harami, who is my closest collaborator in all my films. We really wanted to make a true period film and be faithful to the sounds, the look, the clothes, the stores — all those details, down to the sounds of the alarms, the ambulance sounds on the street. I love the idea of cinema as a time machine.

have surprises. My wife and I always work together, and we both think this is my best film. We believe that all my previous films prepared me to do Robot Dreams. I have so much love for both Robot and Dog, and it’s great to be able share that with the audience. ◆ Neon will release Robot Dreams in select theaters for award season consideration, date to be announced.

B I G A P P L E M E M O R I E S: Above, Robot Dreams centers on the short-lived friendship between a dog and his mail-order robot in New York City during the late 1980s. Below, panels from Sara Varon’s original graphic novel which inspired Pablo Berger’s charming movie.

You even managed to use Earth, Wind & Fire’s iconic song “September,” which plays a pivotal role in the movie. We all know how hard it is to get the music rights in this business, and [the] more popular the song is, the more expensive it becomes to get those rights. I had the song in the first draft of the script. Sara Varon’s book is divided into chapters, and they’re named after months. So, it seemed clear to me that we had to get the song. In life, we have a great connection with people through the music we share. In Casablanca, you have Paris and “As Time Goes By” and here, we have New York City and “September.” What do you hope the film will achieve? I’m a romantic. I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I still love telling stories. I really love animation. I love to deal with emotion honestly and move people, but I want to be light at the same time. I want the film to be surreal and www.animationmagazine.net 26

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“BREATHTAKING ANIMATION” “HEARTWARMING AND FUN!” CO URT N E Y HOWAR D , VA R I ET Y

MI C H AEL F OU S T, CROS S WA LK

“AN ACTION-PACKED ADVENTURE FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY!” DAVE MORA LE S, FOX T V

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Reptile Dysfunction Directors Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim give us the scoop on Leo, their hilarious new animated lizard movie. - By Jeff Spry

nyone who’s ever had their funny bone tickled by those raw and raunchy TV Funhouse parody cartoon sketches that ran on Saturday Night Live from 1996-2008 knows the hilariously inventive work of directors Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim, who animated and produced the segment from the comedic sorcery of writer Robert Smigel. Now those twisted directors are toning things down several notches for Leo, Netflix’s new PG-rated animated musical comedy arriving this fall, which carries an air of nostalgia for all of our favorite class pets growing up. The story is centered around a slightly neurotic 74-year-old lizard named Leo (Adam Sandler) who is living the easy life in Florida at Fort Myers Elementary School as a fifth-grade homeroom pet, along with a box turtle named Squirtle (Bill Burr). After the lovable lizard undergoes a mortality crisis and

hatches a plan to escape his boring terrarium and venture forth into the bright, beautiful world, his bucket-list freedom scheme is interrupted when he’s drawn into the youngsters’ lives by offering them sage advice about school, friendship and growing up.

A Sandler Family Affair Leo was created by Happy Madison, Adam Sandler’s production company, and was penned by Sandler, Smigel and Paul Sado. Sandler’s wife, Jackie, and his two daughters, Sunny and Sadie, are also onboard voicing characters in the film. Rounding out the main vocal cast are Cecily Strong (Ms. Malkin), Jason Alexander (Jayda’s dad) and Rob Schneider (Principal), Animation Magazine caught up with Marianetti and Wachtenheim, who directed Leo with they TV Funhouse

chuckles collaborator Smigel, to hear how this sweet, family-friendly film was crafted. “The legend is that Adam watched Grease with his daughters when they were younger,” recalls Wachtenheim. “He realized that this wasn’t really for kids and wanted to do something that was relatable to middle-schoolers — not a period piece like Grease, but something about school for their age. Robert Smigel got involved and he pitched the class pet idea. So, he and Adam wrote this movie that was about the lizard who thinks he’s dying and wants to escape and live his life and ends up helping the kids, and it’s about listening and mentorship and caring. We hope that it’s

‘Robert Smigel had sent us these demo tapes of him singing into his phone in his bathroom and under the covers of his bed to give us a taste of what [the original songs] were going to be like.’ — Director David Wachtenheim

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‘We love the adult comedy, but It’s nice to finally do something you could be proud to show your kids. When our kids were little, I didn’t even want to show them anything we were doing.’ — director Robert Marinetti

F LO R I DA P R I S O N B R E A K: The new Adam Sandler vehicle Leo tells the story of a 74-year-old lizard who decides to escape from a Florida classroom, where he and his turtle pal have been living for decades.

Robert Smigel

not just for kids but also for adults reaching that age [where they’re] thinking about their own mortality a bit.” With a full vote of confidence from Robert Smigel, the creative team developed further thanks to Adam Sandler holding true to a promise made years earlier. “We’ve worked with Robert on and off for 20-plus years, and we share a similar sense of comedy with him,” Marianetti adds. “He introduced us to Adam, and we worked on Hotel Transylvania 2 as heads of story and contributed to ideas. At the end, he said, ‘I’m gonna do a film with you guys someday,’ and that was back in 2015-16. Paul Sado and Adam worked on the script originally and a couple of years later Robert and Adam showed us their version of the screenplay, and we couldn’t keep our mouths shut tossing out gags and jokes to put in there. Adam was a man of his word, and we eventually got the gig after the Netflix interview process.” Coming from New York where they’ve been a humble momand-pop studio since 1999, doing everything from writing to animation to recording voices to painting cels, Marianetti and Wachtenheim’s transition from shorts to a feature wasn’t as challenging as one might think. “We knew the pipeline of the whole process,” explains Wachtenheim, “It was just the scope and scale of it, working on something from soup to nuts and the huge amount of detail that there is involved and being on top of everything. That was probably the most daunting.” Leo is sprinkled with a surprising number of lively songs and

musical numbers that add to the characters’ inner feelings and provide a sustained levity to this upbeat coming-of-age affair. “Going with the Grease idea, songs were always going to be part of it,” he continues. “The songs were always intended to be a mixture of making fun of songs in musicals and some very touching tunes. There were more songs originally. Smigel had sent us these demo tapes of him singing into his phone in his bathroom and under the covers of his bed to give us a taste of what they were going to be like.” Shifting gears from adult-toned SNL fare to this candy-colored world of children and classroom pets was a seamless departure for the directing duo, since they related to the material and had done work for Sesame Street and Cartoon Network programs. “We all have kids and families,” notes Marianetti. “I think Adam really wanted to do a film from the heart that spoke to kids in all audiences, and that’s one of the things that made the film what it is. We love the adult comedy, but It’s nice to finally do something you could be proud to show your kids. When our kids were little, I didn’t even want to show them anything we were doing.” Wachtenheim emphasizes that the creative team endeavored to concoct a very grounded animation style and didn’t want it to look too cartoony, to the point where the kids were designed to project little individual quirks that you could recognize in real kids you see every day. “So, we had to tone down the generic look,” he says. “Every-

one wants to be very ‘squash-and-stretch’ and ‘arcs.’ Stylistically, we got Dutch desisgner Wouter Tulp, who is a portrait artist and caricature artist, and his stuff is just so specific in his designs. We purposely sought him out, and he was luckily available to do most of our main kids and helped with Leo and Squirtle.” He adds, “Leo takes place in Florida, so Adam wanted people to look at it and say that they’d want to go to school there and be there in the movie. He kept pushing for it to be big and bright and beautiful.”

That Animal Logic Touch The deliberate sunny look and feel to Leo was accomplished after long preproduction sessions that resulted in smart character design and an animation process completed by Animal Logic. “It was a great experience working with Animal Logic — out of their Vancouver studio, primarily,” Marianetti adds. “They were coming off of doing DC League of Super-Pets, and we knew Animal Logic could do comedy. One of the hardest things was translating our style of comedy to others. We love Disney also, but we were purposely avoiding the cutesy stuff and Disney arcs. It was a young crew from Vancouver, and it was a great working experience. Netflix really wanted Leo to look big and look lush and have an impact, and they didn’t skimp.” ◆ Leo will premiere on Netflix on November 21.

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Oil and Toil Six years after the release of their Oscar-nominated Loving Vincent, DK and Hugh Welchman return with their second oil-painted masterwork, The Peasants. - By Rich Johnson -

his year’s Toronto International Film Festival saw the premiere of The Peasants, the latest oil-painted masterstroke of animation from Hugh and DK Welchman. The husband-andwife team are best known for their 2017 feature debut Loving Vincent, a breathtaking, starry-eyed study of Vincent van Gogh’s life (and last days) as a painter. The filmmakers tell Animation Magazine that the beginnings of this latest project go back to the time DK recommended Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, The Peasants, to her husband. They knew that the source material not only provided an opportunity for representation of DK’s Polish culture, but also was a story that portrayed the struggles, strength and passions of a vital female lead.

Painting Poland “After Loving Vincent, people were asking us, ‘Which artist are you going to do next?’” recalls Hugh. “And the truth is, we thought there were many more possibilities rather than [to] stick to the study of a single artist. We were looking for something different. So, when I read the book — learning so much about my wife’s culture — I thought it was a masterpiece; that if this was an example of English literature, it would have had numerous adaptations by now.” But despite DK’s intent to both educate and inspire her

U.K.-born husband to pursue an adaptation, there remained some trepidation. “Of course, all of that is the glorified version of our story. I think the truth is that I immediately thought, ‘No way — people will kill me!’ Because Reymont is a national treasure in my country, and I know full well that the Polish can be tough … as you will see from our film.” Originally published as a four-volume epic, The Peasants (a.k.a. Chłopi, as it appears on Hugh’s T-shirt) focuses on the village of Lipce — specifically, the troublesome romance involving a wealthy widower, Maciej Boryna, his young peasant bride, Jagna, and his son, Antek, with whom she has fallen in love. The scandal is unveiled across the seasons and observed by other peasants, presenting somewhat of a reflective dream of rural Poland on the cusp of the 20th century. In capturing this magnum opus, the most notable production change from their first project was to take a more philosophical approach. As DK notes, “Because we had particular paintings to shape the story of Loving Vincent, every work of art had to be linked. In this case, we had to come up with a definitive visual approach for a preexisting story.” The visual style and process that has emerged is a remark-

able feat in the development of independent animation. They drew inspiration from European realism — specifically Józef Chełmoński and French realist Jean-François Millet — and the rest of the Young Poland Movement that Reymont belonged to during this period, “It made complete sense for this approach to fit with the painters who were working at a time when Poland had been wiped off the map by Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” states Hugh. “The movement was really expressing the national character and culture that was alive back then when it was being completely suppressed,” he adds. “Reymont’s poetic descrip-

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FEATURES ‘The fact is that you can bring a different level of artistry, emotion, complexity and ability from oil painting than you can from photography. It’s all just different forms and tools. We just want to do stuff with heart.’ — Director DK Welchman

B R U S H E S W I T H G R E AT N E S S: DK and Hugh Welchman worked with 127 artists to create over 40,000 frames of oil painted scenes for their labor-heavy feature, The Peasants.

Hugh Welchman

tions were so epic and vivid that it felt as though live action just wouldn’t do it justice; that the actual place just doesn’t look as beautiful and bucolic. It couldn’t be beautiful enough. He spends four pages on a storm — and the great thing is, we can do that in one painting, and so we could visually portray the richness and the complexity of his descriptions by doing it as an oil-painting animation.” A total of 127 artists worked on the oil-painting animation (but not at the same time), including traditional painters based in Lithuania, Poland, Serbia and Ukraine. Among these numbers were 61 digital animators working on the in-betweening and 20 digital painters working on matte paintings and fixes. In total, The Peasants took three years to paint and animate, taking five hours to paint a single keyframe. “We have over 40,000 frames of oil paintings. If one person were to paint the entire film, it would take almost 100 years.”

Partnership and Process Hugh and DK work together very closely, and although the dynamics changed working together on this film, it suited the scope and complexity of the production. “On Loving Vincent, we directed everything together for the live action,” says Hugh. “But the idea with this one was for DK to direct.” Working with the Polish language, it made more

sense for DK to take as much control as possible over the live-action reference, directing 90 percent of the footage, “I worked closely with the actors, doing rehearsals. The only part I missed was a section of the main battle, which Hugh managed to cover.” As you can already imagine, one director isn’t enough on such a mammoth project. DK, a skilled oil painter herself, was also in charge of the animation. “I would approve frames every day,” she says. “Arriving at the studio in the morning, we would have an online meeting with the Serbian studio and the supervisors, analyzing the shots, looking for corrections and approving the first frames. We would then connect to the other studios and do the same. Approvals will involve scrutinizing the use of texture, light, anatomy, characters’ features — everything. Once the first frame is approved, then the painter can carry on and I can just watch daily, which is usually just one frame more each day!” The Welchmans own their method, employing myriad techniques that marry tradition with technological processes. With half of the live-action segments filmed on set and the other half on greenscreen, they used as many VFX technologies and tools as possible to produce the final composites for each shot, such as building the village in Unreal for a live view. There were hand-drawn elements, with other models added via Maya. Weather effects, CGI animals and

background characters were all created in Houdini as an approximation of how the film will look to help repaint in oils. It is important to point out that although The Peasants is certainly closer to rotoscoping, there is no tracing. The shots remain on a screen as a reference with only Dragonframe used to capture and onion skin the previous frames. There are interesting parallels to advancements in artificial intelligence, and those who may ignorantly dismiss the aesthetic of the animated feature as an AI render rather than ‘oilscope.’ “A lot of the painters that we’re referring to were at a pinnacle of their craft, dealing with the invention of photography,” DK points out. “Similar questions were asked: ‘Why are you bothering anymore to paint when you can just take a photograph?’ If people out there want to use CGI or AI, then great. In fact, we attempted to use AI for in-betweening, but it was a disaster. There was just no way that it could cope with the play of light on canvas, the variation and overall individuality. The fact is that you can bring a different level of artistry, emotion, complexity and ability from oil painting than you can from photography. It’s all just different forms and tools. We just want to do stuff with heart.” ◆ The Peasants opened in Poland in October. Sony Pictures Classics will release the movie in select U.S. theaters this year for awards consideration.

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Animated Notes on a Disappearance Fernando Trueba reveals how the mysterious vanishing of a Brazilian musician inspired his new movie, They Shot the Piano Player. - By Tom McLean -

hen filmmaker Fernando Trueba decided to tell the story of Francisco Tenorio Júnior — a gifted Brazilian pianist who mysteriously vanished at age 34 while visiting Argentina — there was no doubt in his mind that animation was the best medium for it. “I wanted to make a documentary about a musician — an artist alive — and see him playing and see him in the bars that don’t exist anymore, where bossa nova was created,” he says. “And after Chico & Rita, I thought that animation was the best possible language for Tenorio’s story.” The result is They Shot the Piano Player, which Trueba wrote the screenplay for and directed with Javier Mariscal — their second animated feature collaboration after 2010’s critically acclaimed Chico & Rita. The feature film puts real interviews with Tenorio’s colleagues, friends and family to animation — all tied together with a fictional framing sequence in which a New York journalist played by Jeff Goldblum discovers and tracks down the story.

Stepping Back in Time That part is in some ways only half fiction, as it’s based on Trueba’s own tale of discovering Tenorio’s music and

then his lost story. While making the 2004 documentary The Miracle of Candeal, Trueba often escaped into bookshops and record stores, where he found a jazz record called O LP, on which Tenorio played. Taken by the pianist’s performance, he tracked down via eBay a copy of the one record Tenorio had made as a bandleader that had long been out of print. “I was interested in him and what the guy was doing now,” Trueba says. “And I discovered that there was nothing where he was participating, or by him, in the last 30-some years.” He describes Tenorio as a “musician’s musician” — he was not popular or famous, but all the best players and most knowledgeable fans of Brazilian jazz knew and loved his playing. There was little information about his disappearance — he left his hotel late one night in 1976 to pick up some sandwiches and never came back. “I was first shocked by it and I started to try to find things,” Trueba says. He started by speaking with Suzana de Moraes, daughter of poet and musician Vinicius de Moraes (whom she made a documentary about). This prompted him to begin to track down more interviews. “From the end of 2005 to 2007, I did like 140-something interviews,” he says. “Most of them were in Brazil, but some

in Argentina and some in the United States.” Trueba at this point was determined to make a film that would document Tenorio’s music and life and preserve his memory. Having just completed Chico & Rita, he had second thoughts about his initial idea of using animation. But the more he thought about it, the stronger the urge became — and the more he thought Mariscal was the right man to help him make it. “I became more convinced that live action or documentary were not the right way to tell that story,” he says. “Javi was the right man to do that, to give color and life into this. So, from that material, from all these hours of interview, I just start writing a screenplay.” The process started with a year of preproduction work during which they decided on the art styles and color palettes and storyboarded the movie. Mariscal says they decided on a more realistic look for the framing sequences of Goldblum’s journalist tracking down the story, and more colorful and expressive looks for the flashback and interview sequences. “The palette of the colors [for the flashbacks] remains more like three, four colors — even one color — and we try with the color to describe the feeling of the people in the

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photo ©Elena Claverol

FEATURES ‘I tried to tell a good story … but if the young generation who doesn’t know anything about Latin America in the ’70s, or about the relationship of American and Brazilian music, can learn and discover things, it’s also very good’ — Director Fernando Trueba (pictured, left, with director Javier Mariscal)

T H E VA N I S H I N G: An N.Y.C. journalist (Jeff Goldblum) sets out to discover the reasons for the disappearance of a young Brazilian piano virtuoso in Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s They Shot the Piano Player.

memory,” he says. Sequences were animated over the following two years by studios in Amsterdam, France, Spain and Portugal, with the production’s main base in Barcelona, Mariscal says. Postproduction — including the detailed sound work — was done in France and was essential to the movie with so much music and original interview audio. “This is a more risky kind of story and kind of movie, so we didn’t want to do the classical animation at all,” Trueba says. “We wanted to experiment more, to break things. And that’s one great thing about Javier Mariscal’s art, is that he is he has this quality that is very open, very risky, very broken, very Picassian in some ways, etc. And it was great to have his style in a movie like this.” Mariscal agrees that animation was the right choice, because it allows the audience to see Tenorio directly through the memories of the people who knew him. If an actor played Tenorio as a character, the audience would see the actor first, and a straight documentary would lack the movement and feel that animation gives to the 1960s and ’70s and the music of those times. “Everybody will have very different memories of the same thing,” he says. “And with the drawings, you can go more far

away and have more a strong relation with the audience.” Obtaining the rights to some of the music was complicated, Trueba says, since the rights holders were often decentralized — there was no one person who could make a decision. “There were some difficult ones, but we got it resolved,” he says. Musicians appearing in the film include such accomplished and iconic players as Vinicius de Moraes, Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Paulo Moura, João Donato, Mutinho and Aretha Franklin. Goldblum leads the cast of actors for the fictional characters, which also includes Roberta Wallach and Brazilian favorite Tony Ramos as João. Trueba says he met and became good friends with Goldblum years ago while making another movie, and he had the actor in mind for the lead role as he wrote it. “He liked the screenplay, and he’s also a pianist and a very good musician,” Trueba says. “For me, apart from being a good friend, Jeff is the most interesting voice in American cinema. … It’s like a jazz player voice … He is always fresh and new. It’s never boring for one second.” The final fate of Tenorio, as revealed in the film, is tragic. His visit to Buenos Aires coincided with the rise of a military

dictatorship in Argentina. He was taken by the police, detained and questioned, and eventually shot in the head. Although Trueba wasn’t looking to teach a history lesson, it does reflect on the state of politics and the rise of authoritarian and dictatorial powers in Latin and South America at that time.

Back to Bossa Nova “I tried to tell a good story, that’s the important thing,” he says. “But if the young generation who doesn’t know anything about Latin America in the ’70s, or about bossa nova or about the relationship of American music and Brazilian music, can learn and discover things, it’s also very good.” The tragedy of his death — he was a musician, and not political — is still relevant with innocent people still being caught in the crossfire of wars today in places like Ukraine and the Middle East. “I think it’s important to rescue this great artist, who has been cut [down] in the middle of his life and career, but also to tell a story about the crash of beauty and violence that happens every day still,” Trueba says. ◆ Sony Pictures Classics will release They Shot the Piano Player in select U.S. theaters on November 22.

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The Return of the Master Hayao Miyazaki’s surreal ‘final film,’ The Boy and the Heron, leaves a deep impact on both the audience and the animation landscape. - By Charles Solomon -

n his 2016 proposal for the film that became The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki wrote, “There’s nothing more pathetic than telling the world you’ll retire because of your age, then making yet another comeback. Is it truly possible to accept how pathetic that is and do it anyway? Doesn’t an elderly person deluding themselves that they’re still capable, despite their geriatric forgetfulness, prove that they’re past their best? You bet it does.” That’s a bet he loses and the audience wins: The Boy and the Heron shows Miyazaki working with all his powers intact, reminding viewers just how brilliant a filmmaker he is. In Japan, the film shares the title How Do You Live? (Kimitachi-wa Dō Ikiru-ka?) with a popular 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino (available in English in a lively recent translation), but the stories have virtually nothing in common. Yoshino uses a series of discussions between 15-year-old Jun’ichi and his maternal uncle to explore the connections all humans share, courage, atonement and other moral questions. The Boy and the Heron is a grand fantasy-adventure, reminiscent of Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.

A Surreal Coming of Age In 1943, Mahito Maki’s mother Hisato is killed in a fire. His wealthy father, whose company manufactures airplane parts for the military (as Miyazaki’s family did), soon marries his wife’s younger sister Natsuko and moves the family to her estate in the country, far from Tokyo. Mahito has

trouble fitting into this arrangement: He’s uncomfortable around his stepmother/aunt who is already pregnant with his half-brother, he gets into fights with the boys at school, and he isn’t used to being watched over by a group of aged maids (referred to as obaasans: grandmothers). A weird talking heron lures Mahito into a crumbling tower on the estate, which serves as an entrance to an alternate reality where he meets younger versions of his mother and one of the obaasans, and the powerful sorcerer who rules the fantasy realm. Mahito may remind viewers of Pazu in Castle in the Sky: Both young men are curious, courageous and engaging. Like Pazu —and Chihiro in Spirited Away, Mahito is tested. Like them, his bravery, resolve and inner growth enable him to overcome the challenges placed before him. No filmmaker can match Miyazaki’s skill at building brilliant fantasy worlds. Like dreams, his creations are governed by an inner logic that makes them feel credible, even when they include such flamboyant visuals as a netsuke-like carving that comes to life as a familiar person, a set of geometric blocks that control the balance of the alternate world and a militaristic tribe of giant, carnivorous parakeets. (After seeing the film, viewers may no longer feel quite comfortable around the family budgie.) In contrast to the nonstop dialog in so many recent American animated films, Miyazaki understands the power of silence. He tells the story primarily through the visuals, without cynical wisecracks, fart jokes, unnecessary songs or self-conscious

homilies. At the end of The Boy and the Heron, the viewer feels a bond with Mahito — not because they’ve been told they do, but because they’ve shared an adventure with him. Together they’ve explored, discovered, learned and reached a satisfying conclusion. The film is exhilarating and a little exhausting: The real world seems a little pallid after seeing it. The power of the filmmaking also shows that there will be no “next Miyazaki,” just as there has been no “next Winsor McCay” or “next Walt Disney.” “Genius” is an overused term in 21st century culture: It often seems difficult to define, but it’s not hard to recognize. An impressive group of talented younger auteur directors have come to the fore in Japan in recent years, pushing storytelling in feature animation in exciting new directions: Mamoru Hosoda, Kenji Kamiyama, Makoto Shinkai,

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FEATURES ‘My own work has been influenced by so many different factors and films: All artists take their place in the continuing cycle of influencing and being influenced. In some ways, the history of art represents a great relay race, with each runner transforming the baton as he carries it.’ — Hayao Miyazaki

M AG I CA L AWA K E N I N G: Since its July release in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki’s new movie The Boy and the Heron has made over $56.2 million at the country’s box office. GKIDS will release the movie in the U.S. and Canada.

Masaaki Yuasa. (Had he lived longer, the brilliant Satoshi Kon would be a member of the group.) The popular press in America has often designated Hosoda and/or Shinkai as Miyazaki’s successor. Both artists are exceptional filmmakers. They’ve clearly learned from the master, but they’re not copying him, nor will they replace him, just as Pete Docter, Brad Bird and Dean DeBlois learned from the great Disney artists, but none of them have replaced Walt. When I first interviewed him in 1999 for the American release of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki said, “My own work has been influenced by so many different factors and films: All artists take their place in the continuing cycle of influencing and being influenced. In some ways, the history of art rep-

resents a great relay race, with each runner transforming the baton as he carries it. At some point, I’ll be ready to hand the baton on to the next generation — if they wish to receive it.”

A Welcome Return Miyazaki went on to talk about retiring then, saying his energy level and eyesight weren’t what they used to be. He mentioned the possible conclusion of his career after every subsequent feature. He did retire in 2013, after The Wind Rises. Happily, it didn’t take. Kaku Arakawa’s 2016 documentary Never-Ending Man Hayao Miyazaki showcased the director’s moody impatience when he’s not working, and concludes with him telling his longtime partner and pro-

ducer, Toshio Suzuki, that he has an idea for the film that will become The Boy and the Heron — and to “work his usual magic” to obtain the funding. The completed film shows he’s not ready to quit the animation relay race: He’s managed to pass on the baton without letting go of it. Charles Dickens had a stroke while writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood; Michelangelo and Titian continued working at their art until their deaths. Animators can only hope Miyazaki follows their examples and continues making films as long as he lives. May he continue for many years to come. ◆ GKIDS will preview The Boy and the Heron in select theaters on November 22 with a wider release from December 8.

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A Spirited Adaptation Director and producer Robert Chandler charts the journey of bringing Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost to animated life. - By Ramin Zahed -

he Canterville Ghost, Oscar Wilde’s 1887 tale of an American family who moves to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead English nobleman, has been adapted for the stage and screen many times. This year, a new CG-animated adaptation of popular story has been brought to the screen, thanks to the efforts of producer and co-director Robert Chandler, producer Gina Carter, director Kim Burdon and their team and the production team at India’s Toonz studio. The film’s voice cast is quite impressive, too: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Freddie Highmore, Emily Carey, David Harewood, Toby Jones and Imelda Staunton play some of the colorful characters in this otherworldly comedy, which was presented by Blue Fox Entertainment and Shout! Studios for a limited release last month.

Memorable Players “Our director Kim Burdon (Fireman Sam, Shaun the Sheep) had the idea for an animated version of Canterville about 14 years ago,” recalls Chandler. “He’s an animator and an excellent artist, and he showed me his drawings for the characters. I fell in love with them immediately, partly be-

cause they looked so unique and … vulnerable. I always look for a quality of vulnerability in actors and characters. Kim suggested we do it for television, but I knew straight away these characters had to become a movie.” While the story had been told several times in live action, with the ghost (Sir Simon) portrayed by screen legends such as Charles Laughton, John Gielgud and David Niven, Chandler notes, “I felt we could bring an otherworldly quality to the story via animation … really push the hauntings and solve the problem Oscar Wilde avoids in his story, which is to show what happened when Virginia confronts Death and breaks Sir Simon’s curse in the walled garden in the tale’s climax.” The director/producer says one of the hardest aspects of realizing the movie was making it for about a fifth of the budget that he set out to raise. “We knew this wasn’t a movie with lots of key characters and many locations, so we pulled back where we could … For example, we scaled down what was once a big party with a hundred guests and an orchestra in a garden marquee to a dinner party in a room (already built in the house) with a three-piece jazz band!” he admits. “But I knew we had a great screenplay and a tale with plenty of heart and that’s what we held on

to. I told myself I could make cuts as long as I was remaining true to the narrative and what certain events meant to the characters, even if those events were scaled back.” The animation was to be Toonz Animation’s first feature film, and Chandler says the studio’s teams in three different countries gave it their all. “We used their pre-production storyboard facility in New Zealand, animated in their main studio in Trivandrum, Kerala in India, and post-produced at their affiliate company, Telegael, in Galway, Ireland,” he says. “Meanwhile, all the audio was recorded and then post-produced at Splice in London. I am so proud of what we were all able to achieve, everybody pulling together to make our Fabergé Egg of a film. I like to think of it as a Fabergé Egg, because it’s beautiful but a little strange!” Creating the animation proved to be a complicated task since the creative team wanted the “real world” of the story to feel grounded, so that the walled garden in the third act of the movie felt more “unreal.” “We also wanted to keep our characters relatively human, both in proportion and in action. There’s not too much squash-and-stretch going on. That was a gamble, of course, because of the expectation distributors and viewers have of animated features. They think they are children’s films where everything is

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‘We were making a family film, for sure, but a film that wasn’t afraid to explore themes of love, death and sacrifice (the holy trinity) in a world that I once pitched as “Downton Abbey gets haunted.”’ — Producer/co-director Robert Chandler

A N O B L E A P PA R I T I O N: Oscar Wilde’s timeless tale of a family haunted by the ghost of an English nobleman is brought to CG animated life thanks to the work of directors Robert Chandler and Kim Burdon and producer Gina Carter.

larger than life! Of course, they are not all this way … or shouldn’t be.” Chandler adds, “We were making a family film, for sure, but a film that wasn’t afraid to explore themes of love, death and sacrifice (the holy trinity) in a world that I once pitched as ‘Downton Abbey gets haunted.’ It was never easy. I often felt we were creating our own aesthetic. And you must remember this was all being done during a pandemic lockdown where we were briefing teams remotely.” So how did he manage to attract such a starry cast? “When we started the film, we pitched it to Stephen Fry and his producer/business partner Gina Carter, and they both fell in love with the screenplay and the designs and came on board as partners,” recalls Chandler. “They became actively involved in the production and this opened up a range of blue-chip British actors for us. We made the first scratch recording with our cast in 2012 … and then spent a decade putting the film’s finances together. When we had finally achieved the full finance raise, we went back to our cast and every single one stayed the course (aside from Virginia and the Twins, where, because of their ages, we had used older actors for the scratch. We were able to cast these roles afresh).”

Among the various stand-out qualities of the movie, Chandler mentions the fact that it is faithful to Wilde’s distinct literary voice. “I love Oscar Wilde through and through — his life, his wit, his ability to create character and moment, the stand he took, the heart of the man,” says Chandler. “The Canterville Ghost is a terrific example of how he was able to write about characters in such a way that you knew he loved them even while satirizing who they were and the worlds from which they were drawn. In the story, it would have been easy to ridicule the Americans or the English aristocracy, but he never ridicules them; he mocks them, for sure, but he also looks after them and makes sure they are treated fairly by the narrative. We wanted a similar tone running through our film.”

Animation for All Chandler points out that the marketing of animated features has plenty of room for improvement. “I feel I’ve been on a mission for many years to have animation regarded not as a genre, but simply as one mode of cinematic storytelling, a medium that works for adults, children, families,” he says. “We of course were finding that many distributors were only able to sell the film as a children’s film, and I

wanted it to be wider than that. But unless distributors can put the film into the ‘children’s film’ box, they probably couldn’t market it successfully. I’d like to see animation spread its wings and attract new audiences of all ages — maybe the critical success of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio will help that? Perhaps our previous film, The Amazing Maurice, will help that, too. And maybe Canterville in a small way will contribute to changing how people regard animation.” Chandler ends our interview with a lovely example of the impact of the film on an observant young viewer. “I was talking on the phone to one of the financiers during the Cannes market and she told me she watched the film with her son, who was around 11 years old. When it was over, she asked him what the film was about, and he replied, ‘It’s about not wasting time and making the most of things while you can.’ I almost burst into tears when she told me. That’s our takeaway, right there!” ◆ The Canterville Ghost opened in the U.K. in September and select U.S. theaters on October 20, available on digital and On Demand on December 6. For more information, visit bluefoxentertainment.com/films/the-canterville-ghost.

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Three Cheers for Intergalactic Football! Sefi Carmel, CEO of Creation Entertainment Media, hopes to win the animation game with his studio’s new feature, Aliens FC! GOOOOOOOOAAAAL! Creation Entertainment’s upcoming animated movie Aliens FC follows an ordinary family who is recruited by aliens to coach them in their own space creature league!

ou may not know this, but apparently, soccer fever has taken over the whole universe! In Magic Frame and Creation Entertainment Media’s upcoming new animated movie Aliens FC, an ordinary family from Earth are mistaken for a famous soccer team and whisked away across the galaxy to help the charming ETs win their local football league! Sefi Carmel, CEO of London-based Creation Entertainment Media (BuddyBots, Secret Magic Control Agency), says the origins of the movie go back a few years, when he and his team decided it would be great idea to launch a project that reflects the huge popularity of football (or if you prefer, soccer!) around the world. “Football now has a diverse and widespread fanbase, with people passionate about both playing and watching the sport, from all age groups,” says Carmel. “There’s also plenty of non-kids facing content on football — Ted Lasso, the Lioness documentaries, you name it. We knew that there was a story about this phenomenon to tell through animation for a family audience. Combined with an imaginative alien universe, it’s a film that definitely brings a lot of humor, joy and uniqueness to the game! Aliens FC offers a unique story that will stand out in the market.” The team at Creation began work on the movie in the summer of 2022. “We work in partnership with Magic Frame Animation and its international team of experienced artists and

a carefully curated team of experienced writers based all over the world,” says Carmel. “Our ballpark budget is about $20 million.” Carmel says his team used AI technology in pre-production to create some of the alien imagery. “The process is very original, as we’re creating both terrestrial and alien worlds for the film,” he notes. The original idea for the movie came from writer Sam Morrison (Shaun the Sheep, Peppa Pig, Robin Robin), Tim Clague (Eight) and Danny Stack (Dog Years, Hey Duggee). “We had been working with Tim and Danny producing the BuddyBots series,” says the CEO/producer. “In a meeting, they shared another idea they were working on about some kids who are mistakenly kidnapped by aliens to save an alien soccer team from relegation. We knew we definitely wanted to hear how this could come into fruition, and that we wanted to be involved in telling this story.”

Animated Team of Champions Carmel mentions that every character in the movie has unique traits, but in particular, the entire family who are mistakenly seen by the aliens as famous footballers have really individual personalities that drive the story on an emotional level. “Their relationship with the aliens develops as they realize there’s much more at stake than football,” he notes. The producer mentions that the movie has some similari-

ties to the Space Jam movies as it centers on a popular sport through the lens of animation. “Our movie is unique in its imagery, with incredible fantasy locations and eccentric characters. Tim, Danny and Sam are soccer experts — something which will help us portray the world of this brilliant game on the animation screen. We plan to attach some soccer stars to the cast that will be announced later.” When asked about his biggest challenges in realizing his movie, Carmel responds, “We work with some incredible animators who bring their vision to life through our projects. They all have their own style. This project has so much potential creativity as this it’s all about an extraterrestrial adventure in an alien universe. We are thrilled to have talented animators and technology to bring this to life. Certain things that could be perceived as challenges we decide to think of as positives — like competing football content, a sudden influx of it — but really that shows demand and the need for something new that can stand out within that category.” Carmel has high hopes for the movie when it arrives on the big screen in the next couple of years. “We hope audiences will enjoy this unique alien universe, especially the football matches held between humans and aliens!” he says. “While playing for victory they will discover what is really means to be a family.” ◆ To learn more, visit creationentertainment.media.

‘Our movie is unique in its imagery, with incredible fantasy locations and eccentric characters. Our writers are soccer experts, and we plan to attach some soccer stars to the cast that will be announced later.’ — Creation Entertainment Media’s CEO Sefi Carmel

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Space Oddity René Laloux’s cerebral and surreal cult classic Fantastic Planet turns 50 on December 6, and there still hasn’t been an animated feature quite like it. - By Rich Johnson -

“Animation is an art form that’s removed from reality.”

imple yet complex, fantastical but real, savage and gentle — René Laloux’s award-winning films remain a huge inspiration within the field of animation. La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet), which was released on December 6, 1973 (after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival earlier that year), not only showcases a decade’s worth of artistic exploration and refinement but is a definitive masterwork. Aside from the hugely influential Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) magazine that would hit newsstands the next year, such hallucinogenic and effervescent concepts have only been hinted at since then in the universes of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; the biopunk concepts of Image Comics’ Prophet and Prism Stalker; and the 2019 animated short Scavengers, which spawned the recent Max Original series Scavengers Reign. But understanding the unique nature of Fantastic Planet is to understand René Laloux’s attitudes and sensibilities. This is hugely important to not only grasp the human qualities of the film, but also the processes he learned working with other artists — all of which brings to light the impact and timeless nature of this animated space oddity.

— René Laloux

A Strange Story Based on the 1957 novel Oms en série (Oms in Series) by Stefan Wul, Fantastic Planet tells the story of the Oms, who have been enslaved by a giant alien race known as the Draag. Comparatively, there are similar threads to what Pierre Boulle would reveal in his 1963 novel Planet of the Apes — the Oms’ Earth origins revealed via the Draag’s telepathic documentation of “Terre” (the French word for Earth). Wul’s mythology and poetry is a major part of what still helps to distinguish the film from most that have succeeded it over the past 50 years; the whimsy and operatic nature often feeling like a strange interplanetary documentary. With no shortage of shocking moments, the contrast of sadism and playfulness is seen from the outset as the Draag offspring repeatedly flick an Om mother (carrying her newborn) to the ground before she is dropped to her

death. As cold as they are blue-skinned, it is hard to distinguish between casual mistreatment or blind cruelty. Yet what is clear is that the audience sympathizes as we are immediately shown the fear, distress and vulnerability of a (fragile) mother; the surviving Om child, Terr, becoming no more than a curious pet. Although some remain domesticated — stroked and caressed by adult Draag between meditations — the more savage Om, who live among giant flora and skeletal alien remains, are exterminated every two Draag years (the equivalent of 90 Earth years). This is an allegorical tale shaped by the savagery and curiosity of humanity.

Technique and Process Accompanied by Alain Goraguer’s psychedelic moon safari orchestration, this hallucinogenic journey boasts a distinct tactile quality that evokes Laloux’s early days as a woodcarver. When Laloux found his calling

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FEATURES ‘Fantastic Planet is a film that showcases the extreme contrasts of human nature; the core narrative is all about the importance of learning. However, far from the prosaic, there is also an ethereal quality and arcane dignity at the heart of this deranged, alternative world.’ as a counselor at the groundbreaking La Borde psychiatric clinic in Cour-Cheverny , he used his practical skills to assist with art therapy, which was revolutionary at the time, and worked with patients on shadowgraphs inspired by his interest in puppetry and animation. He captured the first document of his teachings in a 66mm black-and-white film, Tic-tac (Tick-Tock), in 1957, a human experience that the patients developed themselves through animation; and a crucial collaboration that helped to establish Laloux’s cutout approach. Collaboration with his patients continued, resulting in what is considered to be his directorial debut, Les dents du singe (The Monkey’s Teeth), in 1960. It was through Laloux’s psychiatric work that he met Topor. They would work together on a number of short films, most of which reflected the collective trauma that lingered in the aftermath of World War II. Such ills are highlighted in their first work together, Les temps morts (Dead Times, 1965), which displays the ravages of war, presented as an animated assembly of stock footage, photographs and engravings. The narration spills forth — “The world is a vicious circle” — furthering their themes of madness and despair. Although not as explicit and documentarian as this earlier short, Fantastic Planet carries all the hallmarks of childlike innocence juxtaposed with violence and horror. The visual style Topor gave seed to often resembles a perverse nursery rhyme — like the apocalyptic invasion of giant mollusks in Les escargots (The Snails, 1966) — coupled with heavy influences from Lotte Reiniger, Henri Gruel and Jan Lenica cutout style. On top of its Edward Gorey vibes, obviously Python-esque parallels can be made to Terry Gilliam’s animated comedic interludes, along with Walerian Borowczyk’s early animated works.

This was a period that saw an infinite wealth of ideas between the two men: a meeting (and eating) of minds. However, Topor’s talents went way beyond his surrealist influence and distinctive illustration work, exploring paranoia and lunacy in his 1964 source novel for Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), and playing Renfield in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Style and Substance Beginning production in 1968 — most of which took place in then-Czechoslovakia — Topor’s commitment went as far as adapting the novel and working on the original concept art before Czech artists Josef Kábrt and Josef Váňa built on the world further. While Váňa worked on the backgrounds, Kábrt not only developed the character designs but also, as an animator, instinctively oversaw the techniques and processes that Laloux and Topor had already mastered. Understanding the evolution of Laloux’s earlier cut-out techniques — especially via his collaborations with Topor — proves how important style and technique have become over the years in distinguishing such works. The legacy of Fantastic Planet also lies in its ability to be read into. Topor, Kábrt and Váňa’s visuals make it closer to studying an etching or surrealist masterpiece, and the static nature of the animation focuses on strict composition and framing that feed into the symbolic and metaphorical aspects of the film. Of course, there are the more literal elements, too, such as the phallic spacecraft illustrating the Oms’ generative power as they manage to escape and repopulate during the film’s final moments. Yet, overall — due to its experiential approach — it manages to avoid any of the clichés we would associate

with most science fiction and instead presents a more dignified and liberating experience through a moral message. Looking at these details more closely, while keeping in mind Topor’s inspired “Rabelaisian” style, there is a class and racial allegory at play. Wul’s story descended from François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift’s tradition of satire. During the final act, a fallen Draag reminds us of a bluer (and bloodier) Gulliver pinned by the Lilliputians, and the “de-Ominisation” eerily evokes imagery from the Holocaust as the more “savage” Om are gassed and squashed like ants with tiny corpses littered about the undergrowth as their oppressors — gas-masked Om with hounds at hand — continue their genocide. Fantastic Planet is a film that showcases the extreme contrasts of human nature; the core narrative is all about the importance of learning. However, far from the prosaic, there is also an ethereal quality and arcane dignity at the heart of this deranged, alternative world with Laloux’s humanistic sensibility still shining through; the caretaker refuses to accept man’s ignorance and animosity, in the hope that we continue to inform ourselves and understand each other through peace and coexistence. ◆ Fantastic Planet is currently available to stream on Max, Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu and Apple TV. Rich Johnson has written for many publications including Fangoria, Little White Lies, The Digital Fix, Shots, Rue Morgue, Eureka and 101 Films. A lecturer in graphic design and film studies, he presents BFI masterclasses and provides audio commentary and film analysis as a podcaster. richpieces.com | @richpieces

E A RT H L I N G S A N D A L I E N S: Directed by René Laloux, the FrenchCzech animated sci-fi movie Fantastic Planet has intrigued cinema fans for its haunting visuals as well as deep allegorical meaning for 50 years.

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Caught Between Two Worlds The creative forces behind the new Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai discuss the origins and complicated heroine of their show. - By Devin Nealy -

hether it’s international content like Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite and the inexhaustible popularity of anime or American productions such as Everything Everywhere All at Once and Disney’s Turning Red, stories from Asia and the AAPI perspective have become cornerstones of today’s pop culture. With their new show, Blue Eye Samurai, co-creators Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and supervising director/producer Jane Wu (Mulan, Guardians of the Galaxy) hope to provide audiences with a deeper insight into the AAPI experience. “This show is an authentic Asian-American voice,” says Wu. “It’s not 100 percent culturally Japanese, but it’s our interpretation of our culture.” Blue Eye Samurai follows the adventures of Mizu (Maya Erskine), the eponymous katana-wielding warrior who wanders Japan in disguise during the Edo period of Japan’s 17th century. As a result of Japan closing its borders, a profound sense of nationalism within the country fosters a distaste for anything or anyone with a foreign origin, including the halfwhite Mizu. By tracking illegal European imports, Mizu em-

barks on a bloody mission to confront the four white traders who supply the country with contraband and who may also be responsible for the “impure” blood inside her veins. “It was very important for me to make Mizu complex and deep so [that] you go, ‘Oh, I know somebody like that,’” says Wu. “You feel like you know her, and by the end of the series, you feel like you’ve gone through the journey with her.”

Behind Blue Eyes It’s a time-honored tradition for Japanese swordsmiths to brand each blade with their insignia. In Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai, the series’ meditative and introspective narrative serves as the signature of the husband-and-wife duo behind the show’s creation, Michael Green (Logan, A Haunting in Venice) and Amber Noizumi. “A lot of it was my personal experience growing up biracial,” says Noizumi. “Where I grew up … which was in Indio, California, there were very few Asians.” Born to a Japanese father and a white mother, Noizumi encountered myriad disheartening experiences in her

youth — including people believing she was adopted while running errands with her mother. Consequently, Noizumi developed “a low-level seething anger” that smoldered in the background of her life deep into adulthood. Upon the birth of her first daughter, Noizumi began to reevaluate her heritage with fresh eyes. “I was so excited to have this blueeyed child, and it made me realize, ‘Why am I so excited about this?’” says Noizumi. “I had texted [Michael] one day when he was shooting something … and I sent him a picture of [our daughter’s] bright blue eyes, and Michael called her our blue-eye samurai. And he was like, ‘Oh, that’s a good title.’” “If you were biracial in Japan when the borders were closed, someone would think you were pretty ugly,” says Noizumi. “All the things I did to try and make my eyes look bigger, like getting eye tape and putting on white eyeliner — all of these tricks to make your eyes look bigger — maybe somebody in that period would try to hide it. Maybe she would wear glasses to cover those blue eyes.” During the project’s 15-year gestation period, Green and Noizumi began to feel as if Blue Eye Samurai might be im-

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TV/STREAMING ‘This show is an authentic Asian American voice … It’s not 100 percent culturally Japanese, but it’s our interpretation of our culture.’ — Supervising director-producer Jane Wu

S H A R P E N YO U R S WO R D S: Set in Edo-period Japan, Blue Eye Samurai follows Mizu (Maya Erskine), a mixed-race master of the sword who lives in disguise to deliver revenge.

Co-creators Michael Green & Amber Noizumi

possible to produce, until they arrived at the medium of animation. “We were having a conversation with our executive producer Erwin Stoff about animation in general … and something clicked,” says Green. “I think he used the term ‘animated drama,’ and instantly it was like, ‘Oh my God, we can do Blue Eye Samurai that way.’”

The Art of Swordplay Coming from the world of live action, Noizumi and Green found themselves strangers in the exotic world of animation. “I think the biggest challenge was the learning curve for both of us,” says Noizumi. “We were like, ‘Yeah, we can go to Kyoto, and go to Edo, and go to this city, and build this castle, and [the animators] just have to draw it. That’s not a big deal, right?’ And only when we began to talk to people who knew things were they like, ‘Oh, no, that’s a big deal! These things cost time and they cost money.’” For Green and Noizumi, supervising director Jane Wu became the perfect interpreter for the specificities of Blue Eye Samurai’s

distinct visual dialect. “I’ve been in live action as long as I’ve been in animation, so I’m ‘bilingual/bi-production,’ and I know both production pipelines pretty well,” says Wu. “I felt like I was the translator in the middle. Everything makes sense in my head.” Mirroring Wu’s background in live action and animation is Blue Eye Samurai’s gorgeous painted CGI style, which reconciles traditional 2D animation with modern 3D models. “We wanted it to look like an artist’s hand touched everything,” says Green. “[And] that if it was going to involve a computer, it would still look painterly. We just kept saying, ‘Let’s not do the thing where we have beautiful concept art and throw it away. Let’s make it look like the concept art.’” In addition to adopting the cutting-edge painted CGI style, the trio is excited to be at the forefront of a new and budding movement in adult animation. “When we first talked about it with Netflix, they understood even before we did that adult-animated drama … is a genre that’s just there to be exploited and there to grow,” says Green. “We really wanted

to be the first one out, [but] we’re very happy to be beaten by Invincible and Craig Silverstein’s Pantheon on AMC+.” And although Blue Eye Samurai isn’t anime, Wu found herself drawing copious inspiration from the medium’s profound ability to tell mature stories. “One of my favorite anime movies of all time is Tekkonkinkreet,” says Wu. “I took that film apart, and looked at their pipeline, and said, ‘I want to do it just like this.’ So, if you look at the line quality of our characters, that’s where we borrowed it from.” For Wu, Blue Eye Samurai lives up to its branding as an adult animated drama in its ability to bring the frequently eulogized mythos of the samurai back to reality. “We’re trying to blow all of the [mysticism] out and say, ‘Look, we’re just like you,’” says Wu. “We mess up, we hate ourselves, we love ourselves. We have the same struggles and pulls that everybody else does, and I think that mysticism needs to go away for people to see Asians as people.” ◆ Blue Eye Samurai premieres on Netflix on November 3.

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Facing Demons from the Past The duo behind DreamWorks’ Curses! takes us behind the scenes of the entertaining and spooky new show. - By Ramin Zahed -

nimated shows playing with horror themes and spooky characters seem to be quite the rage this fall. Premiering only a few weeks after DreamWorks’ Fright Krewe on Hulu, another DreamWorks production titled Curses! arrives October 27 on Apple TV+. Created and exec produced by Jim Cooper (DreamWorks Dragons) and Jeff Dixon (The Hurricane Heist), this hair-raising new series follows the adventures of two siblings who have to return artifacts stolen by their ancestors to rid their family of a horrible curse. Writer and director John Krasinski (A Quiet Place) also serves as executive producer on Curses!, and Allyson Seeger is a co-executive producer. Leo Riley (Guardians of the Galaxy, Tron: Uprising) is supervising producer and director on the show. Cooper and Dixon became friends because their kids went to the same kindergarten and elementary school. The pair began talking about their favorite movies and shows and eventually thought it would be fun if they combined their talents to write a family horror picture together. We caught up with the creators via email to about their new project.

Jeff Dixon

Horror Fans at Heart “Both of us had separate solo writing careers with very different focuses,” says Dixon. “Coop is a history and comedy buff and has worked on a lot of family animation projects. I’m a bit darker and love all things horror, and mostly worked on live-action scary projects. The one thing we shared, and bonded over, was our mutual dedication to our kids and family. In the end, we’re both just dads. When we decided to try and work together, all of our ideas seemed to smash our varying sensibilities together in a totally natural way. Curses! is the organic outcome of our brains — it’s horror, but comedic; it’s animated, but cinematic; and at the center of it all is a core of kids and family.” The “family curse” concept of the show came about when Cooper told Dixon about his own family history. “Basically, all the men in my father’s generation died before they were 50 years old,” says Cooper. “One day when we were looking through my grandpa’s photo album, we found a formal portrait of him (around three years old), in his finest clothes, holding a human skull. Since he lived in an Arizona copper mining town, we were pretty sure it wasn’t a prop skull, but a real one. My cousin yelled out, ‘I guess we now know the source of the family curse.’ When Jeff heard this, we started really playing with this idea of what would you do if you

discovered your family was cursed because of something your ancestors did. Or perhaps something they collected. And voilà, Curses! was born.” In early 2018, Cooper and Dixon sold the idea to DreamWorks. “Our kids were freshmen in high school at the time,” recalls Cooper. “We spent a few years developing the script and doing visual development, before going to series in early 2021. Now it is set to be released as our kids enter their junior year in college. So in a very real sense, it all started as our kids started their first day of school and has continued all the way to their collegiate experience!” Curses! had about 60 crew members at DreamWorks, where almost all of the art development and one of the storyboard teams was based. The production also worked with House of Cool in Toronto who storyboarded the other episodes. The animation, which was done by CGCG based out of Taiwan, was created using Storyboard Pro, Maya, Nuke and Houdini. The project attracted a star-studded voice cast as well. Emmy nominee Gabrielle Nevaeh (Monster High) and Andre Robinson (The Loud House) voice siblings Pandora and Russ, while Lyric Lewis, Reid Scott, Rhys Darby, James Marsters, Rhea Perlman, Phylicia Rashad and Robert Englund round out the ensemble cast.

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TV/STREAMING “When you see an object that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old, you have to wonder about its path to where it is now, and I think Curses! really explores that in a way that will make it more than just a bunch of fun jokes and scares.” — Curses! co-creator and exec producer Jim Cooper

R I G H T I N G PA S T W RO N G S: In the new Apple TV+ show Curses!, a family has to return artifacts stolen by their ancestors to their rightful homes to bring their father back to life.

The show’s creators are both quite proud of the overall look of their show. “Our art director, David Chung, and supervising producer/supervising director, Leo Riley, developed a fantastic look for the show that is both beautiful and incredibly functional,” says Cooper. “While it is created in a 3D computer environment, the look is one that emulates the hand-drawn 2D ink work of the classic 1950s EC horror comic books. As a result, we are able to utilize the incredible camera moves and lighting of 3D production, while giving the show a unique handmade quality. On a practical side, it also allows us to augment our 3D assets with 2D assets that can serve as modern-day matte paintings. So this gives us flexibility in production that we might not otherwise have, while simultaneously giving us some incredible visuals.” The Curses! duo says one of the reasons they wanted to create the show was so they could have a show they would love to watch with their kids. “Back in our childhoods, we loved challenging ourselves with what might be best called ‘gateway horror,’” notes Cooper. “Think of classic Steven Spielberg projects like Poltergeist or The Goonies; things that weren’t just ‘spooky’ but had some real moments of

surprise and dread. That is what I think we achieved with Curses!, a show that kids will be super intrigued by, and one that their parents will be excited to join them [in watching].” He says another unique quality is the show’s ability to deal with complicated subjects such as history, repatriation of artifacts and the concept of cultural theft in a way that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. “When you see an object that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old, you have to wonder about its path to where it is now,” he notes. “And I think Curses! really explores that in a way that will make it more than just a bunch of fun jokes and scares.”

Object Lessons Cooper and Dixon have their fingers crossed that the show will make a big impact on viewers . “I’d hope they will look at the world slightly differently,” says Cooper. “I hope they will look at cool old objects and think, ‘I wonder how that ended up here? What was its story? Who were the people that created it or owned it?’ and that they would learn to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Because with each of our stories, there is a backstory of how those artifacts became cursed. And it is up to the family to figure

out how they can make right for long-ago wrongs. In general, I think this world would be a much better place if people learned to try to understand how the past influences the present, and what we can do in the future to improve the situation for everybody.” Dixon adds, “I hope audiences are able to really connect with these characters on a human level, relate their own thoughts and experiences to what they see on the screen, and go through all the emotions along the way. Then, my visceral answer is, ‘I want to scare some kids.’ Now, that may sound mean, but it’s not. Experiencing ‘safe fear,’ such as watching horror, is psychologically healthy. When I was a kid, it was the scary movies and TV shows that stuck with me. They allowed me to feel fear and overcome it. They connected with me on such a visceral level, that when I finished watching them, I felt accomplished. They felt like dares that boosted my self-esteem. I want some kids to experience those same kinds of feelings that I did. It warms my horror heart to think that we might actually be able to do that.” ◆ Curses! premiered on Apple TV+ on October 27.

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The Return of the Complicated Superheroes Creator Robert Kirkman and co-showrunner Simon Racioppa give us an early scoop on the second season of Invincible. - By Jeff Spry -

Simon Racioppa

t a fragile time of waning interest for Hollywood superhero fare — after 15 years of continuous releases — it’s uplifting to see a comic-book-based animated series like Prime Video’s Invincible thrive as it surges into its sophomore season. With 15 years of comic-book source material at its disposal, Invincible became a surprise hit series with its eight-episode debut back in 2021. Based on the Skybound/Image title written by Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) and illustrated by Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, the comic book ran from 2003-18 over the course of 144 issues. It chronicled the turbulent lives of a dysfunctional family of superheroes dealing with severe growing pains and secret alien agendas.

The Plot Thickens The second season of the show offers more alarming developments unfolding for the Grayson clan as Om-

ni-Man tries to redeem himself after failing to enslave Earth for his home planet of Viltrum. He is also searching for another planet to conquer and contending with his conflicted son, Mark, whose powers are amplifying exponentially. The show’s exceptional voice cast includes Steven Yeun (Mark Grayson/Invincible), J.K. Simmons (Nolan Grayson/ Omni-Man), Sandra Oh (Debbie Grayson), Zazie Beetz (Amber Bennett), Gillian Jacobs (Atom Eve), Andrew Rannells (William Clockwell), Walton Goggins (Cecil Stedman), Jason Mantzoukas (Rex Splode), Mark Hamill (Art Rosenbaum), Khary Payton (Black Samson), Malese Jow (Dupli-Kate), Kevin Michael Richardson (The Mauler Twins), Seth Rogen (Allen the Alien), Mahershala Ali (Titan), Chris Diamantopoulos (Doc Seismic), Sterling K. Brown (Angstrom Levy) and the legendary Peter Cullen (Thaddeus). We caught up with the show’s iconic ringmaster, Robert Kirkman, in between tending to his multiple projects, and co-showrunner Simon Racioppa. Together, these talented

architects of this adults-only adaptation of the comic tell us what antics are in store for Mark Grayson and company. “I’m most excited about being back,” Kirkman tells Animation Magazine. “The gap was no fun for anybody, especially us. It’s awesome to have new episodes out there, so I can’t wait to see what the reaction is. It’s a bigger season, we’re definitely doubling down on a lot of the stuff we did in Season One. There’s a quirkiness to things that I think is kind of fun. Invincible has the weirdest tone out of anything on TV, and I hope everybody’s on board for it.” The Mauler Twins, perfectly voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, have a greater role in the new season, and these fan favorites have been unleashed in myriad ways causing mucho mayhem.

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‘It’s a bigger season, we’re definitely doubling down on a lot of the stuff we did in Season One. There’s a quirkiness to things that I think is kind of fun. Invincible has the weirdest tone out of anything on TV, and I hope everybody’s on board for it.’ — Creator/showrunner Robert Kirkman

L I K E F AT H E R, L I K E S O N? The second season of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible takes place after the battle with Omni-Man, and finds Mark trying to pick up the pieces and serve as the world’s strongest protector. Sterling K. Brown joins the voice cast as the new villain, Angstrom Levy.

“The Twins are a good example of the organic nature of how the Invincible series was created,” says Kirkman. “If you look at the back cover of Invincible #1, there’s an ad for #2 with one of the Mauler Twins that says, ‘Invincible faces the dreaded Ogre.’ I told Cory to draw some cool dude stealing video-game systems that Invincible has to fight. When it came time to write the issue, I thought, ‘What if there’s two of them?’ and we came up with the Mauler Twins. They are characters that are much loved in the Invincible offices. We’ll be seeing lots of them.” When mapping out a season, Racioppa (The Boys: Diabolical) tries to think about the overarc h i n g theme to give the project an anchor to build upon emotionally. “Early on, we came up with the idea that Season One was Mark basically

wanting to become his dad and growing up in his dad’s shadow,” he explains. “Then obviously he discovers maybe that’s not who he wants to be. Season Two for us is, ‘What if I become my dad?,’ because now he knows his dad is not a really great person. That was the glue that helped us hold the season together thematically, and [track whether we were] getting to a conclusion of that in the last episode.” The show’s appealing tone harkens back to a gentler age of hand-drawn animation with bright primary colors and evocative, painterly backgrounds that deliver a sense of nostalgia. “We have a style established in the first season, and we were trying to break new ground and figure things out,” says Racioppa. “No one had done an hourlong animated series before. One of our lead designers is Cory Walker, a co-creator of the book who did a huge number of issues. It’s a refinement and pushing it into a better level of quality. Part of that is accomplished via supervising director, Dan Duncan, and Shaun O’Neil, our series art supervisor. Shaun did designs on The Boys: Diabolical. It’s about prioritizing those designs and letting people do their work.” Since Invincible debuted in 2021, the arena of adult animation has exploded, with more and more domestic and imported series in all genres sprinkled across streaming platforms, something Kirkman is well aware of and which propels his creative team further. “Anime being so available has really generated a huge, savvy animation audience, and they’re looking at a wide range of stuff,” he notes. “You’ve got Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites, Star Trek: Lower Decks and things like The Legend of Vox Machina — and then Invincible, which I hope comes off as a superhero drama on the same level of The Boys, but animated instead of

live action. In the last two years, the landscape has gotten bigger and more robust.”

Subtle Voices Angstrom Levy is a sympathetic villain new to this fresh season, imbued with altruistic intentions to better the multiverse, but Kirkman reveals that his misguided plans go terribly awry. “I like it when there’s a logical slant to the villain and hero’s relationship and hatred for each other,” says Racioppa. “As we progress, we’ll see much more of what makes Angstrom tick. The way Sterling plays him is great, because you feel for the guy and see why he reacts the ways he reacts. In a lot of ways, he sees Invincible as no different than our audience sees Omni-Man.” The wealth of vocal talent on Invincible is one of the show’s immeasurable superpowers, catapulting it into the creative stratosphere, and Kirkman and Racioppa are grateful for the actors’ enthusiasm in breathing life into these long-established comic-book characters. “One of the biggest treats is hearing J.K. Simmons and Sandra Oh and Steven Yeun and all our cast do scenes that we’ve written and just launch them off the pages,” adds Racioppa. “It’s a huge part of the show and a reflection of the skill of our actors. They’re 100 percent crucial to the success of the series. We’re not a Pixar movie. We don’t have the fine facial animation that a feature does. So much more of that emotion has to come out through the voice.” He adds,“ We have an even bigger cast for Season Two, so more surprises and more people coming out. The response to Invincible and seeing it all come together has just been supremely gratifying.” ◆ The first four episodes of Invincible Season Two premiere on Prime Video on November 3. The remaining four will roll out in early 2024.

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Animation Magazine’s 2023-’24 Award Season Dossier

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Your 2024 Academy Awards Dossier

- by Michael Mallory t’s another crowded year in the Academy Awards feature animation race, a starting line packed with familiar faces, franchises and filmmakers. While low visibility will likely keep some films (The Canterville Ghost, The Amazing Maurice, The Monkey King, Mummies and others) at arm’s length, we still have a plethora of quality pictures employing all kinds of artistic techniques vying for the five golden nomination slots. One major rule change from AMPAS could tangentially affect animated features: the expansion of qualifying runs beyond L.A. and New York for any Best Picture candidate. This means only those studios with major distribution arms could put up their submission in the Best Picture category in addition to Best Animated Feature. As for the latter, here are this year’s likeliest contenders (Note: Box-office figures are worldwide, unless otherwise noted, as of October 18):

THE TOP TIER

The Boy and the Heron

Elemental

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

Migration

Director: Hayao Miyazaki Released by: GKIDS Production Studio: Studio Ghibli Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100% Synopsis: During the height of World War II, a grey heron with the spirit of a human leads a troubled boy to a mysterious tower that is a portal to an alternate reality populated by wizards and strange creatures. Release Date: July 14, 2023 (Japan); Nov. 22, 2023 (U.S.) Box Office: $56 million (Japan) Director Talk: “I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil.” — Hayao Miyazaki The Word: “This may be Miyazaki’s most expansive and magisterial film.” — Caryn James, The BBC Nomination Chances: Excellent. Like earlier cinematic maestros, Alfred Hitchcock and Preston Sturges, Miyazaki has become his own genre. He will almost certainly be recognized.

Director: Sam Fell Released by: Netflix Production Studio: Aardman Animations Cast: Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Imelda Staunton Synopsis: Ginger and Rocky’s idyllic new home on an island bird sanctuary is threatened by the vengeful Mrs. Tweedy, which forces them to break into her high-tech chicken farm to protect their existence. Release Date: Oct. 15, 2023 (London); Dec. 15, 2023 (internationally) Director Talk: “They say a movie is only as good as its villain, and Ginger’s nemesis, Mrs. Tweedy, is one of the all-time greats. Now she’s out to take industrial-scale revenge on all chicken-kind.” — Sam Fell Chances: Very good, based on the love the Oscars have shown to Aardman in the past (seven Oscar nominations, four wins to date).

Director: Peter Sohn Released by: Disney Production Studio: Pixar Cast: Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen Rotten Tomatoes Score: 74% Synopsis: Earth, wind and fire don’t necessarily play beautiful music together when a blaze-induced flood wreaks havoc in Element City, forcing a fire element and water element to jointly rectify the problem, despite their differences. Release Date: June 16, 2023 Box Office: $493.3 million Director Talk: “This idea of culture clash and the idea of this Romeo and Juliet type of story, and understanding the sacrifices our parents have made for us … that was always the cement.” — Peter Sohn The Word: “It’s the most human rom-com in years. There’s no villain, no phony contrivances, and the mandatory breakup is well-buttressed by the script. This is what animation should do: wow us with expressive, impossible wonders rather than reimagining Flounder from The Little Mermaid a photorealistic fish.” — Amy Nicholson, The New York Times Chances: Good. Even though it was not recognized as top-drawer Pixar initially, it’s still Pixar, which is the name most recognizable to academy voters.

Director: Benjamin Renner Released by: Universal Production Studio: Illumination Cast: Kumail Nanjiani, Awkwafina, Elizabeth Banks, Danny DeVito Synopsis: Spurred by the more-adventurous new ducks in the pond, the staid Mallard family goes on a migration from which misadventures ensue. Release Date: Dec. 22, 2023 Director Talk: “This movie is really relatable, about the family and opening yourself up to discovery of new places, and getting out of your comfort zone.” — Benjamin Renner Chances: Fair. While bright and beautifully rendered, the animated family road trip subgenre is at risk of becoming overly familiar. Yet, you can never underestimate the power of a crowd-pleasing Illumination movie, and the acclaimed director has proved his artistic touch in previous projects.

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Nimona

Directors: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane Released by: Netflix Production Studios: Annapurna Pictures, DNEG Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94% Synopsis: In a futuristic medieval world, a falsely accused knight must join with a shape-shifting creature, ostensibly a mortal enemy, to clear his name. Release Date: June 23, 2023 Director Talk: “The character of Nimona … she’s funny, she’s in your face, she’s not taking any crap … was the cornerstone of this movie.” — Troy Quane The Word: “Nimona is imaginative and boisterous, just like its main character.” — Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times Chances: Very good. Stunning graphic style, highly original storyline and cool, trailblazing characters bode well to flag Oscar’s attention.

Robot Dreams

Director: Pablo Berger Released by: Neon Production Studio: Arcadia Motion Pictures Cast: Ivan Labanda, Esther Solans, José García Tos Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100% Synopsis: A lonely dog builds a robotic best friend, and together they brave the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s. Release Date: May 21, 2023 (Cannes); TBA (U.S.) Director Talk: “In Robot Dreams, there is direct sound: characters laugh, shout, breathe, and we hear doors close. But there’s no text. Tackling writing through images is what I prefer in the creative process, and that was essential for this film.” — Pablo Berger The Word: “A gift for children, but also for adults who love animation.” — Àngel Quintana, Caimán Cuadernos de Cine Chances: Possible. Visibility is the key to breaking through in this year’s crowded indie field. Neon had not announced a release date at press time, but if the distributor launches a strong campaign (like it did for Flee), it could have a mechanical dark horse nominee on its hand.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson Released by: Sony Production Studio: Sony Pictures Animation Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96% Synopsis: Multiverse action ensues when Miles Morales as Spider-Man teams up with Gwen Stacy to universe-hop to combat the powerful villain The Spot. Release Date: June 2, 2023 Box Office: $690 million Director Talk: “The great thing about feature animation is that it’s an iterative process. We’ve made this film probably 40 times.” — Joaquim Dos Santos The Word: “Tempts you to think that Spider-Man was always meant to be animated.” — Matthew Lickona, San Diego Reader Chances: Very good. Everything from its Oscar-nabbing predecessor is back, while the visuals and the emotional and physical perils are all amped even higher.

Trolls Band Together

Director: Walt Dohrn Released by: Universal Production Studio: DreamWorks Animation Cast: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Camila Cabello Synopsis: Trolls Branch and Poppy reunite Branch’s old boy band in order to rescue another band member who has been kidnapped. Release Date: Nov. 17, 2023 Director Talk: “There’s such a rich history of family bands, and this idea of blood harmony we thought was an exciting event as a weapon — the power of family harmony.” — Walt Dohrn Chances: Hard to read now. It’s an audience-pleasing franchise to be sure, but all that glitters may not translate to Oscar gold, especially since the first two Trolls movies didn’t score a Best Animated Feature Oscar nom either.

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Release Date: Nov. 22, 2023 Director Talk: “Fawn [Veerasunthorn] and I both grew up on Disney classics and fell in love with them. There is truly no greater power in the universe than someone with a true wish in their heart.” — Chris Buck Chances: More than decent. In a less competitive year, this re-creation of the classic Disney feature visual style and character dynamics might make it more of a sure bet. The trailer set a new viewership record on the internet, and the studio is putting a lot of 100th-anniversary promotional efforts behind it.

Wish

Directors: Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn Released by: Disney Production Studio: Disney Cast: Ariana DeBose, Chris Pine, Alan Tudyk Synopsis: A teenage girl makes a wish on a star to put a stop to the growing dangers threatening her native homeland, and the star actually works with her to save her land.

Indies and Other Studio Contenders The Inventor

Directors: Jim Capobianco, Pierre-Luc Granjon Released by: Blue Fox Entertainment Production Studio: Foliascope Studio Cast: Stephen Fry, Marion Cotillard, Daisy Ridley Rotten Tomatoes Score: 76% Synopsis: The life and escapades of Leonardo da Vinci in France, presented in stop-motion/2D animation. Release Date: Sept. 15, 2023 Box Office: $306,385 Director Talk: “When thinking about Leonardo da Vinci, I felt the film had to be made using a handcrafted animation style. Stop-motion felt right because it was engineered with armatures and constructed and painted.” — Jim Capobianco The Word: “An engaging and amusing history lesson.” — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter Chances: Possible. It’s charming, but it may struggle to break through to the top.

Leo

Directors: Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel, David Wachtenheim Released by: Netflix Production Studio: Netflix Animation Cast: Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, Cecily Strong Synopsis: A geriatric gradeschool class lizard experiences an end-of-life crisis and transforms into a mentor and therapist for his students. Release Date: Nov. 21, 2023 Director Talk: “Adam is very silly and nonsensical; he’s very underrated as a writer.” — Robert Smigel Chances: Unlikely, even though the title character is original. Adam Sandler and his TV Funhouse posse probably had fun, and the kids watching this probably will, too, but it’s a stretch to see it as Oscar-worthy.

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My Love Affair with Marriage

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken

Director: Signe Baumane Released by: New Europe Film Sales Production Studio: Studio Locomotive Cast: Dagmara Dominczyk, Michele Pawk, Matthew Modine Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85% Synopsis: Goaded by mythological sirens, an introverted young girl named Zelma sets out on a decades-long search for love and marriage, finding it a fraught and bumpy process. Release Date: Oct. 6, 2023 (North America) Director Talk: “For an animated feature film produced independently, to have 30 speaking and singing characters in the film, I didn’t realize until we started it was almost impossible. But we pulled it off.” — Signe Baumane The Word: “Easily one of the most distinctive animated films I’ve seen in quite a while, and it serves as a needed reminder that animation is an art form that can be used for more than family-oriented narratives.” — Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com Chances: Decent. This uniquely stylish, adult-oriented festival fave stands out from the crowd enough to possibly nab the foreign/indie slot on the nomination list.

Director: Kirk DeMicco Released by: Universal Production Studio: DreamWorks Animation Cast: Lana Condor, Toni Collette, Annie Murphy, Jane Fonda Rotten Tomatoes Score: 66% Synopsis: Trying to get along in school is hard enough without secretly being a kraken and having to combat antagonistic mermaids who bear a magical trident that kills krakens. Release Date: June 30, 2023 Box Office: $45.2 million Director Talk: “This is the first female title lead we’ve had in DreamWorks’ history. We wanted Ruby to have an adventure as strong, powerful and dangerous as any of the ones we threw at any of the guys.” — Kirk DeMicco The Word: “[The film] turns into something bigger and better than your average kid’s pic.” — Mariah Eakin, Chicago Reader Chances: Low possibility; despite its solid voice work and slick production, it faces an uphill battle against films with more original stories and more distinctive graphics.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Director: Cal Brunker Released by: Paramount/Nickelodeon Movies Production Studio: Mikros AnimationCast: Mckenna Grace, Taraji P. Henson, Marsai MartinRotten Tomatoes Score: 82% Synopsis: A crash-landing meteor emits crystals that give the PAW Patrol superpowers, which prompts their nemesis, Mayor Humdinger, to try and steal them away. Release Date: Sept. 28, 2023 Box Office: $127.3 million Director Talk: “We [wanted] this to be as exciting as possible for the most number of people without scaring our youngest audience. The feedback we got [showed] we were much more nervous about it then the kids were.” — Cal Brunker The Word: “It won’t win awards, but it is certain to delight its target audience.” — Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News Chances: What he said … though stranger things have happened.

Directors: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic Released by: Universal Production Studios: Illumination/Nintendo Cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day Rotten Tomatoes Score: 59% Synopsis: Plumber brothers Mario and Luigi tumble through a pipe into fantasy lands that are in conflict with each other, which they strive to resolve. Release Date: April 5, 2023 Box Office: $1.36 billion Director Talk: “We really wanted to deliver the movie we never got to see when we were kids.” — Michael Horvath The Word: “Despite lapses into dull and disposable, it’s also a godsend for parents seeking family entertainment for the five-year-old in all of us.” — Peter Travers, ABC News Chances: Slim. Despite it being a monster commercial hit, it is unlikely the brothers will advance to boss level.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Directors: Jeff Rowe, Kyler Spears (co-director) Released by: Paramount Production Studios: Nickelodeon Movies/ Mikros Animation/Cinesite Cast: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon, Ayo Edebiri, Jackie Chan Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96% Synopsis: The origin story for the venerable heroes in a half-shell finds them helping teen April O’Neil to recover stolen technology through which a supervillain plans to mutate every animal in the world. Release Date: Aug. 23, 2023 Box Office: $180.3 million

Director Talk: “The goal was to make a great film, not a great Ninja Turtles film. The fact that it’s the Ninja Turtles … is secondary to the objective of just making something that’s, I think hopefully, moving and entertaining and artistically daring.” — Jeff Rowe The Word: “The rare reboot that harkens back to its franchise origins while presenting something new.” — David Simms, The Atlantic Chances: Possible; reboots and remakes have a harder time proving themselves to Oscar, particularly in such venerable franchises, but don’t count this one out. The movie had lots of fans in the community due to its highly original animation style.

PRESTIGE IMPORTS Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia

Directors: Julien Chheng, Jean-Christophe Roger Released by: GKIDS Production Studios: Folivari, Mélusine, StudioCanal Cast: Andrew Kishino, Ashley Boettcher (English version) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100% Synopsis: Returning to his homeland, once known for its music, Ernest the bear and Celestine the mouse discover music has been banned. In their quest to bring it back, Ernest must confront both his past and the dynamics of their friendship. Release Date: Sept. 1, 2023 (U.S.) Box Office: $4.2 million Director Talk: “We’ve all heard in our lives, ‘That’s just the way it is.’ … The film explores that idea through the child’s ability to decide what job they want to do.” — Julien ChhengThe Word: “A unique joie de vivre courses through A Trip to Gibberitia’s every meticulously composed frame.” — Ross McIndoe, Slant Magazine Chances: Decent; its charming storybook design, 2D animation, humor and appealing message might well allow it to reach for the gold.

The First Slam Dunk

Director: Takehiko Inoue Released by: GKIDS Production Studio: Toei Animation Cast: Paul Castro Jr., Jonah Scott, Aleks Le (English) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100% Synopsis: A high school basketball star dunks his way to the national championship. Release Date: July 28, 2023 (U.S.) Box Office: $151 million Director Talk: “A film has no value unless the audience sees it. A film is truly complete when the audience sees it, when it has been conveyed to each and every one of them.” — Takehiko Inoue The Word: “No movie has so literally reduced basketball to ‘just a game,’ and no movie this side of Hoop Dreams has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.” — David Ehrlich, IndieWire Chances: Possible, but in a year so filled with riches, getting a nom for this manga-inspired sports film would mean sinking a full-court shot.

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Four Souls of Coyote

Director: Áron Gauder Production Studio: Cinemon Entertainment Cast: Karin Anglin, Clé Bennett, John Eric Bentley (English) Synopsis: The elder of a Native American village tells stories of creation in the wake of the encroachment of modern industrial technology. Box Office: $64,000 Director Talk: “We wanted to show the aspects of creation and existence that are less known to Europeans … the film’s message aims to be as inclusive as possible, inviting all of creation into the circle of dialogue of cooperation.” — Áron Gauder The Word: “Using a striking blend of 2D and 3D animation and a strong graphic style … the film is a timely reminder of the importance of living harmoniously with the natural world.” — Wendy Ide, Screen International Chances: Iffy. The fact that this Annecy winner has already been submitted as Hungary’s official entry in Oscar’s International Feature race could complicate a Best Animated Feature nom.

Suzume

Director: Makoto Shinkai Released by: Crunchyroll, Sony Pictures Releasing Production Studio: CoMix Wave Films Cast: Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96% Synopsis: Teenage Suzume encounters a young man searching for mysterious doors that prove to be destructive portals. Release Date: April 14, 2023 (limited U.S. release) Box Office: $174 million Director Talk: “I was first thinking about a road movie and adventure film that examines Japan in its current state … these unlivable locales caused by either disaster or population decline that I thought would make for a good backdrop.” — Makoto Shinkai The Word: “A whirlwind of tentacled monsters, interdimensional portals and talking chairs, but the film is at its strongest when grounded in everyday life.” — Jessica Kiang, Sight & Sound Chances: Possible, if voters aren’t suffering from anime-teenage-girl-facing-otherworldly-threat fatigue.

The Peasants

Directors: DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman Released by: Sony Pictures Classics Production Studio: BreakThru Films Cast: Kamila Urzędowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Mirosław Baka Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100% Synopsis: A young woman in early 20th century Poland is being forced into a loveless marriage with an older man, whose son she really loves. Release Date: TBD Director Talk: “I read [the 1905 source novel] in 2018 and realized the issues were the same we have today, and we haven’t moved on from the time of The Peasants.” — Hugh Welchman The Word: “One of the most impressive animated films of the year by far.” — Ross Bonaime, Collider Chances: Wildcard. Adult, visually stunning and emotionally resonant, the film is not animated in the traditional sense, but oil-painted live action. But so was 2017’s Loving Vincent, and that scored a nom. Also Poland’s entry in the International Feature category.

They Shot the Piano Player

Directors: Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal Released by: Sony Pictures Classics Production Studio: Fernando Trueba PC Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Roberta Wallach, Tony Ramos Rotten Tomatoes Score: 56% Synopsis: A young journalist goes on a quest to find out what happened to real-life musician Francisco Tenório Júnior, who vanished in 1976 during political upheaval in Argentina. Release Date: Sept. 6, 2023 (Telluride Film Festival) Director Talk: “I did an animation because I realized if I was doing a documentary, it was going to be another documentary about a missing guy, a killed guy, and I thought that’s not fair to him … I want people to see him alive.” — Fernando Trueba The Word: “It offers greater rewards on a scene-by-scene basis than it does with any strong payoff to a narrative buildup.” — Chris Willman, Variety Chances: Doubtful. Although it plays in unique musical ways with the medium, that might not be enough to break through (and the answer to the central question is rather given away in the title).

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The Canterville Ghost

Titina

Director: Kajsa Næss Released by: Les Films du losange Production Studios: Mikrofilm, Vivi Film Cast: Jan Gunnar Røise, Kåre Conradi, Anne Marit Jacobsen Synopsis: Based on a true story, a rivalry explodes between two intrepid Norwegian explorers who take an airship to the unexplored North Pole with a small, observant terrier named Titina. Release Date: Oct. 21, 2022 (Norway); TBD (U.S.) Box Office: $462,000 Director Talk: “For Norwegians, if you bring dogs to the polar area, they have to be big, strong dogs … and this little, tiny lap dog came along. It adds a bit of fun to the heroic history.” — Kajsa Næss The Word: “The Norwegian film is charming and perfect to familiarize us with this small piece of history [but] has its moments of fantasy and tends to simplify the plot a lot when convenient.” — Mariló Delgado, Espinof Chances: The clean, inspired design is quite memorable and the canine hero is appealing, but this is already a crowded award season, and the indie spot may be claimed by higher-visibility films like Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Director: Pierre Földes Released by: Zeitgeist Films Production Studios: Miyu Productions, Cinemadefacto Cast: Amaury de Cravencour, Mathilde Auneveux, Arnaud Maillard Rotten Tomatoes Score: 78% Synopsis: Based on stories by Haruki Murakami, this unusual movie chronicles how a giant talking frog, a lost cat and a tsunami help a bank employee, his wife and a schizophrenic accountant save Tokyo from disaster. Release Date: June 15, 2022 (Annecy Festival, France), April 14, 2023 (U.S. limited) Box Office: $66,612 Director Talk: “Accidents happen when you’re trying to go someplace or do something specific. I shaped the film in this way, as I saw the story bursting out of the maze I had created — as I saw characters, linking one with another, and as I saw a common timeline make its way little-by-little through stories that didn’t know they were connected.” — Pierre Földes The Word: “Despite its original, unusual premise, the movie can’t shake the sense that it is multiple short stories stitched together.” — Claire Shaffer, The New York Times Chances: As slim as a Giacometti.

Perlimps

Directors: Kim Burdon, Robert Chandler Released by: Blue Fox Ent., Shout! Studios Production Studios: Space Age Films, Toonz Media Cast: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, Emily Carey Rotten Tomatoes Score: 67% Synopsis: This new adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story follows an American family who moves into a British estate haunted by a ghost. Release Date: Sept. 22, 2023 (U.K.), Oct. 23, 2023 (U.S.) Box Office: $442,621 (U.K.) Director Talk: “In the story, it would have been easier to ridicule the Americans or the English aristocracy, but Wilde never ridicules them. We wanted a similar tone running through our film … I’m so proud of what we were all able to achieve, everybody pulling together to make our Fabergé Egg of a film. (I like to think of it as a Fabergé Egg because it’s beautiful, but a little strange.)” — Director Robert Chandler The Word: “Here’s a sprightly and good-natured pre-Halloween animation. The visuals are not exactly cutting edge, but the storytelling has bounce and there’s gusto in the vocal talents.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian Chances: Sadly, the movie is caught in the avalanche of year-end releases by big studios. There are simply too many original titles trying to get the attention of Academy voters in 2023

Directory: Alê Abreu Released by: Adult Swim, Sony Pictures TV Production Studios: Buriti Filmes, Globo Filmes, Sony Pictures International Cast: Lorenzo Tarantelli, Giulia Benite, Stenio Garcia Synopsis: Two secret agents working for enemy kingdoms are dispatched to the Enchanted Forest, but they realize they’re on the same mission to save Perlimps from destructive giants. Release Date: June 16, 2022 (Annecy Festival, France), May 4, 2023 (U.S. TV) Box Office: $147,125 Director Talk: “With this film I was guided mainly by color, a very powerful tool that brings an important layer to the adventure and is key to the understanding of the film. Childhood is represented in the film as a physical space where everything is possible, generating an incredible power of transformation through hope.” — Alê Abreu Chances: Although Abreu’s movie is a real visual treat and beautifully crafted, there are too many other more visible and engaging international contenders at play this year.

Unicorn Wars

Director: Alberto Vázquez Released by: GKIDS Production Studios: UniKo, Abano Productions, Autour de Minuit Cast: Jon Goiri, Joione Insausti, Ramon Barea Rotten Tomatoes Score: 84% Synopsis: War-hungry teddy bears journey from bootcamp to the psychelic terrors of the Magic Forest to hunt down their enemies, the unicorns. Release Date: June 15, 2023 (Annecy Festival, France), March 10, 2023 (U.S.) Box Office: $28,809 Director Talk: “I think I have made the film I wanted to make. Unicorn Wars is actually an anti-war film that talks about the absurd origin of all wars. Unfortunately, it is very topical now, because when we started this project we never thought we would have the current conflict in Europe.” — Alberto Vázquez The Word: “Even this early in the year, it seems unfathomable that another release could dethrone Unicorn Wars as the most uncompromisingly audacious animated film of 2023.” — Carlos Aguilar, Los Angeles Times Chances: These Teddy Bears are not cuddly enough to find a way to Academy voters’ hearts. ◆

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The Long List Before the Shortlist Your Guide to This Year’s Award Season Shorts

iguring out the very many animated shorts that will qualify to land on the Oscar shortlist each year is about as difficult as the most challenging brainteasers. Nevertheless, we’ve done it again: We have compiled a list of the shorts that have won a qualifying prize at one of the world’s top film festivals or booked theatrical screening engagements to qualify for consideration. (The official Oscar shortlist of 15 films will be announced on December 21.) Our hats off to all the creators of these innovative, challenging and artistic shorts for making it to this first round! After all, being considered for a shortlist is a great achievement in its own right!

27 France, Hungary Director: Flóra Anna Buda Produced by: Pierre Baussaron, Péter Benjámin Lukács, Laure Goasguen, Gábor Osváth, Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Boddah, Miyu Productions Synopsis: Alice is 27 years old today. Even though she is suffocating a bit, she still lives with her parents and tends to live in her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life. After a psychedelic party on a factory roof, she has a serious drunken bike accident. Qualifying Wins: Annecy International Animation Film Festival (Cristal for a Short Film), Cannes (Palme d’Or – Best Short Film), Melbourne International Film Festival (Best Animation Short Film), Sarajevo Film Festival (Heart of Sarajevo for the Best Short Film)

All My Scars Vanish in the Wind

eternal bond that heals and hurts, and that is perpetuated when Daughter becomes a mother. Qualifying Win: Animayo (Best Animated Short Film in Spanish)

Armat Switzerland Director: Élodie Dermange Produced by: Nicolas Burlet, Nadasdy Film, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse Synopsis: Élodie tries to find out more about her family’s Armenian origins. She interviews her father, her uncle, her great aunt, and discovers a harsh history where violence and the inability to express love are passed down from generation to generation. Qualifying Wins: Animator International Animated Film Festival (Grand Jury Prize – The Golden Pegasus), Fest Anča International Animation Festival (Best Animated Short)

Colombia Directors: Angélica Restrepo, Carlos Velandia Produced by: Angélica Restrepo, Carlos Velandia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia Synopsis: Between intrusive memories and sought-after memories, a woman answers a disconcerting call from the depths of her being. Qualifying Wins: Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film (ZINEBI Grand Prize: International Short Film Competition), Encounters Film Festival (Animated Encounters Grand Prix)

Arrest in Flight

Amarradas

Germany, France Director: Nikita Diakur Produced by: Nikita Diakur, Miyu Productions Synopsis: A digital avatar learns to move, walk and talk. Inspirational quotes from the internet drive him forward, and his creators capture the process in an improvised documentary.

Spain Director: Carmen Córdoba Produced by: Carmen Córdoba, La Chula Films, Comunidad de Madrid, Gobierno de España, Movistar Plus+ Synopsis: Mother and Daughter are roped for life by an

Switzerland Director: Adrian Flury Produced by: Adrian Flury Synopsis: This experiment in film sets the stage for a hitherto unseen magical life form. The film focuses on the non-obvious character of movement when transferred to an alien object thus endowed with the life derived from the movement’s true to life source. Qualifying Wins: Ann Arbor Film Festival (Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film)

Backflip

Qualifying Win: German Short Film Award (Animated Film 1 min.–30 min.)

The Brave Locomotive U.S. Director: Andrew Chesworth Produced by: Andrew Chesworth Synopsis: An Old West musical tale with 1940s flair about a mighty little train facing harrowing disaster. Qualifying Win: LA Shorts Fest (Best Animation)

The Bridge Poland Director: Izumi Yoshida Produced by: Wojciech Leszczynski, Anna Mroczek, Justyna Rucinska, EC1 Lódz – Miasto Kultury, EJT Labo, Likaon, WJTeam Synopsis: Inspired by events of the year 1920 that brought Poland and Japan closer, the story is told from a 10-yearold boy’s perspective, showing the history of orphans who lost their families and had to rush into manhood to fight for their lives. Qualifying Win: Short Shorts Film Festival (Best Short – Animation)

By Water U.S., Singapore Director: Iyabo Kwayana Produced by: Chris Hastings, Maori Karmel Holmes, Nevo Shinaar Synopsis: An unlikely hero’s journey into his own memories becomes a vehicle for reconciliation and healing for himself and his sibling. Qualifying Win: San Francisco International Film Festival (Golden Gate Award Animated Short)

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Carl’s Date

Crab

U.S. Director: Bob Peterson Produced by: Kim Collins, Pixar Synopsis: Carl Fredricksen reluctantly agrees to go on a date with a lady friend, but admittedly has no idea how dating works these days. Ever the helpful friend, Dug steps in to calm Carl’s pre-date jitters and offer some tried-and-true tips for making friends — if you’re a dog. Qualified by exhibition

Poland Director: Piotr Chmielewski Produced by: Wojciech Leszczynski Synopsis: Animals are our silent companions; they have witnessed the greatest achievements and most horrible failures of humankind. They live their lives parallel to ours. Usually our victory means death for them, but there are moments where the situation changes… Qualifying Win: Edmonton International Film Festival (Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short)

– L’École de la 3D Synopsis: At the moment of alignment, of total eclipse, humanity will vanish — this was the message sent by the Sun and the Moon. The World Council decides to send his best negotiator to stop the end of the world. Qualifying Win: Siggraph (Best in Show)

Daffy in Wackyland

Dog Apartment / Koerkorter

U.S. Director: Max Winston Produced by: Warner Bros. Animation Synopsis: Daffy goes to Wackyland and chases Gogo Dodo in search of a simple meal. In the process, he comes across strange and fantastical worlds in his journey. Qualified by exhibition

Estonia Director: Priit Tender Produced by: Kerdi Oengo, OÜ Nukufilm Synopsis: Misfortune exiles a ballet dancer named Sergei to a suburban kolhoz, where he endures mundane fights against routine, domestic animals and alcohol. Qualifying Wins: In the Palace International Short Film Festival (Best Animation, International Competition), Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film (Grand Prix International Competition)

The City / La ciudad Mexico Directors: Camilla Uboldi, Andreas Papacostas Produced by: Lucía Cavalchini, Melissa Meléndez, César Moheno Plá, Alejandro García, Flare Animation, Fedora Productions Synopsis: An extraordinary journey through the (un) wonders of a Mexican megalopolis. Qualifying Win: Morelia International Film Festival (Ojo for Best Mexican Animated Short Film)

Colour! U.K., Ireland Director: Britt Bailey Produced by: Italic Pig, Northern Ireland Screen, BFI Network Synopsis: On her first day at a new school, one vibrant little girl is constantly clashing with the crowd. Soon enough, all she wants is to blend in with the background. Can she learn to embrace herself? Or does she risk fading away entirely? Qualifying Win: Animation Dingle (Best Irish Professional Short)

The Day I Became a Bird U.K. Director: Andrew Ruhemann Produced by: Passion Pictures Synopsis: Based on a book written by Chabbert Ingrid and illustrated by Guridi, the short centers on a young boy who comes up with an unusual plan to win the heart of a girl who has only has eyes for birds. Qualified by exhibition

The Diplomacy of the Eclipse / La diplomatie de l’éclipse France Directors: César Luton, Axel Mechin, Achille Pasquier, Clémence Bailly, Selim Lallaoui Produced by: MoPA

Doubt Czech Republic Director: Adela Križovenská Synopsis: Doubt is a short animated essay, which, through voices of four different authors from various fields of art, describes all stages of creative process. Qualifying Win: Fest Anča International Animation Festival (Best Slovak Animated Short)

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Drijf

Flesh of God / Carne de Dios

Belgium Director: Levi Stoops Produced by: Lunanime Bvba, Jeroen Derycke Synopsis: Adrift on the open sea, two people fight a bloody battle for their survival and that of their relationship. Qualifying Win: Annecy International Animation Film Festival (Jury Award)

Argentina Director: Patricio Plaza Produced by: Ojo Raro, Fedora Productions Synopsis: Latin America, 17th century: Amidst the mountains, a Spanish Friar is taken by his indigenous disciple to the house of an old female shaman to cure his strange illness. Qualifying Wins: Chilemonos International Animation Festival (Best Latin American Animation Short Film), Guadalajara International Film Festival (Rigo Mora Award for Best International Animated Short Film)

Electra Czech Republic, France, Slovakia Director: Daria Kashcheeva Produced by: Zuzana Křivková, Martin Vandas, MAUR Film, FAMU International, Papy3D Productions, Artichoke Film Production Synopsis: Electra rethinks her 10th birthday, mixing memories with dreams and hidden fantasies in this powerful exploration of early sexual abuse. Qualifying Win: Toronto International Film Festival (Best Short Film)

Epicenter South Korea Director: Heeyoon Hahm Produced by: Lithium Synopsis: An old man dreams about the Bukhansan Mountain perpetually covered with snow, while a young woman sees the mountain grows taller after an earthquake. Slowly, the worlds of fantasy and reality collide, exposing an invisible universe. Qualifying Win: Santa Barbara International Film Festival (Bruce Corwin Award – Best Animation Short Film)

fur U.S. Director: Zhen Li Produced by: Zhen Li Synopsis: When the awkward feelings of a crush are stuck in you for too long, they turn wet and furry. Qualifying Win: Seattle International Film Festival (Grand Jury Prize Short Animation)

ca Castellar Produced by: Diego Felipe Cortés Synopsis: Gloria moves between thoughts and the space of the bathroom; inside, something grows that cannot be contained. Qualifying Win: Bogoshorts (Best Animation Short Film – National Competition)

Harvey Canada, France Director: Janice Nadeau Produced by: Marc Bertrand, NFB Synopsis: Told through the eyes of a child with an overflowing imagination, Harvey is a poetic, luminous look at bereavement and coping with the loss of a parent. Qualified by exhibition

Headprickles

Turkey Director: Önder Menken Produced by: Anadolu Üniversitesi Synopsis: A story about the games played around the world, leaving the future of humanity in the dark. Qualifying Win: Izmir International Short Film Festival (Best National Short Animation)

Poland Director: Katarzyna Miechowicz Produced by: Agata Golańska, Polish National Film School In Łódź Synopsis: The film consists of over a dozen animated epigrams connected by the motif of being trapped in a loop of absurdity. In a colorful labyrinth of observations, the protagonists try to make sense of nonsense — or stay mindlessly within it. Qualifying Win: Guanajuato International Film Festival (Best Short Animation)

Gloria

Home of the Heart / À cœur perdu

Colombia Directors: Daniela Briceño Bello, Diego Felipe Cortés, Blan-

France Director: Sarah Saidan

Game / Oyun

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Produced by: Jérôme Barthélemy, Camille Condemi, Daniel Sauvage, Caïmans Productions Synopsis: Omid, an Iranian immigrant now living in France, has a fateful encounter that takes his breath and heart away. Or maybe he left it behind in his beloved homeland. Qualifying Win: New York International Children’s Film Festival (Jury Award Animated Short)

Hospes U.S. Director: Stephanie J. Williams Produced by: Stephanie J. Williams Synopsis: Performing a choreography of resistance, a scaffolded amalgam of body pieces tries to remain whole in an environment programmed to disassemble it. A film about appearing “racially ambiguous.” Qualifying Win: New Orleans Film Festival (Helen Hill Award for Animated Short)

Hot Dogs! U.S. Director: Frank Volk Synopsis: A hot dog man has a crisis of faith. Qualifying Win: Slamdance Film Festival (Jury Award for Animation Short)

The House of Loss Japan, South Korea Director: Jeon Jinkyu Produced by: Yamamura Koji Synopsis: The elderly at the nursing home

have their heads shaved. The protagonist who works there sees them but can’t read their expressions. Qualifying Win: Cinequest Film Festival (Best Animated Short Film)

Howl if You Love Me Director: John R. Dilworth Produced by: Stretch Films Synopsis: This new short from the beloved creator of Courage the Cowardly Dog is a romantic horror comedy about a man named Jim whose girlfriend Jane is a werewolf. When Jane is put in danger, Jim is forced to make a life-transforming decision. Qualified by exhibition

A Kind of Testament France Director: Stephen Vuillemin Produced by: Remembers Synopsis: A young woman comes across animations on the internet that have clearly been created from her private selfies. A stranger with the same name confesses to identity theft. But death is quicker than the answer to the question: “Why?” Qualifying Win: Go Short International Short Film Festival Nijmegen (Best European Short Animation Film)

Letter to a Pig France, Israel Director: Tal Kantor Produced by: Pierre Baussaron, Amit R. Gicelter, Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Miyu Productions, The

I’m Hip U.S. Director: John Musker Produced by: John Musker Synopsis: The world doesn’t quite agree with a self-absorbed cat who proclaims his “hipness” to the world in a jazzy song and dance. Qualified by exhibition

Hive Studio Synopsis: A Holocaust survivor writes a “thank you” letter, after the war, to the pig that saved his life. Following his testimony in the classroom, a young schoolgirl dreams a dark version of his story. Qualifying Win: Anima (Grand Prix Anima for Best International Short Film)

It’s a Gray, Gray World

Little Smasher / Petit cogneur

Iran Director: Seyed Mohsen Pourmohseni Shakib Produced by: Seyed Mohsen Pourmohseni Shakib Synopsis: In a completely gray world, people are terrified when the colorful identity of a conservative young man is accidentally revealed by a playful boy. Qualifying Win: Cleveland International Film Festival (Best Animated Short Jury Award)

France Director: Gilles Cuvelier Produced by: Papy3D Productions Synopsis: Poetic testimony of a family crossing time and space to the rhythm of the uncontrollable crises of the youngest. Qualifying Win: Interfilm International Short Film Festival Berlin (Best Animation, International Competition)

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Mariupol. A Hundred Nights

Mushka

Oneluv

Ukraine, Germany Director: Sofiia Melnyk Produced by: Andrii Palatnyi (Gogol Fest) Synopsis: In Mariupol, Ukraine, a little girl is woken up on February 24 by the air alert and tries to find someone living in the burning city. Qualifying Win: Krakow Film Festival (Silver Dragon for Best Short Animated Film)

U.S. Director: Andreas Deja Produced by: Andreas Deja, Roger Viloria, Mushka Productions Synopsis: A story of love and sacrifice set in Ukraine. A nine-year-old girl raises a young tiger cub, but as the cub grows up, trouble ensues. Qualified by exhibition

Russia Director: Varya Yakovleva Produced by: Studio SHAR Synopsis: Strangers come to visit the home of a young couple. Taking advantage of the hospitality of the hosts, the unexpected guests push the couple to do rash things, which leads to the destruction of the established order and harmony within the family. Qualifying Win: Animafest Zagreb (Grand Prix – Best Short Film of the Festival)

Misaligned Latvia, Poland

Ninety-five Senses

Director: Marta Magnuska Produced by: Piotr Szczepanowicz, Grzegorz Wacławek, Animoon Synopsis: Scenes of a marriage as a minimalist, vibrating black-and-white animation: a woman and a man in a room. A fly rotates around the lightbulb and the couple around themselves. Qualifying Win: DOK Leipzig (Golden Dove – International Competition Short Animated Film)

U.S. Directors: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess Produced by: Miles David Romney, Tori A. Baker Synopsis: An ode to the body’s five senses delivered by a man with little time left to enjoy them. Qualifying Win: Florida Film Festival (Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short)

Miserable Miracle

Once Upon a Studio

France, Japan, Canada Director: Ryo Orikasa Produced by: Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Pierre Baussaron, Jelena Popovic, Robert McLaughlin, Michael Fukushima, Nobuaki Doi, Miyu Productions, NFB, New Deer Synopsis: An animated adaptation from Misérable Miracle by Henri Michaux (1956), on his experiences with mescaline. Qualifying Win: Ottawa International Animation Festival (Best Independent Short)

U.S. Directors: Dan Abraham, Trent Correy Produced by: Yvett Merino, Brad Simonsen, Walt Disney Animation Studios Synopsis: An all-star ensemble of beloved characters from Walt Disney Animation Studios assembles to take a group photo in honor of The Walt Disney Company’s 100th anniversary — making for a joyful, entertaining and emotional reunion. Qualified by exhibition

Our Uniform Iran Director and Producer: Yegane Moghaddam Synopsis: An Iranian girl unfolds her school memories through the wrinkles and fabrics of her old uniform. She admits that she’s nothing but a “female” and explores the roots of this idea in her school years. Qualifying Win: Animayo (Grand Jury Prize)

Pacemaker U.K. Directors: Christopher Lennertz, Brian Vincent Rhodes Produced by: Alex Bedford, Magdiela Hermida Duhamel, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Ben Parkin, A Running Commentary Synopsis: When a lonely widower who needs a pacemaker to save his life accepts his grandson’s identity and opens his heart to him, he receives a second opportunity at true love. Qualified by exhibition

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Pachyderm France Director: Stephanié Clement Produced by: TNZPV Productions Synopsis: Like every summer, Louise stays at her grandparents’ in the countryside for a few days during the holidays. It will snow at the height of summer and a monster is going to die. Qualifying Wins: Foyle Film Festival (Best Animated Short Film), Manchester Animation Festival (Best Short Film)

Pete

Questbound: Forbidden Ventures of the Undead Soul Netherlands Directors: Owen Buckley, Alexander Bierling Synopsis: An ancient, evil creature misreads the intentions of a quest-bound knight and ends up flirting with a married man. Qualifying Win: Kaboom Animation Festival (Best Dutch Short Film)

U.S.

The Record

Director: Bret “Brook” Parker Produced by: Jake Kaplan Synopsis: A story about gender identity, Little League Baseball, the people who inspire change by trying to be themselves and the superheroes who allow that change to happen. Qualified by exhibition

Switzerland Director: Jonathan Laskar Produced by: Sophie Laskar-Haller, Punched Paper Films Synopsis: A traveler gives an antiques dealer a magic vinyl record: “It reads your mind and plays your lost memories.” Obsessed by this endless record, he listens to it again and again. Qualifying Win: RiverRun International Film Festival (Best Animated Short) and qualified by exhibition

Pina Belgium, France Directors: Jérémy Depuydt, Gieseppe Accardo Produced by: Lucas Tothe, Maxime Feyers, François-Xavier Willems Synopsis: In the 19th century, in a Sicilian countryside village, the young Pina holds the power to regenerate the land. With each harvest, the village is prey to shameless mafia looting. Qualifying Win: Flickerfest International Short Film Festival (Yoram Gross Award for Best International Animation)

Red Ears / Das Rotohr Germany Director: Paul Drey Produced by: Max Breuer, Nils Gustenhofen Synopsis: Thirteen years after his civil service in a hospital in Thiès, Senegal, Paul challenges his memories and traumas. With old video footage, interviews and animations, he questions his role as a volunteer within the German system of development aid. Qualifying Win: Tampere Film Festival (International Competition Grand Prix)

Remember How I Used to Ride a White Horse / Sjeti se kako sam jahala bijelog konja Croatia Directors: Ivana Bošnjak Volda, Thomas Johnson Volda Produced by: Igor Grubić, Kreativni sindikat Synopsis: Time continuously elapses, apathy can trap consciousness into a loop. Escaping this stagnation, one can discover the true beauty of existence. Qualifying Win: VIS Vienna Shorts Festival (Jury Prize – Animation)

Reprise Switzerland Directors: Saskia Bulletti, Carine Chrast, Livia Neuenschwander, Leance Volschenk Produced by: Gerd Gockell, Jürgen Haas, HSLU Studienbereich BA Animation Hochschule Luzern, Design & Kunst Synopsis: A young girl navigates her daily life with her family and stepfather, the fox. The girl seems strangely cautious of the friendly fox. It is only when they are alone that the fox becomes intrusive and the girl’s situation becomes clear. Qualifying Win: Warsaw Film Festival (Best Animated Short Film)

Rest in Piece France, Germany Director: Antoine Antabi Produced by: Katharina Weser, Georg Neubert, Laure Dahout, Reynard Films CONTINUED ON PAGE 68

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Synopsis: A starving migrant man resorts to eating the objects he has packed for the journey. The monstrous effects give him the strength to carry on through a scorching desert. Qualifying Win: Atlanta Film Festival (Best Animated Short Film)

Rosemary A.D. (After Dad) U.S. Director: Ethan Barrett Produced by: Tiffany Barrett Synopsis: Would my daughter be better off without me? The question swims around a father’s mind as he cradles his newborn, in this darkly funny and poignant animated tale. Qualifying Wins: Austin Film Festival (Animated Short Jury Award), Cairo International Film Festival (Youssef Chahine Award for Best Short Film), Heartland Film: Indy Shorts International Film Festival (Grand Prize for Animated Short), St. Louis International Film Festival (Best Animated Short)

Qualifying Win: Rhode Island International Film Festival (Best Short Animation)

Skinned / Écorchée France Director: Joachim Hérissé Produced by: Komadoli Studio Synopsis: In an old building, lost in the middle of the swamp, live Siamese twins connected at one leg. At night, the Skinned has terrifying nightmares in which she sees her sister’s flesh covering her own body. Qualifying Win: Kaboom Animation Festival (Best Short Film), Odense International Film Festival (H.C. Andersen International Award), Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia (Best Animated Short Film)

The Smeds and the Smoos The U.K. Directed by: Samantha Cutler, Daniel Snaddon Produced by: Barney Goodland, Martin Pope, Magic Light Pictures, BBC One,

Scale Belgium, U.K., France, Czech Republic Director: Joseph Pierce Produced by: Helene Mitjavile, Bridge Way Films, Endorfilm, Melocoton Films, OZÙ Productions Synopsis: Driving along the motorway, Will loses his sense of scale. As his condition deepens, he struggles to unpick the sequence of events that led to this predicament, before he’s lost forever. Qualified by exhibition

ZDF Synopsis: Based on the children’s book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, this tale of forbidden love centers on two young creatures from warring families who flee to a distant planet to stay together. Featuring Sally Hawkins, Bill Bailey, Ashna Rabheru, Rob Brydon. Qualified by exhibition

Smoke / Humo Mexico, U.S. Director: Rita Basulto Produced by: 3rd Street Video, Mindsoup Entertainment, Outik Anima-

Search for the Human France Directors: Mélina Ienco, Lucie Juric, Caroline Leibel, Faustine Merle, Claire Pellet Produced by: Cécile Blondel Synopsis: In a fantasy world, a griffin embraces his fate and goes on an epic journey to find a legendary creature: The Human.

Director: Martine Syms Produced by: Rocket Caleshu, Gabrielle Datau Synopsis: Digital avatar Kita, who acts as cultural commentator, speaks to questions of consciousness within the systems of race, capitalism and technology. Qualifying Win: Athens International Film and Video Festival (Best Animation)

Starling U.S. Director: Mitra Shahidi Produced by: Jessica Heidt, Mona Productions Synopsis: Starling, the spirit of a mischievous little girl, shoots down from the heavens to spend her birthday with her family. Qualifying Win: Tribeca Film Festival (Best Animated Short)

Sunflower Field U.S., Ukraine Director: Polina Buchak Produced by: Polina Buchak, Camila Grimaldi, Honto 88, Fazed Films Synopsis: Under the shadowy threat of war, a young Ukrainian girl awaits a call from her father and, as day turns into night, sinks into a dreamscape from which she must find her way home. Qualifying Win: Woodstock Film Festival (Best Animated Short)

Swing to the Moon

tion Synopsis: A boy, Daniel, travels by train towards a dark destination known as the smokehouse. Qualifying Win: HollyShorts Film Festival (Best Animation Award)

Soliloquy U.S.

France Directors: Marie Bordessoule, Adriana Bouissie, Nadine De Boer, Elisa Drique, Chloé Luau, Vincent Levrero, Solenne CONTINUED ON PAGE 70

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Moreau Produced by: ESMA CG & FX School Synopsis: Living in the forest, little spider Temi dreams of catching the Moon. For that, she will do anything. Qualifying Win: DeadCenter Film Festival (Best Short Animation)

Teacups Australia Directors: Alec Green, Finbar Watson Produced by: Alan Holly, Alec Green, Finbar Watson, Carla Vulpiani Synopsis: Encapsulates the legacy of Don Ritchie, who for almost half a century approached people contemplating suicide at the edge of a cliff near his home. Qualifying Win: Sydney Film Festival (Yoram Gross Animation Award)

Tomato Kitchen China Director: Junyi Xiao Produced by: Junyi Xiao Synopsis: An accident interrupted Lee’s dinner with his colleagues. The dark truth of the Tomato Kitchen, along with Lee’s hidden past, were revealed by this unexpected incident. Qualifying Win: Chilemonos International Animation Festival (Best International Animation Short Film)

Trace / Sleda Bulgaria Director: Asparuh Petrov Synopsis: A young man is trying to hold his life and career together. When he learns that his wife is pregnant, everything collapses. He enters the dark space of his fears, where he is confronted by memories of his childhood. Qualifying Win: Lebu International Film Festival (Best Short Film, International Animation)

Way Better Lithuania Director: Skirmanta Jakaitė Produced by: Agnė Adomėnė, Art Shot Synopsis: A man is waiting for a test result. He expects the worst, but hopes for the best. Distressed and afraid, he spends a week in a limbo of his own creation, dreading the things that haven’t happened yet. Qualifying Win: Palm Springs International ShortFest (Best Animation Short)

We Are Here U.S. Directors: Doménica Castro, Constanza Castro Produced by: Doménica Castro, Constanza Castro Synopsis: What is it like to walk this land in the shoes of an immigrant under 30? Reflections of young adults who immigrated to the United States as children remind us that beyond citizenship, there is a human. Qualifying Win: New Hampshire Film Festival (Shorts Jury Award, Animation)

Welcome to Texas U.S. Director: Mike Corey Produced by: Mike Corey Synopsis: In January of 2022, with the threat of overturning Roe v. Wade looming, Mike Corey started work on this project, which personalizes the traumatic impact the loss of healthcare for women poses. Qualified by exhibition

Well Wishes My Love, Your Love Malaysia, Sweden Director: Gabriel Gabriel Garble Synopsis: Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss,

a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. Qualifying Win: Uppsala International Short Film Festival (Best Swedish Short Film)

Worry World Ireland Director: Jessica Patterson Produced by: Shauna Cullen, JAM Media Synopsis: A young factory worker dreams of escape from a world where one’s every thought is on display. Qualifying Win: Galway Film Fleadh (James Horgan Award for the Best Animation Short)

Zima Poland Directors: Tomek Popakul, Kasumi Ozeki Produced by: Marcin Podolec, Wiktoria Podolec (Yellow Tapir Films) Synopsis: Anka loves cats. And Jesus. In a winter silence, the lagoon freezes and the unspoken resurfaces like crack on ice. Qualifying Win: Krakow Film Festival (Golden Dragon for Best Short Film)

Dora and the Fantastical Creatures U.S. Directed by: William Mata Produced by: Nickelodeon Synopsis: Nickelodeon’s famous explorer and her monkey friend Boots embark on an incredible adventure to the land of alebrijes, the most magical creatures in the rainforest. Qualified by exhibition ◆ Compiled by Gillian Glover, with assistance from Benoit Berthe Siward.

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Drawn to Big Laughs Picture This! offers a hilarious mix of stand-up comedy and speedy animation.

S K E TC H CO M E DY: From Left, Sam Varela, Mike L. Mayfield, Mike Hollingsworth and Brandie Posey mix stand-up comedy with fast artistry in their popular Picture This! performances.

e all know that animation and humor go hand in hand. However, marrying the fine art of improv comedy with live art by animation pros can create a whole new kind of performance magic. Just ask Brandie Posey and partner Sam Varela, who along with Emmy-nominated animation director Mike Hollingsworth (BoJack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie) and Mike L. Mayfield (The Midnight Gospel, Big Mouth), have been the masterminds behind the live show Picture This! for over a decade. Stand-up comedy scene veterans Posey and Varela first came up with the idea of Picture This! because they wanted to create a project where animators and comedians worked together on stage. As Posey recalls, “There used to be a show where people would get drawn during their sets, and I thought that the concept could be taken a lot farther with the right changes. Sam had some great insights I wouldn’t have thought of from the producing side, so we set a date to try it out and brought in some artist friends to draw. After the first show, we knew we had something special on our hands.”

Spontaneous Combustion As they started to workshop the show, they began working regularly with toon pros Mayfield and Hollingsworth. “Once the four of us joined forces, we started pushing ourselves to take the show on the road to festivals and try to grow the show,” says Varela. “We had no idea we’d still be doing this show almost 13 years later on two coasts, having survived a TV pilot, COVID lockdown and the competitive live show scenes of both L.A. and New York.” Hollingsworth says he loves the way the show mixes the adrenaline rush of a live comedy show with the visual punch of a great cartoon. “To animators, I describe Picture This! as the Warner Bros. cartoon Duck Amuck, but in real life,” he says. “The relationship between Daffy Duck and the animator in that classic cartoon is recreated when the Picture This! stand-up comic is teamed with the Picture This! artist in front of a live audience.” Posey and Varela love the way each edition of their show can take both the audiences and the performers in wild and new directions. “My favorite moment in a show is watching a comedian who has told a joke a hundred times get surprised and delighted at a fresh direction that the joke ends up going,” says Posey.

Varela agrees, “I love seeing comedians and artists in awe of each other as they witness each other’s talent. Normally these creatives don’t get to interact much in the TV world, so it’s really cool to kind of play matchmaker and see people that connect at our show go on to work together in the future.” Picture This! has allowed Posey and Varela to work side by side with some of their childhood animation heroes. “I was a weird kid. I really resented when my friends started watching live-action TV! Batman: The Animated Series is a masterpiece. My stand-up comedy heroes are Kyle Kinane, Maria Bamford, Billy Connolly and Eddie Pepitone. I couldn’t get enough of Strangers With Candy and the Upright Citizens Brigade TV show.” “One of the coolest parts of Picture This! is that I’ve been able to meet creators that shaped my childhood,” says Varela. We’ve had Craig Bartlett (Hey Arnold!, Rugrats) and Adventure Time creator Pen Ward regularly draw on the show. We’ve even had the legendary actors like Billy West, John DiMaggio and Carlos Alazraqui do the show! As a comedy nerd, I’m so honored that comedy heroes like Maria Bamford, Emo Philips, Nicole Byer, Roy Wood Jr., Andy Kindler, Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, Chris Gethard, Jon Glazer and many more have done the show.” Posey says she’ll never forget doing a smaller festival in New Orleans. “One of the comedians was losing their mind that their animator was the supervising director of animation (Mike Hollingsworth) on BoJack Horseman. That was his favorite show of all time — and then he just got roasted to hell with BoJack drawings for his whole set. It was so funny and truly delightful to witness someone get to fight with their favorite cartoon character!” Posey and Varela hope to keep expanding their project in the future. “We’d love to take a crack at TV if anyone’s reading and is interested in making that happen!” says Varela. “You never know where a live show will take you. I’m just excited to keep spreading the novelty and joy of live animated comedy to audiences far and wide.” ◆ You can enjoy Picture This! at the World Animation Summit in N. Hollywood at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, November 3. For more information, visit picturethisshow.com.

‘I love seeing comedians and artists in awe of each other as they witness each other’s talent. Normally comedians and artists don’t get to interact much in the TV world, so it’s really cool to play matchmaker and see people that connect at our show go on to work together in the future.’ — Co-producer Sam Varela

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CONGRATULATES

SAM FELL DIRECTOR OF

FOR RECEIVING THE VERY EGGCITING

HALL OF FAME AWARD

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Walt Would Have Loved It! Directors Dan Abraham and Trent Correy reflect on the making of their wonderful 100th anniversary Disney short, Once Upon a Studio. - By Ramin Zahed -

uch a huge milestone as the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney Animation Studios deserves a beautifully crafted, star-filled celebration. That’s exactly what fans all over the world will experience when they watch Once Upon a Studio, the poignant and lovingly crafted short directed by Dan Abraham and Trent Correy and produced by Yvett Merino and Bradford Simonsen. The short, which premiered at Annecy in June and aired October 15 on ABC , pays homage to 10 decades of beloved movies and shorts, featuring an astonishing 543 characters from more than 85 feature-length and short films. The project showcases the work of dozens of original voice actors, as well as Disney’s Oscar-winning songwriter Richard Sherman and studio veteran, the late great Burny Mattinson. The story of how Abraham and Correy came up with the idea for the project is quite remarkable. The duo, who had previously co-directed the 2020 Emmy-nominated Frozen short Once Upon a Snowman, had been looking for a project to work on for a while. “I worked on the Zootopia+ series and Dan was working on the Baymax! show, and we started sharing ideas back and forth,” recalls Correy. “We quickly realized that the 100-year anniversary of the studio was upon us, and we were about two years out [from] that point. We knew that Wish was coming out in 2023, but there was nothing at that point that focused on the legacy

characters, So, we just began sharing inspirations of why we got into animation and started just dreaming of this short.”

Taco Bell Tales As Abraham, who was storyboard artist on Encanto and several Tinker Bell movies, recalls, “For about eight months at night and on weekends, we did sketches and drawings, and we’d show them to each other. These were the early days of COVID when everyone was scared, and you couldn’t go anywhere near each other. So, we’d go to the drive-through at Taco Bell in separate cars, and then park in the parking lot and roll down our windows and talk about our ideas for the short.” Once they thought their pitch was presentable, they called up Disney’s Chief Creative Officer, Jennifer Lee, and arranged for a Zoom meeting. Abraham recalls, “We pitched our storyboards and went through the whole story,” which is about all the characters at the studio getting ready for a big 100th-anniversary group photo. “I even had to sing at the end, and then when we were done, she stood up and left the screen. Trent and I were sitting there, staring at each other, and we wondered what had happened. Then, she came back, and she had her glasses on top of her head, and she was wiping away tears. She told us, ‘I don’t know, but we have to figure out how to make this happen!’” “When Dan and Trent pitched me the idea, I couldn’t talk, I

‘Burny Mattinson was in the short even before he knew he was going to be in the short. We had done a drawing of Bernie walking out of the doors with a new intern from Day 1 of boarding the short.’ — Trent Correy, co-director

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‘We met someone incredible every day. I’ve told so many people that I haven’t had to go to work for a year and a half, because making this short has been unbridled joy and wish fulfillment for the two of us.’ — Dan Abraham, co-director

M O U S E H O U S E R E U N I O N: The directors and producers of Once Upon a Studio faced the Herculean task of seamlessly bringing together 543 characters from over 85 features and shorts.

was just crying,” recalls Lee. “I have never had more confidence in something. It celebrates the most important thing, which is these characters and what they mean to all of us. And it did that by staying true to the artistry of these characters, their original designs, regardless of whether they were hand-drawn or CG, and even our studio building, which is symbolic of the home where things are created. They came up with something incredibly special, and we knew we wanted to make it from the very start.” Abraham mentions that they knew from the start that it would be quite a challenging project. “You have hundreds of characters, some hand-drawn on paper and some CG, with live-action plates, so there’s a lot to say no to, but from the get-go, Jennifer Lee and our entire crew were completely dedicated to figuring out how to do it and how to do it right,” he says. “It was quite an emotional experience because so many people were dedicated and cared so much about the project.” Adding to the short’s poignancy is the presence of Disney legend Burny Mattinson, who worked at Disney for almost 70 years (from Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty, all the way to Big Hero 6 and Strange World) and passed away in early 2023. He is the last man leaving the storied animation building in the short. “Burny was in the short even before he knew he was going to be in the short,” says Correy. “Dan and I had done a drawing of Bernie walking out of the doors with a new intern from Day One of boarding the short. The idea is that he is passing the torch to the next generation. We were so glad when he accepted our proposal, and he was really excited and loved being in it. What a legend: He worked at Disney animation just shy of 70 years, making him the employee with the longest career at Disney. He worked at the stu-

dio longer than Disney was alive. And he was a prince of man.” About 80 percent of the animated characters in the film are hand-drawn, with beloved Disney veteran Eric Goldberg serving as head of hand-drawn animation. Mark Henn, Randy Haycock, Alex Kupershmidt and Bert Klein were among the top artists lending a hand. In addition, five of Disney’s most accomplished animators — James Baxter (Belle and the Beast, Quasimodo, Rafiki), Ruben A. Aquino (Ursula), Tony Bancroft (Timon and Pumbaa), Nik Ranieri (Hades, Kuzco and Meeko) and Will Finn (Iago and Cogsworth) — reunited with their famous characters. Meanwhile, Andrew Feliciano was the head of CG animation and worked with an amazing group of Disney animators to create cameos from Wreck-It Ralph, Moana, Zootopia and Encanto. “It was such an honor to work with dozens of animation legends; Eric Goldberg, Randy Haycock and Mark Henn, and so many others,” says Correy. “We were also so lucky to work with the great Richard Sherman. I will never forget the moment he played ‘Feed the Birds’ for us on the piano in Walt’s office.” “We couldn’t believe it when our head of music, Matt Walker, suggested that we get Richard Sherman to play that for us,” Abraham shares. “Matt said, ‘Why don’t we record that up in Walt’s office on a Friday afternoon on the same piano that he used to play for Walt Disney?’ We couldn’t believe that we could dream that big. So, about a year ago we were up in Walt’s office, and there sat Richard at the same piano. Everything looks exactly like it did back when Walt was alive. I believe his spirit was with us. Richard did a marvelous job, and you couldn’t get him off the piano. He even played ‘A Spoonful of

Sugar’ for us! He is 95 years old, and simply fantastic.”

The Time of Their Lives The directors were also quite moved by the genuinely positive response they have received from their labor of love. “When the 40-plus original voice actors who came back to do their original characters again, we would show them the storyboards and they’d just pour out their experiences from the ’90s or 2000s,” says Correy. “They had so many stories about how much these characters and working for Disney meant to them and how it has impacted their lives,” adds Abraham. “For example, Richard White, who does the voice of Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, goes to children’s hospitals and does the voice for kids. It’s incredible; we often think of what they’ve given us by voicing these characters, but they told us that the experiences gave them so much more.” Abraham said he kept a daily journal during the making of the short, just so that he’d have a record of the experience. “We met someone incredible every day,” he says. “Just seeing Eric Goldberg’s rough animation of the Mad Hatter for the first time was amazing. I’ve told so many people that I haven’t had to go to work for a year and a half, because making this short has been unbridled joy and wish fulfillment for the two of us.” “Usually, when you finish a project, you are very tired, but this time, we were just very sad it was over,” says Correy. “Can we please just go back and start all over again?” asks Abraham. ◆ Once Upon a Studio is currently streaming on Disney+.

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Natural Wonder Andrew Ruhemann takes us behind the scenes of his acclaimed new short, The Day I Became a Bird. - By Ramin Zahed -

he joys and pangs of first love have inspired numerous works of art through the years. Director Andrew Ruhemann’s gently observed new short, The Day I Became a Bird, ranks among the more subtle animated works inspired by the theme, while also reflecting upon our relationship with the natural world. Ruhemann, who is the founder and executive producer of acclaimed animation company Passion Pictures, won an Oscar for his short The Lost Thing in 2011 and an Emmy earlier this year for the popular “Ice” episode of Love, Death + Robots. In a recent email interview, he tells us that he was instantly drawn to Ingrid Chabbert and Guridi’s book, which inspired the short, because of its title and cover illustration. “I’m a big one for titles, and it was such an intriguing notion … and I’m a mad bird enthusiast and I do like to go birdwatching!” One of the biggest challenges was getting the storytelling right. “There were some sort of traps that I was very concerned not to fall into,” says the talented Englishman, who began his career at the Richard Williams Animation studio in London in the 1980s. “It could easily have turned into a very simple, almost preschool girl-meets-boy story. And it was never that for me. It was something much deeper. It was about transformation. It’s about a young boy, just getting a sense of something other in this world, something beyond [what] this girl represents.”

Far from the Madding Crowd Ruhemann says he was inspired by what he hopes his son can experience. “It’s what I might wish for him in a world of TikTok and mobile phones and social media, where nature is a place to sort of breathe and have a sense of magic and mystery and poetry that only nature can provide. And in this case, particularly the birds. You know, they’re like sort of the bridge to this other world. So, it was very important I hit that tone.” The short, which was made thanks to a grant from Epic, used Unreal Engine to produce its animation. “It was new for a lot of us,” recalls Ruhemann. “But I think as a director,

‘I think if everybody came out and just never quite heard birdsong in quite the same way again, I would think “job done,” because it is a thing of true beauty. I do think it is a connector to another world.’ — Director Andrew Ruhemann

I’m used to working with animation, so I know things take time. But there is something about Unreal that lets you get a little bit closer to a live-action experience. And maybe in some places, it can respond even faster than live action, where you can make alterations or you can visualize things very, very quickly. It’s an extraordinary program. Incredibly powerful … I think we surprised people and ourselves by how sensitive and craft-like the imagery could be on something that you’d associate much more with game imagery and hyper-real stuff. And here is this really lovely illustrative style.” As you’d expect from a short that features a character who is an avid birdwatcher, it has a wonderful aural landscape, full of soothing birdsong and subtle music choices. “We wanted the sound to match the transformation for the boy,” explains the director. “You are hearing more and more of the birds as the film progresses, just like he is. It’s not in his vocabulary when he starts, you know; you wouldn’t notice it. And I think that’s a very true thing, —

F L I G H T O F F A NCY: Raul Nieto Guridi’s illustrations in Ingrid Chabbert’s book served as inspirations for the animated short The Day I Became a Bird.

speaking as somebody who’s become a great nature lover through my life. And even [after] having made this film, I notice birdsong more, no matter where I am. I was lucky to work with a very good friend of mine, who is, I think, a genius composer, called Mara Carlyle and her partner on this, Max de Wardener. And they just got it, you know, and right from the beginning, they got it.” Ruhemann names films such as Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, UPA shorts, Brad Bird’s Family Dog and Tim Burton’s short Vincent as some of his favorites in the world of animation. “I have a lot to thank Richard Williams and another great animation director, Chuck Gammage, for. Both of whom kind of mentored me in the early days and introduced me to a lot of these directors and animators, who sat slightly outside the mainstream. I also have to mention many of the people I’ve worked with. I mean, Alan Barillaro for one — Pixar’s really inspirational; Pete Candeland, with whom I worked for decades. All of these things inspire me to do more.” So, what does he hope his gentle short will inspire in the audience? “I’d like them to get this notion of something other in this world,” he notes. “I’d like them to get the idea that it’s easy to say that it’s OK to be ourselves, but the short celebrates our uniqueness or individuality and not conforming necessarily … I also think if everybody came out and just never quite heard birdsong in quite the same way again, I would think, ‘job done,’ because it is a thing of true beauty. I do think it is a connector to another world.” ◆ The Day I Became a Bird will screen at The World Animation Summit, Manchester Animation Festival and the CTN eXpo. It’s also available at The Animation Showcase website.

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Like Poetry in Motion Japanese director Ryo Orikasa discusses how the words of Henri Michaux inspired his thought-provoking short, Miserable Miracle. - By Ramin Zahed -

L I N G E R I N G WO R D S: Director Ryo Orikasa used analog techniques, such as drawing one sheet at a time on paper, to create the visual motifs of Miserable Miracle.

yo Orikasa, whose latest work, Miserable Miracle, won the top animated short prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in September, first became interested in the works of Henri Michaux (1899-1984) back when he was in his early 20s and picked up a copy of the Belgian-French poet and artist’s work at a used bookstore in Tokyo. “I remember reading the poem Dog’s Life at the beginning of the book,” Orikasa recalls in an email interview. “Later, I found out Michaux’s complete works were published in Japan before they were published in France, and all the texts were translated by one person: Eiji Kokai, a poet who’s also known for translating André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?” Years later, Michaux’s work would come alive through animation in Orikasa’s acclaimed short, which is a joint venture between Miyu Productions, National Film Board of Canada and New Deer with the support of CNC and the Ciclic Animation Residency. Narrated memorably by Tony Robinow, the 2D-animated short casts a light on the limits of language and perception, and seamlessly weaves a hypnotic trance as it connects sounds, meanings, shapes and motion. Orikasa says it’s difficult to explain what originally inspired him. “I believe that one’s motive for a project is something that’s discovered or invented later, but it had caught my attention that Michaux frequently wrote about the relationship between his drawing lines and film,” says the director. “Then I learned that he had attempted to produce a film.” The 37-year-old director’s thought-provoking short began to take shape when he participated in a residency at the Fontevraud Abbey organized by NEF Animation in France in the fall of 2018. He later worked in Ibaraki, Japan; Saumur and Paris, France; and Tokyo, changing production locations every six months or year. “At a studio in Saumur (Ciclic) and the one in Tokyo, I worked with the staff for six months each,” he recalls. “In total, 17

‘I love the moments in which I can immerse myself in creation … moments when I, as the creator, serve the words, which act as master. Certain words become a stimulus and the image expands beyond the original conception.’ — Director Ryo Orikasa

people participated in the project, including myself and two or three other people working at the same time. The production lasted four-and-a-half years, though the original plan was for two years; it was extended due to the huge amount of work and technical challenges that were all new to me.” When the NFB joined the production, it was decided to produce an English-dubbed version of the film. “They also suggested that Tony Robinow would be the best person to do the voice work,” says Orikasa. “I was very grateful for the suggestion, as I have always found subtitles to be a source of stress for viewers in my films where the written word appears. His calm but strong voice has a different appeal than the original French version by Denis Lavant, and as a result I have two films on my hands, not a different version of one film. Now we’re planning to make a Japanese-dubbed version for the 2024 release in Japan.”

Paper Work One of the major challenges for the director was that most of the short’s shots are uninterrupted, and the imagery changes slowly at times. “This made communication with multiple crew members difficult in terms of sharing the final image,” he explains. “I constantly struggled to quantify and communicate my intent by preparing diagrams and graphs. I also always traveled with a lot of paper, which was another tough aspect of the production process.”

Of course, there were ample rewards in the process itself. “I love the moments in which I can immerse myself in creation,” he recalls. “Moments when I, as the creator, serve the words, which act as master. Certain words become a stimulus, and the image expands beyond the original conception, and I, myself, am forced to follow the image, which never stops moving.” When asked about his animation heroes, Orikasa says he has learned a lot from Jan Švankmajer, Koji Yamamura and Pierre Hébert. “Also, the work of André Lindon (director of The Invisible Child, 1984) makes me want to keep making films, even if no one sees them.” The director says Miserable Miracle has taught him an important lesson in keeping a limited view or portrait of an artist in your head. “The danger in referring to the work of a particular artist is that it risks fixing the image of that artist and limiting it within the confines of a particular culture,” he notes. “For example, as of September 2023, there is still no catalogue raisonné [descriptive catalog of an artist’s work] of Henri Michaux’s entire oeuvre, and every day in galleries and online auctions I continue to encounter a Michaux I do not yet know. I would be happy if animation provided another way of discovering a different facet of Michaux.” ◆ For more information, visit nfb.ca/film/miserable-miracle and miyu.fr/production/en/emergences-2.

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A Bright Light Director Mitra Shahidi discusses her charming TriBeCa Prize-winning short, Starling

tarling, Mitra Shahidi’s beautiful short about the spirit of a cute little girl who shoots down to Earth to spend her birthday with her parents, won the top animation prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. We caught up with the talented director, who is a story artist at Pixar, to find out more about her project:

On the short’s origins and team: I started working on it in late 2018 when I couldn’t stop drawing a little cute spirit that comes down to Earth to visit. In my mind it represented a lively soul that lived on and shined upon me. It percolated in my mind for a long time before I realized I needed to make this into a film, since that is the medium I work with. We teamed up with Jessica Heidt and the film started to take shape into reels after that. It was a Pixar Co-op, which means we get to use the equipment at Pixar, but we own the film. Lots of incredible colleagues at Pixar held the leadership helm, such as producer Jessica Heidt, animation supervisor Holger Leihe, director of photography and composer Andrew Jimenez, film editor Ayse Arkali, production designer Celine You and VFX supervisor Kristoffer Landes. More than 70 people worked on it from 14 different countries. We used everything we could get our hands on such as TVPaint, Toon Boom, Blender, Photoshop, After Effects and more.

Can you tell us more about how your childhood friend’s passing inspired the short? My friend was an absolute shining star. She was larger than life, extremely energetic, funny, full of hopes and beautiful dreams. She invited me to her birthday one summer, I was abroad and couldn’t make it, but she was not well enough to celebrate it the way she wanted to. Her passing devastated me, and I still have a hard time believing she is gone. Maybe because she isn’t. On the visual style: It really came from my own soft spot for everything chibi and cute, and when we teamed up with the incredible Celine You, she really breathed life into ‘90s Istanbul and all the colorful characters that live in it. The movie’s style is really her wonderful style, of which I’m a huge fan. Influences: Definitely Miyazaki; Yoshifumi Kondo, who made Whisper of the Heart; Disney movies like Fantasia and Bambi; Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon) for sure; Brad Bird and his total masterpiece Ratatouille. A lot of current colleagues greatly inspire me every day. When did you know you wanted to work in animation? I knew I loved animation when I watched Fantasia super young, perhaps five or six years old. I also watched my mom illustrate children’s books, so I knew someone drew those films. I have been pestering everyone around me

about everything animation since then. Biggest Challenge: It was definitely figuring out how to tell this very delicate story. I just wanted to bring my friend back to life for one night and eventually her personality and mine meshed into the Starling character, who took on a life of her own. It was really difficult to try to figure out what she does on Earth, what it means, how she navigates the city. Another super tough part was to do this whole thing with zero budget, before and after full time job responsibilities, lunch hours and weekends. I am forever grateful for all the incredible artists and animators who put in an enormous amount of energy and talent into this passion project. Audience Response: So far, I’ve been getting very emotional and poignant feedback — people have been taking away different things from this film, some I didn’t even think about. I’d like the audiences to watch it and interpret it however they like. Feel the presence of a loved one maybe. Remember to enjoy our time on the ground perhaps, since we are all joining them in the skies in the end. ◆ For more information, visit starlingshort.com.

Mitra Shahidi

BACK TO EARTH: A young spirit revisits her mourning parents on Earth on her birthday in Mitra Shahidi’s award-winning short, Starling.

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Can’t We All Just Get Along? Producer Barney Goodland takes us behind the scenes of Magic Light’s The Smeds and the Smoos.

Barney Goodland

INTERPLANETARY ROMEO & JULIET: Two young aliens from warring families fall in love and run away in Magic Light Pictures’ The Smeds and the Smoos.

ver the past decade, TV audiences in the U.K. have grown accustomed to watching a new animated special based on the popular books by Julia Donaldson and longtime collaborator Axel Scheffler on Christmas. The 2022 special, The Smeds and the Smoos — a lovely tale of two aliens from warring families who fall in love — is one of the shorts that is eligible for Oscar consideration in the animated shorts category this year. Sally Hawkins, Adjoa Andoh, Bill Bailey, Ashna Rabheru and Rob Brydon are among the stars lending their voices to the characters. Producer Barney Goodland, who has also worked on the previous award-winning adaptations of Donaldson’s books by Magic Light Pictures, was kind enough to answer a few of our questions “This is our 10th adaptation of a Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler book,” says Goodland, who was a producer on last year’s Superworm and also worked on Zog and the Flying Doctors, The Snail and the Whale, Zog, The Highway Rat, Revolting Rhymes and Stick Man. “Their books are the most beautiful collaborations — Julia’s witty, creative and engaging text combining with Axel’s rich, unique and endearing illustrations to create wonderful worlds and stories. Those elements are an absolute treat for animation and for us it’s a joy to get to expand them into half-hour films.” According to Goodland, the team at Magic Light Pictures began working on the special in early 2021, developing the story into a 25-minute script and animatic. “These specials

take about two years to produce, from starting work on the script to delivery to the BBC,” he says. “The film is a Magic Light Pictures production with services by Blue Zoo Animation in London. In total, approximately 140 people worked on the film across two years.” The production used ZBrush for modeling, Maya for animation and lighting and Nuke for compositing. “We also use Photoshop and Premiere and rendering was done using Redshift,” the producer says.

Spreading Scheffler’s Magic Obviously, the starting point for the visuals is always Axel Scheffler’s original illustrations. “In The Smeds and the Smoos, Axel created such an incredible range of aliens and planets with stunning colorscapes that we were really spoiled in terms of a starting point,” says Goodland. “We then worked hard to keep the aesthetic in line with our previous films so that they all feel part of the same universe. We looked at lots of real world influences (from slime to water vapor shapes to exotic plants) so that things feel believable and realistic for the story world.” However, creating an entire universe from scratch was one of the production’s big challenges. “On previous specials we’ve been able to make some efficiencies from reusing assets, but these worlds and characters are so unique that we had to design and build everything from day one,” admits the producer. “We still managed to do that within

our usual schedule and pipeline, which is a testament to our talented crew.” Goodland says he loves how the special elegantly balances an emotional story with moments of great humor. “The themes of putting differences aside and understanding one another feels very relevant at the moment, and our directors Samantha Cutler and Daniel Snaddon have done an incredible job carrying them delicately through the story,” he offers. “My favorite scene is when the Smoos have run out of their black tea and so the Smeds share their pink milk. It represents a softening of the two families’ feelings towards one another, and in the scene we go through despair, tension and kindness with the characters, and the story then takes a new turn towards the final act.” The producer says he hopes the special spreads the message that our differences are to be celebrated and that they make life more magical. “The Smeds and the Smoos learn that through their bickering they lose the people they love and feel worse as a result,” he explains. “By working together and accepting others they all get to enjoy themselves and experience new things. On their journey, the Smeds and Smoos also visit lots of incredible planets and meet new aliens. Similarly, I hope that this will leave young viewers feeling excited about discovering new cultures and the benefits of doing so.” ◆ For more information, visit magiclightpictures.com.

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SHORTS

Animation Scotland is an industry-led body created to showcase, represent and develop the Scottish animation industry both at home and internationally. To get involved or to ﬁnd out more please visit:

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Euro Students Bask in Oscar’s Glow Animation schools in France and the U.K. take the top three spots at the Student Academy Awards. - By Ellen Wolff -

t’s hard to believe that the Student Academy Awards, the pinnacle of recognition for young filmmakers, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The gold, silver and bronze medals awarded to student animators in October by the Academy in L.A. inscribe their names on a prestigious list of talent from around the world. What’s notable this year is that the schools which produced these winners are located solely in Europe — two in France and one in the U.K. Boom is representing France’s École des Nouvelles Images, Diplomatie de L’eclipse was made at France’s MoPA 3D Animation School and Mum’s Spaghetti was produced at the U.K.’s National Film and Television School. This recognition is just the latest example of how animation education is thriving around the globe and yielding a new generation of talent.

Boom By Laurie Pereira de Figueiredo, Yannick Jacquin, Romain Augier, Gabriel Augerai and then rigged and animated in Maya. Augier built a custom system in Houdini to generate and groom the birds’ feathers, and the crowd animation was created using Golaem Charles DiCicco It’s a safe bet that the wordless short Boom is greeted by laughter wherever in the software. A mix of Houdini, ZBrush, SpeedTree and Substance Painter were used to world it screens. Like an Aesop’s fable run amok, the short celebrates the slapstick create the island environment of rocks, earth and trees, while the simulations — which chaos that breaks out within a colony of birds when the volcano on their island habi- appear in half the shots of the eight-minute film — were crafted in Houdini alongside tat erupts. Some frantic birds dive like lemmings into the sea, while others scramble custom-purposed tools. Guerrilla Render was used to complete the piece, with an average 30-minute render time per frame. Augier also developed pipeline software that haplessly to collect their nested eggs. “Our inspiration was the work of classic comedy masters like Buster Keaton and enabled the five co-directors to automate various processes that were redundant. With Jacques Tati,” explains Romain Augier, who hatched the film’s original concept. “We also help from four interns, Boom was completed in nine months’ time. When the film screened at SIGGRAPH’s Electronic had more contemporary influences like the TV shows Family Theater this past summer, it earned the Audience Choice Guy and Fresh Prince. The original idea was to mix an apocAward — and lots of laughs. Industry recognition has alyptic environment with goofy characters and create a been swift: The quintet behind the shot, all of whom movie where VFX was a real narrative element.” graduated from École des Nouvelles Images, already There’s enough realism in Boom to capture a believable landed industry positions at Skydance Animation’s Malevel of peril among the birds as they rush to flee the exdrid offices, the Paris-based companies Monarch Softploding lava. As Augier notes, “If people understand our ware and Sacrebleu Productions, and TNZPV Producbirds, it is surely due to the fact that our characters have tions in Arles, France. It’s nice to see that the Boom team very human solutions to the situations they experience.” Laurie Pereira de Figueiredo, Yannick Jacquin, Romain has already spread its wings. Their 3D flock was modeled using ZBrush and Maya, and Augier, Gabriel Augerai and Charles DiCicco

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César Luton, Achille Pasquier, Clémence Bailly, Selim Lallaoui and Axel Mechin

Diplomatie de l’éclipse (Diplomacy of the Eclipse) By César Luton, Achille Pasquier, Clémence Bailly, Selim Lallaoui and Axel Mechin As enigmatic as its title suggests, Diplomatie de l’éclipse takes viewers on a surreal journey that defies simple descriptions of plot and character. The film’s three protagonists — a heroic diplomat and two “astral children” — confront a world upended by an eclipse. As director César Luton explains, “It took all five brains of ours more than three months to write slightly more than eight minutes of animation. The fact that we are all generalists who could collaborate on every aspect of the film definitely helped!” Transporting viewers through CG environments as diverse as a child’s playground, a stained-glass cathedral and a field of lotus blossoms, Diplomatie de l’éclipse drew inspiration from myriad places. “Comics were an especially large source of visual references,” notes Luton. “Think of Otomo’s unending buildings or Mœbius’ fantastic empty landscapes.

A lot of the symbols of the film come from the universe of childhood.” Although the sweep of the finished piece is quite grand, the original storyboards were very simple, recalls Luton. “Most of them were stick figures made on a whiteboard during brainstorming sessions!” All the animation in Diplomatie de l’éclipse was done in Blender. “The best tool is simply the tool you know best,” Luton believes. “Through its community, Blender outclasses every other alternative. No matter the challenges you face, someone somewhere already faced it, solved it and shared their findings with the world.” The team of five also used Houdini for cloth simulation, as well as ZBrush and Adobe Substance 3D Painter for the characters. They spent a bit less than a year to complete the piece. While all have graduated from MoPA 3D Animation School and moved on to professional pursuits, they’ve already earned the acclaim of SIGGRAPH, which awarded Diplomatie de l’éclipse its Best in Show prize this summer.

Lisa Kenney

Mum’s Spaghetti By Lisa Kenney “I always pitch Mum’s Spaghetti as Wallace & Gromit meets 8 Mile,” says director Lisa Kenney about her master’s graduation film from Britain’s National Film and Television School (NFTS). In fact, savvy music fans might recognize that Kenney’s title evokes a lyric from 8 Mile’s protagonist, played by the rapper Eminem. And her teenage protagonist, Poppy, paired with a beatboxing dog named Snoop, form a “gang of two” that carries on the plasticine tradition made famous by the stop-motion experts at Aardman Animations. Unlike the other two winning films this year, which are largely dialog-free, Mum’s Spaghetti talks a blue streak, such as when the feisty Poppy raps proudly that she can get straight As and “still write the best tracks.” Kenney recalls finding her voice actor on YouTube, and during recording sessions the director would join in rapping and dancing to keep the energy up. Like the best stop-motion filmmaking, Mum’s Spaghetti teems with revealing details — from atmospheric tableaus of the rooms in Poppy’s home to the trash-littered world on the other side of the tracks. During 10 months of production, Kenney’s main team of 13 (plus

volunteers) had three sets running at once, and the NFTS allowed them the space to swap setups as needed. “It took a jigsaw of a schedule to make it work,” she says. Working with 1:8 scale puppets made of plasticine, silicone and fabric, the director wrung palpable emotions from eyes that were simple white discs with black dots. “The animation was all done in-camera using Dragonframe,” Kenney explains. When the director returns to Britain following the Student Academy Award events, she won’t be done quite yet with Poppy and Snoop. “I’m putting together ideas for a potential Mum’s Spaghetti series, and I’m developing my first live-action short (cue nervous laughter) as part of a scheme with the BBC and the NFTS. I’d love to direct a stop-motion feature at some point, but I think I’d like to get a few more shorts under my belt first. I’ll absolutely stay involved with the NFTS whenever I can. That place changed my life!” ◆ The Student Academy Awards took place on October 23 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. You can find out who snagged the top prize at animationmagazine.net.

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Paid Content

Meet the New Breed of Nature Preservation Heroes! Studio 100 Media producer Thorsten Wegener, and On the Edge Productions’ Executive Producer Karen Vermeulen give us the scoop on their new movie, On the Edge: Donnie Dares!

mong the new animated features debuting at the American Film Market this month is Studio 100 Film’s On the Edge: Donnie Dares!, a charming movie about six lesser-known animals on a list of endangered species. Thorsten Wegener, head of business operations and producer at Studio 100 Media, and Karen Vermeulen, one of the movie’s Executive Producers and representing On the Edge Productions, were kind enough to jointly answer a few of our questions: Your new movie sounds quite entertaining. Can you tell us more about it? On the Edge: Donnie Dares! is a CG-animated movie about a group of animals who set out on a mission to get humans to see them, appreciate them, and maybe even respect and fall in love with them—and above all, to stop endangering them! But of course, nothing is ever simple when humans are involved. We are collaborating with On the Edge, a not-for-profit conservation and media organisation that originated the project in order to inspire a young audience to emotionally connect with the awe and wonder of the natural world, and use comedy to achieve that. The movie is pure family entertainment at its best but with a significant undertone and an important message: A world where nature is seen, acknowledged, and respected — to emotionally reconnect humanity with nature. Who are the creatives behind it? We have just started funding the movie and are currently in the process of setting up the team. The script is written by Emmy Award winner, Michael Ryan, who has worked on television projects like Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny and Wolfboy and the Everything Factory, as well as feature films such as Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo! Meets Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Gulliver Returns. Recently, Archie Donato at Jellyfish Pictures joined our team as creative director, responsible for developing the look and feel of the movie. He worked at DreamWorks for over 17 years and contributed to many of the studio’s biggest movies such as Shrek Forever After, Kung Fu Panda, and Megamind. The movie is produced by On the Edge Productions Ltd. and Studio 100 Media, and we’ve just finalized negotiations

with Viva Kids who will join as co-producer. The movie is set for delivery in 2026 with Studio 100 Film acting as international sales agent. What is the plotline? The new/current official synopsis reads: When survival is the mission… anything is possible! Lots of people have never heard of these six endangered animals: The Solenodon, the Kakapo, the Pangolin, the Aye-Aye, the Greater Funnel-eared Bat and the Purple Frog. But soon everyone is going to know everything about them. A team of these weird and wonderful animals takes fate into their own paws to fight against extinction – so that one day their descendants will not have to live their lives forever ON THE EDGE. How would you describe the animation and visual style? On the Edge: Donnie Dares! promises to be one of those incredible animated feature films where hilarious comedy is perfectly intertwined with very important life lessons, universal values, and environmental themes. It is a character-driven project with massive visual potential; from the beautiful but fragile environments our characters originate from, to the exotic destinations they are willing to travel to in order to accomplish their daring mission. Imagine the story told from our heroes’ perspective, exposing small details that we humans do not even notice, thus delivering to the audience a whole new, undiscovered world. The camera language is fast-paced, and actiondriven with slapstick, physical comedy at its heart. We will explore the size variance of our ensemble cast with shallow depth of field, creating a macro backdrop juxtaposed by the massive new world our small heroes find themselves in on their epic quest. What do you think makes the movie stand out in the competitive animated feature landscape? The whole concept and background of the movie makes it stand out, distinguishing it from other animated movies. The idea for it was created by the On the

Edge organization, whose mission is to emotionally reconnect people – in particular younger generations – with nature by challenging the way it is portrayed in popular culture. Through various forms of media and with highly entertaining content, On the Edge aims to redefine how people see, feel and ultimately, behave towards it. In addition, all profits from this organization go to the charity for the conservation of species. What would you like our readers to know about this movie and its creative team? At the heart of On the Edge’s mission lies a commitment to change the narrative for nature through contemporary storytelling and funding vital conservation initiatives for underrepresented threatened species and ecosystems worldwide: “We exist because, as people, we’ve never been more disconnected and isolated from the natural world than we are now. It is this disconnection that allows us to overlook the destruction of nature,” says Beth Blood, founder and CEO of On the Edge. “We’re on a mission to emotionally reconnect humanity with it. We truly believe that only by falling in love with nature we will appreciate its value and do what it takes to save it.” What are the other movies Studio 100 is bringing to the AFM? As producer, we are finalizing Giants of La Mancha, which will be screened at AFM. We are also in the middle of production for the CGI adventure Heidi—Rescue of the Lynx, which is set for delivery at the end of 2024. We have more movies in development, but we can’t announce any details. As sales agent, we also have 200% Wolf (the sequel to 100% Wolf from 2020), My Freaky Family (formerly known as Being Betty Flood), Miss Moxy and North in our portfolio. ◆ For more info, visit studio100film.com

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VFX & TECH

Building the Perfectly Lovable Robot VFX supervisor Jay Cooper tells us about crafting the retro-futuristic world of The Creator. - By Trevor Hogg -

hile traveling from one hole to another on a golf course in Park City, Utah, visual effects supervisor Jay Cooper (Babylon) took the time to discuss creating the VFX for a sci-fi action thriller that was as unusual as the circumstances of the interview. The movie in question was The Creator, in which an ex-special forces agent is sent to destroy an advanced form of AI which has created a weapon of mass destruction in the form of a child. What was especially unique about the $80 million feature made by Regency Enterprises, eOne and Bad Dreams and distributed by 20th Century Studios, is that director Gareth Edwards (Monsters) resorted to guerrilla filmmaking tactics to maximize its cinematic value.

An Unconventional Cameraman “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Gareth is also a camera operator on his films, which is unconventional,” says Cooper. “He shoots long takes because he wants to find framing during the course of the shot. A lot of this movie was shot in real locations in Thailand, Japan and Nepal, and those served as the spin for what we’re adding [in visual effects]. There are shots where members of the local population are on binoculars watching the filming. We kept those in because it goes with the story. Also, we’re not trying to construct a

world where every single shot is at the same time of day and you’re 100 percent correct on your spatial cues.” He adds, “It’s a lot more of old school filmmaking where we picked up one shot at 11 a.m. and another at 4 p.m. We’re rolling with that as long as it cuts into the movie.” Cooper mentions that Apocalypse Now and Baraka were two of the major cinematic influences on the project. “They’re not necessarily what you would think of as touchstones for a large sci-fi visual effects movie, but Gareth wanted that grittiness and notion of documentary filmmaking,” he explains. Before work began on the project, Edwards approached ILM about doing a visual effects test, which was supervised by Chief Creative Officer John Knoll. “Gareth asked, ‘What if I brought you footage where we didn’t necessarily have the best photogrammetry, spheres, charts and HDRIs? Could you roll with that?’ ” Knoll recalls. “So, we put together 30 or so shots that were in the style of the movie Gareth wanted, and it became the sizzle reel that he used to get The Creator greenlit.” In addition to having Andrew Roberts as the on-set visual effects supervisor, a multitude of things were done to prepare for the shortage of set reference material. “We sent our actors to Clear Angle in London to have photogrammetry scans done there. We did iPhone scans, but we couldn’t do a proper LiDAR scan. We would send up a drone for re-

ality capture to create set meshes.” As expected, a wide range of visual effects shots had to be produced. “There is an all-CG space station in the third act, augmented characters like Haru [Ken Watanabe] and Alphie [Madeleine Yuna Voyles] and a number of other characters that we turned into ‘simulates,’ which are AI robots that have evolved to the same level of quality as humans. Then, we also have straight-up robots.” Toolsets and techniques were developed to seamlessly integrate CG elements with the human actors to create the simulates. “People are squishy, and their jaws and cheeks move,” notes Cooper. “We created meshes of the CG equivalents of these characters, did a rigid body track and using our ILM tracking tools, we did secondary tracking for the soft body animations. Then there was a Nuke process where we were able to combine the motion of the CG renders with the motion that was in the plate and that was done with a combination of KeenTools tracking, Smart Vector tracking, which is inside of Nuke, and some of our own bespoke stuff.” Madeleine Yuna Voyles portrays the AI entity Alphie, and had the lower half of her cranium, ears and back of neck transformed into robotics. “We put five or six tracking dots on her face. She wasn’t working through prosthetics and spending two hours in the makeup chair. It was important to Gareth that we didn’t do so much that the audience

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VFX & TECH ‘Gareth had a specific design aesthetic and wanted things to feel future forward, but [as] if we had taken a hard right in the late 1980s … A lot of the props used in the movie, Gareth gathered them from eBay and other places.’ — VFX supervisor Jay Cooper

couldn’t bond with the character. But neither did we want to do so little that there was no point in doing it.” Cooper also mentions that the filmmakers sought a retro, analog vibe in the futuristic technology. “Gareth had a specific design aesthetic and wanted things to feel future forward, but [as] if we took a hard right in the late 1980s,” explains Cooper. “A lot of the props used in the movie, Gareth gathered them from eBay and other places. There were 1980s graphics switchers and old technology, and then we would add on top of that. We would take a Sprinter van and redesign it, make some negative space, do racetrack shapes in it, and all kinds of cool stuff that was in keeping with Gareth’s aesthetic. [Production designer] James Clyne would do a design, and then we would bring something up to 60 to 70 percent in CG and do another round of design on top of it. It was all very iterative.” Outer space offered its own path of discovery. “There’s a visual style that we were trying to carry on as much as we could from the terrestrial part of the movie,” says the VFX supervisor. “Gareth came to ILM right after principal photography, and we had a game version of the space station

and had a number of sequences set up in rough animatic form. We gave him a camera and the room to find shot composition in the same way he was doing on set.”

Grand-Scale CG to the Rescue Practical effects were used for elements that were close in proximity. “If there was an explosion, we would try to have an air mortar or some notion of that [which] would tie into the characters,” remarks Cooper. “But a lot of the larger-scale stuff is entirely computer generated. The goal was to have a low visual effects impact on set and figure it out in postproduction. There was not a ton of bluescreen or greenscreen. More often than

not, we would try to find a location. We did shoot for a week on the ILM StageCraft stage in London for the airlock and biosphere. We built those ahead of time and threw them on the LED screens so even if it didn’t survive to the final shot, there was an understanding for the actors of what the environment was and a reality that comes with shooting it together.” The biggest challenge was making sure that the audience does not know where the practical and CG elements begin and end. “There is a version of The Creator that you could show that has almost no visual effects, and you would still understand what the movie is about. But it doesn’t get any of the world building and the scope is not as large,” observes Cooper. “We’re adding in ways that are in keeping with the same visual style [of the footage]. If there’s a tank going down a hill, we have to re-create the hill and vegetation and do explosions. It should feel like if you didn’t have these fantastic visual effects elements, that you would believe this was something shot on that day.” ◆ The Creator is currently playing in theaters around the world.

F A N TA S T I C F U T U R E - S CA P E: To build the retro-futuristic world of The Creator, VFX supervisor Jay Cooper and the team at ILM added digital extensions to footage shot in Thailand, Japan and Nepal. The film also features an all-CG space station as well as augmented characters, “simulate” AI robots and complete robots.

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STATE OF THE ART

Meet HAL, Your New Animation Assistant! A few thoughts on embracing or shying away from AI - By Carl Reed -

DAW N O F T H E M AC H I N E S: Among the latest developments in AI and animation are reports that OpenAI’s ChatGPT will use 10 million NVIDIA GPUs to create a super-powered AI.

avigating the world of animation these days feels a bit like stepping into a sci-fi movie, complete with all its awe and apprehension. Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and it’s got people talking about all of the ways that it can revolutionize the way we create. But, alas, in many of the sci-fi flicks that I have seen, the new super technology usually ‘escapes the machine’ and tries to eliminate humanity as we know it. Trust me, as someone who started out as a traditional artist with pencil and paper, toiling for years to improve my craft, seeing a machine create art in a blink is very similar to watching the T-1000 shapeshift to get into a locked room in Terminator 2. Jarring, to say the least! To be clear, AI presents both opportunities and challenges. It has the capability to produce work that closely mimics the craftsmanship of a seasoned artist. And, sure, it can be the ultimate “copycat” if used unethically. Big studios could go all-in with AI, leading some to fear a rise in the unemployment rate faster than you can prompt ChatGPT to write a term paper. Haven’t we seen this movie before? Cue the flashback to the mid-2000s, when the animation industry was transitioning from traditional pen and paper to digital animation. Everybody was on edge. There were similar concerns about job security and quality at the time, with many wondering if these new tools — or the less experienced people who had access to them — were ready for primetime. But the end credits told a different story. We didn’t just sur-

vive; we thrived. The animation industry expanded, leading to the creation of new animation houses specializing in digital animation, as well as an increase in the number of projects produced due to the reduction in cost. Also, more creators have gotten to contribute their talents. So, could AI be the sequel we didn’t know we needed? From my vantage point, it’s scary, but promising. It’s still the first act, but with the speed of innovation that we are witnessing, it won’t be long until the tools become very useful. At our studio, we have already been impacted. In one of our recent projects, using Adobe’s generative fill helped us instantly revise a set of production art background paintings that would have normally taken over two weeks. That’s two extra weeks for creative refinement, which is worth more than gold in our industry. But it can’t be that easy, can it? Well, the fear of job loss isn’t baseless. Reports are already emerging that some of the largest studios are establishing specialized ‘task forces’ to integrate AI for the purpose of cutting costs. This could very well lead to a reduction in the workforce, which is a concerning development. However, it’s important to recognize that technological advancements often create new roles even as they make others less essential. Take the rise of YouTube, for example. This platform has given birth to a new category of content creators, working in formats we never before envisioned. These small creators are now competing with some of the largest broadcasters and studios for viewers’ atten-

tion, all from the comfort of their own bedrooms. In a similar vein, AI could likely spawn professions and creative avenues that we can’t yet anticipate. Additionally, with advanced tools like Stable Diffusion and Claude AI becoming increasingly accessible, the proverbial Pandora’s box is not just open — it’s been opensourced. There’s no turning back now. The undeniable reality is that AI is here, bringing both transformative potential and ethical considerations with it. We are at a crossroads: we can either embrace AI to enhance our artistic capabilities and tap into unprecedented creative possibilities, or we can shy away, leaving the field open for large studios to monopolize these advantages. Faced with these alternatives, my preference is clear: let’s harness this technology to amplify, rather than replace, our human skills. For my team and me, the decision is easy. We choose to be proactive, contributing to shape the future of AI in a way that enriches the world of animation and media production for the better. ◆ Carl Reed is the CCO and president of Lion Forge Animation. His career includes 20 years in media creation. Over the course of his career, Carl has worked with high-profile clients to produce a variety of different types of content, from comic books to broadcast animated series, toys and video games.

‘With advanced tools like Stable Diffusion and Claude AI becoming increasingly accessible, the proverbial Pandora’s box is not just open — it’s been open-sourced. There’s no turning back now.’ www.animationmagazine.net 90

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www.BentoBoxEnt.com Bob’s Burgers: © 2023 20th Television. The Great North: © 2023 20th Television & Fox Media LLC. Grimsburg, Krapopolis, and Big Bruh: ©2023 Fox Media LLC ・ HouseBroken: © 2023 Fox Media LLC and Kapital Entertainment, LLC. Hazbin Hotel: © 2023 A24 Films, LLC and Bento Rights, LLC

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VFX & TECH

Tech Reviews - By Todd Sheridan Perry -

T E R R I F I C TO O L S: Clockwise from top, examples of visuals created using Maxon’s Red Giant Trapcode, Magic Bullet and VFX toolset.

Maxon’s Red Giant Trapcode We continue our exploration of Maxon One’s suite of tools, which we started in last month’s issue. We’ll begin with Trapcode, which isn’t really a tool in itself so much as it is a sub-suite of tools that mostly orbits around design-y effects in After Effects and Premiere Pro: Particular (particle systems), Form (particle grids and objects), Mir (3D terrains and wireframes), 3D Stroke (3D shapes and lines), Shine (light ray effects), Starglow (glints and glows), Sound Keys (audio-driven animation), Tao (3D objects along paths), Lux (in-camera lights), Echospace (cloning layers) and Horizon (360 background). Yes, you’re right — It’s a lot! Let’s begin with the easy one: A ground plane was added into Particular for bounce calculation. Not only does this speed up the setup, but because it’s built into the system tools, it can be part of presets, which incidentally can now be saved as custom presets. In previous releases, you had to set up AE layers and then attach that to the Particular system. This doesn’t mean layer integration went

away — you still have that ability. You can also use up to three layers, along with the internal ground plane for four particle bounces. More substantially, we now have child-inheritance upgrades. Particles could be emitted from different parents before, but now you can inherit a number of different variables from those parents — including size, opacity and particle type. This adds a lots of variations, but it’s not limited just to the inheritance override. You still have animation control curves for opacity and size on top of the parents’. Another subtle but powerful change is that more multiple color gradients are now available to choose from when driving particle color interpolations. The RGB gradient is all well and good, but if you are moving through the color wheel, things get a little dull and muddy. So now you have choices of HCL, LAB or HSV gradients to choose from for more interesting paths through the color range. In the 2024 update, Particular has a new Combustion

fluid dynamics choice for burning and explosions. With Stroke from Parent, Particular can generate lines from particles quickly with less overhead. Previously, you had to generate a multitude of particles to get them to feel like solid lines. Particular, Form and 3D Stroke have also received updates to the control curves with a mirror mode that give you the ability to make symmetrical effects with minimal fuss and time. Sound Keys now has a new UI update that more closely reflects the workflow and functionality of the other tools, like Particular. Overall, these are pretty cool additions, especially the Particular ones. Maxon’s Red Giant Magic Bullet Magic Bullet is defined as collection of color-correction and process nodes: Looks (look development), Colorista

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VFX & TECH (color correction), Cosmo II (beauty and skin adjustments), Denoiser III (fo denoising), Renoiser (for use after denoising), Film (for film emulation) and Mojo II (another flavor of look-development like Looks, but nowhere near the same amount of control). It has had a pretty strong foothold in film, commercials and design, and since it became part of the Maxon family it continues to move forward. This collection of plugins grew up in After Effects and Premiere, but it can also be found in Final Cut and Avid. Because it comes as an OpenFX plugin as well, it can be used in Resolve and Nuke too. We’ll begin with Looks since it has generated the most attention over the past year. It is basically a color- and look-development process, which is a sequence of processes that you add to your footage to build a look. The footage comes into the input node where the color space is set, the processes are added, and then it goes out through the output node, where the color space is set back. This flow would be familiar to Resolve users, without the option of parallel streams. But while you can build looks from scratch, the power lies in the huge library of preset looks that you can quickly audition. The presets are collections of those nodes, not black boxes, and so once a look is chosen, you can dive into the parameters and start to tweak and refine. With this new version, users can add Looks presets to the library — which are referred to as Capsules. The Capsules have cloud support, so updates and preset management are automatic. 30-plus presets have been added in the 2024 update. Additionally, full ACES support and OCIO color management have been incorporated, which is critical for modern VFX and film color pipelines. Magic Bullet Looks isn’t limited to color and compositing

tools. There is also an Unreal Engine Magic Bullet plugin, which installs if you have Unreal already on your system. As far as I can tell, it’s set to active by default. The plugin lives as a Post Process Volume, and the interface itself is exactly the same as it is in the other host software. It works in conjunction with the Cine Camera Actor, so when your camera is within the volume in a Level Sequence, it will apply the Magic Bullet Look to the output. On my system it works in real time, but even on slower systems the render output would have the look baked in. This was implemented back for UE 4.27, and in the 2024 Magic Bullet release, support has been added for 5.2 and 5.3. Also, in conjunction with other 2023/24 Red Giant updates, Japanese and Chinese languages have been added. Maxon’s Red Giant VFX Maxon’s Red Giant VFX suite is a collection of tools — composite finessing and balancing, chroma keying, tracking and cleanup, glow and flares, and distortions — created to make VFX work easier. I consider the flagship to be Supercomp, which acts like an adjustment layer on top of the rudimentary comp layers and was developed by VFX supervisor and Red Giant’s Chief Creative Officer Stu Maschwitz. This is almost like an integration layer which is about balancing blacks, edge blurs, light wraps, haze and diffusion. If you are an After Effects compositor, this should definitely be part of your toolbox. But in the latest update of VFX Suite, the star is Real Lens Flares. Flares are always cool, just ask J.J. Abrams. But they are tricky to get right and they are dynamic, which means they change as the shot changes. The latest update includes a handful of tools to make this more straightforward. Let’s take a look:

First thing to note is that you can now have flares driven by After Effects lights. This gets the flare to be generated from a source in 3D space. So, if you have a light tracked to something in the shot, the flare will change based on the movement. This helps more so if a light is moving in Z (toward or away from the camera), because the light source would change size. Furthermore, if the light has some direction to it (like a spotlight), the direction the light is facing is respected. So, you won’t have a lens flare if the light is facing away, but it will flare dramatically when the light is turned into the camera lens. In the lens flare structure, a ring flare has been added to help with spherical lens. A word of warning: Don’t use this when the lens is anamorphic. Otherwise you might as well turn in your VFX membership card! Lens dirt, or schmutz, is something we seem to love — despite the wails of protest from the cinematographers and their camera departments. But usually, dirt on the lens isn’t noticed unless it’s lit. Real Lens Flare has an illumination setting so you can light the dirt with your scene lights or the actual background plate, or both together. And to speed things up, a quality toggle has been added in the layer stack so flares will calculate at one-quarter resolution. This will automagically switch to full quality for final renders. I should mention that Real Lens Flare can also be used in Premiere. Website: maxon.net/en/red-giant Price: $49.91 (per month); $500 (per year) Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist. You can reach him at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.

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CROSSWORD

Your 2024 Animated Oscar Crossword - By Myles Mellor -

Across 1 Director of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, 2 words 6 Disney animated musical fantasy in which Fawn Veerasunthorn made her feature direction debut 9 School website ending 10 Director of The Inventor, Jim ____ 13 Setting for many Stephen King books 14 Frankfurter 15 Brief, sharp argument, 2 words 17 Former heavyweight champ 19 Ostrich relative 20 Grey’s Anatomy’s Sandra 21 She is the voice of Ember Lumen in Elemental, Leah ______ 22 Even finish 24 ____luv: animated short that won first prize at the World Festival of Animated film 25 The Matrix actor Reeves 26 _____ Deja, Disney legend who created the animated short, Mushka 28 Room, abbr. 30 Doctor who travels with a Tardis 32 Director of the Japanese animated fantasy titled The Boy and the Heron 35 Apiece, at Wimbledon 36 Shapeshifter who insists on being the sidekick to Ballister Boldheart in the Netflix fantasy adventure comedy 37 Name of the rat in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 40 Gentle alien in film 41 Animated short created by John Musker, 3 words 42 Barely beat

Down 1 Animation studio that produced Trolls Band Together 2 Live-action/animated short film released by Disney. Once Upon a ____ 3 Blood group letters 4 She voiced Ginger in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, _____ Newton 5 Absorbent sea creatures 6 Chinese dynasty name 7 Harry or William, to Charles 8 Four Souls of _____: climate change animation for the international film category 11 Great serve

12 Distribute cards, 2 words 15 The ____ ____ Bros.: animated movie based on one of the greatest video games of all time, 2 words 16 Domesticated fish 18 Dancing With the Stars judge Goodman 23 Raw fish 26 Chair part

27 Not sweet, as a wine 29 Director of the animated short Scale, Joseph ____ 31 __ __ carte, 2 words 33 Played on a film 34 Green Gables gal 35 27, a short by Flora ____ Budda 38 Soft drink 39 Acidity factor, abbr.

Myles Mellor is one of the top crossword writers in the world. He is published in over 60 magazines, newspapers and web outlets, with over 15,000 crosswords published worldwide. He supplies theme crosswords, diamond crosswords, syndicated puzzles, cryptograms, diagramless crosswords, word searches, sudokus, anagrams and word games (themedcrosswords.com). Subscribe to Myles’ crosswords at ilovecrosswords.com.

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dec 23

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2D ANIMATION SOFTWARE

BRING YOUR ANIMATIONS TO LIFE WITH

www.tvpaint.fr

Illustration by Charline Lemoal

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A DAY IN THE LIFE Every now and then, we really hit the jackpot with our features, and this month’s photographic visit with Disney icon, two-time Oscar-nominated director John Musker (The Princess and the Frog, Moana) is one of those great moments. The brilliant writer and helmer, whose long list of credits also includes The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules and Treasure Planet, has been the toast of the town with his wonderful new short I’m Hip. We are so grateful to him for sharing his fun pics with us.

3 I am aided and abetted in making my short, I’m Hip, by this talented woman, Talin Tanielian (compositor, shot supervisor, editor, production manager — and yes, she also does effects). Boy, I am lucky!

Of course, my studio is filled with things like this — a bust created in ZBrush and 3D printed by modeler Ryan Tottler. It reminds me never to look in a mirror!

I am retired, so I can sleep in. Here is my wake-up call from granddaughter Lucy. “Boompah! Get up and get drawing on that short.”

4 When lunch rolls around, I try to have it as often as possible with a Cub Hall of Famer, Here I am with pitcher Fergie Jenkins. (Did I tell you I’m from Chicago?)

Then, it’s back to drawing board — in this case the Cintiq — where granddaughter Gwen gives me a lesson in drawing cute.

When stuck for ideas, stretching and drinking helps loosen the frontal lobe …

7 Or I may retreat to the treehouse I built in my backyard. “Green thoughts in a green shade!”

8 Some days, I may be shooting dance reference for my short with my brilliant dancers, Mark Ballas and Daniella Karagach (Dancing with the Stars).

And then, after a long day’s work and dinner, I am serenaded by men in straw hats. It rounds out the day perfectly! ◆

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dec 23

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The Perfect Gift for the Holidays! Free 1-Year Digital sub, Discounted print or both!

AnimationMagazine.net/Subscribe Use promo code AMHOL23

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The #1 Content and Co-Production Market for Latin America and US Hispanic Television The TV Market that will put you face-to-face with LATAM & US Hispanic executives thanks to its 1-to-1 pre-scheduled meetings format.

14-17 November 2023 Moon Palace Resort Hotel, Cancun, Mexico

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