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Escape from Reality: The Midnight King is a fantasy about a young boy who is haunted by dark forces.
The project definitely seems to be spiking interest and enthusiasm, the Cartoon Movie will be the first big meeting with the market and we look forward to presenting all our work and development up to now.”
A Boy’s Demons Autour de Minuit’s second feature at Cartoon Movie is The Midnight King, an intriguing feature about a young boy who leaves his troubled home for an enchanted forest, only to discover that the woods are cursed and his fears have followed him there. The timeless, fantastical tale is directed by Oscar nominee Chris Lavis (NFB’s Madame Tutli-Putli) and Maciek Szczerbowski. “The Midnight King was born out of our long history of collaborating with the musician Patrick Watson, who created the soundtracks and landscapes for our film Nightmare and our VR experience Gymnasia,” says Lavis. “In the development of our films we are generally first inspired by fragments of scenes or images. We collect these fragments, hoping that they will challenge us to create a story around them. For The Midnight King, we also had Patrick’s musical explorations to work with. To our delight, the story revealed itself out of that soup: a musical odyssey about a runaway boy and a girl with silver eyes and legs of glass.” From there it was a question of finding collaborators and producers who were just as excited to be on the journey with Lavis and his team. “We had been searching for years for the right project to bring to Luc Déry and Kim McCraw at micro_scope in Montreal, and had long admired Nicolas Schmerkin’s eye for films and his studio’s talent roster from our years on the festival circuit,” says the helmer. “They all came on board early and we’ve been developing the movie together ever since.”
‘Our main challenge is to tell a serious, sometimes dark, story about exile and migration to a young audience. We believe it’s an important topic to be taught and shown to children.’ — Producer Nicolas Schmerkin
Lavis says he has no preferred techniques or dogmas except perhaps one — that the story should always drive the method. “As the story is revealed, so is the method,” he explains. “Because we began the process by drawing — usually we build props and puppets — it became obvious to us that the most emotionally and visually satisfying way of telling the story we wanted to tell was in the medium of drawn, 2D animation.” The director says this required a leap in thinking. “It was like starting all over again,” he points out. “At first, we thought all the tricks we had learned from stop-motion (from live video animatics to puppet and set building) would be worthless in 2D, but we’ve found just the opposite. Thanks to the affordability of 3D scanners and new production pipelines that integrate CG and 2D, we’ve discovered that many of our stop-motion techniques flow right into a modern 2D pipeline.” Among the inspirations for the feature, Lavis cites Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville and Disney’s The Rescuers. “All three are features with bold, personal drawing styles,” says Lavis. “However, once we started developing the pipeline with our collaborators, the more we were able to leave these initial references behind and find our own voice in the medium.” The filmmaker estimates the feature’s budget to be around 10 million dollars. He adds, “It will be a co-production between Canada, France and probably a third country. We are now focused on finishing a two-minute pilot.”
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Of course, the animated movie landscape keeps getting busier and more competitive. We had to ask Lavis why he thinks The Midnight King stands out? “Many of this century’s most experimental, outrageous and courageous films have come from artists working in animation,” he responds. “However, there is also a side to our business that is extremely conservative and risk-averse. Feature animation, in particular, has suffered from the perception that animated films must target either an adult or child audience. This false divide limits funders and creators alike. The Midnight King doesn’t fit neatly into either box. We seek an intergenerational, ‘crossover’ audience, children and adults who hunger for an experience that reaches across mediums and categories and speaks to them personally.” As in many of Autour de Minuit’s projects, music plays an important role in Lavis’ feature. “Animation’s dirty secret is just how important music and sound is to the success and emotional weight of a film,” he explains. “Luckily, we believe, the songs Patrick Watson has written for The Midnight King are some of the best work he’s done in his life. But the prospect of an animated musical is still daunting. For this film we’ve never been more reliant on sound, because Patrick is a co-writer who is building the movie with us from the ground up. That’s frightening and exciting, as all creation ought to be!” You can find out more about the French studio at autourdeminuit.com. www.animationmagazine.net
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