During its ongoing festival run, which has included stops at Annecy, Encounters, Pictoplasma, Animator Festival, Etiuda & Anima, Imaginaria and our own Skwigly Screening at Manchester Animation Festival, the film recently qualified for Academy Award consideration with its Jury Award win at New Hampshire Film Festival. Skwigly took the opportunity to speak with Anne about this milestone and the journey of the film’s production.

Thank you for speaking with Skwigly today. To start with, I’d be keen to hear about what drew you to art and animation, and what your formative influences were?

Thanks a lot for your interest in my work. As a kid I loved drawing and sculpting weird creatures from clay and paper maché (I still do). I took a short detour in studying art history, where I was fascinated by surrealist painters and tribal art from around the world, but soon discovered that I enjoy making art much more than talking about it. When I attended an animation workshop in Poland I was immediately hooked, especially by stop motion animation. It felt like magic to make my creatures come alive. After this workshop l teamed up with two friends to make our first claymation short from scratch in their living room, and eventually endend up studying animation at the School of Art and Design in Kassel. One of the early influences during this time was the work of the Brothers Quay, which strongly changed my perspective on storytelling.

Can you tell us a bit about the animation (and, by extension, stop-motion) scene in Berlin? Is there a strong community and industry in that part of the world or does it feel like more of a niche?

There is a very supportive and strong community of independent animation artists. Berlin even has its own Animation Festival. If you want to meet fellow animation people, it’s a great place to be. But there is no big animation industry, especially not for stop motion. I’ve been lucky to work as a puppet maker for Germany’s iconic stop motion tv series Our Little Sandman over the last three years, but that’s a rare opportunity. Otherwise I mostly work for international clients.

Image: Anne Breymann

Following from this, the credits for Radix mention assistance from the German Federal Film Board and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Can you tell us a bit about these organisations and how they’re set up to assist artists such as yourself?

I’m very grateful for both their support. The Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion provided me with a four-month artist grant, which gave me the freedom to explore different ideas. The first drafts of the story and design for Radix were created during this time. The production was supported by the German Federal Film Board through reference funding. This is a system where your film collects credits every time it’s selected in certain festivals, and those credit points can be turned into funding for your next project. So the budget I had for Radix was generated through the festival success of my previous short film Nocturne. It was still a very small budget though. I submitted Radix to two more film funding institutions, but got rejected.

We’ve previously featured your film Nocturne on the site, a film that shares many aesthetic traits with your latest film Radix that also proved very popular. Looking back on the experiences of both projects, what are some of the main ways you’d say you’ve grown as an artist and storyteller in the intervening years?

It wasn’t my intention, but I feel like Radix is somehow a continuation of Nocturne. They’re both situated in a world that I’ve been creating in my head over a long time. I feel very much at home in this world, and sometimes I need to escape there from reality and surround myself with strange and magical creatures. The experiences of both projects were similar, I even mostly worked with the same small team (sound designer Michal Krajczok and cinematographer Björn Ullrich). But I think over the years I’ve learned to trust myself a little more and just follow my intuition, and also to let go of control and trust the amazing people I work with.

Cinematographer Björn Ullrich (Image: Anne Breymann)

Some of your other earlier work has used digital 2D and cutout animation; is this a medium you might return to at some point, or do you imagine yourself sticking with stop-motion films in the future (Ekke Nekkepenn, for example, appears to be a hybrid of stop-mo and 2D approaches)?

Most of my commissioned animations are done in digital cutout or hybrid techniques. This is mostly a practical decision to adapt to clients’ timeframes and budgets, and also to make it possible for me to work from anywhere. Ekke Nekkepenn, a short film about a dark Frisian folktale, was a commissioned film for De Kraak, a traveling multimedia exhibition featuring folktales from the sea. For this project I worked in a hybrid technique with handcrafted relief puppets from clay and paper, which I photographed, and then animated in the 2D animation program Moho. I don’t think I’ll ever stick to just one technique, maybe I’ll try live action puppetry next.

As well as animated films, you’ve produced stunning standalone pieces and posed illustrations using puppets. Does this go hand in hand with how you approach animated storytelling, or is it its own separate skillset to tell stories in single, static images?

It‘s my favourite way to tell a story in just one image, because it gives me so much freedom. I can create these photographs spontaneously, without the time, planning and budget I‘d need for an animated short film. I usually draw a very rough sketch, and then I just start creating. To me those puppet illustrations (I never really know what to call them) are like stills from a film that doesn’t exist. Maybe this sounds strange coming from a filmmaker, but I personally enjoy more looking at still than moving images, because I can take as much time as I want to discover all the details.

As mentioned, Radix continues in a similar vein to prior works in its embracing of folklore and mystic elements. Was the concept of its two main characters and their interactions rooted in any pre-existing mythology at all?

I’m very much inspired by mythology and folktales, but Radix isn’t based on any existing mythology, it‘s a rather personal story.

Image: Anne Breymann

It notably draws upon a recurring visual motif across your work wherein creatures and plant life appear to be biologically entangled – branches emerging from or within body parts, for example. Does this imagery hold any particular symbolism or weight to you personally?

My films are all created very intuitively, and sometimes I‘m surprised myself that I keep coming back to the same motives such as masks and roots. For me the branches stand for something rooted deep inside ourselves, something that changes and evolves, but is mostly hidden, and only comes out in certain situations. I‘m very much inspired by plants and animals, but also by everyday‘s human behavior and interaction.

When making this kind of film, do you pre-plan out the story in a traditional sense (script, storyboard) or is it more of a stream-of-consciousness approach? Or something different entirely?

It always starts with something visual, a drawing or a sculpture, which I create without a plan. The story and the characters develop simultaneously. I wish I could make the entire film this way, but once I get to the point where I apply for funding, I have to make a storyboard and precise plan. When animating I work with an animatic, but try to shoot as much chronologically as possible, so I can still be open to changes and new ideas.

From a technical perspective, I’d love to hear more about what goes into the crafting of the puppets themselves; do you use standard rigs and materials or do your films require something more bespoke?

The puppets of Radix are actually made from very simple materials. The armature is built from wire, balsa wood and brass, the feathers are made from paper, and the faces are sculpted from polymer clay with glass eyes. I prefer to use materials that I can spontaneously adjust during the making, as the characters’ design often evolves while I‘m making them. I like my puppets to be visibly tactile, with imperfections and rough textures.

Image: Anne Breymann

The interplay of light and dark – indeed, the use of light as a whole – is fascinating to observe within the film. The internal lighting effects read as though they were created in-camera as part of the puppet designs themselves, was that the case?

Most of the lighting effects are indeed created in camera. The glowing creature for example was made from white paper and transparent plastic with fairy lights and LED wires inside. The only lighting that was done digitally was the glowing of the leaves, because they were so tiny. I made them from paper and wire, and Jonatan Schwenk animated them one by one in stop motion, and later composited them into the film. The overall lighting of the film was done by cinematographer Björn Ullrich.

What sort of demands on your time and circumstances does a project like this have on you as an independent artist? Did you have access to a studio space/resources or was it a home setup?

I worked on Radix over the course of two years, while simultaneously doing commissioned work, and it was sometimes hard to juggle both. I’m very lucky to share a studio in Berlin with eight artist friends. Their company kept me sane while I was animating all day on my own behind black curtains.

Image: Anne Breymann

From screening the film for recent major UK events including the Encounters Film Festival and Manchester Animation Festival, I’ve been able to enjoy firsthand an enthusiastic response from audiences. How have you found Radix’s festival journey so far, and has it yielded any valuable interactions/opportunities?

I‘m happy to hear that, as I‘ve only managed to attend a few screenings in person, but I hope I’ll have more chances to travel and actually meet the audience. Radix is running very well in festivals and received some awards. I get kind messages from people who have seen it in a cinema somewhere around the world, which always makes me happy. One of the good interactions that happened is this interview with Skwigly

Having recently qualified for Academy Award consideration following its recent win at New Hampshire Film Festival, do you have immediate plans for Radix as far as keeping it in contention (upcoming screening dates etc)?

Radix is a self-produced film, and I don‘t have the means for a campaign or screenings beyond film festivals. I think it’s already great to be on on the longlist, and don’t have very high hopes for more.
I‘m planning to release Radix online soon though. The trailer gained a lot of attention on social media, and I know that many people have been waiting to finally watch the film.

Beyond Radix, are there any other projects you have out in the world, or in the pipeline, that readers should keep an eye out for?

At the moment I’m creating narrative sculptures and creatures for several exhibitions next year.

For more on the work of Anne Breymann, visit annebreymann.de

The post Radix | Q&A with Anne Breymann appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

© Studio 4ºC, Anime LTD

Animation’s history with mermaids is a daunting one to add to. Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo is one of many films from Japan’s most celebrated animation studio, and The Little Mermaid kicked off the Disney renaissance, while also being one of the first major western works to incorporate computer animation. ChaO, one of two features coming from the famed Studio 4ºC in 2026, avoids having to live up to that standard of trailblazing through its unconventional approach to the mermaid-human love story. 

The bones of a princess mermaid (ChaO herself) falling in love with a human (an average Joe named Stephan) are intact in ChaO. The story is slightly subverted through ChaO’s sudden insistence on marrying this random human, the reasons for which are unclear to the audience until the final stages of the film. ChaO also greets its audience with a staggeringly surreal but fully realised fantasy world, one more distinctly alien than that of Ponyo or the Little Mermaid. Set in Shanghai, the film blends land and sea aesthetics, creating architecture, transport and fauna all its own. It’s a massive boon for any film to be able to show the audience something they haven’t seen before.

In the director’s chair on ChaO is Yasuhiro Aoki who has worked as an animator in the Japanese industry for over 30 years. On his resumé are genre-defining works like Mind Game, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Animatrix and Sailor Moon, but his love for the medium started with a 1970s series from Tokyo Movie. “There’s an animation called Gutsy frog where the action is really well done,” Aoki tells Skwigly. “That’s what got me interested in animation.” 

Gutsy Frog propelled Aoki to pursue animation school, but he found it left him unprepared for actually working in the industry, “I did go to animation school, but I can’t say that it really helped me that much. I think I learned more once I started work from butting heads with people and getting told off and and just growing that way. But I guess you can’t grow without skill.” 

In the mid 90s Aoki began working at Studio Live, a service studio that allowed him to gain credits on some of the aforementioned iconic anime of the decade. Aoki believes this period taught him invaluable lessons he’d take forward in his career, “I learned a lot. I learned the importance of layout which was particularly important on ChaO, because normally you have characters who fit in the frame and they’re all the same sort of size, but in ChaO,the characters are all different sizes, and that means you have to change the layout to fit the characters, but that, in turn, gives the world of ChaO its breadth and its depth.” The clash between the land and sea is most apparent in the character design across ChaO, with humans often dwarfed by gigantic sea creatures. 

© Studio 4ºC, Anime LTD

Crafting the idea for ChaO meant looking into 4ºC’s history and expanding a small section of Aoki’s past work, “Obviously the story of A Little Mermaid really exists, but ChaO itself goes back 19 years to something Studio 4ºC made called Amazing nuts! There was one episode which I directed, it was called ‘Even If You Become The Enemy of the World,’ [also known as ‘Kung-Fu Love’] and that was like a pilot for ChaO.”

With experience and cache at 4ºC in the bag, Aoki set to work on developing the fundamental pillars of ChaO. The film’s setting is what provides its most unique flavour, a hybrid world equally influenced by land and sea. For Aoki, this design was guided by the ideas of co-existence he was keen to stress, “The theme of the film is how different cultures can come together, and how you go about accepting other cultures, in this case, it’s humans and merpeople. Part of that is asking how to bring together the sea and this futuristic city of Shanghai, and one way I did that was with the merpeople’s roads which are water pipes that flow through the city of Shanghai. That’s one way of tying this whole city into this theme. It’s not an easy theme to draw, but that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

As it turns out, the city is drawn immaculately, each environment and background a sensory pleasure for the audience. Aoki found that the backgrounds had to be juxtaposed to the film’s foregrounded action, “The style of the background was developed to to complement the style of the character designs. And as I said before, you can’t ignore the layout with something like this. But to contrast with the manga-like, cartoonish characters, the background art has more reality, and it was something that the art director [Hiroshi Takiguchi] put a lot of work into.”

© Studio 4ºC, Anime LTD

Along with establishing an aquatic version of Shanghai, the other big challenge was ChaO herself. She spends the majority of the movie as a big old fish that waddles around on land, until she begins to feel more comfortable around her reluctant Prince Eric analogue Stephen, at which point she takes on a more humanoid shape. 

“She has very tiny legs,” says Aoki. “She can’t really walk. Her steps are very small. She sways as she walks. This was the idea of the character designer Hirokazu Kojima, he loves cute things, and he came up with this rough concept of how she should move and walk. You could see straight away, this was such a cute design. Just from watching her walk, you get an idea of how cute, awkward and clumsy she is.”

Since the film’s premiere at the 2025 Annecy Festival, ChaO has received some criticism for its main character. Many critics and fans have seen her as one dimensional, unable to express motivation beyond making the male lead of the story happy by serving him any way she can.

Aoki believes this perception comes from ChaO’s character design, “If people think she’s a superficial character, that means that they just saw her and immediately thought she was cute. But actually, the intention was that we would be more attracted to her as the film goes on, that we should find her that way in the end. But maybe some people do see her and immediately think, ‘Oh, she’s cute,’ in which case it’s probably down to the skill of the character designer.”

Whether due to weaponized cuteness or some underwritten dialogue, ChaO definitely has its critics. However, the film’s visual splendour and technical craft is undeniable, making for a debate that has bubbled around the western film festival circuit for a few months. In 2026, that debate will extend to the public who can pick apart the flaws and fantasy of ChaO.

The post Yasuhiro Aoki on ChaO appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

When last we spoke, Clyde Henry had recently completed Cochemare. Having followed the work of the studio since Madame Tutli-Putli, it’s been fascinating to see the different directions you have gone with your work over the years, and the different approaches taken with mixed-media. Can you talk a bit about how the studio has grown in the past decade up to The Girl Who Cried Pearls?

Following Cochemare, which was an experimental stereoscopic film, we spent the best part of the next decade exploring virtual reality. The film, or experience, that came out of that process was Gymnasia which taught us a great deal about the power of puppets to elicit a strong emotional response, no matter the medium. And it became clear that the rest of our career would probably be defined by exploring the limits of puppets on screen.

Handmade puppet for The Girl Who Cried Pearls (Credit: Clyde Henry Productions)

The film has all the hallmarks of being adapted from an existing fable, but I gather it is an original story; what brought the idea about initially, did it stem from anywhere in particular?

The goal was a story that felt like it had existed for millennia. In truth, it only goes back as far as the making of Madame Tutli-Putli, where one night we came up with this idea of a poor girl crying pearls, and a poor boy who is torn between his desire for her and his desire to get rich. But we put it aside because we couldn’t solve the ending. That’s not unusual for us, we have dozens of half-baked ideas that never come out of the oven, for one reason or another.

Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski (Credit: Martin Gros)

I believe that production on the film went back to 2020 – did the pandemic throw things into disarray at all, or compel you to steer your approach in a way you might not have done otherwise?

The film’s production was defined by the pandemic. It affected every aspect, but it wasn’t all negative. The first few months of isolation allowed us to fully concentrate on the sculpting and building of the puppets instead of our original plan, which was to multi-task and work on the animatic, schedule, and editing all at once. The puppets definitely benefited from that singular focus.

The presentation of Montreal in the early 20th century is very nicely done. Was there much by way of research into how the city and architecture looked at that time to keep its representation authentic?

We love the research phase of any project, and we spent months gathering material on the neighborhoods, architecture, clothing and streetcars of the era. But the ultimate decisions were artistic ones, and we were happy to throw accuracy to the wind if it made for a better story.

Artistic Director Brigitte Henry on Set (Credit: Martin Gros)

On that note, the production design and set craftsmanship is impeccably detailed and immersive. Can you talk a bit about working with Brigitte (Henry, Artistic Director) and the talents who constructed the environments of the film (and did you yourselves get involved on that front)?

Brigitte Henry was intimately involved in the research phase, and during production her particular responsibility was procuring props from antique markets and websites, as well as scanning or creating objects for 3D printing. She was also involved in shooting the animatic and the sets. Special mention should go to Yso South, who helped design and build most of the costumes. As with all our films, we were responsible for sculpting puppets, designing and building sets and props, lighting, and for applying the final patina, dust, and dirt to every object and character that appeared on screen.

Chris Lavis on Set (Credit: Martin Gros)

I got the impression from the credits that performers were used for LAV (live action video) reference, which would account for how uniquely imbued with life the puppet performances are throughout the film. How much LAV would you say was used throughout, and was this an important part of achieving the quality of animation you had in mind for the film?

We use live action footage of actors for every scene. Our animatics take the place of storyboards, so we use them to reference gestures, camera, edits—the entire film exists in live action from beginning to end before we shoot a frame. We find this method creates, then preserves spontaneity in both the performances and the camera. For us the camera is as much an animated character as the puppets are.

To achieve this fluidity of performance, were there any special considerations or approaches when it came to the puppet armatures and materials themselves?

We have found that simple aluminum armatures are the best way to achieve fluid motion in our films. Our puppets tend to be light and quite bendable, in comparison to mechanical armatures.

Maciek Szczerbowski on Set (Credit: Martin Gros)

There are some inevitable comparisons I can’t help but draw with Madame Tutli-Putli, though it struck me as interesting that, while that film used mixed-media to give the characters’ eyes a striking sense of life, the eyes in The Girl Who Cried Pearls are almost static, yet they still feel alive. I’d be interested in hearing about what led to this approach and how you alighted on it.

For most characters, the faces are completely static. Not even the eyes move. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could make a puppet emote without any tricks, to show that the inherent power of a puppet has nothing to do with technology. As Orson Welles said: “Puppets are ancient entertainers. They don’t just go back to the crib, they go back to the cave.”

A similarly interesting visual choice is the absence of lip-sync, but only in the flashback sequences; was this symbolic of anything in particular?

When we recall a conversation from decades ago, we may remember some words, but we certainly don’t recall details like blinks or moving lips. Memories are not recordings, they are impressions.

On the Set of The Girl Who Cried Pearls (Credit: Martin Gros)

Another subtle disparity between the present-day scenes is the more fleshy, organic quality of the puppets relative to those of the flashbacks, which appear almost wood-carved with cadaverous colouring. Can you elaborate on the reasoning behind this approach, and were there any specific artists or eras of filmmaking you wished to evoke with it?

They are meant to appear carved, recalling wooden church idols or well-worn marionettes. The intention was to invoke religious worship, a theme of the film, and to reinforce the idea that we are telling you a fable, the kind that may have been repeated by a puppeteer travelling from town to town.

Avoiding spoilers, the film concludes with something of a rug-pull for the audience. Was this always how you intended to go with the ending, or was it a decision that came later on in the writing process?

The decision came late. As we said before, we put the idea aside for more than a decade because we couldn’t find the ending.  The ending as is wasn’t tacked on, it was the eureka moment that made the film work—a story about the very nature of stories.

As is often the case with NFB films, an English language version was produced concurrently with a French language version. How was it to direct Colm Feore and James Hyndman as each respective narrator, and did they have any interaction with one another to ensure the character was portrayed consistently across both versions?

James Hyndman’s French version came before Colm’s, but really, that made no difference. Each actor defined the role in their own way, and each interpretation is unique to that version.  As for directing them, these are two absolute masters, we didn’t direct so much as nudge them a little this way and that, to make sure we had some options in the editing room.

Canadian actor Colm Feore lent his voice to the animated short The Girl Who Cried Pearls (Credit: Scott McQuarrie)

As an extension of that, and as a curiosity, were the scenes that involved lip-sync animated to one specific performance that the other actor had to then time his to?

Each actor got to do their own thing, as long as they kept to the length of the shot. The French and English mouths were animated separately, in post-production. It’s not a dub, but two separate films.

I thought the work that Patrick Watson brought to the film was really strong, and seemed to extend beyond a musical score to elements that played off of the sound design and specific, individual sound effects. Can you tell us a bit about your working relationship and what sort of back-and-forths you may have had to achieve this?

Patrick has been a wonderful collaborator over several films. There are instances where the music and the sound design are indistinguishable, which is a testament to the collaboration between Olivier Calvert, the sound designer, and Patrick, the composer. Ideally, that’s how it should work, you don’t feel the work of one or the other is dominant. Patrick also helped us make some crucial editing decisions during the process, suggesting we cut three short scenes to help streamline the story.

The film will next screen in the UK at Manchester Animation Festival this month, how have you found the festival and audience response to the film so far?

The response has been very positive. We are proud of this movie. It is, to the frame, exactly the film we wanted to make. Its flaws are our flaws, this is the best we could do. To see it resonate with so many people, and to see the film appreciated not just for the visuals, but for the story, has been wonderfully gratifying.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls plays as part of MAF’s Animation Mixtape 1 screening, both as an in-person event (Nov 12 8:30pm, HOME Cinema 2) and online (available Nov 14-30)

The post The Girl Who Cried Pearls | Interview with Clyde Henry Productions appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Wataru Takahashi’s film is a delight — dazzlingly and sincerely grappling with questions of love, limerence, and idealised identity. Takahashi is a veteran director at Shin-Ei Animation, a prolific studio best known domestically for a reliable stream of Doraemon and Shin-chan theatrical feature films. Takahashi has previously helmed Shin-chan features, and The Obsessed (Toritsukare Otoko) is his first directorial effort outside of that franchise. In recent years, Shin-Ei has produced exciting and fresh films such as Totto-chan and Ghost Cat Anzu. Much like those works, The Obsessed has a striking and distinctive visual style. Characters are drawn in thin lines filled in with block colour, their angular, wonky lines resembling shapes that you might arrange in Microsoft Paint on an idle afternoon. It’s a fitting look for a film that’s an ode to imagination and daydreaming.

Skwigly had the pleasure of sitting down with Takahashi during the Tokyo International Film Festival, where The Obsessed was screened. In our interview, which leaps from topic to topic much like Giuseppe, we discussed the many joys and challenges of animation, adaptation, and romance.

Where did the idea for this film emerge from?

It started out as a short story of the same name, by Shinji Ishii. We approached him to discuss adapting it.

Why adapt it into a musical?

I wanted to deliver joy that can only be experienced through cinema. Giuseppe is obsessed with all kinds of things, and it made sense for him to express that level of obsession in the film through song and music.

What was it about the short story that made you think this could be a successful film?

The actions this character takes, the way he behaves – these days we don’t really have a character like this. We tend to think about blending in and cooperating with others, whereas this Giuseppe goes his own way – he runs wild, possessed by all these passions. I thought it would be really fun to bring this character to life on screen.

Tell me about casting Masaya Sano as Giuseppe.

We wanted to make a musical, so we needed someone who’s good at singing – that was the initial reason. This Giuseppe character is kind of a naive, innocent guy – but he’s also very open. He has this ‘trickster’ quality to him, and he’s very charismatic. So we got to thinking: “What kind of person could embody this character?”. I was recommended Sano-san. I remembered seeing him on television, where he’d crack jokes. And our film also has a comedic element. So I thought “Okay, he’s the right person”.

Tell me about the setting of the film and your visual approach to it. It feels somewhat indistinctly European. There are echoes of films like Ratatouille of course, but also the Professor Layton series and the Sylvain Chomet film Belleville Rendez-vous.

The protagonist’s name is ‘Giuseppe’, so he obviously comes from a foreign country. In the original story, where exactly was left up to the imagination of the reader. But I was envisioning the UK. And I thought it would be nice to create a town setting – indeed, much like we see in Belleville Rendez-vous. It looks how Japanese people imagine Europe to be.

©2001 Shinji Ishii / Shinchosha ©2025 The Obsessed Production Partners

There’s an angularity to the character designs in this film, and a charming scrappiness to its diversity of art styles. What was the starting point for the look of the film? That angularity reminds me somewhat of your work on the Shin-chan films.

Masatsugu Arakawa was responsible for the character designs – a first-class creator in the Japanese anime industry. He was involved in a series called Windy Tales (Fūjin Monogatari). So everyone in the industry knows him well. We thought it would be right to request his character designs, because this is in many respects a ‘fantasy’ story. And indeed, as you note, I do think I have been impacted and influenced by my past work on the Shin-chan films.

Looking back over Shin-chan and recent Shin-Ei efforts such as Totto-chan, Ghost Cat Anzu and this film, there appears to be no such thing as ‘conventional animation’ at Shin-Ei Animation – if indeed such a thing exists at all. Is there a design philosophy and culture at the studio where they strive to create original, atypical works?

I don’t think there’s really a set philosophy at Shin-Ei. They’re best known for characters such as Doraemon and Shin-chan, and those are both manga properties – and what that means is that Shin-Ei’s task is to replicate the mangaka’s world in film form. But with their original films, I do think that what they strive to achieve is a powerful uniqueness with each work.

Is this film hand-drawn, computer-animated, or a mix of both?

We drew it by hand, scanned it, then worked with the results on computers – that’s how the production process has evolved. We did have a tiny bit of 3D CG – the butterfly, and the falling leaves – but Masatsugu Arakawa was against it. He said it’s better to hand-draw.

You acutely and accurately capture romantic obsession in this film. Do you feel there’s something about cinema or animation specifically that lends itself well to exploring that subject?

Yes, I do. The original novel was very detailed in capturing how this guy – obsessed with so many things – begins to encounter romance. The writing was very straightforward about the way that he acts and open about the way that he thinks. Giuseppe is a straightforward character, and I thought that would look good in animation.

Who is your expected or intended audience for this film?

I feel it’s targeted at everybody. Shinji Ishii’s original work started out as a children’s picture book, but there was so much content to it that it became a novel. I think that evidences the fact that Ishii had so much to say – that there was so much emotion and power contained within his words.

©2001 Shinji Ishii / Shinchosha ©2025 The Obsessed

Would you describe yourself as “obsessed”?

Well, yes – I was obsessed with creating this film, The Obsessed. Now that it’s completed, I’m having more fun helping raise my kids.

What would you like your audiences to take away from this film when they leave the theatre?

Sometimes fiction can be more powerful than reality. Right now, around the world, war is going on. I don’t want people to lose against the feelings that that situation induces in us. I want to help support people mentally with films like this one – because film saved me.

The Obsessed screened at the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival. With thanks to Naomi Ikezawa for translating.

The post The Obsessed | Interview with director Wataru Takahashi appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Kateryna, Mary Yanko (Source: Mary Yanko / MIYU Productions)

In just a few years, Ukrainian filmmaker Mary Yanko has established herself as an original, emerging voice in animation. Splitting her time between Kyiv and Paris, with a background in fine art and animation, she has been remarkably prolific since graduating from Gobelins in 2022. While still a student, she co-directed one of the 2020 Annecy Festival opening sequences. Her graduation short Vulvine Reine d’Extase (2022) went on to screen at over 60 festivals worldwide; even as it was blocked from YouTube, Instagram, and Vimeo for its erotic and violent content. The film eventually found a home on the UK-based platform Shadows Streaming via Amazon Prime, and you can watch it here.

More recently she directed La Princesse de Babylone for France Télévisions, which premiered at Annecy in 2024 and received a Special Mention at the Linoleum Animation Festival.

Her latest film in development, the animated documentary Kateryna, explores how the Russo-Ukrainian War is depicted across social media, following the unique perspective of a webcam model who becomes a soldier. Co-produced by Miyu Productions (France) and Moon Man Prod (Ukraine), the project won the ARTE France Prize at this year’s Annecy MIFA pitch, demonstrating its powerful message and well-received concept.

Mary Yanko presenting her film at Linoleum Festival (Photo by Roman Shalamov)

We chatted with Mary about her career so far and to delve deeper into her new project.

First of all, congratulations on ‘Kateryna’ winning the ARTE France Prize at Annecy’s MIFA this year! What do you think resonated most with the jury, and what does this recognition mean for you and the project?

Having now spoken with Helene who curates the Arte program “Short circuit” I can surely say that she actually appreciated Katryna’s writing and the “best script” mention that came with the MIFA prize is another testament to it. As an author I’m reassured that the film will have a life outside film festivals, because once Kateryna is finished it will be available on the Arte’s online platform and will be broadcast on TV.

I consider Kateryna an international story, even though the film is about Ukrainians who grew up with the war, it is also a story about foreigners who watch them through screens and accidentally become spectators of this war while sitting in the comfort of their homes. The foreigners are only depicted in the form of comments that appear on the screen, but it is interesting that Europeans identify with this digital image when watching. Arte’s commitment during this early stage of production proves that they believe French and German audiences will find this story interesting.

Kateryna, Mary Yanko (Source: Mary Yanko / MIYU Productions)

Although the film is based on a real friend’s story, you also drew from many conversations with women in the Ukrainian army, whose stories are rarely told. Did these conversations change your original idea, and in what ways (if any) did they help shape Kateryna’s character?

Talking to soldiers with active online activity experiences was crucial for me to understand what I was dealing with. We are given so much power as filmmakers to present and amplify our points of view. When we’re working with such sensitive topics I believe in staying humble and keeping this power in check by doing extensive research and consulting with those who have actually lived what we are writing. Many soldiers are deeply traumatised by their experience and it’s my responsibility to fact check and be as empathic as I can when I work with such a subject. Some of them helped with important visual details and dialogue, mostly they confirmed the narrative was on the right track.

A female soldier I interviewed admitted to me that she had a hidden past as a camgirl. I was surprised because there was no explicit content on her account. She told me that she sold sexual videos to strangers online to be able to feed her daughter when she couldn’t find work, and she’s afraid that one day someone will find out. She confirmed that it was important for her to be able to read or see stories like Kateryna’s. Animation makes this story anonymous and universal; many Ukrainian women can see themselves in it, and their experience can be shared with viewers in a story designed to be understood, felt, and shared.

Kateryna, Mary Yanko (Source: Mary Yanko / MIYU Productions)

One of the themes running throughout the film is the use of social media; while you shared how you created your first Instagram account in the same year that Russia invaded Ukraine (2014). How do you think platforms like Instagram or TikTok have shaped the way your generation experiences war?

When I need to shelter from ballistic missiles I put a picture online and people thousands of kilometers away can see it and become aware of what I’m going through.

We are people of a modern, very digitalised country with almost no military industrial complex facing one of the world’s greatest powers. We have to constantly remind the international community of our existence to have a chance to defend ourselves. This means playing by the rules the social media are imposing.

In June 2023, my father sent me a video of him making jokes on the front lines. Three days later, he died in combat near Sloviansk. The first thing I did was delete a post promoting a fundraiser for his equipment because I found it too depressing for my followers. I also knew I would need them for other fundraisers and to share information about what’s happening in my country. Like other Ukrainians, I adapt my life to algorithms.

Kateryna, Mary Yanko (Source: Mary Yanko / MIYU Productions)

You trained in both fine arts in Kyiv and animation at Gobelins in Paris, giving you a mix of traditional and digital techniques. How has that background influenced the way you approached Kateryna, which will blend traditional 2D, rotoscoping, 3D techniques and documentary material?

I see endless possibilities in the transformative nature of animation as an art form and a filmmaking tool. If painting is captured in time, then in cinema we have complete control over time. The dynamics of editing, the transition from scene to scene can have an ironic, sarcastic or calming effect on the viewer, adding new contexts.

I am lucky to have a good set of technical knowledge and good producers so I feel very free as a director to mix all the animation techniques I want, and most importantly be able to work with talented teams of artists and animators to make my vision come true.

In your pitch, you described how you want the film to be “aesthetically beautiful, understandable to all, and entertaining”. With the film following two timelines – one depicting the horrors of the frontline; the other with flashbacks to Kateryna’s civilian life – how do you walk the line between beauty and horror?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder right? Well not really. I believe we all choose when to make something aesthetically appealing or appalling, in animation more so than in realtime shooting. Then we make that choice again when we choose to keep or remove the footage. Should war be represented as something aesthetically appealing? When a soldier films herself bleeding in a trench in order to fundraise for her team’s equipment should she add a contrast filter or adjust colors before posting? My film asks these questions, but I don’t have definite answers. What I can say is that when I post a video of a missile hit during a beautiful sunset I get more views and reactions then when it’s raining.

You have mentioned how you plan to use real photos and videos of women soldiers in the closing credits. Why was it important to close with documentary material after such a stylized approach?

I think it’s necessary to anchor the film in reality. Animation is an excellent way to convey emotions, but it’s also important to show that these aren’t fictional characters and fantasy drawings. These women exist and are fighting as we work on the film.

Kateryna, Mary Yanko (Source: Mary Yanko / MIYU Productions)

What do you hope international audiences will take away from this film – not just about the war but about your generation’s experience?

I hope they see how a whole generation of Ukrainians like myself end up curating our own trauma, turning survival into a kind of performance through screens. It would be good if they understood through watching the film that we didn’t choose to live like this, but we make it work. Streaming our fate in hopes that the algorithms carry it further is better than dying in silence.

Compared to live-action documentary, what do you think are the strengths of animation in terms of telling a story like this and engaging audiences emotionally?

It wouldn’t be interesting to watch 15 minutes of a film where everyone is looking at the screens! All the shots and all the dialogues of the soldiers in the film are based on real videos, testimonies, interviews. And thanks to animation, I can go beyond the vertical frame shot for social media, change angles, visualize text posts. I can animate flashbacks and scenes that weren’t documented to complete the narration. I have the footage to back up my story, but at the same time I’m free from it.

And lastly, when working with sensitive topics like war PTSD and online sex work, which is by the way still illegal in Ukraine, it’s important to provide the promise of anonymity to the real people behind these stories – animation assures that.

Kateryna, Mary Yanko (Source: Mary Yanko / MIYU Productions)

Kateryna is currently in production, with the Ukrainian portion completed and the French animation phase about to begin, ahead of its scheduled 2027 release. You can keep up to date with Mary and her work at her website, her Instagram, or Twitter/X.

The post Emerging Ukrainian Animator Mary Yanko Discusses Latest Project ‘Kateryna’: Interview appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Conor lives at home with his Gran on Anfield Road, Liverpool. Life is routine — Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea, drunk scallies on the way to the footy, and a school that’s more like a prison.
But Conor dreams of getting out, going to art college in London with his girlfriend Maureen… but he’s terrified of leaving his sick domineering grandmother behind and striking out on his own.
What follows is a Northern Fantasy, as Conor navigates bigotry, sickness, and being true to himself, all against the glorious backdrop of 1980s Liverpool.

Ahead of the next leg of his book tour, which begins this Thursday (Sep 25) as part of the Encounters Film Festival, Skwigly caught up with Chris to learn more about Anfield Road‘s origins, development and ties to his earlier work in film and animation.

You’ve made many films over the years and you’re known for your eclectic work that spans live-action, animation and hybrid work that is deeply funny, whilst also often being quite dark. Having had the idea as a script for a number of years, I understand you worked on the novelised version of the story for four years. What prompted the change in medium?

I had initially tried to make the project as a film. I wrote a feature-length script and pitched it, but I could never secure the funding. Then lockdown came, and I found myself with much more time to draw. Feeling determined, I decided to tackle the entire project through drawing.
Initially, I was apprehensive about working alone because I enjoy collaborating with others. However, once I started drawing, I discovered that I truly enjoyed the process. Although I had spent time drawing before, this time I could see my skills improving, which was incredibly exciting.
At the end of the day, a story is a story, and it doesn’t matter how you tell it. You just have to get it out there. Whether it’s a painting, an installation, a film, or a musical, what matters is that you communicate something to the audience.
When I started in animation by making a film called “Safari”. I only animated because I didn’t know any actors and didn’t have a camera, so I made my characters out of plasticine. For me, the story always comes first; the medium is secondary.

You’re not a football fan yourself, but the film is set against an important event both in Liverpool’s and football history – why did you feel this was important to document and what do you feel it reflects in Conor’s own journey?

I always felt like an outsider growing up. I didn’t watch EastEnders, Coronation Street, or go to the football matches like everyone else I went to school, with. I guess I was the arty Scouser who liked to draw pictures and play music. I thought it would be interesting to create a character who felt like an outsider as well. Someone who, upon seeing everyone else heading to the football ground, wanted to go somewhere else.
As the story progresses, Connor develops an appreciation for football, but it’s something he has to experience firsthand. Football is very much a part of Liverpool. In fact, you can’t really have a story about Liverpool without mentioning football. The game’s influence on the city and its people is unmistakable.

The book shows a development in your own art style and has an energy and immediacy akin to Reportage Illustration, how did you develop this when representing a Liverpool of the past?

I think the more you do something, the better you get at it. That was certainly the case with my drawing. I drew and drew, and my drawings just became stronger. As an animator, I felt like I didn’t really have a style. I always saw myself as an animator-actor who uses his animation skills to create different stories and characters. For years, I never saw myself as having a distinct style. One minute I’d be doing children’s commercials, like those hedgehog road safety ads, and the next minute I’d be directing something truly dark like “Dad’s Dead.” The audiences for both projects didn’t really know about the existence of my artistic counterparts, which is probably just as well.
Back in 1998, I visited Paris and came across the work of Jacques Tardi. His cartoon books were truly a revelation to me. They were quite realistic in style, but at the same time impressionistic. I was particularly taken with his Nestor Burma books—they’re just beautiful. When I saw them in a bookshop in Paris, I thought, “If I could draw in any style, I’d like to draw like Tardi.”
In 1998, I made a postcard that was my own take on Tardi’s style, which showed Santa Claus arriving at Liverpool Lime Street on a train. This was something I always wanted to do, but instead, I explored many different styles, such as hybrid animation and live-action 2D, and never went back to that cartoon style until I started working on “Anfield Road.” Another key reference for my was my 1997 film “The Broken Jaw” in which I used different colour palettes for each story section. This is something I brought back for “Anfield Road”.

Anfield Road (Chris Shepherd/Titan Publishing)

The book has being doing really well and is already in its second edition. You’ve been very proactive in getting it out there. How have you found the response and do you have any highlight from its journey so far from events or people who have read/commented on the book?

It has been an amazing experience to publish the book. I never imagined I would ever do this. When I got the book out there, I saw it as my one chance to get people to look at it. I felt like I was back in that position of not knowing what I was doing, similar to when I first started working in animation. The first film I ever made, “Safari,” back in the 80s, was created with little knowledge. I ended up cutting it down from an amazing 12 minutes of animation to just two because I didn’t know any better.
With “Anfield Road,” it was the same thing. I didn’t know what I was doing and just launched into creating a 272-page graphic novel. I had no idea how much time it would take to draw. The same went for publicity—I had never done a graphic novel before, so I approached lots of people to see if they wanted to cover it or if it might interest them. The team at Titan really helped me out, and ultimately, it was a lot of fun to get the book out there.
I’ve had some great interactions with people from Liverpool about the book, which is really emotional for me since it’s my hometown. Many people have come to me with pictures of their houses, showing me where they lived on Anfield Road and sharing stories about their lives. It’s really exciting. One person even showed me a picture of a dolls house that their grandfather had made, which was based on a house on Anfield Road. I looked it up on Google Earth, and the dollhouse was incredibly accurate. That was truly amazing.
It’s incredible when a piece of art you create can have an impact on the real world. That is what creative expression is all about.

You’ve also been running the highly successful Bar Shorts with creative partner Dave Anderson (Dog & Rabbit) at London’s Garden Cinema for a number of years, through which you hosted a screening of Willy Russell’s 1977 Our Day Out with Alexei Sayle, who has been a great advocate for the book. Can you tell me bit more about the screenings and yours and Dave’s plans for Bar Shorts moving forward?

When I was writing the book, Titan – the publishers – asked me to get some endorsements. I thought about asking Alexei, as he is a comedy hero and grew up in Anfield. During my time working in TV, I seldom met anyone from my background. Film and TV tend to be populated by non-working-class people. The only people I could think of from Anfield in the business were Alexei and Alison Steadman. I had never met Alexei, so I got in touch with him, sent him the manuscript, and he endorsed it. Later on, he even wrote a foreword for the book! He has been very generous to me and the project.
The foreword sets the scene really well, describing how beautiful Anfield is. That was something I wanted to convey with the book—the idea that there is beauty in the everyday life of 1980s Liverpool. When we launched the book, we thought it would be a great idea to show one of the big inspirations, which is Willy Russell’s Our Day Out. The story of Our Day Out focuses on a group of Liverpool schoolchildren going on a trip to a zoo in Wales. I remember seeing it for the first time in school when it came out in 1978. Older kids were talking about it and were amazed by it. It was the first time we saw our world on screen, and seeing where you grow up portrayed in that way is a very powerful thing.
That idea has always stayed with me throughout all my films and books. We were honoured to have Willy Russell’s wife, Annie, come along to the screening, and Alexi was there too. We spoke about many things, including how Liverpool has changed over time. It was interesting that Alexi left home ten years before me, so how we saw the city was slightly different. It was brilliant to acknowledge and celebrate this city.
The biggest thing for me was when Rachel Cooke wrote a positive article in The Guardian about the book, calling it From Liverpool With Love. It meant a lot when it became the Graphic Novel of the Month, as it felt like I had come home to the city with the book. It was like the circle of life had joined up.
Regarding Bar Shorts, I’ve been involved with Dog & Rabbit’s Dave Anderson on this project for 15 years, on and off. Dave is such a good friend, and we see life in very similar ways. Our collaboration with the Garden Cinema has been truly inspirational. Bar Shorts has given us the chance to interview various creative people and showcase their favourite works. We love it when people from different backgrounds participate, whether they are composers, directors, comedians—you name it.
In the past, we’ve had some amazing guests, including Alexei Sayle, Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, Robert Bradbrook, Jonathan Hodgson, and Jesse Davies. Jesse shared his father’s [Carl Davis] compositions for Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual films. The magic of Bar Shorts lies in the fact that each screening is very different from the last. We have more screenings coming up in the next few months and some exciting announcements to make about Bar Shorts.

Anfield Road (Chris Shepherd/Titan Publishing)

With the popularity of the book and your history of creating outstanding films, do you think an adaption could be on the horizon?

Yes there could be a film of Anfield Road, for sure. But I’m not really thinking about that at the minute; I’m currently plotting out a sequel to the book.

And do you think we’ll see more of Conor’s journey, or will you leave us hoping for the best for him and his future?

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about what happens next to Conor in the story, as well as all the other characters including Maureen and Danny. I don’t want to give away too much if you haven’t read the book yet. The sequel is set in London, in the 1990s.
What I did with Anfield Road was capture many parts of Liverpool that no longer exist, as they have been demolished. I want to do the same for London. I want to recreate 90s London, particularly focusing on places that have long gone or been forgotten. It’s funny, I’ve actually lived in London longer than I ever lived in Liverpool, so it’s time for me to explore the capital.
London is so big and changes so rapidly that you can hardly remember what used to be there. Parts of London have just disappeared. So it would be fun to recreate some of these. I have a few ideas in mind, such as incorporating settings like the Black Cap in Camden or the wonderful Piccadilly Café on Denman Street. These were really pivotal places for many of us.
So, there’s a lot to look forward to in the future.

Chris Shepherd will present Anfield Road at the Encounters Film Festival this week (Sep 25, 2:30pm Arnolfini). See below or visit https://anfieldroadstory.com/blog for a full list of upcoming tour dates.

The post Anfield Road | Q&A with Chris Shepherd appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Flaka Kokolli (speaking) at the How to Start (and Maintain) a Career in Animation in the Balkans panel

Although Kosovo’s animation scene is still young and emerging, its future talents are clearly shining through – demonstrated by the many young creatives who gathered in Peja for the festival, including 18 projects pitched at the Kosovar-French Anibar Pro Genesis forum and an additional 9 projects presented at the Pitch It! event.

Despite all the wonderful projects and directors I encountered, one creative stood out for me during the festival – Flaka Kokolli. This may be in part to her asking the first question during my panel (Ask the Pro: Navigating the International Animation Landscape) – about how local directors can find producers in such a young industry. However, there was no denying how prolific she was during this edition of Anibar: she was a panelist on How to Start (and Maintain) a Career in Animation in the Balkans, won first prize at Pitch It! with her new project I Still Haven’t Cried, and represented her previous short film 17 O’Clock, which competed in the Animated Documentaries category.

Flaka Kokolli’s film ’17 O’Clock’ in competition

We caught up with Flaka to discuss her journey from festival volunteer to studio owner, the Kosovan animation scene, and her latest short film.

You were born in Kosovo, studied animation in Budapest, before returning to found your animation studio Flammorum in 2020. Could you share more about your journey and what inspired you to return to Kosovo and start your own studio?

I went off to study one month before turning 18, so when I graduated, I was only 20. At the time, my return back home was necessary to the point that there was no doubt I would return. This was in the year 2019, and Kosovo still needed VISAs to travel almost anywhere in Europe; Hungary included. To stay there, I needed proof of enough financial security to sustain myself for about a year, which for 20 year old me was impossible. Even getting there in the first place took one Student VISA rejection, and I was only granted the chance to go when I applied the second time. So, up until 2024, going and staying abroad was a bureaucratic hell for Kosovars.

Upon my return, I quickly realized that there were no opportunities for animated film; no studios had existed at the time, and all initiatives were on an individual basis, and of course, difficult to push through since it was hard to gather teams. I worked in motion graphics and illustration for 6 months, and when COVID hit, I decided to open a studio. Looking back, I never had a clear sense of what the consequences would be if that did not work out, but I am glad that was not the case.

Flaka Kokolli (centre) at the How to Start (and Maintain) a Career in Animation in the Balkans panel

Anibar is the only major animation festival in Kosovo. How important has it been for the local animation scene?

Anibar has been an amazing platform since its beginning. My first engagement with it was in 2013 when I participated in a workshop of theirs. I had been looking for a way to do animation and go past illustrating in class for some time, and when I was told about that workshop I immediately applied.

It was where I met some of the people I am closest to today, but I also kept in touch with the festival regularly. A large part of the encouragement to keep going with the studio definitely came from the festival and everyone I was meeting there. Being in contact with animators, workshops, masterclasses – plus, being given so many opportunities from the festival to see how animation is done elsewhere – made it a lot more tangible. And suddenly animation wasn’t this thing they just do in developed countries because they have solved some of their basic issues which we haven’t. Instead, it started feeling like another career that you can simply decide to do.

In terms of Anibar’s goal to start an animation industry in Kosovo – a place that had little to no animation tradition and no animation school, I believe it has truly achieved it.

I would like to delve more into your studio, Flammorum, and how it come together, especially during the middle of the pandemic! Could you tell me a little more about your team, structure, and how you all operate?

My first few jobs came purely through word of mouth, and I immediately applied in the National Film Fund with my first personal film. It was still during the pandemic, so everything was done remotely; even the interviews with our Center for Cinematography. In a few months, I received a positive answer and started calling up friends of mine – and one way or another I gathered up enough of a team to make that film happen.

One project came after the other and I had friends and people I met along the way, mostly through Anibar Animation Academy, and we were all working together. At a point, with two friends of mine we tried to start a collective, but none of us had the maturity and knowledge to keep that going. I kept getting projects and making teams based on the project. Two years ago, the projects were consistent enough, and the collaboration with the team was smooth enough, that it organically transitioned into a full-time team.

Now, and for the past two years, we are four women – Leonita Thaqi, Diellza Franca, Elsa Talla, and myself – and we still work interchangeably in our roles. The goal is for this to eventually change, so we can all stay in the creative roles we find ourselves most suited for. However, the wish to work as a collective is still present. The point of having a studio for me was to be able to work on animated films, not to run a business, so we are constantly working on arranging our team in such a way that we can all make decisions together, and there is more of a hierarchy in the project, based on who is directing it, rather than in how we function as a studio.

Flammorum Animation Studio, Prishtinë, Kosovo

What types of projects does Flammorum mainly focus on (e.g., short films, music videos, educational campaigns)? Which projects do you enjoy working on the most?

Currently, we do animated films, both commissioned and personal, educational videos, and music videos. All of these have been very fun to work on, especially considering the fact that creatively we treat them all in a similar way, working on films is the smoothest, just because it is a more long-term project and there is less worrying about when the next project will come up, since you have a longer period of scouting to find something.

But one thing that is impossible to ignore is the lack of producers in the country, we do produce for one another when needed, but it is a gap that’s noticeable and takes a lot of energy to fill.

As a studio owner, would you mind sharing your most challenging experience running a studio?

While I am the founder, our aim is for it to be a worker-owned studio, so both the privileges and the burdens that come with it are spread across everyone who is dedicating so many hours of their day to work here. A big difficulty so far has been knowing exactly how to do this and not really having any examples of similarly run businesses locally. But the more we get in touch with international studios that work in a similar way, the easier it feels. Just this week, I have already set up two meetings with Animation collectives where I intend to go into detail with questions and see how they are internally managed.

Aside from your new short film, what does the future hold for Flammorum? What projects do you have in the pipeline?

My short film ‘I Still Haven’t Cried’ has a long way to go until production (I expect that to be around the middle of next year), so the personal films of Leonita and Diellza, both of whom won funding from the Anibar Genesis pitch, are what we will prioritise. At the same time, part of our team, alongside our external collaborators Agon Ahmetaj and Blend Leci, are working on a video game that I am very excited about. While I am not personally engaged in that project, it is something that was born out of passion and I am very excited to see where that will go.

We took the summer off, partly due to a lack of projects, and partly to avoid a serious burn out, but it seems that we all used it to come up with great ideas of projects to do in the future and I am just really happy to be surrounded with people with so much passion, creativity and will to work hard.

The most difficult part in all of this has been the general feeling that “I have no fucking idea what I am doing” that has been following since the beginning, but the more time passes, the more that feeling seems to go away, and maybe one day I won’t hear from her at all.

Congratulations on pitching, and winning first prize for, I Still Haven’t Cried at Anibar this year! Can you walk us through the core idea of the project and why you decided to tell this particular personal story?

I Still Haven’t Cried is a project I have a hard time speaking about at this stage. It was triggered from a very specific encounter but that moment also seemed to be a culmination of so many similar encounters in life. Constantly being viewed through a sexual lens is a burden all women carry, and it is like a heavy cloud that stays on top of you no matter what you are trying to do. The film is not so much about the perspective of women, it is more about voyeurism and, untimely, sexualisation.

How is the project being supported now, and who/what are you looking for now to take the project to its next stage?

Besides winning the first prize at Anibar, I was awarded at the Euro Connection in Clermont-Ferrand by Dokufest, which I am extremely grateful for. I have also applied for the National Film Fund, which I will find out about in a couple of months.

So far, I have just been trying to pave the way for this film to have as much time and effort as it needs. Besides funding, co-production, and assembling an experienced team, I have been looking for sound designers and editors to work with; but most importantly I am still looking for a local producer.

Participating in all of these events has been very useful and proved extremely worthy; not just for the prizes but also for the people I have met, so I intend to keep going on like this for a while more.

I Still Haven’t Cried wins first prize at Anibar’s Pitch It! 2025

Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the future of I Still Haven’t Cried, Flammorum, and the broader Kosovar animation community?

For my film, for now, I just want it to be something I can look at and be truly proud of.

For my studio, I hope we will keep going and improving – keep the collaborative spirit both inside the team but also with our fellow animators and filmmakers outside of our studio.

And for the industry, I just hope to see it be a healthy industry where we prioritize self-expression and the well-being of each-other in that process. In this current economical climate it feels too easy to let go of anything you are passionate about and only work from a place of fear about survival, which in turn prioritizes profit and growth, and that is often where original, strange, and risky ideas die. So I truly hope we can stay away from that as much as possible.

The post Spotlight on Kosovan Animation: Interview with Rising Star, Flaka Kokolli appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Diplo The Mighty Dinosaur © Signature Entertainment

Twelve years in the making, Diplo: The Mighty Dinosaur certainly had a series of development and production hurdles ahead of it to try and create something different for animated films aimed at children. The efforts behind this small team of animators on this Polish production have finally paid off, as not only will it see its release in UK cinemas this month (19th September), but it will also be distributed across ninety-nine other territories.

The film tells the story of Diplo, a young anthropomorphic Diplodocus with large ears and a cartoon creation from a struggling artist, who finds his world erased and magically teleports to different stories and worlds that this same artist has created over the years. Trying to find a way to restore the old pages of his story to bring his family back, he unexpectedly finds himself teaming up with a wizard, a scientist, and his assistant to find out why their worlds are being erased.

Diplo The Mighty Dinosaur © Signature Entertainment

I was fortunate to interview the film’s director and writer, Wojtek Wawszczyk, to discuss why an obscure comic book would have made a fun film, the biggest challenges for him during the lengthy development stage, and why it’s a unique animated feature compared to others made in Poland.

What was it about Tadeusz Baranowski’s Hocus Pocus and The Diplodocus comic books that inspired you to adapt them into a film?

I discovered those books when I was six or seven. It was the eighties, and Poland was quite an isolated country. I had this huge magnetism towards comic books, and there were only a couple of books being published in Poland back in the day. Poland was really grey and poor, and amongst those few books, there were a few of them that were absolutely incredible, and I think that Baranowski’s comics are the only Polish comic books from the eighties that remained extremely fresh.

They’re super colourful and drawn with truly original artwork, and full of absurd humour. There are these characters that are aware that they’re being drawn by the artist, and they even get in a fight with the artist because they don’t like the adventures. I think this kind of humour is actually quite British in a way, because it’s very Monty Python, for kids.

I wanted to draw my own comic books, and that’s what I did. My first drawings were these copies of characters from these books, and years later, I met the author and we became friends. I told him that maybe one day, if I ever had the skills, I would love to bring his characters to the screen. That was twenty-something years ago, and now Diplo is complete.

Diplo The Mighty Dinosaur © Signature Entertainment

As the film’s writer as well as director, what was the biggest obstacle during the lengthy development stage of the film?

It was 2012, and I joined this really small animation studio in Warsaw called Human Film. I joined first as an animator, because I had experience working in the US and in India for a short period of time. I told my idea of bringing Baranowski’s comic books to the screen, and producer Maks Sikora said, “Why not?”

I was fascinated by these huge animation features by Pixar and Sony Pictures Imageworks, and I wanted to try and make a movie with such a technique in Poland, which hadn’t been done yet. Nobody had ever tried to do this, and it sounded absurd to do it without much of experience. First of all, we were trying to find some money to finance the production, and it took us so long because there was no proof that such a movie is feasible and producible in Poland. So that was one thing.

Another quite difficult thing was that these comic books don’t have a traditional story structure. They are mostly a series of jokes, and in the beginning, my friends (nine of us from different cultures and different backgrounds) started talking about it, and each of us pointed to something completely different that was interesting to them. That’s why I also thought that I couldn’t just make a simple copy of these books. I wanted to tell an original story that would capture the spirit of the books not only visually, but also in terms of the absurd atmosphere of what’s happening.

I think that’s why it took so long. The first version of the script was written after two years of talking. We had to maintain the studio and take a lot of service jobs. When we were involved in making service work, we didn’t have much time to keep working on our movie. We also knew quite early that we needed help, so that’s why we looked for a co-producer from another country. There were three attempts in building these relations until we finally found PFX, a company from the Czech Republic.

Diplo The Mighty Dinosaur © Signature Entertainment

There’s a wonderfully animated and colourful cast of characters featured across the film. Which one was your personal favourite and why?

I love Hocus Pocus. He has the biggest emotional range. We really loved animating him as well. For instance, for Hocus Pocus, the more pompous he is, the more cartoony he animates.

I also love Professor Nervekowsky. My little team named me after him because that’s who I am in a way. When I get involved in something, I can behave and even move a little like him. These two characters are my favourite and reflect who I am, I think.

Diplo The Mighty Dinosaur © Signature Entertainment

What makes this production unique compared to other animated titles made in Poland?

There are plenty of unique things in the movie. Baranowski’s comic books are a strong IP in Poland, and a lot of people of my generation who grew up with this sense of humour are drawn to them.

Poland is primarily known for its artistic animation. I also come from this background. Even before making this film, I had created many artistic short films. Perhaps this is what makes Diplo a film that combines mainstream cinema with artistic and experimental cinema—for example, through the combination of animated and live-action scenes and an original, somewhat strange plot with an intelligent message.

We have a bunch of great artists, and these talents can cross over to something very unique and beautiful. Many comic book artists were involved in the production. There is also that great ’80s vibe in the camera work and soundtrack. Such an animated movie is extremely rare and unique, especially in Poland.

When audiences see the film, what is the biggest takeaway you hope audiences leave with after watching?

My first motivation of bringing these books to the screen was that I wanted to tell my original story, but I also wanted viewers to feel the same emotions and have the same thoughts that I had when I read these comics forty years ago.

I would like viewers to feel and experience something truly original, and I want children to believe that being unique and original is something cool. Both the artist and Diplodocus go through the same story and have a similar problem. They have to believe in what their hearts tell them and not listen to what everyone around them says. It’s about finding the strength not to follow the crowd, but to do your own thing. I would very much like children to do just that. And maybe after the screening, to pick up a pencil and a piece of paper, and draw their own stories, their own comics, in their very own way.

Diplo: The Mighty Dinosaur is out in UK cinemas from the 19th of September.

The post Diplo: The Mighty Dinosaur – Interview with Writer/Director Wojtek Wawszczyk appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

In anticipation of the second edition of INBETWEENS – Queer Animation Screening, this time happening at Cardiff Chapter in collaboration with Cardiff Animation Festival, we had the chance to dive deeper into one of the films that will be screening on Saturday the 23rd. Based on the poem by Dean Atta, Two Black Boys in Paradise (2025) is a stop-motion short film narrated by Jordan Stephens. It follows the two boys – Edan (19) and Dula (18) – on a poetic journey of queer love and self-discovery, where paradise is not just a place but a state of being; fragile and threatened by internalised fear, shame, and societal expectations. Skwigly had the chance to catch up with Dean Atta, Baz Sells and Ben Jackson ahead of the INBETWEENS screening. Before we dive deeper into your film Two Black Boys in Paradise (2025), could you introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your creative work and roles in the making of the film.

Dean Atta: I am a poet and author. I wrote the poem that TBBIP is adapted from. I have been writing and performing poetry for over twenty years and have also been writing young adult novels more recently – the most well known being The Black Flamingo. I write about black and queer issues in a lot of my work and I am black and gay myself. It has been really lovely to see how my words are travelling now, through the film, all over the world, which is a dream come true.

Ben Jackson: I am the producer on TBBIP and co-founder of One6th, which is the production company Baz and I set up in 2018. I have produced a couple of other short films with Baz before this and wanted to make a film that explores LGBT+ themes as I had been struggling a lot with my sexuality. I didn’t come out until I was 30 – once I moved to Berlin, actually. My boyfriend mentioned a poetry event in Berlin that Dean was at. TBBIP was actually one of the poems that Dean read there and it did really stick with me.

Baz Sells: I am the director of TBBIP. Ben, Dean and myself were all involved in the writing of the film. I am also co-DOP on the film. Me and Ben first started making stop motion together at the Northern Film School – Leeds Beckett now. Since then, our films tend to lean into social, political subjects. Ben came out ten years into our friendship but before then we hadn’t really had that conversation and I always just assumed Ben was straight. So making this film was a very personal process for our friendship as well, because we got to know more about each other. We got stuck into developing TBBIP in 2020 but it wasn’t without a little trepidation I have to admit, because I am straight and I am white myself, so there were some tough questions asked and we had a few discussions between us. I was committed to listening as much as I possibly could. It wasn’t always smooth sailing but we all dealt with the subject matter and the conversations with openness, understanding and grace.

Two Black Boys in Paradise (One6th)

The poem Two Black Boys in Paradise is part of a poetry collection from 2022, called There is (still) love here. I couldn’t help but notice that the book cover looks very similar to one particular shot in your film where the two main characters Dula and Edan are floating together underwater. What were your original inspirations and visions for the poem and how did they eventually translate into the film?

DA: I wrote the poem several years before 2022. We were already beginning to make the film when the book was published. We were able to use some of the concept art that Sanna Räsänen had made. The poem was first written for the Courtauld Gallery. They were having an event in which they wanted poets to respond to different artworks. I chose the portrait of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and wanted to reclaim Eden for black, queer people. As someone who grew up Christian, I always felt it was a story that I didn’t have complete access to. I heard the phrase a few times in my youth: “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” That stuck with me. There is a line in my book The Black Flamingo where I mention Two Black Boys in Paradise: The character of Michael imagines having a black boyfriend and what that would be like. It’s about self-acceptance and the loving of other black queer people. You’ve got to love yourself first before you can really love anyone else – that is what the poem is about.

It’s been a few years since you started working on TBBIP and I was wondering if we could travel back in time and get a little insight of how it all began?

BJ: It was summer of 2020, when I approached Dean and we started putting moodboards together. It was a really long process and a year of development before we applied for BFI funding. By the time we applied for it we had done absolutely everything we could to make this as strong as possible. At the end of 2021, we found out that we got the funding and then it was another six months of admin and paperwork before we got into pre-production.

BS: Looking back it’s been a very long road. One of the things that still sticks with me was the writing process after Ben sent Dean’s poem over. It was such an enjoyable and singular creative experience for me because the poem is so strong and lends itself well to a visual interpretation. It was really beautiful. What struck me reading the poem initially was that it really challenged me. Dean’s voice is so strong, bold and unapologetic and I feel like the poem itself is really confident in its own identity.

DA: There is no police in paradise. That line, I think, a lot of people can get behind, because we’re seeing these boys being criminalised for something they haven’t done and we’re saying this wouldn’t happen in paradise. But then the poem also says: There are no white people in this paradise. This paradise is the paradise between the two black boys. When I perform the poem, I sometimes look into the audience at the white people for their responses. I am actually mixed race, I’ve got a white mum, so what does that mean: there are no white people in this paradise? For me it was important for the two boys in the poem, that they have this moment where it is just the two of them. They can be fully themselves with one another without interruption. No one is asking who they are, they are just together.

BS: In 2020 we were experiencing growing momentum and coverage of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It was a time in which there was a lot of debate around these subjects and I loved that Dean is willing to go there.

DA: The Black Lives Matter movement is still really strong and our film is one way of expressing that in an artistic way. Some people will organise in the community, some people will march on the streets, some people will write to their politicians and some people make art. There are so many ways to express that black lives matter.

BJ: And I love that shot of the film, how proud Dula walks away and leaves the policeman behind. With this film it was important that it was a celebration, that there was joy coming through and a feeling of belonging.

Camera & Lighting Assistant Ann Li Ho & Co-DOP Kevin Paul Lawrence working on TBBIP paradise set (One6th)

Within the poem and film, you have created two opposing worlds. The paradise realm, where the two boys are free. Where you can feel the love and tenderness. You also have the market world where the boys are facing marginalisation, and societal pressures. These spaces are differentiated by the visuals, sound and narration. An element that occurs both in the poem and the film is the apple. What were your intentions behind choosing the apple as a bridge from one world to the other?

DA: In the poem, the apple was inspired by the garden of Eden and the temptation of Adam and Eve. In the film, the boys reach for the apple and are dragged out of paradise. They are accused of stealing this apple that had just appeared out of nowhere. It is about the distraction that homophobia and racism is for us to be able to just live our lives. The boys are treated with suspicion and then defiantly decide to come back together, kiss and return to paradise, where none of this will bother them. The apple can mean many things and we chose intentionally for paradise to be as real as the market stalls. Both these spaces in our film are real and we treat them as such.

BTS of the TBBIP Market Set (One6th)

The visual distinction between these two worlds is really well crafted. Things that come to mind are a pub in the background called The Red Herring, cracks and puddles in the road, red warning signs that are part of the background. Could you give us an insight into the concept behind the look of the film?

BS: Although the worlds are different tonally, there are a lot of recurring shapes. The houses in the market have a similar silhouette to the mountains, the lampposts are a similar shade of green to the trees in paradise, the shape of the puddle is the same as the shape of the lake. I don’t want to point all of them out because I want to leave them for people to discover themselves but there are lots of little Easter eggs and visual ties between paradise and the market. Both of these worlds can be as real as we want them to be. From a design point of view, we were very much focusing on creating characters and shapes that were imperfect because we wanted to embrace the feeling and belief that beauty can come from imperfect forms and that there is beauty in everything.

I am really interested in the process of making the puppets for your film, could you talk a little bit about the making?

BJ: It started with concept art, which Sanna did, and then based on that, she made sculpts out of plasticine. From that moulds were made. We had different types of armatures. Most of the background characters were wire armatures, but the boys, the police, and the judge were ball and socket armatures. 
We had two sets of naked boy puppets and a set of clothed boy puppets. It is rare to get naked puppets – and for good reason. They were not easy to work with, especially the underwater shot with the position the boys were in. They were splitting all the time mid shot and had to be fixed by the animators. 
We were often only getting ten to twelve frames a day on that shot. The eyelids and mouths were 3D printed and I spent days and days sanding eyelids to get them smooth. We achieved Albert’s certificate for sustainable production on this film, so we were trying to be as sustainable as possible. One of the most sustainable things to make hair out of is real human hair, so the hair was made out of a mixture of real human hair and felt. Dula’s locks had to be animated so we drilled holes in the top of his head, loads of little holes, and then glue each lock into the holes so that it could be animated independently.

BTS shot of Dula and Edan underwater with key animator, Kecy Salangad (One6th)

There’s one puppet that only occurs in the paradise realm. 
A big majestic bird that also looks happy and goofy with big round eyes. What was the idea behind this bird character?

BS: 
On the climax shot we wanted to provide this beautiful backdrop that was an absolute celebration of these boys and what they represent. But then it became also a representation of an audience member that might not be familiar with this kind of film. He always gets a laugh. Every time we go to a screening, there is always a point at which everyone chuckles and laughs. We deal with such heavy subject matters in the market, and they’re all vital, but before going into the sex scene, you want to feel like you’re changing the tone slightly and bringing in a more lighthearted feel. For me, the peacock is a representation of how I hope people will absorb the film: with curiosity and an open mind.

DA: I was really excited to hold that puppet when I went to visit the studio. 
I like its goofiness and I like the comic moment that it kind of allows to happen and the relief that it gives to the audience members after some of the heavier stuff. It’s an essential character in the film.

Every time I go on social media these days, a new laurel seems to have been added to the film. What has the reception of the film been like so far and where is the journey taking it?

BJ: The reception has been absolutely overwhelming. We’ve been very lucky to be selected for the biggest and oldest LGBT+ festivals, which is really amazing and obviously helps us reach a queer audience, which was always our intention. The feedback we’ve had at festivals has been amazing and touching – it makes the whole process worthwhile. 
We have been selected for quite a lot of Oscar-qualifying and BAFTA-qualifying festivals. I am currently in the process of doing our Oscar submission and we’re waiting for BAFTA to open. We do have ambitious hopes, but we’ll see how awards season goes. Actually, on the note of awards: over the weekend, we did win Best Stop Motion Short at the Portlands Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology.

DA: An audience member, who was black, queer and nonbinary, came up to me and said: “I came along to this, thinking I’d only be partially seen because it was about two black boys in paradise, but then at the end, when you open up paradise to trans and non-binary people and everyone, I felt completely seen.” That was a really lovely feedback. The majority of the film is about the boys, but at the end, we do open paradise up for anyone that needs it. Everyone involved in the film has been so proud to have been involved in something that’s doing so well. By the time we got to the crew screening, we all saw that we’d made something special.

BS: I also know that the film festival circuit can be quite difficult. Everyone will see the laurels, we upload, but obviously we don’t share the rejections we get – and there are rejections. It’s a very difficult time for the animation industry, and for any filmmakers that have their film out there. Every film is a small miracle to finish because it takes so many moving parts, and to put it out there is another act of bravery. From that point of view, I’m almost wary to portray an image where it’s constantly win after win for us, even though I’m really enthusastic and happy that we’re getting these kind of selections and such great opportunities. The animation and film community has just been outstanding, just so brilliant and supportive, and that has been one of the lovely things about this journey as well.

Dean Atta in front of the TBBIP paradise set (Leona Gasper)

If you would like to catch the film and dive into the world of Dula and Edan yourself, you have the chance to do so on Saturday the 23rd of August at Chaper Arts Centre inCardiff where the next edition of INBETWEENS – Queer Animation Screening will be held in collaboration with Cardiff Animation Festival. 

The post Two Black Boys in Paradise | Interview with Dean Atta, Baz Sells, and Ben Jackson appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

In a world where the planet is starving, a malevolent enterprise known as The Mill offers the solution of ‘miracle bread’ that turns all who consume it into bread themselves. When young Magret realises her brother has become one such bread zombie, she takes it upon herself to protect him from a ravenous, addled society at all costs and against increasingly frenzied odds.

With the film currently screening at International Countryside Animafest Cyprus and upcoming selections including the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Skwigly caught up with Alex to learn more about the project’s unique concept and visual approach.

We’ve spoken with you previously about your prior short film work Focus (2015) and Turbine (2018) – can you bring us up to speed with what you’ve been up to since then and how it led to the production of your latest film Bread Will Walk?

Bread Will Walk is a natural extension of my earlier works but began in another medium: with my graphic novel The Mill (Chapter 1): Walking Bread, completed in 2018. That world—circular, man-made, existentially industrial—felt like the logical next stage of my filmmaking after Turbine. I brought the concept to the NFB in 2019, and after some development positioning, I began production in May 2021. It was a four-year journey through analog, digital, and hybrid processes. The NFB’s creative environment allowed me to go deep into that process, treating animation as fermentation rather than manufacture.

Where did the concept of ‘nonviolent bread zombies’ originate from?

It began with a visual pun on emotional dependency. What if bread, the symbol of basic comfort and sustenance, could turn against us not with violence, but by absorbing our love? The zombies in the film aren’t predators. They’re lost beings made of our most familiar food, walking with ritualistic aimlessness. They mirror our own hunger, not just for nourishment, but for meaning, for purpose, for each other.

Image from Bread Will Walk – Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

Is ‘The Mill’ a stand-in for a particular organization or governmental body?

Not explicitly. The Mill is more of a behavioural schema than a bureaucracy. It mills not flour but willpower. Its shape is circular, suggesting inescapability. I wasn’t targeting any specific entity but rather mapping a structure we all internalize, the one that teaches us to sacrifice intimacy for productivity, clarity for belief.

Having worked with them previously in your career, did you always intend for this film to be an NFB production, and how did their involvement help get it made/developed?

Absolutely. After Turbine, the trust with producer Jelena Popović and the NFB was firmly in place. From the beginning, the NFB supported this film not just financially but ideologically. It gave me access to a collaborative space where invention and imperfection are valued. It also gave me time—four years—to knead the story, test methods, abandon others, and return to core instincts.

The film has a very specific, multi-layered visual approach. Can you tell us a bit about how you developed this and how it technically breaks down?

The process started with thousands of ink-on-paper drawings done straight-ahead, scanned and composited in Photoshop. I performed shape segmentation on each frame to isolate layers, skin, fabric, structures, before overlaying photo textures. Bread textures were collaged from real photographic elements, sometimes even baked, shot, and dissected. The final look came from digital compositing in After Effects, where Mathieu Tremblay created a custom “pastry glaze” blend of filters that softened harshness and gave the image a glazed, fleshy cohesion. Norman McLaren’s spirit was constantly invoked. Animation happens between frames, not just on them.

I remember seeing that, during the development phase, you were dabbling with AI. What ultimately led to you moving away from that path?

AI was useful as a preliminary texture generator, especially in-house tools I was developing at the NFB. But visually, AI has a flattening effect. It draws from statistical norms and delivers what you expect rather than what you feel. I didn’t want that probability grid dictating the emotional tone. We ended up using AI-generated outputs as references, volume, light, colour cues, and repainted or redrew them entirely by hand. I’d describe it as using AI as a prosthetic for imagining, not replacing, the artist’s gesture.

Image from Bread Will Walk – Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

In our last interview, you also mentioned that stop-motion might play a part in this project, then titled The Mill. Did any aspects of this approach remain in the final film?

We went fairly deep into it. We tested bread-based pixillation sequences, including 3D-printed bread forms and discussions about rigging real dough in a fireproof green- screen oven. But safety concerns (and the impracticality of baking frame-by-frame) meant we couldn’t continue on premises. Still, that inquiry shaped the logic of textures, lighting references, and rhythm. There’s a stop-motion spirit in the final piece, a stiffness, a tactile impulse, even if it’s entirely 2D.

The film makes use of a continuous ‘long take’ shot method occasionally seen in live-action and, rarer still, animation. Were there any particular artists or films/projects that influenced this?

In Turbine, I had already begun wrapping camera logic around the characters. This time, I committed to one uninterrupted take, a fresco rather than a montage. Béla Tarr was an influence, and so was the tradition of single-shot stage theatre. But technically, it was the absence of editing that interested me most: a psychological claustrophobia. The viewer isn’t allowed to look away. You are implicated in the breathlessness. That’s the trap.

Image from Bread Will Walk – Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

Was there any particular significance to the film’s main protagonists being brother and sister?

Yes. Siblinghood embodies involuntary love. Gerben’s sister, Magret, shelters him not because she must, but because she remembers who he used to be. This relationship predates ideology, predates consumption. In that sense, she’s a kind of Antigone, trying to restore dignity to a body society has discarded. The brother, now made of bread, represents both personal loss and cultural rot in the zettabyte age.

How did you come to work with Jay Baruchel on the film and what was behind the choice to have him take on all the voices?

Jay and I first connected by phone, and I was immediately struck by his instinct to stretch a single voice across a fractured cast. His range isn’t just technical, it’s architectural. He sculpts entire worlds through tonal shifts. What stood out most was the rawness and pliability in his performance, which made the piece feel lived-in. By assigning every role to the same voice, we weren’t just blurring identities, we were building a sonic ecosystem, where each character feels filtered through the same worn machinery.

Previously you had mentioned scoring the film to Edvard Grieg—in the end Bread Will Walk is bookended by the classical Chopin piece Nocturne in E-Flat Major and the jazz standard All of Me, both interpreted by Martin Floyd Cesar. Can you tell us a bit about the musical direction of the film and working with Cesar to achieve it?

Martin Floyd Cesar brought a needed vulnerability. Grieg was too architecturally grand. Chopin and “All of Me” gave the film an emotional echo: one classical, one vernacular. Both pieces were interpreted as if overheard through a cracked window. Martin’s voice wraps around the final moments like a memory you didn’t know you had. The song “All of Me” became unintentionally literal. The crowd in the film wants all of Gerben. But also, Magret gives all of herself.

Image from Bread Will Walk – Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

The film premiered as part of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in May of this year – how was that experience and has it opened doors for the project’s visibility and distribution?

Premiering at Cannes on May 22 was surreal. It’s not just about the prestige, it’s about context. Watching Bread Will Walk on a giant screen with an international audience, in silence, during the final scenes… that kind of reception reinforced that even the strangest concepts can resonate viscerally. Since Cannes, the film has screened at Annecy, and several upcoming festivals have expressed interest in the film. International interest in the distribution has increased significantly, especially from curators seeking hybrid or speculative animation. The conversations happening now wouldn’t have occurred without the visibility the Directors’ Fortnight provided.

The post Bread Will Walk | Q&A with Alex Boya appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

© Sony Pictures Animation

One of the standout presentations at the 2025 Annecy festival was for the next Sony Pictures Animation feature, Goat. Since the first Spider-Verse movie, Sony have had animation fans hanging on to their every project, and Goat promises to satiate fans of the animation style which the studio has become synonymous with. Goat, a coming of age story set in a version of New York populated by anthropomorphic animals, is full of 2D and 3D meshing, variable frame rates and distinct character designs; typical of Sony at this point. 

Skwigly caught up with the film’s director, Tyree Dillihay, and producer, Michelle Ramio Kouyate, to chat about what Goat has in store. 

During your presentation you talked about Sony being rulebreakers in animation. Does that mean you have an extra burden to break rules again?

TD: No burden at all. Spider-verse is a great franchise, but we wanted to separate ourselves from the pack and do something that’s unique in all its own. The beautiful thing about Sony Imageworks is they absolutely love challenges. So when you see the film come out in February, you’ll see that we’ve done things that truly separate it, not only just from Spider-Verse, but from all animated films.

MRK: Sony animation does like its films to have a unique voice and something different about it. But to Tyree’s point, it’s not a burden, it’s exciting.

TD: I would say Sony’s probably the only studio that’s style agnostic. Their films do not look the same from film to film.

What were the new techniques that you were excited to play with on this film?

TD: The one I can speak to right now is changing frame rates. Some films are animated completely on twos but we’ve played with all kinds of frame rates.

Why was it important to use that technique?

TD: It gives you a different feel. Images hold on the screen a lot longer, so they’ll have a different impact on the screen. We’ve got animals playing basketball, certain animals bounce the ball in a certain way. If it was at a certain frame rate, it might feel differently, or how they run, how they walk, even just the acting performances, just across the board, is just a different feel.

How has your experience in the industry helped with this project? What were the main challenges?

MRK: My experience is pretty unique. I’ve been an executive, I’ve been a producer, I’ve worked in live action, I’ve worked in animation, and that all comes together. It helps you in every aspect of the storytelling and it helps me be able to work with the studio, work with the filmmakers and be able to bridge between both things. In terms of the challenges, this is probably the first time I worked with Unreal Engine and worked with previs and learned how that could work in our favor, especially with the challenges of the action in the movie, and having the opportunity to do that. So that was a really great learning experience. I think the other thing was needing to have a single character model. We couldn’t have a different model for the animals on all fours and one for when they’re upright. 

TD: For me, it’s having more time and more personnel to execute a very large proposition that’s been not necessarily a challenge, but an exciting opportunity to answer questions to hard problems. And by hard problems, I mean things that we need to accomplish. Like Michelle said, one of those big technical challenges was getting these animals from upright to all fours, but then we have some stylistic things that weren’t really revealed in the presentation. I think the other experience is just the time to craft a really great story. That takes a lot of time. In my experience, having worked in television animation, you don’t have a lot of time, but we’ve been working on this thing for years behind the scenes, and it’s all paying off now. 

© Sony Pictures Animation

What made you gravitate towards Caleb McLaughlin for the main role?

TD: Best Actor for the job. He embodies who Will is as a character. He’s a little older than Will, but he still fits in that same age bracket. His voice sounds like the right age. He’s got heart, he’s got charm, he’s got…

MRK: … Exuberance, he’s got an attitude,he’s got all of it. We wanted a great quality to his voice. When you’re casting for animation and you’re listening to voices of some great actors, they don’t always have the voice quality that feels like it cuts through, and Caleb had a real empathy in him. It really sounded great.

What was it like to direct Steph Curry?

TD: Amazing. I think I actually hold that title. I think I am the first director to actually direct Stephen Curry for voiceover. So yay. But Stephan, when we did our session, he said it himself, he’s coachable, not just on the court, but off the court, and probably just in life. So very willing and really good. He’s going to surprise a lot of people, because he’s just as great in the booth as he is on the court. 

One thing Sony has never been afraid of is putting people of colour in leadership positions on their films. Does it feel like a safer environment for people of colour when compared to the rest of the industry?

TD: Safer is an interesting word. I will say, from my personal experience, it’s number one to me. Sony Animation is the best studio on the planet, just because of the stories they tell, the diverse level of stories that they tell, and the fact that I’ve been welcome since day one in terms of who they put in front of or behind the screen. That’s never really registered for me. It’s always just been the best person for the project, best person for the role. And then I’m just glad they see the vision.

Sony Pictures Animation’s “Goat” is scheduled for theatrical release in the UK on 13th February 2026

The post Tyree Dillihay & Michelle Ramio Kouyate on Sony’s Goat appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Firstly I wanted to briefly mention My Life as a Courgette, we didn’t speak to you about it back then but it was one of our favourite of that decade, can you talk a bit about how that film paved the way for Savages?

When My Life as a Courgette gained an unexpected level of success, my new agent, which had been Céline Sciamma, my co-writer on that film’s agent, because suddenly I needed an agent, gave me a sound piece of advice which was ‘Given the success of this film, now’s the time to make your dream film on the back of it’, so it was a chance to make a film that was really exotic and so far removed from my own experience.

Getting a long form animated feature made outside of the normal studio system has never been an easy feat, but today seems particularly hard. What was the journey like as far as getting this film made and funded, and how long did the process take overall?

In Europe, when you want to make a film whose budget will be about 8-9million euros, it’s fairly straightforward. Once you start to be a bit more ambitious, that’s when you have to start thinking more in a commercial logic or perspective. So I did think the theme of the orangutan might be a bit of a crowd-pleaser, and then I was still riding the wave of success with Courgette, so that helped me secure 12 million euros from France, Belgium and Switzerland. Now commercially it’s not as successful, I’d say, as Courgette, it’s not on the same scale. In Switzerland, to be honest it’s done well, in Switzerland for example in each cinema it’s had roughly the same number of people, but fewer cinemas will screen it across the board. I think this is also due to the fact that it’s been presented in terms of a militant film, or an environmental film, which sadly suffers sometimes from bad press or tends to put some of the exhibitors off. The other thing that’s happened since is that there are just more animated films being released, so essentially the film is competing with them, each film finds it a little bit harder to find its place in that market.

It would be great to hear a bit about your personal connection to the characters and story at the centre of Savages?

My grandparents had lived what could be called a semi-nomadic lifestyle, which meant that in the summer they would go to the Swiss alps with their flocks of sheep, then in winter they would go down back to the village, down the mountain to tend to the gardens and the vines etc. And that way of life really changed so much after the 60s, when I was born, so I ended up growing up in town, in an urban setting, so there is an exotic element of the film but it does hark back to that lifestyle that my own family had known. The other thing was, in a world where things keep changing and evolving so fast, I wanted to question what can be transmitted in terms of values from one generation to the next.

Thinking of how that experience translates to the setting of the film in Borneo. Have you spent time there, either for this film or in your general life?

The centrality of the figure of the orangutan is due to the fact that they are an endangered species, there are so few wild orangutans still alive, and I wanted to question our relationship as human beings to nature, and I thought the orangutan is one of the animals that would have a large appeal to children. So all these ideas came together and these wild orangutans live in Borneo, so that’s how Borneo came about as a location, and then I found out that the Penan people are engaged in a fight to preserve their environment and against deforestation so I went there myself and immersed myself in their way of life, to better understand it. I basically replicated Kéria’s journey in order to better tell that story.

Savages (Dir. Claude Barras, MetFilm Distribution)

You wrote the script with Catherine Paillé and Morgan Navarro, how did you all come together on the project and were there specific aspects of the story each of you brought to the table?

So at first I worked with Morgan Navarro on creating the dialogue that would be specific to each character, and then I did work with Nancy Huston to develop the relationships between the characters, and then came a third phase where I worked with Catherine Paillé on the script, on constructing the story. She’s quite experienced in the world of documentary, and because there’s quite a strong documentary element she brought a lot of her experience to the table. And that phase took two years, because at the level of financing there was a lot of back and forth where we would send off a version of the script to readers and they would send their feedback back, so there were roughly ten versions but divided up into three big chunks, three phases of that writing process.

Given our current ecological and economic situation in the world, did you feel that it was especially important to tell this story now?

When I started to look at the topics of the extraction of palm oil and the consequences of that and deforestation, exploitation of resources, I ended up getting quite depressed because the power imbalance was so obvious between the people exploiting those resources and the people trying to fight back. But in a way, that’s not to deny that there are small victories, that there are people trying to resist, trying to fight back, and therefore it makes making this film about these people all the more necessary, because it allows us to highlight the importance of what they’re doing, the impact of deforestation, not only on biodiversity but on our collective futures as we see through the effects of climate change that we’re feeling already. I’ve also tried to change my own lifestyle to try as much as possible to accommodate that, I no longer have a car, I cycle everywhere, try to grow my own vegetables and so on.

Savages (Dir. Claude Barras, MetFilm Distribution)

An aspect of the film I thought was interesting is that it isn’t anti-technology, insofar as phones and social media actually have a valuable function in rallying people to a cause. Was that a specific message you were hoping to convey?

I went in really wanting to be fully engaged in that fight against modernity, but then I took a bit of a step back. I’m not rejecting modernity; there are beautiful things being made, especially in science, and the real issue isn’t technology itself, it’s the power dynamics and the way that technology is used. In fact, that’s when I started to think of technology as a potential weapon of resistance. When we looked into it, to give you an example, the Penan community uses drones to track the illegal logging of the forests and to draw maps of that, and in the forest they leave messages to each other, not just with leaves and so on, but using WhatsApp. So I didn’t want to give this completely idealised version or vision of this community. This hybrid-use of technology and nature I thought was very interesting and bred creativity.

Were there any creative or technical aspects of the film that were particularly unique or difficult to complete?

The first technical difficulty was creating the soundtrack of the film, because we had to have a French actor speaking Penan. So we had two women, a mother and her daughter, in France, from the Penan communities, who helped coach the actors. The second one was to respect the natural sounds of the area; the film is actually being screened to the Penan communities throughout July using portable devices, and we wanted these audience to feel like we’re representing their environment accurately, so what we did was to send a sound designer to record all the sounds of animals, the sounds of nature and we played them in a way that respected the natural schedule or timeframes of those sounds, so which animals you would hear in the morning, which you would hear at noon and in the evenings, I wanted to reproduce those.

Savages (Dir. Claude Barras, MetFilm Distribution)

You mentioned about the importance of the orangutan and appealing to younger audiences, I’m interested in how you’ve found younger audiences have responded to the film. Do you feel that it’s reach them?

When I have an audience of children aged around 8+, they always have a lot of questions about how to help, how to support the orangutans, how to support the Penan communities, what do we do about this, et cetera. So we actually set up a website with the help of five NGOs that have educational materials and resources for those children and their parents to use. For younger kids, it’s a bit more tricky, because some of the themes – like the death of the mother – are quite hard. It really depends on the parents, how they are framing the film and how they’re watching it with their children. I’ve had parents come up to me and say “we don’t think this is appropriate for younger children” because of the political content, so it really depends. But, as with Courgette, what I like to do is make films that create dialogue within generations.

Savages is out in UK cinemas August 1st

The post Savages | Interview with director Claude Barras appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

© DreamWorks

Summer blockbuster season is a sequel-rich section of the calendar, and DreamWorks is getting in on the fun. The Bad Guys 2 has seen a relatively quick turnaround for animation (especially when compared to the Spider-verse films) coming three years after the first, a sign of how much the studio believes in the franchise and its director, Pierre Perifel. Perifel had been a DreamWorks alum since 2008 before making his directorial debut with The Bad Guys, surviving through some of the companies most tumultuous periods to arrive at the ongoing DreamWorks renaissance. 

Skwigly caught up with Perifel to chat about the approach to the new film, referencing anime and the structural changes at DreamWorks. 

What lessons did you take from the first film to this one?

I think there’s a naivete when you do a first film and you get sucked into trying to solve a puzzle of 10 million pieces without knowing that you have 10 million pieces to solve. It’s so complicated. Going on to this, I knew it was going to be hard and new so I was much better prepped. What was a little tricky was the pressure that you put on yourself of, “I’m in charge of making a sequel now, and I want to make sure it’s as good as the first one.” What I practiced more and more is the ability of looking at the macro and diving into the micro, constantly going back and forth between the bird’s eye view and going to detail, never losing sight of the big picture, because that’s literally the job of a director, having the big picture vision.

You maintain the same visual style from the first film, was there a temptation to go full Puss In Boots with it?

I don’t think we could have done what Puss In Boots has done. First of all, the identity of the first one was pretty strong, and we’re quite happy with it. Also, reinventing a style demands a lot of time, effort and money, and we wanted to put that into a bigger-scoped film. But also, I don’t think it would have been relevant to change the visuals of this one the way Puss in Boots reinvented the first one. Bad Guys 1 and 2 are coming so close to each other. Puss in Boots 1 and 2 are almost like two different adventures. In our case, it’s a continuation of the story, but at the same time, what we did was try to push and plus the visuals. Going a bit more graphic, a bit more painterly in the matte painting, a bit more rough on the brush strokes and those transitions between light and shadows, a bit more line work here and there, more to the effects, reshaping the characters a little bit. The cool thing with the visuals of The Bad Guys is you have that stylised character design with a stylised background and those brushstrokes and everything, but we have realistic cameras, realistic lens flares and and light distortions and lens effects and bokehs, all of that stuff is taken from live action. So it’s a really interesting layering of graphic illustration and cinema techniques and camera techniques.

© DreamWorks

How much of an influence is Lupin III on these films?

Massive, man, I grew up with that. You’re one of the rare ones that’s really putting your finger on it. That rocket scene, riding on that rocket or driving in the streets of Cairo with all those cops on a scooter, that’s literally Lupin inspired. The car driving on a wall is coming from there. And in that rocket scene, climbing up, those silly poses that our characters have, like Lupin jumping from that rooftop, are so funny. It’s in everybody’s mind. That’s the charm we were trying to capture here, never taking ourselves too seriously, even though it’s a very sophisticated type of filmmaking. There’s always that layer of humour that connects with the kids, but also connects with animation fans so well. Did you notice the Mind Game reference when they run on the ice?

I still haven’t seen Mind Game…

You should check it out. It’s an old, crazy anime. We have a few shots that’s literally from Mind Game where he runs on fish. 

I watched a DreamWorks documentary you contributed to where you talked about three projects in a row being cancelled and the toll it took on the staff. Do you think the studio has moved on from that being an issue?

I think it’s a completely different time now. What was happening at the time was that the company was independent, and there was no possibility for DreamWorks to have another movie not do well at the box office. They were easily doubting themselves as they were putting these movies out. Now Universal is our parent company, and they have shareholders and they are also going through a process that’s much more calibrated. The studio and the filmmakers come out with ideas, try to put a movie together as a presentation, and then we show it to Donna Langley and her team, and they’re reviewing this, and we’re looking at all all angles, and then once we all love it, we shake hands and from there on it’s gonna go. So movies are a lot less likely to be stopped halfway, and that’s awesome, because it really helps us be confident and trust in the project all together. 

© DreamWorks

Once we decide to go and push some of the boundaries of what we’re doing visually, or story wise, we have the blessing of DreamWorks executives and Universal executives. Margie Cohn is the president of Dreamworks Animation, and Kristin Lowe is our chief creative officer and they’re really good at letting the movie be filmmaker-driven, you know. They have their own ideas about a story, but they are trying as much as possible to let the filmmakers and directors achieve their vision. This is why you see a Bad Guys, a Puss in Boots, a Wild Robot and a Dog Man and they are all vastly different, very cool visually and honestly good movies. We are in a renaissance at Dreamworks thanks to all these conditions, and I’m super proud that Bad Guys is part of this renaissance, being the first movie that Margie greenlit.

It’s a great time to be an animation fan!

Definitely. DreamWorks is now a very strong contender and leader in animation, and just trying to push the limits a little bit. In particular in the US, there’s a vast array of projects right now and it’s very exciting. The box office is not always here, but at least people are trying things.

The Bad Guys 2 is out today in UK cinemas

The post The Bad Guys 2 | Interview with director Pierre Perifel appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Curated by local animator Luzie Ilgner, the screening showcases a playful, heartfelt, and thought-provoking mix of animations that either explore LGBTQIA+ themes or are created by queer artists.

What hides behind those masks, the leather and the rubber, and who can help me fix my pipe?

-(Pipes 2022, Presskit)

Ahead of INBETWEENS we had the chance to dive deeper into the journey of Pipes (2022) – one of the films from the queer screening’s programme. Pipes was directed by the filmmaker trio Jessica Meier, Kilian Feusi and Sujanth Ravichandran. We caught up with Jessica Meier and had a chat about her role in the film team and the making of Pipes. 

Tell me a little bit about yourself and your animation journey!

I am one of the three directors of Pipes, our graduation film at the Bachelor’s programme for Animation Film at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. I came to animation by accident. I always loved drawing and wanted to be an illustrator for a long time. When it was time to get into art school I went to visit the universities and ended up going to the animation department, pretty much by accident. I then thought that this was so much cooler than illustration. So I applied for it, got in and moved to Lucerne where we made the movie together. We are still friends, of course, but we have gone our separate ways and are all working independently now. Kilian is working mostly in sound now and doing some animation while also trying to pitch for his film. Sujanth is currently taking a break from animation and is doing more technical work. I did a little bit of freelance work last year and now I am trying to work on my own new film. It’s in very early pre-production stages and mostly just an idea.

In your own words, what is Pipes about?

Pipes is about a plumber that needs to go fix a pipe in a gay fetish club and he goes on an adventure in there.

And he comes out transformed..

It’s like a little hero’s journey!

Pipes (Dir. Kilian Feusi, Jessica Meier, Sujanth Ravichandran)

Where did the idea for the film come from and how did you form the team?

How it works in our school is that, over the summer, you prepare a pitch for a film that you would like to do as your graduation project. I pitched something and Kilian pitched the original idea for Pipes, which was quite different, but the setting of the gay club and the teddy bear protagonist was the same. At the time it was a much more serious – and less sexual – idea; it was more about male loneliness and questioning your sexuality. Sujanth didn’t pitch. He wanted to work mostly on action shots animation. The teachers looked at all the pitches. Because of time and budget restraints of the school not every project can get made, so you have to team up. The teachers basically sat us down and said “Hey Jess and Kilian, your ideas sound similar, you seem to have similar things to say, how about you guys get together and work on either of your projects?” Then we formed the trio and decided to work on the idea of Pipes.

Your film is inspired by a personal experience. Could you elaborate on this?

The idea of Pipes is inspired by something that happened to Kilian. The club [in the film] is also based on a real club that existed in Zürich. It was called Rage and closed down during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, there was a night where Kilian was out with his friends. They went to several clubs and also ended up going to that gay fetish club. Kilian is gay but wasn’t into the fetish scene, so he had this very vivid experience of going into a space where he should technically belong, but he felt very out of place and insecure about his body and about the things he saw. He felt so alienated at that time that it made him really think about his place in the community.

Is this personal experience also the reason why you chose this super cute and innocent-looking teddy bear as a main character?

Yes, very much. It’s also because of the gay male archetype of a bear. A lot of the other characters in the film are sort of representative of different kinks. There is a foot character, there are people in uniforms and swimsuits. All of the characters are sort of different nudges to different aspects of gay fetish culture.

Pipes (Dir. Kilian Feusi, Jessica Meier, Sujanth

There is a lot of visual overlap between the work of a plumber and activities that might occur in a gay fetish club in your film. What was interesting about creating the crossover of these two realms?

It’s just very funny. This “handy work world” feels at least to us very straight, very “macho”. When you contrast that with this flamboyant, gay culture, we thought clashing these two worlds together would be very funny and interesting. And the imagery of a pipe – you can do so much with that if you take this phallic shape and create associations. That is how all the jokes and the visual jump cuts were born.

Did Kilian, Sujanth and you have different responsibilities working on Pipes?

Yes! It was very important to us that we did the directing together. Every story, look and vibe-based decision was made together. We all animated a little bit. I animated the least out of everyone because I was also working on the backgrounds and I was also the line producer, so I organised the funding, the behind the scenes, the helpers and pipelines. Kilian is a very fast and good animator, he animated the most. Sujanth did the “big money shots”. We all did a little bit of everything, but it was distributed differently. I think the way that we worked together on Pipes, where everyone had something to say but also respected the other’s opinions and ideas was truly an ideal situation. I hope to recreate that situation.

You mentioned you made the backgrounds, how did you come up with the very distinct visual style of the film?

The original poster that Kilian drew for the pitch was also in black and white. The very bouncy and flowing style of animation we wanted to create takes a lot of time to animate. Having colours in the film takes also a lot of time as you need to work out the colour keys and colour concepts. We wanted to avoid that. The theme kind of lends itself to this black and white style. When I was designing the backgrounds we were drawing style frames to see what a finished frame of the film could look like. We had these big crowd shots with the main character, fifteen different moving characters and the background itself and it became completely unreadable. I came up with the idea of adding leather textures in the background. Everything else is flat, black and white with a little bit of shadow and highlights, but then you have these really organic textures in the background and that made it visually much easier to read what was happening. We had an amazing compositor, Marco Jörger. He mainly is a stop-motion artist and he took pictures of different leather that he found and then animated it in stop motion. He then composited it into the background.

How has the audience reception watching Pipes been so far?

It was very mixed, I would say. It has been very successful, so overall I would say it has been positive. In terms of audience reaction, whilst you’re watching it, it’s been all over the place. We’ve had screenings where we had a lot of laughter and everyone found it super funny. Then there were other times when it was screened at other festivals and there was just dead silence and I was feeling so uncomfortable. So yeah, we had a little bit of everything, but it has been amazing so far!

What is your perception of the Swiss animation industry, and how open is it towards queer themes?

The art scene in general is very queer-friendly, at least from my perspective. I am obviously in the queer bubble. I might have a skewed perspective but I feel like it is quite open. There is not really an animation industry in Switzerland, so we don’t really have that. There are a lot of small-sized, independent studios or collectives of artists, but there is not really an “industry” as you would have it in France, England or in some parts of Germany and of course in Asia or America. A lot of people that work in animation are freelancers or independent filmmakers who try and secure funding for the next project. We are very lucky to have pretty good funding for the arts, depending on where you live. We also have the GSFA (Groupement Suisse Du Film D’Animation) which is the Swiss Organisation for Animated Film. It is a huge help and really works hard to ensure that animated independent film lives on in Switzerland. We’re very proud to have that and it’s growing steadily. People who really want to go into the “industry” usually have to leave Switzerland or work remotely for a foreign studio, but there are also more and more people trying to build up something here and band together as a studio or a collective.

What has been going on in your creative life since Pipes? 

I have been doing a project for a festival that wanted me to animate an opening sequence for them and I have also been asked by a game studio to animate parts of their trailer for their upcoming game. These were gigs I worked on, but I realised after a year that I don’t really enjoy freelancing for projects that I don’t have any creative control over and I really want to focus on my own projects. In my free time I draw, I try to go to festivals, I watch a lot of movies and I am also a programmer for my local queer film festival The Pink Panorama in Lucerne. It’s happening every year in mid-November and we are currently working hard to finalise the programme that will hopefully be released in August.

Pipes will be showing at INBETWEENS – Queer Animation Screening at Cube Microplex in Bristol 8pm on July 8th in association with BAM/Encounters, and at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre 5pm on August 23rd in association with Skwigly/CAF.

To keep up-to-date with BAM’s current and future events follow @bristol_animation_meetup on Instagram.

The post INBETWEENS Filmmaker Focus: Jessica Meier appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

A director, animator and writer based in Bristol, May Kindred-Boothby has worked freelance within animation for around 9 years. Her work focuses on surreal explorations of sexuality and convention, told through a colourful and painterly hand drawn style. The Eating of an Orange is her first directorial short and is currently doing the festival rounds, having recently screened as part of the prestigious Annecy festival with upcoming screenings including INBETWEENS, a celebration of contemporary queer animation taking place July 8th at Bristol’s Cube Microplex in association with Bristol Animation Meetup (BAM) and the returning Encounters Film Festival.
Tickets available at headfirstbristol.co.uk

In a large manor house, identical figures eat the same, move the same, look the same. But everything will change for one woman when she gets given an orange by an unknown figure. She has never seen an orange. In the exploration of this new and exciting discovery, she gets transported into another realm of lichens, slugs and sensuous fluidity. But how can she balance this with the world she knows? She must make a choice: abandon her discovery, or step forwards into a new way of being.

Download here or stream the episode below:

INBETWEENS will also screen 5pm August 23rd at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre in association with Skwigly and Cardiff Animation Festival. Tickets available soon at chapter.org

See more of May Kindred-Boothby’s work at maykindredboothby.co.uk

Interview conducted and edited by Luzie Lilie
Produced and presented by Ben Mitchell

The post INBETWEENS Filmmaker Focus: May Kindred-Boothby appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Behind the scenes of an animated feature film usually involves a team of animators and supervisors who can help keep the boat afloat and be able to co-ordinate the team, from junior animators all the way to the directors. We sat down with animation supervisor Jude Brownbill to discuss her storied career at Pixar, working on the newly released Elio and how she has navigated her journey from an animator to directing and supervising roles within Pixar. 

Jude grew up in the UK where she studied 3D computer animation before moving to the US to work on some of Pixar’s most successful films including Soul, Inside Out, Cars 2 & 3, Turning Red, Incredibles 2, The Good Dinosaur and Brave.

Elio, image courtesy of Disney Pixar

How was it like to return as an animation supervisor for a Pixar film after previously working on the same role for Soul? 

Jude Brownbill: It was great to return to be a supervisor in animation the second time. It was a different team of people and a different co-supervisor. That always provides different opportunities to get to know other people, work with them and learn new things, and to just have another go at being a supervisor. Often when you finish one project, you think ‘Oh, I’ll do that differently’ or ‘that went really well, I’d love to see that be repeated in other films’. So to get the chance to do it again and to sort of correct the things that we wanted to do differently, and to build on the things that were successes, I think that was actually quite a nice secondary benefit to doing it again. 

Was there anything specific you learned from your first go at the role that you carried over? 

Good question. I think what’s quite successful about working on Soul, and it was something that I learned as a directing animator on Cars 3, working with my supervisor at the time, Bobby Podesta, is this idea that asking the animator what kind of work do you want to do and trying as a supervisor to always give somebody something that they want to work on. Oftentimes we have this broad selection of shots, different characters, different types of scenes, whether they’re very cartoony or emotional, high paced, or sort of like slow moving emotional scenes. So you kind of want to spread the work out amongst the team, but you also sometimes can make big assumptions about what people want to do. Everyone’s going to work on that sequence. Everyone’s going to want to work on that character where everyone’s going to want to work on that moment in the film. 

It’s very surprising when you reach out to people and you say, hey, you’re about to become free to do more work or you’re just coming on the show. Tell us what you want to work on, what types of things, what you’re personally working on. If you want to get better at subtle acting or you feel like your physicality could do with some extra attention. So finding these things out from people at the very beginning and then offering them options, tell us what you want to work on is quite broad, but if there were times when we would say, all right, we’ve got this sequence and we’ve got these five chunks of shots, which one would you like to work on? 

Oftentimes it was the complete opposite that we thought they would want to do. So that kind of leaves you going, oh, maybe I don’t really know what people want. I think that was a really important lesson of asking people what they want. Then when they have the opportunity to choose what they’re going to spend the next 6 to 10 weeks working on, is actually very powerful because they’ve been involved in the decision making and then they get to work on the thing they chose. As opposed to you’re just giving somebody the thing that you think they’ll want. Then they’ve been given something and this is what I’m working on now. So that was kind of what I learned in Cars 3, put that into practice again on Soul and built upon that with LA again, of just reaching out, asking people, trying really hard to give them something that they want to work on because that kind of helps with people’s efficiency and it helps with people’s enjoyment and it helps boost morale. 

These are all really important things and it’s much better to be working on something. You already have a vision for then trying to find your way through a piece of work, erronic shots, whether you didn’t you just don’t really understand because it wasn’t your choice or you were just given it. 

Any particular challenges that became easier this time around with Elio? 

Personally, I think dealing with change, I think that’s amazing. A very important thing to be able to cope with is it’s not going to go according to plan. Because when you begin as an animation supervisor or in any position in leadership, they’ll give you, this is the plan of action. This many weeks, this is a release date, this many animators, is it going to come on these dates? It’s just that it’s a plan, a rough idea, how things are going to go. But this is storytelling, it’s filmmaking, it’s animation and things take longer or they change or you have another idea that could be better or any number of things could could change or deviate from that original plan. So you’re almost looking at this plan and putting it in the bin because it’s going to change. So panicking too soon and panicking every time is actually quite detrimental to your personal health. 

Also, it kind of is a waste of time because everyone is 100% behind the film in getting it done and making it great. So there isn’t really nothing too big that we can’t figure out together. It’s embracing the change and seeing where it goes and not worrying about what that has done to the well crafted original plan because there’s going to be a million plans in between, and you will get there in the end and your film will be released. So I think that was a lesson that was further solidified on earlier. 

You worked on several Pixar movies as an animator, directing animator and as a supervisor recently. How do these roles differ and which do you personally enjoy doing most? 

Oh, that’s a good question. So an animator is the member of the team who is responsible for the acting choices and the movement of the characters on the screen. So we will take the voice acting that’s been recorded. We’ll take the storyboard pass that’s been done to show the action required in the shots. We’ll take the layout, the characters and the direction from the director and what they want from this particular moment. We will go off and do our own research into who the character is or how that character might move. We’ll spend like 6 to 10 weeks on our run of shots, which could be anything from like 3 shots to 10 shots, depending on how complicated they are. We’ll go away and then craft the performance of the character. So a lot of being an animator is working either in 2D to Spark ideas, thumbnails, video reference, and then sitting down at your computer, blocking in ideas for the performance, talking with your fellow animators, talking with the fellow leadership team to see, is this a good choice? Could this be better going to dailies every day or showing your work every so often to the director and getting feedback? Then addressing those notes, speaking to your superiors, your directing animators, to holding in on the right performance and the appeal. Then your end goal is to get a final on your run-up shots and then polish them and get them through to the damstream departments. So it’s very much, you’re in a big team of animators and you’re an individual contributor putting your animation skills to work on your run of shots. 

A directing animator is part of the animation leadership team. They are kind of in between the supervisors who are working on a more macro level above them. There might be two or three per film depending on how many animators there are. They’re sort of the in-between of the supervisors and the animator. They’re there to make sure the animators have everything that they need. They should have the most knowledge of the animation rigs, the characters, the appeal, what control does what, how to make, that mouth shape look nice. This new tool and how it works, this character, or who their personality is and how they might move. So that if an animator has any questions about the rigs or the characters or the story, they can go straight to the directing animator and get their questions answered. They’ll also be helping the animators to get the shots up to sort of polished animation, like gold level that we like. So they sort of run this room, we call the polish room, which is just about making sure everything is reading clearly. There’s no intersections and you’ve got the really peeling shapes. So they’re there for the animators.

Then the supervising animators work with the directing animators, but also every other supe in every other department and with the directors, producers, the effects supervisor, production manager, associate producer. So kind of that macro level of what’s happening when we need that character to be done before we start animation here. We need to make sure that we’re passing you this and you’ve got all the right things for simulation. If this lighting isn’t quite hitting this character right, then can we fix it? How’s the story looking? Is the changes happening in story where we need to make a new character or we need to figure out a new process. It’s kind of like that higher up level where you’re looking at the film as the whole and trying to sort of communicate to your directing animators and the animators and keep them fed, keep the sequences coming in and keep them fed with work. So our job is towards the end or bulk of production, we’re kind of making sure that animators have the work and looking at what’s coming in and looking at who’s available and who wants to work on what and trying to give people the work that they need to work on. 

We go to dailies with the directors, directing animators and the animators. We’re there along with the directors to give notes as a team. Anyone can give a note if you have a better idea or if something’s not reading correctly or if you see a hook-up issue or something, any kind of note can come from an animator or directing animator, supervisor. Then the directors are the first people to speak. So they’ll give the notes, but that’s kind of the daily’s room, which is where we spend most mornings watching people’s progression in their work every day. 

Elio in the Communiverse, image courtesy of Disney Pixar

How did your team get that introduction of the universe ride with its vibrant colours and the unique design that you go for? 

I mean, all of the artwork that is generated in the art department and from a production designer Harley Jessup, that’s where we’ll dive in straight away when we get on a show and look at all of the artwork. It’s all digitally captured and there are art rooms and working rooms where we can go and see those images of the Communiverse and the different discs that combine the Communiverse and the life forms that inhabit it. So it comes from art and is inspired by art.

Then when the sets team gets involved to build it every day we were having this meeting where anyone who was on the crew was invited, either in person or if you wanted to keep working at your desk, you could log on to the Zoom meeting. You could see anything that needed director feedback. So one day it could be the disc of the Communiverse and how they’re moving and should they move quicker? Or should this one be swapped with that one? How do we build up Glordon’s den and the webs or this animation test of Melmac. So it was a really fun space where everybody on the crew, no matter what department you were in, was able to see what anybody else was doing. A lot of our introduction to Communiverse and how it moved and how it was being brought to life with the crowds, characters and all of that kind of stuff was happening in that daily meeting we had. 

As an animator, do you relish in creating more expansive environments like space in Elio or You Seminar in Soul, or do you prefer something closer to the ground in Cars and Turning Red? 

I think as long as it makes sense in the story, it tends to not really affect us in a sense of, which we prefer. The You Seminar and the Communiverse, they’re beautiful and huge environments where you know action is taking place. So it depends on the work you’re doing. I think if you’re doing a small, quiet, touching, vulnerable moment about connection, even if that’s taking place in the Communiverse. We did some sequences like that. The discs of the Communiverse are still moving, but you’re concentrating solely on what these characters are doing, what they’re feeling and what they’re saying or not saying. So we’re still concentrating on the performance, the acting and communicating of all those emotions in that moment. 

Needless to say, it is a lot of fun when there is a huge expanse to explore and in tandem with the directors and layout cinematography, being able to say, how can we explore this giant world? On Elio, there is a specific sequence where Elio and Glordon are having a friendship montage. They are venturing through the Communiverse, discovering places together, and that sequence was all about, let’s show off this amazing set that we have and this amazing environment in this world we’ve created. Let’s show it to the viewer and to Elio and Glordon. Let’s have them react to the things that they’re seeing. The bathroom, the canteen where they get their food, they’re going into all of the sets that were made and just having fun being goofy and being friends.

So that was actually quite, especially in a space movie, where you can turn your gravity off and fly up and spin around and jump on these little discs that are in the Communiverse that you can ride on. Suddenly it becomes a very expansive and exciting world where you can play with the scale and the dynamic camera moves, and really show off the beautiful sets and the designs that were done for the film. So it really is dependent on the story and the emotion. Either works, I think we’re always trying to get to the truth of the moment.

Did you draw on any influences for the film that you could quickly share? 

Some influences I had were my two nephews. They were sort of the right age for Elio. So I would watch them, see what they were doing, how they were reacting, video them, try and take pieces of them and oftentimes in dailies, what would Elio do, I’d be thinking?

How much do you think about the rule of cool or wanting the audience to feel strong emotions when you’re animating a scene? 

I think predominantly in the roots of animation and the 12 principles, you want really clear posing, you want to exaggerate your poses, you want it to be dynamic. Oftentimes we do work in two constrained a box. So often the notes that are given are; push it, make it bigger, make it broader, make it more in your face. It’s not necessarily to make it cooler, but it’s just to make it read better and to make it more interesting to watch. As long as it’s right for the moment emotionally instead of having a live action person acting, we’re doing animation. So we want to push things, exaggerate and stylise things to make it worth watching. We push things, but not too far and it looks too unrealistic or not genuine.

This interview is edited for consistency and clarity.

Elio and Glordon, image courtesy of Disney Pixar

Elio is out now in cinemas 

The post Jude Brownhill on Pixar’s ‘Elio’ and the Art of Animation Supervision appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Curated by local animator Luzie Ilgner, the screening showcases a playful, heartfelt, and thought-provoking mix of animations that either explore LGBTQIA+ themes or are created by queer artists.

Ahead of the screening we had the chance to catch up with one of the featured filmmakers, Steven Fraser – an award winning animator and maker with a special focus on queer themes, mental health and neurodiversity in his work. His film Coming out Autistic (2022) will be part of the INBETWEENS lineup.

Coming Out Autistic (Dir. Steven Fraser)

Where did your animation journey start and did you always know you wanted to be an animator?

I think so! I was always drawing when I was younger and found it quite interesting. I would just pick up a pencil and draw. I studied Computer Arts in Dundee and that course is really focused on video games. Most of the stuff I was doing at university was more CG focused, but in my spare time I was still drawing. When I started making films, I did not want to use a computer. I wanted it to be hand drawn or puppetry because I did not want to spend all day sat in front of a computer and then go home and do that as well. I realised, for the stories I wanted to tell, I wanted to make things you can touch and hold.

Would you say the story idea inspires the medium you choose to work in, or is it the other way around?

I think it’s a bit of both. I think a lot of the short films I make are very driven by emotion and feelings. These are things that you can’t touch and hold because they are internal and I like to make them external. And that is why the mediums I go for you can touch and hold. It makes them feel a little bit more real.

It feels like your art is very focused around personal experiences and subjects…

Definitely! For Coming Out Autistic I was having conversations with people who identify as LGBT+ and are also on the autism spectrum. I identify as bisexual and I am autistic. I realised there was a connection there. A lot of people I knew were queer and also neurodiverse in some way. I also made a film called Prosopagnosia, which was more like a diary. It was about diaries that I wrote when I was younger. Prosopagnosia means face blindness, which is something that I also live with. I thought ‘instead of interviewing experts and clinical professionals, why don’t I just look at my own diaries’? I was very selective of what I showed, but I felt that was more personal and it would be an easier way to explain what it means to me. I thought people could relate to that. I think there always has to be a personal connection.

Coming Out Autistic (Dir. Steven Fraser)

What inspires you to set these themes as a focus for your art?

There are definitely reasons. In the past I have seen a lot of films about sexuality or neurodiversity, but they were made by people that were not part of those communities. I always felt like those people were trying to find a way into the story. When I talk about these subjects I can talk about experience or I can talk to other people and I am not trying to get in. As part of the community, I felt the communities could speak for themselves. So that’s why I really wanted to do it. And I just think I find personal stories more interesting.

Let’s have a closer look at Coming Out Autistic. What context did you make the film in?

I just really wanted to make a short documentary, so I interviewed different people about their experiences with coming out to other people as autistic and who also identify as LGBT+ in some way. I just had the idea for this film and it was something I wanted to do. I like interviews and talking to people. Coming Out Autistic was supposed to be made in lockdown. I started it before Prosopagnosia, but I ended up getting funding for Prosopagnosia, finished that first, and then came back to Coming out Autistic.

So this was not your first documentary-style animation?

I have made a couple of documentary films before. I made a film about voice-hearing, so about people who hear voices. It is similar to schizophrenia but they identify as someone who hears voices because there is less stigma around that.

The style of your film is super colourful. Can you tell me a little bit about the creative process behind making the film?

For the colours I was looking at different LGBT+ flags, the rainbow flags are always really colourful. I wanted to make it bright. I think a lot of times when people think of a film about sexuality and neurodiversity, they think it is going to be negative and it is going to look at what the problems are. And there is that, but I didn’t want it to be solely that.

When I was thinking about the colours, I wanted to make them bright and draw people in that way other than making it dark, moody and depressing. So I just looked at different LGBT+ flags and used them as colour palettes for the different scenes.

Coming Out Autistic (Dir. Steven Fraser)

I also noticed in the film, that you tell stories not only through interviews but on a visual level there were a lot of social media references, like dating apps for example.

I like the idea of a people coming out online. When I initially envisioned the film, it was going to be animated but I was going to put the animation on a phone and then film the phone. And then I had the great idea of animating things around the phone as well. I thought it would be interesting to put it on a dating app or in a YouTube video. People will be out on dating apps with their sexuality and also a lot of people make YouTube videos about neurodiversity and sexuality. So I thought that would be great way to represent that.

You are doing a lot of interesting work within different genres and techniques and I was just wondering what you are currently up to and what is happening in your artistic life at the moment?

I am doing a documentary lab with Sheffield documentary festival. It’s called Queer Realities, where different documentary filmmakers are pitching their ideas. We have done a series of workshops for the last couple of months. So I will hopefully be working on a feature-length film which is going to have some animation in it as well. It is about letters I wrote when I was younger and I am talking about sexuality in there as well. I want to use animation to bring those letters alive. That is what I am working on at the moment, but it is still in very early stages.

Catch Coming out Autistic as part of the INBETWEENS – Queer Animation Screening at the Cube Microplex in Bristol 8pm on July 8th in association with BAM/Encounters, and at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre 5pm on August 23rd in association with Skwigly/CAF.

To follow Steven Fraser’s work visit stevenfraserart.com and to keep up-to-date with BAM’s current and future events follow @bristol_animation_meetup on Instagram.

The post INBETWEENS Filmmaker Focus: Steven Fraser appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Image provided by Eaglet Films

Nearly four years have passed since I last interviewed Massimo Fenati, who was then discussing his work as the director of the Channel 4 Christmas special The Abominable Snow Baby. And in such a short space of time, he directed Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures for the BBC, and became a co-founder of Eaglet Films alongside Tess Cuming.

But he is also the creator of his own original series, Piripenguins, which is set to be broadcasted on CBeebies on the 19th May. Set on a giant floating iceberg, the comedy show revolves around five energetic penguins who end up finding themselves in funny scenarios that they try to resolve with sometimes wacky results.

I had the opportunity to interview and catch up with Massimo during his trip to London, where he shared what creators face with developing an original IP, the challenges towards it’s approach to it’s unique blend of animations, and what it was like to have two major broadcasting commissioners to support the production.

Image provided by Eaglet Films

Since we last spoke before Christmas in 2021 for our interview for The Abominable Snow Baby, you co-founded Eaglet Films with Tess Cuming in 2022. What has that new role been like for you since then?

It’s been quite exciting to run a company because it’s a much bigger project: you need to think about what you want to do and what is more feasible and more achievable, you need to have short term plans and long term plans and those I find quite exciting to be honest.

And we’ve probably been quite lucky as after The Abominable Snow Baby, we got this big commission for the BBC which was Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures, which is an anthology series adapting his books by into twenty-six minute animations, and thanks to that we gained quite a lot of appreciation from the BBC. It’s been a very successful series (it also won us an RTS Award for Best Children’s Programme last month), I pitched the idea of Piripenguins and the BBC was very interested from the start.

What was the inspiration behind Piripenguins and the vivid stars of the show?

It’s a very personal project for me because a long time ago, we’re talking about fifteen, sixteen years ago, I did a very simple sketch of a penguin on a post-it note that was supposed to be for somebody, and I liked it so much that I was showing it to friends and everybody kept saying “Oh this penguin is fantastic. You should do something with it.”  Patricia Hidalgo, Director of Children and Education at the BBC, had just said in an interview that she was looking for a sitcom for children, something that could be for CBeebies but could work as a bridge show, bridging between the typical preschool audience of CBeebies and the school age audience of CBBC. It would need to gather all the preschoolers around the TV but with the option that the slightly older siblings, who wouldn’t normally be that keen on watching preschool programmes, could sit down and enjoy it all the same.

It was an interesting challenge because it had to be the right level of speed and tone. I thought that my penguins could be a good idea for this brief and so I came up with this very simple scenario of a colony of penguins living on an iceberg that floats around the Antarctic Ocean. And just because it’s for the age of children that are just about to go (or just started going) to school, the concept for me is about identity: it’s the age when you suddenly leave your family nest and you realise the world is not you or your siblings and your parents. There’s a lot of human beings of the same age, more or less the same height, and all of a sudden, you have to confront yourself with them and you start thinking: who am I in relation to the?. Am I the same? Am I different?

It’s that kind of moment when children need to work out who they are. So the penguins kind of echo other shows like the Smurfs or the Minions, where the characters all look quite similar to each other, but the personalities are very different. So that’s the concept of the show: you might look alike, but in fact, you are very unique. All of you are very different from each other and that’s beautiful. We want to celebrate that. And so the main five characters all have a prop or something that helps you to tell them apart, but we also pushed for very different voices, very different body language and expressions just to make them as individual and as diverse as possible. It’s become an interesting scenario and even the writers, after the normal gearing up process, understanding and writing the characters became all very easy.

Image provided by Eaglet Films

In our news piece on Piripenguins last year, you mentioned: “opportunities for new ideas to emerge and flourish have been shrinking steadily.” What challenges did you have as its creator and one of the founders of Eaglet Films to get your show off the ground?

Well, it’s interesting because at the moment, I think the industry, and in general the world of television, is going through weird times because of what happened with the pandemic. All of a sudden, animation had a big influx because, obviously, live action TV couldn’t happen so there were more commissions in the animation industry, but things changed back to the status quo after the pandemic, and nowadays streamers have lower profits because people are cancelling subscriptions. That kind of triggers the usual scenario of commissioners feeling that they would rather green-light programmes based on global IP, something that is already recognised and established and I understand it, but I also think at the same time it’s important to keep commissioning brand-new ideas, as innovation is key at times of crisis.

We started with adapting Quentin Blake’s and Terry Pratchett’s works, so we realised that starting from known IP was the way to go because, as a start-up, it would have been almost impossible to pitch something completely new. You need to establish certain credentials to them, to then be able to say “Look, we’ve done that, but we can also create something new, give us a chance and we can prove that the new IP can be just as exciting.” It was a challenge, but we had a very open-minded, keen ear in the BBC.

I was very keen to select a very good team of collaborators, I was probably quite demanding when I started looking for writers, for the studios, for the actors… But in the end, it paid off because the team was absolutely perfect. There is a huge multitude of creatives out there that are very talented, but it’s paramount to find the best fit for every project, find somebody who really gets it and can deliver what I’m looking for. I’m delighted with all my collaborators and I’ve had the best time with the whole team honestly, starting from the writers all the way down to people working on the lightning and the final audio mix. It’s been a fantastic journey for me, I enjoyed every single moment of it.

The show looks as though it has a mixture of animations in it with the characters having a two-dimensional appearance in a three-dimensional space. What were the decisions and challenges that you faced when blending these different animation styles?

The decision was quite simple for me, right at the start, because we tried to turn my original sketch into a 3D character, but it didn’t work. It kind of lost that immediate and streamlined language that I found worked incredibly well in 2D. At the same time, I was fearing that going for a fully 2D show would have been a bit too bland, because the show is set in a world of ice and water and there would have been a lot of white and blue. It needed the richness, the extra texture and light that you can really get only from 3D, so for me it was a no brainer to try and do the hybrid of 2D characters in a 3D world. And I must say that everybody liked it from the start.

Technically, it was difficult because the penguins’ bodies are actually three dimensional although they’re rendered as flat 2D elements without any shading, but the face (meaning the eyes and the beak) is two dimensional, so making these two elements work harmoniously in animation isn’t a slam-dunk. It’s something difficult for 3D animators to get their heads around, it’s quite a process for them at the beginning. But after the standard and expected teething problems of any new production, once they’ve discover the potential and learned the unusual visual language, they started delivering great performances for the characters.

With the show released later this month, what are you hoping that children and grown-ups will take away from it when they watch it for the first time?

The first concept I hope that would be taken will be conveyed by the programme is the one I was mentioning about identity… The second one is about communal living because it’s also about a group of penguins stuck on an iceberg with each other and it will speak to a child stuck in a classroom with lots of other children they haven’t chosen. But how to live together and get along with each other, finding that differences can actually enrich us, is a very important lesson we all need to learn, especially for the difficult times we all live in.

Image provided by Eaglet Films

Piripenguins will broadcast on CBeebies on the 19th May 2025.

The post Piripenguins – Interview with Series Creator Massimo Fenati appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.