Oscar winner Andrew Ruhemann has returned to the director’s chair for “The Day I Became a Bird.”
His first short in 13 years, based on a book by Chabbert Ingrid, illustrated byGuridi, will see a boy who falls in love – with a girl that only has eyes for birds. Desperate to get her attention, he comes up with a rather unusual plan.
“I was at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and that’s where I found this book. I thought it was a very intriguing image: Why is there this kid in a bird costume? It moved me,” he says.
Ruhemann’s previous short, “The Lost Thing,” brought him an Academy Award in 2011, shared with Shaun Tan.
“With ‘The Lost Thing,’ it was the first book I saw at that fair. I felt a little tingle at the back of my spine and said to myself: ‘This is going to be my first film.’ It all happened in a very similar way,” he laughs.
“You could say this story is about first love or about being true to yourself, but it’s just one layer. This girl is able to connect with nature in a way he doesn’t quite understand.He gets a taste of something transcendent,”he says about his protagonist.
“The Day I Became a Bird,” produced by Passion Pictures with the support from Epic MegaGrants, will be “teased” at Annecy before embarking on a festival run.
Despite taking a break from directing, Ruhemann has kept himself busy as founder and executive creative director of Passion Pictures. The company, with teams in London, Paris, New York and Barcelona, boasts a Passion Animation division, with recent credits including Netflix’s “Love, Death, & Robots.”
“I always say I am lucky: I don’t have to direct for a living. But I do love it. I love it if I am passionate about the stories I want to tell,” he says.
“There is this constant tension between trying to be commercial and trying to make art. It has always been like this in my career. After I made ‘The Lost Thing,’ I had to put my producer’shat on and that took me away for a long time. But suddenly, a little space opened up and I thought I was ready.”
At Annecy, Ruhemann will also address the audience during A Studio Focus panel, Finding Space for Creativity, Magic, and Poetry with Passion Pictures,on June 14. It’s something he believes in as well, calling his upcoming film “an outburst of poetry and magic.”
“We keep hitting all these big bumps in our world. There’s war in Ukraine, we have been through the pandemic, we are now in recession and have to deal with a refugee crisis, climate crisis and some absurd politics in our country. I have been under a fair bit of pressure to commercialize our studio and hit certain targets, but I don’t think companies can succeed unless they have a vision,” he observes.
“I can’t say to my team: ‘The vision is to make X million pounds.’ We need to make money to keep the studio doors open, but we also need to remember why we are doing this.”
Ruhemann is not afraid of being called sentimental following his film’s premiere.
“I am sure I am going to be hit with that. There is no question,” he says.
“If I talk about life and death, and the human condition, these are big things that people can roll their eyes at. But that’s what we, as artists, are trying to make sense of and to express. We are all trying to connect.”
He is excited about the ever-changing animation landscape, he observes, as well as new tools he could use while making the film.
“I feel blessed to have lived in what I call the second golden age of animation. We all know about the golden age of Disney, then we had Dark Ages and Roger Rabbit came along and blew everything wide open. But you can’t talk about animation without acknowledging all the technological leaps being made.”
“We can make things a lot cheaper and we have seen some examples of people really pushing the boundaries now. I made this film with Unreal Engine and for me, one of the most exciting places to reside in is where poetry meets technology. It’s amazing when they come together.”
Still, most of all, he wanted to take his time.
“The theme of the film is paying attention to all the wonders that can be right in front of our nose. Taking a pause to see them, to feel them. I know that my son, who is of the TikTok generation, will go: ‘Dad, this is way too slow.’ But it really needed that pace,” he says.
“I challenge you not to hear bird songs in a different way from now on.”
