As Annecy rounds the final bend on its biggest edition to date, with a tantalizing promise of a brighter future for animation in much of Europe, Marjolaine Perreten’s 29-minute film “Pebble Hill” (“La Colline aux cailloux”), part of its TV Films competition,has been one of the multiple gems to come out of it.
Minimalist in design, a trademark of the young Swiss filmmaker’s unique style, the animation, which has already won an award at Hamburg’s Mo & Friese Kinder Kurzfilm Festival, is charming and tender, the 29-minute film, produced by renowned Swiss production company Nadasdy Film in Geneva, a producer on “No Dogs or Italians Allowed,” and France’s Les Films du Nord, tells the story of a family of shrews that after loosing their home due to the breaking of an upstream dam embark on a journey alongside an old shrew to find the Pebble Hill.
Perreten’s previous short film “Last Day of Autumn” was screened at the Berlinale in 2019, With this one she proves to have a quite singular voice that through quirky comedy and endearing characters achieve sincere emotion.
PvNewinterviewed Perreten as her short film bowed at Annecy
Right from the get-go you use sound design in such a sensorial and tactile way and take such advantage of the world building tool that it i. Could you talk about your process of establishingthe sound of the film?
I would say, as my animation and graphic world are really simple and minimalist, it was important to give it a realistic sound design, toanchor my characters into reality, to make public believe in their existence. Professional sound effectsin this filmwere actually extremely important, because they make my characters exist. Céline Bernard, the foley artist, and Jonathan Vanneste, the sound designer, are a duo that worked perfectly together, and their sensitivity was exactly what I needed.
You and your team achieve a character design that it feels effortless when it actually prompts so many questions of character movement, expression and emotion. What were your guidelines when facing those issues?
In fact, this minimalism comes from the fact that I didn’t go to animation school, but multimedia school, where the motto “less is more” is king. With my limited knowledge of animation, I animate as best I can, empirically, with rules and shortcuts that I’ve invented for myself… My philosophy is: “Well, if it works, keep it!”
This way of doing things worked until now, because I animated all my films on my own! But when I started having to work with animators (“a festive wind” to start with), I had to explain to professional animators how I work… Because they had to “learn” to imitate my kind of animation (poor things)…
Anyway, I learned a lot from them, and I hope I didn’t traumatise them too much.
Very rapidly the film builds into tender comedy that springs not only from the characters’ charming design and voice but also the rhythm in which actions occur. What does it entail in the animating process to find that rhythm?
I think subtle humor is born of rhythm, that all it takes is a well-calculated pause to set up a little joke, and this timing is something delicate that I appreciate enormously.
The subtlety of the looks, the pauses and the compositions are something that comes to me from the films of Jacques Tati, whose work has never ceased to inspire me, I must admit.
In animation, we can’t afford multiple takes, and there are rarely any “happy accidents” of actions or dialogues that can be inserted into the film during shooting.
As each minute of film is extremely expensive to produce, every gesture and every word must be calculated from the outset, planned in the animatic. And that’s where it stays until the end of production. So the director has to anticipate the slightest joke from the outset!
Could you talk about your animation references, because at least in the background and your use of 2D it feels like a very rich mix of styles not necessarily all from the West.
about backgrounds, I think a good part of my style comes from my very first background artist internship, at L’Enclume, on Rémi Durin’s “Le Parfum de la Carotte”.
Since my references at the time were underdeveloped, his work stayed with me for a long time. But now, as I develop new projects and discover new things every year, my style is taking a different direction, and I hope I’ll be able to settle into something even more my own.
As for animation “style”, that’s hard to say…! I can talk about films I’ve always loved, like Konstantin Bronzit’s “Au Bout du Monde”, or the first “Simon’s Cat” film, which I watched frame by frame to understand animation… and the humor of rhythm and situational comedy.
The minimalism and narrative of the image in my work also comes from some Japanese inspirations, rather from painting, such as Noriko Yamaguchi, Yoshiko Hada, Gomatsu… I also have a soft spot for Outsider Art, where naïve art draws on the essential, gets straight to the point in what it’s telling, it’s something that inspires me a lot.
