Nina Gantz discusses her stop-motion film about 3 tiny humans, stars of a kids’ TV series, whose creator dies, leaving them alone in the studio to somehow survive and continue making episodes.
Many writers say that characters – both in scripts and novels - take on lives of their own, essentially coming alive within the pages of a story. Nina Gantz’s animated short film, Wander to Wonder, embraces that sentiment and with it, runs absolutely wild.
Directed by the London-based Dutch filmmaker and produced by Stienette Bosklopper of Circe Films and Maarten Swart of Kaap Holland Film, the short is 90% stop-motion and 10% live-action. Its unique story follows miniature character models Mary, Billybud, and Fumbleton, three tiny humans dressed in fuzzy creature costumes, who starred in a kids' TV series called Wander to Wonder. After the creator dies, they find themselves left alone in the studio. Struggling to find enough food, often resorting to eating flies, they continue to make increasingly strange episodes for their fans.
Wander to Wonder just won for Best Short Subject at this past Saturday evening’s 52nd Annie Awards. It has also been nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards, being held Sunday, March 2, alongside four other short films: Magic Candies, Beautiful Men, Yuck! and In the Shadow of the Cypress.
AWN has interviewed each of the directors to discuss the origin of their film, learn about its production, and better understand why they chose to tell this particular story.
Before reading our interview with Gantz, check out her film’s trailer and Making Of featurette.
Victoria Davis: Where did the idea for Wander to Wonder come from?
Nina Gantz: The first spark came from the longing to combine live-action and traditional stop-motion animation. I love the work of the great Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans) and the way that you can see the craft. Even nowadays, it still looks very convincing.
During a flight to a festival, I was bouncing ideas around with Simon Cartwright, who I co-wrote the initial versions of the script with, and we came up with the idea of a kids’ TV show with a presenter and his puppets, which felt like a good way to explore this mix of techniques. We got very interested in where the story would go if we went behind the scenes and treated it more like a family drama, with actual little humans inside the puppets.
VD: What was the urgency, the need, for you to tell this story now? What messages or feelings did you want to share with your audience?
NG: The film, for me, became quite a personal story. I experienced the death of a loved one while writing the last version of the script, which made its way into the film. I saw around me that everybody copes very differently with grief. How do you move on after such a seismic event? Some hold on to the past, some try to blank it out, while for others, it can also mean a form of liberation. I think this experience of loss and the absurdity of the situation is something people can relate to.
VD: How did you settle on stop-motion animation and your specific stylistic choices for this film? How do you feel the visuals enhance the story?
NG: The animation style and the character design needed to be quite realistic, so it blended well with the live-action character. However, I still wanted it to be noticeable as stop-motion, so we had to strike a fine balance between the two.
We also wanted the TV show to feel authentic to give the audience a sense of nostalgia as if it could have really existed. We took inspiration for the visual style from classic British shows such as The Wombles, Sooty and Sweep, The Flumps, Rainbow and the U.S. series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The show is very colorful and sweet, making a nice juxtaposition against the backstage studio, which we deliberately made dirty with much less color to emphasize the feeling of despair that our characters start to experience.
VD: What were the biggest challenges in production?
NG: The journey of the puppet design was a huge challenge. I had never made a film with dialogue before and I also knew we would need a lot of expressions, especially for Mary. The tricky thing was that the puppets were very small. Next to our life-sized props and sets, they needed to look in proportion and, as mentioned before, they also needed to look quite realistic to fit in with the live-action character, Uncle Gilly.
With puppet heads so small, it meant that we couldn’t use armatures, so we had to use 3D-printed faces, something that no one in our team had very much experience with. It took months and months of testing. When we finally had a good prototype that we thought we could work with, we were a week from shooting, so we just went for it!
The scale of the puppets was something that kept coming back to haunt us. The eyelids were three millimeters in size and kept jumping off the puppets like fleas. After each day of animation, we ended up crawling around on the floor trying to find them.
VD: And what about the biggest rewards?
NG: Although it was tricky, it was rewarding to see how much emotion we got out of our characters and that is down to the persistence with the puppet creation. It allowed the acting from our wonderful voice actors, Amanda Lawrence and Toby Jones, to really shine. We used videos of their recording session to model the faces, and our animators also used these reference videos to capture the nuances of their performances and pass them to our puppets. All together it was a huge team effort that I feel totally paid off.
VD: Any lesser-known special aspects of the film or its visuals you'd like to point out to people who get the chance to watch it, or even to entice those who have already seen the film to see it again?
NG: One of the themes present in the film is the need to create and how it can keep you sane. If you pay attention to the paper mâché figures that Mary is making throughout the film, they show her state of mind beginning to unravel. It begins with the pretty TV show sets and then we see her using torn-up fan mail to make flowers that she lays around Gilly as a sort of shrine. Towards the end, she makes an entire freaky-looking audience that she is anxiously cobbling together.
VD: How long did it take to produce this film? How big was the team?
NG: Due to a changing budget, we had to keep rewriting the script and by the end, we had made three different animatics. It took a total of eight years to make and during that time, my interest in the story was shifting. I found that the script needed to change with me and so the final version became very different from the first.
Also, because of the ambition of the project - shooting everything “in-camera” using stop-motion - we needed to build large life-size sets, so our funding had to come from four countries, which made it quite a puzzle to pull the team together. Many of us have never worked together, and I’m so happy they all trusted in the project for so long.
I sculpted the puppets in Brighton with guidance from Sculptor Eve Sheppard, Pedri Animation helped to make the puppets in the Netherlands, a small team in Northern France built the sets, BlinkInk in London worked on the 3D modeling of faces and the post-production team was in Valence in the South of France. We shot in Belgium with four people on set every day.
VD: What are your hopes as you continue heading through festival and awards season? Many people say they don't make films for the accolades. So how do you hope the film touches people and gets recognized?
NG: We are nearing the end of its festival run and I’m over the moon that [Wander to Wonder] has been embraced by so many people. Each person seems to take something different from the story and many of them say that they feel a sense of hope at the end, which is amazing to hear. I have also been contacted by some of my animation heroes to tell me that they love the film, and that kind of recognition has given me a lot of confidence.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
