Director Loïc Espuche and producer Juliette Marquet discuss their 2D animated short about a group of kids on vacation and how they react with disgust as they spy people kissing on the mouth… although for one young boy and girl, the idea may not be so awful.
Ah, memories of your first kiss. Exciting, nerve-wracking, even traumatic. Many can’t remember at what point in their lives the mere idea of a tender kiss went from gross to enticing. But for a group of kids on vacation at a campground, constantly spying on adults of various ages and persuasions in various stages of kissing, lips glowing pink and sparkly, their overwhelming response is… “yuck!” Although, for one young boy, Léo, and one young girl, Lucy, that first kiss might not be such a terrible thing…
Directed by Loïc Espuche and produced by Juliette Marquet of Ikki Films and Manon Messiant of Iliad & Films, Yuck! is a gentle, charming 2D animated short that has enjoyed an expansive, successful festival run, selected at dozens, including Annecy, Stuttgart and Ottawa, as well as nominated for two Annie Awards and a César. Not to mention it has also been nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards - which takes place Sunday, March 2 - alongside four other short films: Beautiful Men, Wander to Wonder, Magical Candies, and In the Shadow of the Cypress.
The three filmmakers met in 2017 at Sacrebleu Productions while working on the animated feature Marona’s Fantastic Tale. When Espuche’s idea for Yuck! started taking shape in 2018, the trio decided to make the film together.
Developed, financed, and produced over a five-year period, around 60 people in total worked on the film. Yuck! was animated by a team of six at the Ciclic animation residency in Vendôme (near the center of France): Espuche, Léo Schweitzer, Simon Duong Van Huyen, Emma Carré, and Elie Martens. The entire team lived on site, in shared accommodation, for 8 months. The film was animated in 2D, frame by frame, more than 9,300 drawings (20,000 hours of work) using TV Paint. It was also during this residency that Martens created the film’s colors.
AWN has interviewed filmmakers from each of the five shorts 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 Espuche and Marquet, check out the trailer and Making Of featurette.
Dan Sarto: Where did the idea for this film come from?
Loïc Espuche: I got the idea of making this film during a screening of my previous short film in a cinema full of children! At the beginning of the film, the main character says goodbye to his fiancée with a little kiss... At that moment, all the kids in the room started screaming, “Yyuck! that's so disgusting! They're kissing!”
Their reaction made me die laughing and took me back to my own childhood, when I too screamed in disgust at every kiss, while dying to kiss Sophie, my girlfriend at the time… And I said to myself “Wow I absolutely have to make a film about kissing and all the reactions it can provoke for children.” I had the subject of the film, but no idea yet. Sometime later I came up with the idea of mouths lighting up to symbolize the desire to kiss.
DS: Why tell this particular story now? What message or feeling did you want to share with your audience?
LE: With this film, I explore themes of the birth of feelings, fear of the other person's gaze, and how to find one's own secret garden. Even though the story is told from a child's point of view, I think these issues continue to follow us into our adult lives. These issues affect a lot of people that can relate at their own level. To give you a concrete example: the scene with the soccer players is an opportunity to talk about homophobia in the world of soccer, an environment in which very few professional players have made their coming out during their career.
Moreover, in the film, kisses only take place when the two people kissing have pink mouths. As a subtext, this allows me to evoke the notion of consent. After school screenings, this is often a subject that is discussed with children. I think it's necessary to tell them at a very young age that kissing is only possible when both people agree, that you don't kiss someone who doesn't want to be kissed and above all that you have the right not to want to be kissed!
Finally, there was something else that was important to me: I wanted this to be a film that people could share together. I wanted it to be seen by young and old alike, by film lovers and casual viewers alike. It was very important for me to try and make a film that tried to bring people together, especially at the moment!
DS: How did you settle on the film’s animation style and design? How do you feel the visuals enhance the story?
LE: The graphic concept of the pink mouths plays a central narrative role in Yuck! It was therefore necessary to develop specific graphics for the film. Color is central to the film. So, I chose a design with no outlines, to let the color come to life without enclosing it. The viewer's attention had to be drawn to the lips, even in distant shots. That's why the lips sparkle with a glittery texture that attracts the viewer's eye, fascinates the little ones, and reminds me of the sensation of candies sparkling under the tongue when I was little.
This texture stands out from the rest of the graphics, which are in solid colors.
In order to focus the viewer's attention on the characters' lips, I also chose very clean graphics, with no unnecessary details that might distract the audience.
This choice of simple graphics also aimed to allow the animators to concentrate not on complexity, but rather on the quality of the acting, so as to best convey the energy of childhood that you could feel in the voices.
DS: What were the biggest challenges during the production? And the biggest rewards?
Juliette Marquet: Yuck! is somehow the film of “first times:” it’s Léo’s first kiss, but also Loïc's first personal and professional project and my first film as a producer, alongside co-producer Manon Messiant. As newbies, we had to work twice as much during the development phase to convince financial partners to come on board.
It was a blessing in disguise, as it pushed us to work hard on the script and animatics, and ultimately, to make a better film.
During production, we experimented with our process for the first time, which meant we had to invent solutions when things didn’t go as planned. One of the biggest issues was that, when we started production, the animation style became more precise and demanding than we expected. This required more time and more money than we could afford. At the same time, we had trouble finding the right graphic style for the backgrounds. So, we faced both financial and an artistic challenges.
We found a double solution: we chose to put more money on the animation phase and Loïc took over the backgrounds.
We'd also noticed Elie Martens' (one of the animators) great sense of colors, so we asked him to change positions and back up Loïc on the backgrounds. That’s how we found our graphic style, and Elie revealed himself as a great colorscript artist.
One of the most challenging parts was finding a music composer. The film was practically finished, we had two months left before delivering it to the broadcaster and we had lost hope… until we found Aliénor Doublet’s Soundcloud. She’s a director and an animator herself and at the time, she had just made the music for her own film. This was her first commissioned work. Finding the right music for the film came so naturally to her, it was amazing!
So, we’d say the greatest reward is that the film enabled us to discover talented people and help them grow their skills. And that along the way, we all became very good friends!
DS: Any special aspects or less-known details of the film or its visuals you'd like to point out?
LE: People often talk to me about pink mouths from a conceptual and visual point of view, but rarely in terms of sound! And the sound of the pink mouths was super hard to find! It's the only sound in the film, apart from the music, which doesn't exist in real life. So, we had to find a sound that was specific to them but at the same time not too present because the characters never seem to hear it. It was Grégoire Chauvot, the film's sound editor, who succeeded in creating this sound. At first, he used skin tones and the sound of sparkling water, but we weren't completely convinced. What we needed was something more musical, full of micro-events like sprinkles, and above all, something whose intensity we could modulate.
And on the last day of sound editing, Grégoire had an idea: we should try out a rain stick. I went to buy one, and it was during this last day of sound editing that Grégoire put the finishing touches to the mouth sounds. All of a sudden, this sound, which doesn't exist in real life, seemed natural and organic. So much so, that a lot of people don't even notice it. But without this sound, the experience of the film would definitely not be the same. So, here's what I want to do: shed some light on the finesse of Grégoire's work.
DS: What are your hopes as you continue your festival and awards season run? Most people say they don't make their films for the accolades. So how do you hope the film touches people and gets recognized?
LE: Before embarking on this Oscar campaign, my two producers, Juliette Marquet and Manon Messiant, and I took a moment to ask ourselves what we would expect in return for the time and energy we would have to devote to it. And the answer was pretty obvious: give the film as much exposure as possible, so that as many people as possible would want to see it. When you spend five and a half years working on a film, the greatest reward is that it finds an audience. And for me, there's nothing like the reactions of the audience, whether it's the howls of disgust from the kids, the laughter from the adults, the applause during the credits or the wet eyes of my parents when they saw the film for the first time.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
