Just after the two heard the good news early Tuesday while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, they hopped on a call with The Globe and Mail to talk about homegrown collaboration and innovation.
You have made three films together now, each of which has been nominated for an Academy Award. What’s your secret?We’ve been making films together for almost 28 years now, and our working relationship is basically each of us doing a bit of everything. Amanda does more of the character animation, while I do more of the editing and compositing, but we both have a hand in the entire process.
That idea of fragility is important to us, because we started out with just this single vision of a naked, pink sailor flailing, and then we slowed it down so it would become more like a ballet.That pinkness in contrast to the grey, smoky debris-filled mayhem, it was something so terrible but also poignant and beautiful.
How beneficial, in terms of exposure, was the partnership with The New Yorker, which screened the film online on its digital channels?It reached such a larger audience, particularly Americans, and for us as filmmakers, that’s the main objective. To get people to see it.It’s always a challenge to find large audiences for short animated films. While The New Yorker deal meant that the film would be rendered ineligible for certain film festivals in the U.S.
Do you find that distribution of short films has changed, or gotten better, over the past few years thanks to the proliferation of streamers and audiences eager for more bite-sized entertainment?Those new avenues have changed it, yes, and one thing we’ve discovered while in Sundance right now is that shorts are gaining traction and stature. We’ve always felt that when we go to big festivals, short films are at the kids’ table, and animation, well, it’s in a different room altogether.