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| The Smeds And The Smoos |
An ancient feud, jungle exploration, forbidden romance and an interplanetary adventure complete with aliens – BAFTA longlisted animation The Smeds And The Smoos has got it all. It’s based on the book by children's author and illustrator team Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, best known for the Gruffalo and Samantha, and has been brought to life by director team Samantha Cutler and Daniel Snaddon. I caught up with the two of them at an animation event late last year to find out how this delightful children’s fable made it to the screen and enjoyed such success there.
Daniel has worked on previous adaptations of Donaldson and Scheffler’s work, and for him it was all about the story.
“It's about two races of aliens,” he explains. “Red aliens and blue aliens who live on a planet. And they're neighbours and they can't stand each other. They hate each other. The set-up's a bit of a Romeo And Juliet thing. You know, this is the fourth film that I've worked on with Magic Light, as a director. It's Samantha's first and it really resonated with me. We're both talking to you from Cape town, South Africa. I personally come from a mixed race marriage. My parents’ marriage wasn't recognised in South Africa when I was growing up.
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| The Smeds And The Smoos |
“What I really loved about the book is that the characters have to leave their families and go off and find another planet so that they can be themselves and love the people they want to love. So I thought of it on a very personal level – it's a way of honouring the bravery my parents had in leaving their families and going off to make me and my sister – and also just to celebrate that idea that love can cross boundaries, that we find each other somehow.”
“It's definitely a celebration of differences and coming together,” says Sam, who has brough three of the characters – Bill Smoo and Janet Smoo and Grandfather Smoo – and holds them up, beaming proudly.
“I think, as you can see in the book, the characters are quite strange looking,” she says. “Axel Scheffler does these amazing drawings, but to translate that into 3D is a massive challenge, as well as the colours. So we kind of went into making them in real life before going into the computer, which I absolutely love because I feel like this solves a lot of challenges. We used a special type of clay called crazy clay, and it dries sort of like marshmallows. We thought it gave them a unique sort of alien feel. It wasn't the usual plasticine. And it was sort of different from the other Magic Lights.
“To really promote that they're aliens was something that we were always fighting for. It was sort of like the alien versus human. How do you make them relatable but not too human, where it looks like a person in a suit or something? Or if they get too alien and freaky, it's going to creep people out. So we're really trying to just find that appeal. But I think starting this way was super helpful, and we got there.
“Dan and I have been friends for quite a while, so we work really well together. I think one of the challenges was it was remote. It was a brand new team. We didn't know anybody, so we did a lot of things with initiating a lot of meetings to promote communication, and that was really good. And our animation director, Annike Pienaar, initiated this thing called coffee time, where everyone would meet in the morning and just talk about random stuff, not even film related. It really made everyone feel like a team. And she'd make them do a show and tell so they could show little sculptures, or I think she showed a vacuum cleaner just to really just make everyone relax and have a good time and get to know everybody. So even though we weren't in a studio, you felt like you knew who you were working with.”
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| The Smeds And The Smoos book |
“Sam and I are both animators and have worked as animators on shows,” says Dan. “But Sam's been the head of modeling on a lot of the Magic Light projects, and I've been a storyboard artist before. So in pre-production, I took point on storyboarding. I did the first pass of the boards myself, and Sam started, as you can see, making all the stuff in clay. And so that was great. And what it did is it allowed us to get ahead of a lot of the questions that we knew were coming. The quality needed to be very high, but we were not working with the same sort of resources as we would in a feature. It gave us a bit of a chance to answer a lot of big questions that all the different departments were going to need. Hopefully that set everyone up for as smooth a ride as possible.”
To make this kind of film work you need to be able to put a lot of personality into the characters, I note. Some of that, of course, comes from the wonderful narration provided by Sally Hawkins, but how was it handled from an animation perspective?
"It’s very much a collaborative effort, but for us it started with looking at what we could pick up from the original book - both words and pictures,” says Dan. "We then worked closely with the screenwriter to figure out each character’s perspective, and made sure we understood how they feel about what’s happening in each moment in the story, and how that drives them in the story. It’s then a question of putting them in situations that can get the best reactions out of them!
"When the animators start work on a shot, they pitch us different approaches and we make choices together that best reflect the thought processes of the characters through their performances. We’re always looking for actions that reveal a glimpse into the inner world of the characters."
The Smeds And The Smoos is currently available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
