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| Maybe Elephants |
At the Animation Showcase event where I met several of this year’s Oscar-shortlisted filmmakers, there was one person who handled herself a little differently. The short film awards are often populated by people at an early stage in their careers, and for many, the prestige of being included in this kind of group is the first step to raising the finance that lets them move into features. Norwegian Tirill Kove, however, has a long term interest in the short form.
She’s been here before, nominated for My Grandmother Ironed The King's Shirts (2000) and Me And My Moulton (2015), and she won an Oscar in 2007 for The Danish Poet. Now she’s back with Maybe Elephants. “It's a story about this very normal Norwegian family in the 1970s. A family of two parents and three children,” she says. “And I say normal like this, you know, because in some ways they weren't exactly like other families.”
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| Maybe Elephants |
It is, in part, an autobiographical film.
“The parents in the story decided that it would be a good idea to leave this very small, very homogenous little town in Norway and move to Nairobi, Kenya. So the film is about that move and what triggered it. And then once we arrive in Kenya the family has to adapt to this environment and culture that is very, very different from what they are used to. And in the story there is a bit of teenagers coming of age and exploring different things, pushing boundaries. In some ways, the kids are doing that but the parents are also doing it.
“One of the reasons that the mother in particular wanted to move to this other country was because she has this kind of cloud hanging over her, which I think that one can loosely interpret as a kind of melancholy that she suffers from. So she's constantly trying to escape, go somewhere else, get away from this. But of course, the cloud follows her. It follows her to Nairobi, and it follows her wherever she goes. And then after a few years, the family goes back to an environment that looks pretty much the same as the one that they left, but everybody is different now, for various reasons.
“So that's the story, in short. Many of my films relate to or have to do with the topic of family relationships. I'm really interested in that topic. I think the relationship that you have with people that are close to you, your parents, siblings that you have, they have a big impact on the kinds of relationships that you make yourself later in life. So that is one part of the origin story. And another thing is this whole idea about memory. How well do you really remember things that happened 20, 30 years ago? I addressed that to some extent in this film.
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| Maybe Elephants |
“The title itself is Maybe Elephants. The protagonist thinks she remembers elephants on a camping trip, but, you know, maybe she doesn't. Maybe they weren't actually there.”
The film follows the same characters previously seen in Me And My Moulton, but at a different point in their lives.
“The theme is related. It's about this kind of tension between what the parents want and what the kids want and how often actually they're not the same thing, and how families resolve that.”
It does a good job of distinguishing the personalities of three girls around the same age who are engaged in similar activities, I observe. What was the starting point for this in terms of artistic technique?
“This was actually kind of challenging,” she says. “My drawing style is very simple and the character design quite stylised, so I had to make good use of body height and shape, hair colour and length and clothing to set the sisters apart. It helped a lot that we had different voices for them, so the youngest could sound that way, and the actor playing the big sister gave her a lot of snarky teenage attitude. The fact that they had speaking parts really helped create the sense that they were separate individuals and not just a three-headed teen.”
She talks about the other challenges involved in the production.
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| Maybe Elephants |
“The film was produced by the NFD [Norwegian Film Development] and Mikrofilm in Norway. It's the fourth time we have had this kind of collaboration. So there's always a practical challenge around who does what, but we divided it up so that animation took place in Montreal, where I am.
“I don't feel like I have a huge repertoire of styles to choose from when I make a film. I draw a certain way, and that’s my style. I didn't think that I wanted this film to be any different in that sense, and I want to draw the storyboard myself. I want to design the characters, and I want to design the universe that the film takes place in.
“I was really concerned with colours this time because we were going to be in two different countries that are actually very different. I wanted this to somehow be evident in the art direction. To put a country like Kenya, in an animated film like this is very challenging. There were, like, certain things I really wanted to be there, and some of those had to do with colour – you know, the vibrancy of the colours, the redness of the earth, the purple of the jacarandas and all that. So after I had made some sketches, I took it to the art director [Magnhild Valen-Sendstad Winsnes] in Oslo, who sorted out what the overall aesthetic look should be. That was a really fun project.
“I had a bigger team on this film than I've had on other teams, and I love going to work with all these animators every day. That was just so enjoyable. I learned a lot from them. The whole production was a really good experience.”
