Annecy Audience Award Winner’s Director on Defying CGI and AI to Capture the Magic of Childhood
The 60th Annecy Animation Film Festival, which wrapped up this weekend, provided a quiet defiance of the technological trends — including CGI and A.I. — that seem to be irresistible in the animated industry today. Every one of the 2023 Anncey award winners was a traditional 2D feature, a celebration of the old-school craft of hand-drawn cartoons and hand-crafted animation.
None more so than Benoît Chieux’s opening night film Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air, which won this year’s audience award. The director’s first solo feature — he co-directed 2013’s Aunt Hilda! with frequent collaborator Jacques-Rémy Girerd — is a loving tribute to traditional animation. Hand-drawn, with only some scene transitions done on the computer, the children’s film follows the adventures of two young sisters who get sucked into the pages of a children’s book, entering into a fantastical Kingdom of the Winds, ruled over by a Sirocco, a wizard who appears to embody the wind itself.
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Produced by Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five and Ciel de Paris, Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air is going out in France via Haut et Court and being sold by Kinology worldwide.
Chieux spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the long struggle to bring the film to the screen, the “trap” of photorealism in animation, and the dangers of A.I. for the animation industry.
You’ve said it took years to get this film financed. Why was it so difficult to get backing?
That’s the big question. I cannot understand why we had so much trouble finding financing. Maybe it was because the film is very visual and some of the financiers had a hard time imagining how the film would look. We are talking about depicting wind and, of course, you can’t draw the wind. So maybe that was the challenge. Because the story itself, I think, is very easy to understand. It’s a very simple story, but, I think, very powerful and universal.
Where did the original idea for the film come from?
All my ideas come from drawing, I need to draw a line to start the process. So I did a drawing of a windmill with two children and the windmill, and the children become unanchored from the ground and fly up into the air. That was the start of thinking about childhood, the wind and imagination.
It’s an image, the flying windmill, that isn’t in the final film.
There was a lot of progression and evolution from that initial development. But I kept that first intent in mind, the excitement of that first image. What I found really interesting was the challenge of trying to draw the wind, to portray this invisible thing in a visible medium. Of course, drawing the wind means showing the draft, the objects moved by the wind, but as we developed the story [Chieux co-wrote the script with Alain Gagnol], the wind also began to represent breath, the breath of song and the breath of life.
Stylistically, the film is very stripped down, very basic, not at all like the crowded CGI-animated films that seem to be the standard these days.
I had just come off a project that was very visually complex, and so I wanted to reduce this one down to simple expressions, to reduce the technical challenge and make things as visually simple as possible. So, for example, there are no cast shadows in the animation, the characters are drawn as simply as possible, as are the backgrounds. All the characters, and almost all the objects, are drawn with curved lines. There are no straight lines at all in the film until we get to the palace where the storm winds are being kept in prison.
To explain why I wanted to do this I need to go back a bit into the history of art. What I see right now with animation in the world of A.I. looks to me like what happened with painting when photography arrived. Classical painting evoking photorealism basically stopped, because it was so close to photography. I think it might be the same with A.I., we might see the same impact on 3D and CGI images. Because when you look back to the 19th century, you realize the painting that has lasted, that we still appreciate today, is impressionism, which wasn’t trying to replicate reality, wasn’t trying to be perfectly photorealistic, to reflect reality, but give an impression of reality. I think it may be the same with animation.
What impact do you think A.I. will have or is already having, on the animation industry?
I don’t believe that imagination will be replaced by artificial intelligence but there is a whole structure of professional technical workers and other basic professions that are required to make an animated film, and I fear they could disappear. All those companies that do that sometimes mundane work. We rely on them, and they are the ones most under threat.
Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air feels refreshingly retro, both in its animation style but also in its storytelling, which has a slower more gentle pace than we’re used to with most Hollywood animation.
That was a big challenge because I think animated films these days are just too chock full of stuff: Of sound and visual stimulation, that they leave no extra space for imagination. And the truth is, I feel, that children need to develop their imagination. If they are too occupied, always constantly being entertained, I don’t think that’s good for them. A key plot point in the film is the two sisters start the day being bored. It’s because they are bored, because they don’t have anything to entertain them, that their imagination takes over, and the story can begin.
This interview was edited for length and comprehension.
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