Bono’s Original ‘Peter & the Wolf’ Illustrations Come to Life in Gothic Animated Short

Max’s new animated short, “Peter & the Wolf” (now streaming), turns the beloved folktale and Sergei Prokofiev symphony into a Gothic re-invention about grief and environmental protection. It’s about 12-year-old Peter who lives with his grandfather and explores a vast meadow and forest to find a wolf — with the help of some animals — while fending off hunters.

Based on the 2003 book by Irish musician/composer Gavin Friday (with illustrations by Bono) and accompanying CD with The Friday-Seezer Ensemble, the 30-minute black-and-white short animates the characters in 2D. They contain a rough, hand-of-the-artist aesthetic, bolstered by miniature sets to complete the monochromatic, hybrid look.

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It’s produced by Adriana Piasek-Wanski for BMG and Blink Industries and directed by Elliot Dear and Stephen McNally. Coinciding with the short, there’s a new edition of the book along with a new release of the score and a theme song by Friday titled “There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of,” in continuing support of the Irish Hospice Foundation.

“It was very late in 2018 that we first had discussions about the animation,” Friday told IndieWire. “Then we put together a test film and we came over to Dublin with [an mp3 file ripped from the CD and the illustrations] and then came the lockdown. It’s basically a new narrative. But when we were talking with HBO we realized that you can’t kill the wolf and you can’t put it in a zoo, so we came up with a new [resolution] for today. And then there were the logical concerns about Peter and why he is living with his grandfather. Maybe his mother has died. Those were the two cornerstones of the retelling.”

The greatest challenge for the animation team at Blink was adapting Bono’s punkish drawings (with occasional red streaks), which were done on the wall of a gallery. “They were energetic kind of brush marks, very loose in form in a good way,” McNally told IndieWire. “They were relatively inconsistent, and the type of animation that we work on relies on consistency, so the biggest challenge was to make these illustrations animatable.

“How could we bring order to them so that they were still recognizable, so that Bono could see the genesis in his own artwork?” McNally continued. “I’d give them 3D volume so that the animators could understand them from various angles so that they were animatable and people would want to look at them.”

Animation director Yoshimichi Tamura and animation supervisor Robert Milne oversaw a key team of 17 artists. Additionally, there were 22 on the clean-up team led by 2D clean-up supervisor Eleonora Quario and five on the shadows team.

The most complex animation involved the wolf because Bono’s illustrations consisted of white, scratchy lines as a symbol that evoked fear. The solution was the creation of a chalk line as a mask superimposed over an elegant-looking 2D wolf. “You couldn’t have the symbol of the wolf in animation language terms bumping up against Peter,” added McNally. “So what we decided is that what Peter sees is this angry symbol that represents death that moves in an erratic way.”

Dear, who is primarily a stop-motion director, oversaw the live-action shoot at Clapham Road Studios in South London, where the miniature environments were built. They shot in color and converted to monochrome in post to have greater control for green screen removal and digital matte painting extensions.

“We had three different scales of sets happening,” Dear said. “We had a street scene that was 1:24 scale, and everything was 1:13 or 1:16. We had three forest sets, one large-scale house, an interior bedroom set, and a garden and garden wall. And we had a very zoomed-out tiny scale for the forest and house and church and wide shots. It was a kind of mix-and-match puzzle.”

“Peter & the Wolf” is now streaming on Max.

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