Oscar Shortlist Interviews: Director Dice Tsutsumi Shares His Favorite Shot From ‘Bottle George’ (Exclusive)
Cartoon Brew invited the filmmakers behind each of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts to share their favorite shot from their film and explain why it’s special to them. The pieces are being published in the order that materials were received.
In this piece, we’re looking at Bottle George from Japanese director and Tonko House founder Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi.
A stop motion animated short film about the darkness of addiction and the strength of family, Bottle George depicts a father’s alcohol addiction seen through the eyes of his child.
Below, Tsutsumi shares his favorite shot from the short and why it’s significant to him:
The story of Bottle George touches the sensitive topic of addiction problems, something both Akihiro Nishino (my co-writer) and I both respectively experienced with people who were very close to us in our lives. That’s why if I’m asked to pick one shot from the film, this is the shot.
The girl character Chaco carries a lot on her shoulders. She is quietly waiting for something without showing a lot of emotions on the outside. But there is one shot that shows the different side of Chaco. She laughs uncontrollably just like a normal happy kid. It’s a fading memory of George’s.
We tried really hard to capture authenticity of this moment. Our animator Shota Ogawa animated the camera to bring the gentle light into the lens to help convey Chaco’s performance in this particular moment. In the film, hopefully you will feel the contrast of this moment compared to the rest. And this is a key moment for George in the story.
Read the other entries in the series:
- Nina Gantz on Wander to Wonder
- Kei Kanamori on Origami
- Loïc Espuche on Yuck!
- Torill Kove on Maybe Elephants
- Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani on In the Shadow of the Cypress
- Anna Samo on The Wild-Tempered Clavier
- Iain Gardner on A Bear Named Wojtek
- Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires on Percebes
- Tod Polson on The 21
- Alexandra Myotte & Jean-Sébastien Hamel on A Crab In The Pool
