Oscar Shortlist Interviews: Director Torill Kove Shares Her Favorite Shot From ‘Maybe Elephants’ (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 the Maybe Elephants by Torill Kove.
Maybe Elephants is a 2d animated short co-produced by Norwegian studio Mikrofilm and the National Film Board of Canada. In the film, Oscar-winning filmmaker Torill Kove (The Danish Poet) recalls the memories of her childhood in 1970s Kenya. Her happy recollections clash with her mother’s attitude, who seems to often fall into a depressive and restless state.
Kove recently spoke with Cartoon Brew about the making of this short. Below, she shares her favorite shot from the short and why it’s significant to her:
Maybe Elephants is partly autobiographical and based on memories of my family living in Nairobi in the early 1970s. We came from a small Norwegian town, but Nairobi was a sprawling metropolis, and we had to get used to driving pretty much everywhere. My parents often chauffeured my sisters and me around, and we also had friends with cars, so a lot of my memories from Nairobi are of cars and being a passenger.
In this shot, it is nighttime in Nairobi and the parents are driving their teen girls somewhere to meet up with friends. The city lights are flickering, and the parents look slightly concerned while the girls transform from children to young women in the back seat. Coming-of-age is happening right behind the parents’ backs.
I picked this shot because it encapsulates one of the film’s central themes: the emotional distance that is growing between the parents and the children, even though they are physically so close, like here, in the car. It also illustrates the beginning of detachment: The parents are in the driver’s seat for a while, and then, one by one, the kids leave.
This was a fun shot to animate. Makeup application typically involves measured repetitive movements. But these girls were in a hurry, and the shot was relatively short, so things had to happen fast. We decided to animate the girls’ makeup session in a time-lapse style, which added some comedy and created a lot of activity in the back seat — a 10-second transformation.
Read the other entries in the series:
