A new animated take on Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf begins to roam on Max today (Thurs. Oct.19). Based on the 2003 book by Irish musician and poet Gavin Friday, with illustrations by his friend, U2’s Bono (with a tie-in CD by The Friday-Seezer Ensemble), the half-hour short centers on a grieving 12-year-old boy named Peter who lives with his grandfather and sets out to find a wolf and eventually protects the animal from greedy hunters.
The short’s directors Elliot Dear (Love, Death + Robots’ “All Through the House”) and Stephen McNally (Meanwhile) of London-based Blink Industries took the time to answer a few of our questions about their highly stylized 2D, hybrid project:
Animag: Gentlemen, congrats on the striking new animated special. Can you tell us a bit about how this project came together?
Elliot Dear: In 2002, Gavin Friday was rearranging the Prokofiev score and his best friend Bono worked on the artwork and these murals in aid of the Irish Hospice to raise money for charity. It was around the same time that Bono lost his father so it was semi-autobiographical when he was making these illustrations. Those were released in a bound book with a CD and it wasn’t until 2018 that BMG gained the rights to the work to turn it into an animated project. That’s when they got in touch with Blink Industries where we work, and we embarked on this animation journey of Peter & the Wolf.
How long did it take to produce the animation?
Stephen McNally: The next year we put together the treatment document with all of our ideas and we made a very basic, one-minute-long snippet as a short test. There was a massive pandemic you might have heard of. Then, it took a bit of time to get the production started, but then in 2022, we wrote down our version of it and storyboarded it. That summer we shot all the background plates and were animating frantically until January of this year, and compositing alongside that as well. It took a lot of editing.
What was your favorite part of this process?
Elliot: I think the process was the best part, working on the miniature backgrounds with the 2D characters, and seeing the quality of the animators were able to produce was very enjoyable, and it was such a unique aesthetic. It’s very exciting to work on things that you don’t see very often.
Did you get to hang out with Bono?
Elliot: It wasn’t until very, very late in the process, that we got to meet Bono. The animation was actually finished by then!
Was the animation team all spread out? Which tools were used?
Stephen: They were mostly in our studio in London, but then we had some extra stringers from around the world as well. Our animation director Yoshimichi Tamura was based in Paris for quite a lot of it, so he had his lieutenant on the ground, animation supervisor Robert Milne corraling the animators (a team of about 17 artists). It was TVPaint and composited in After Effects.
Can you talk about the visual style, the black-and-white color with splashes of red?
Stephen: Our choices kind of sprang from the source material, based on Bono’s expressive murals, which were black paint on white walls with little splashes of red accents within it, so we took that as our inspiration and ran with it.
What would you say was the most difficult part of creating this animated short based on Prokofiev’s music, which has also inspired other famous animated shorts by Clyde Geronimi (1946) and Suzie Templeton (2006)?
Elliot: It was the fact that the original audio file that we were working with was an MP3 ripped from the CD back in 2002. So the music and the voiceover was all baked in already. Our brief was to make this into a watchable half-hour movie, but we didn’t have the ability to move the voice-over around. That meant that we couldn’t go off script and just animate whatever we wanted. It wasn’t until very late in the project that we actually were able to digitally separate the music from the voiceover . It meant that we could rerecord the voiceover from scratch and give ourselves more freedom with the pacing. But, we actually did successfully create a story around the original voiceover, which we’re quite proud of
I think the most recent version of Peter and the Wolf would have put Suzie Templeton’s Oscar-winning stop-motion one, which I think is a fantastic interpretation, but I think ours was very different project with very different intentions. I think it was wise to go into it as fresh as possible.
What was the biggest lesson you learned from the experience?
Elliot: In terms of the miniature shoot, I would say don’t ever try and shoot over 550 shots in five weeks. We made it work out. Incorporating a miniature shoot gives great depth to the film. It embraces two kinds of classical animation process. We’re big fans of working with those processes at Blink Industries. We like the old school ways. It’s not to say that nobody has done it before, but it’s a very charming aesthetic and done many times over the years. The charming human error, the brush marks that you find in model making, that tangibility is very valuable and people can feel that regardless of whether they have an animation background. It’s not mentioned in the film, but in our minds, we figured that the story takes place in late ’70s Ireland. That syle kind of encapsulates it nicely.
Who are your big animation favorites?
Stephen: Miyazaki’s up there for me.
Elliot: I was a huge fan of Cosgrove Hall’s 80s stop-motion animation. Of course, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a stop-motion masterpiece. It’s always a reference.
What is your take on the state of animation in the UK in 2023 and beyond?
Stephen: It’s a really amazing rich period. It’s very encouraging to see animation treated as an art form, and entertainment at the same time.
Elliot: It’s fantastic that there’s so much work going on. The only downside is that all our fantastic animators are being pinched by other jobs.
You can watch the trailer below:
Peter & The Wolf is currently streaming on Max.
