It’s unusual for an animated movie to make its debut at Park City, Utah’s celebrated Sundance Festival. However, veteran animation director Chris Jenkin’s latest feature 10 Lives is about to make a splash at the indie film festival this week. The movie, which is produced by U.K.’s GFM Animation and is animated by Montreal’s L’Atelier (Leap!, Fireheart), centers on a pampered cat named Beckett (voiced by Mo Gilligan) who gets an opportunity to show he can learn from his mistakes after he carelessly loses his ninth life. The voice cast includes Simone Ashley, Zayn Malik, Dylan Llewellyn, Bill Nighy, Jeremy Swift and Sophie Okonedo.
We had a chance to speak with Jenkins, who has worked on features such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, produced DreamWorks’ Home and Sony’s Surf’s Up and directed the indie feature Duck Duck Goose in recent years. Here is what he told us about his new movie:
Animation Magazine: Congrats on the premiere of your new movie at Sundance. Can you fill us in a bit about the production history of 10 Lives and how you got involved with the project?
Chris Jenkins: I got involved with this project around the August of 2020 because of a very good friend of mine, Penney Finkelman Cox, who was fostering this movie at GFM and got it from Original Force Animation. There was an older version that was set in California, but when they brought it to me, the setting shifted to England, because we wanted to do something a bit different. I had a blast reading the script by Karen Wengrod and Ken Cinnamon (Who’s the Boss). However, by the end of 2020, I got really sick — it wasn’t COVID, but I was taken to the hospital, and my sister-in-law Pam Zieganhagen rallied the animation community and started a Go Fund Me campaign, because working in animation is not that enriching, and things were tough for me at that point.
The contributions of all these friends I knew and a lot of people that I didn’t even know made me feel like George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life), which is an amazing thing, because the analogy has been made with this movie. I get choked up just thinking about it. It has the same kind of feeling and emotion behind it. On reflection, I wrote the movie with a kind of same sensibility: The key elements of Heaven and Earth, and the redemption of a good person is all built into it. Another big reference point for me was the Fawlty Towers series, because I love a good farce. I love the way you can set up a a number of characters and have all of them come together at the end. I had the most fun time writing the movie and directing it and working with the team at L’Atelier in Montreal.
Was L’Atelier involved from the beginning?
Yes, they started out with the project sometime in 2020 as well. We also started working with House of Cool during the storyboarding stage. It was an amazing experience. Those guys are so good. I am very particular on the structure and my scripts, so I knew what had to happen. I also drew up sets before storyboarding got involved. I also like to write up a sort of a document on every scene that tells us where we’re going, what the high points of the scenes are, what the comedic opportunities are. My relationship with with House of Cool was was fantastic because they just kept bringing it. We had to move quite quickly and then when L’Atelier came on board, I met the head of animation, Nikki Braine (Harry Potter). I already knew she was great. Most things are done over Zoom these days, and I went there over the last few months of production to meet everybody. I met a lot of good friends there.
What do you love about this movie? Do you have a favorite scene that really means a lot to you?
Picking a scene is hard, because there so many funny things, and there are emotional and sad moments that are built in, obviously. But, what I love about the movie is [that you have] a character who is kind of reprehensible at first … He has lived these previous nine lives and he’s been a jerk because he thinks that people will give him anything he wants — “I know what to do. I’ll just purr a little bit!” Consequently, he hasn’t figured it out that’s how he’s lost all his lives. Then, when meets Rose, he realizes it’s a different situation here. It’s a match made in Heaven in a sense, and he bonds with her. Then, when her boyfriend comes back, it messes things up and sets his journey up.
I think overall the movie just doesn’t stop, and keeps going. There’s no down moment. And seeing Beckett as a rat and a cockroach in the early parts of the movie, and then coming to the midpoint with the parrot … Everything changes, and he becomes a good guy and tries to do the right thing. I also love Bill Nighy’s moments throughout the movie [as the voice of Professor Craven]. Working with him was a dream come true, and Mo Gilligan and Simone Ashely together in a scene are so wonderful. It’s difficult to pick just one!
Can you talk a bit about the film’s lush English countryside visuals and how you were able to create them in CG ?
Well, hats off to Frederick Gaudreau and the lighting team at L’Atelier, who did such a great job. The truth is that we didn’t have enough time to mess around. It’s a storybook type of animation which feels like when you sit down with your kid and open a children’s picture book and you fall into these pictures, which is what we got from the older animated movies. We wanted to take audiences to a place they’ve never been before, and for us, it was the English Riviera [the south Devon coastline], where you have the greens and the houses with the thatched roofs.
Looking back, what were your biggest challenges on this project?
I guess it was the three-year time frame. the time scale and how long we had to produce it. Of course, we had such a smaller budget compared to the movies produced at Disney, DreamWorks and Sony. I didn’t want to cut corners, because we wanted to compete with all the other features released today.
I had a great partner in our wonderful producer, Louis-Philippe Vermette [formerly of L’Atelier and currently founder of The Happy Producers]. What we had to do early on was to think of ways to be flexible with the script, and my training at Disney came into play. We had to plan carefully. For example, there is a scene with Beckett towards the end of the movie, where he’s in Heaven, and we have all the heavenly staff around. The team was terrified of that scene, with good reason, because there were so many characters there. But I do know a few tricks so we shot the scene from the ground level so you could only see the feet of the characters. That’s an example of the kind of tricks we were able to pull off to make the movie look like a $100 million production, which it only cost less than a quarter of what a typical Disney feature costs these days.
I think I was lucky — because of the time and budget limitations of the movie, nobody really messed with me. One of the dangers of animation is that sometimes you get so many suggestions and notes that you get to the point where you start to lose the initial picture. We were fortunate because we were able to let the creative artists do what they can do.
Things have changed a lot in the feature animation scene in the past few years. What is your take on the landscape in 2024?
I believe the indie animation scene is in a good position right now, especially when you can work with your producer and there’s nobody constantly looking over your should. We have so many exceptional artists working in the animation industry, and we have seen some extraordinary work just this past year — movies like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. You can think of animation as visual poetry, doing a lot with less. You have to be able to build these worlds efficiently, it’s all a sleight-of-hand trick because these worlds don’t need to exist off the screen. The most important thing is what you get to see on the screen. Budgets are not what they used to be, so you have to learn how to do more with less.
Fantastic! And final question: What do you hope audiences will take away from Beckett’s fantastic adventure and 10 Lives?
You know, we live in a period which is all about this “me first” attitude. Our movie hopes to be a treatise against that view. It’s saying that it’s good to live your best life, but also be able to step into somebody else’s shoes for a while to understand what that feels like. It’s about this overarching sense of living life and embracing what you have when you have it.
10 Lives is screening at Sundance this week. The movie is produced by Guy Collins, Sean Feeney, Martin Metz, Adrian Politowski, Yann Zenou, Valérie d’Auteuil, André Rouleau and Louis-Philippe Vermette. GFM Animation is in charge of international sales and WME Independent is on U.S sales.
