Fresh off its screening at the World Animation Summit in November, Harvey, by Canadian filmmaker Janice Nadeau, will enjoy continued exposure in Los Angeles thanks to a screening at the Los Angeles Animation Festival in December. Since its world premiere at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, this National Film Board of Canada/Folimage co-production has been selected by more than 70 festivals, picking up eight awards and accolades along the way.
Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name by Hervé Bouchard, which Nadeau illustrated, Harvey depicts a young boy who candidly recalls the spring day when his world turned upside down. Filled with original little touches and told through the eyes of a child with an overflowing imagination, this luminous short poetically examines bereavement and coping with the loss of a parent.
In its transition from page to screen, Harvey has lost nothing of Nadeau’s evocative style, which blends retro and modern aesthetics. Working in fine line drawings enhanced by charcoal and soft colors, the artist has imagined Harvey’s world as a realm of the familiar, but in which extraordinary things can suddenly happen.
Janice Nadeau has won the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada three times, and also teaches at Montreal’s UQAM School of Design. To make Harvey, she used traditional 2D drawings as well as paper cut-out animation.
Below, Nadeau takes us inside her creative process, selecting seven images that shed light on her artistic journey.
Image 1
This detailed view is from my character models, which in animation we call “turnarounds.” Harvey, my main character, is the one in the yellow-lozenge jacket. With him are his friends and his little brother Cantin — who, much to Harvey’s dismay, is actually taller than he is.
Image 2
To define the film’s color palette, I was inspired by the faded hues in family photo albums, and to dress my characters, I looked at pictures from old mail-order catalogs — I imagined that in Harvey’s world, all the families got their clothes from them.
Image 3
A few preparatory research sketches in pencil and charcoal; sometimes I added shapes inked with stencils, which I then colored in digitally.
Image 4
At the heart of the film, there’s a scene showing Harvey’s dad with a bunch of different heads that change, rapid-fire. For several years, whenever I had a free moment, I would do a little sketch of the dad’s head. These hundreds of heads served me well when it came time to animate the scene. My stylized animations, with fish or flowers as heads, were a source of amusement for lead animator Claude Cloutier, who has a lot of experience with animated metamorphoses.
Image 5
Like many animators, if I don’t have a model, I’ll sometimes use myself to draw the right key pose. And I occasionally asked my son Félix (photo at lower left) to pose. That worked well, because he was eight years old, which is about the same age as Harvey. Today, with the film now finished, my son is 15!
Image 6
A look back at the shooting of the paper cut-out scenes, animated by Pierre-Luc Granjon (seen here in one photo) and Sophie Roze at Folimage’s studios in France.
Image 7
I created the opening credits with stencils, cutting out all the little letters for the titles and then inking them on paper. This technique allows me to add and subtract material, and I also used it for the backgrounds, especially in the paper cut-out scenes.
Janice Nadeau has illustrated a dozen or so books. She also co-directed and directed, respectively, the animated films No Fish Where to Go (NFB, 2014) and Mamie (NFB/Folimage, 2016), which screened in the official competition at more than 50 festivals worldwide and won several awards, including the Japan Foundation President’s Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize for No Fish Where to Go.
Harvey was produced by Marc Bertrand (National Film Board of Canada) and Reginald de Guillebon (Folimage).
