Among the many innovative and promising new animated movies unveiled at Cartoon Movie last week was Island of Salamanders. Directed by Catherine Maximoff and produced by Artichoke (Slovakia), Les Contes Modernes (France) and Fabian & Fred (Germany), the 80-minute 2D/3D film follows the adventures of a young girl named Juliet who washes up on a wild island with her father and befriends an amazing giant salamander.
The film is produced by Patrice Nezan, Juraj Krasnohorsky and Fabian Driehorst.
“Although my background is in live action, when I read Karel Capek’s original book (War with the Newts) on which the movie is based on, I knew we needed to develop an animated feature because it features a young girl talking to a giant salamander!” says Maximoff. “I felt the storyline was also quite fascinating as it involves the young girl’s friendship with the salamander and how her father, who is a business, opens a pandora’s box because he realizes he can benefit from these fantastic salamanders for profit.”
To help bring the story to animated life, the team is using a motion-capture studio in Bratislava named Blue Faces, which also collaborated on the acclaimed 2023 feature The Siren.
“We wanted to create a pipeline that allowed live-action directors to work smoothly with animators and stop-motion actors,” says Krasnohorsky. “Catherine has the opportunity to work on the set with actors and can check out the live preview using Unreal engine. It provides the freedom to work with live-action actors to create realistic and detailed acting. Obviously, the results are not automatic. You just don’t press a button and get beautiful animation. The process involves animators and artists to create the final 2D-animated results and requires simulations for water, hair and outlines of the characters. However, it does speed up the process and allows us to experiment more and make changes when needed at a lower budget range.”
Watch the trailer and behind-the-scenes footage below:
