‘A Crab in the Pool’ Directors Jean-Sébastien Hamel & Alexandra Myotte Dive into Life’s Deep End in Their Award-Winning Short

***This article was written for the January ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 346)***

A teenage girl and her younger brother deal with the boring details of life, as well as bigger issues such as loss and grief, in the unique and idiosyncratic short A Crab in the Pool, which received the Best Canadian Short prize at Ottawa in September. Directors Jean-Sébastien Hamel and Alexandra Myotte explain that although it’s the duo’s third project, it’s the first one that really expresses their voice and message, both narratively and visually. “We didn’t know how it would be received, but we felt ready to make it, because we had the self-confidence to tell our story,” says Hamel in an email interview. “When Alexandra presented her concept to me, I was completely moved, and we knew then that we were on the right track!”

The Montreal-based filmmakers based their short on real-life incidents in their lives. Both Hamel’s mother and Myotte battled breast cancer a few years ago. “The pain, fear and anguish are so great when you’re facing what could be the end of your life,” the duo says. “It’s a very difficult subject to tackle because it makes us vulnerable and there’s nothing joyful about it, except that it highlights our love and our strength to get through trials that sometimes seem insurmountable. We’ve been a couple for 15 years, and having been confronted with illness in this way, the now-inevitable awareness of death created this urgency to make films that allowed us both to fulfill ourselves as artists but also to exorcise our demons.”

Power of Pencil Strokes

“When I was studying animation in the early 2000s, I often heard that it was foolish to pursue a career in traditional 2D animation, which was destined to disappear,” says Myotte. “CG animation was the only possible future. But I persisted, and here we are today! Our style is very simple and minimalist; the main thing, especially when you have a very small budget and team, is not to try to compete with the big studios. There’s a very strong emotional potential in just a few pencil strokes.”

The couple basically did 95% of the work: from scriptwriting, direction, production, art direction and animation to editing and even some of the voices. “We spent about 4,000 hours on the whole short,” the directors say. “Apart from the two of us, we were also supported by a talented actress, Élisabeth Gauthier Pelletier, who did the voices of the [main characters] Zoé and Théo, and François Lacasse, our audio pro who did the sound design, as well as the recordings and mix. Alexandra works on a Wacom Cintiq, an unbreakable 25-year-old dinosaur that she affectionately calls Gertie. As far as software is concerned, Toon Boom Harmony is used for line animation and coloring, and because we always like to add layers of textures and dirt as well as certain filters to our scenes, compositing is done in After Effects.”

‘We approach the creation of our scenes as if we were very difficult spectators to convince, so if we don’t have a strong emotion that persuades us that our approach is the right one, we go back to the drawing board or even the script.’

— Directors Jean-Sébastien Hamel and Alexandra Myotte

Having grown up in North America in the 1990s, the duo says they were influenced by MTV’s Liquid Television, especially, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Maxx and Æon Flux. “Our visual style is often compared to that of Mike Judge, which is a great honor for us,” they say. “But our influences go back even further, to when we were young children, with 2D-animated Saturday morning. We still watch a lot of Japanese content; a classic like Akira was a revelation about what could be done in 2D animation and a big inspiration for Alexandra to study animation.”

The great response to the short has been revelatory to Myotte and Hamel. “The first prize we won for the film was at OIAF, and it was absolutely memorable, because we were there to be honored at a festival where we’d been dreaming of playing since university!” Moytte recalls. “At SXSW, Jean-Sébastien fell down the stairs because he was so euphoric. Winning the prize at the Short Shorts Festival in Japan, which for us is the mythical land of animation, was very special; we weren’t able to celebrate on location because Jean-Sébastien’s father was dying at the same time from a devastating cancer. Once again, fiction met reality. Almost every time we presented our film, there was someone who came up to us at the end to tell us that we’d understood them and that we’d told their story. It goes beyond age, gender, country, culture; it’s universal. That’s why we make films — to come together and share deep emotions.”

The Human Connection

Myotte and Hamel explain that the underlying message of the movie is the importance of love and the connections between living beings. “It might sound sappy, but even through the greatest challenges, if you’re not alone, you can find your way through the dark,” they say. “That’s what happens at the end of the film: The two siblings, even with their differences and their conflicts and their fears, come together and give each other a hug; they’re there for each other in spite of everything. This hug was in fact directly inspired by the one we gave each other just before Alexandra’s operation for breast cancer, when the future was uncertain. So, this film is our way of sharing that hug with the audience.”

When we ask them to offer some advice for first-time animation directors, they say it’s all about having confidence in yourself and your creativity and not trying to please or to reproduce something that has already been done. They add, “It’s a lot of sweat and tears, a lot of sacrifice for little income — especially in the early days. It’s also a gamble to know whether the film will be loved or not, and whether it will be seen or not. Sometimes you invest a lot for what you’ll feel might be a disappointing result, but you have to be patient with yourself and with the independent film milieu, if that’s what you choose to do. When it works, there’s an indescribable feeling of pride and accomplishment that makes you forget everything else!”

A Crab in the Pool made its online premiere as a Vimeo Staff Pick in October, you can watch the film in full here. The short has qualified for Academy Awards consideration by winning recognized prizes at the Short Shorts and Animest festivals.