Stick Girl flowers into riveting Rosie
Vancouver filmmaker's Window Horses a journey of discovery in a land westerners know little about
Nearly 30 years ago, Anne Marie Fleming literally drew strength and purpose from her animated creation Stick Girl.
With her one-line limbs and a dark bob, Stick Girl was like a minimalist teen Olive Oil in a pink triangle-shaped skirt.
She first showed up in short films and webisodes and even an app, but times changed and she grew up into a 20-something woman named Rosie Ming at the centre of the new animated feature film Window Horses (The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming) that gets its theatrical release March 10 in Vancouver and Toronto.
“This is the first time she has been given a name. It’s the first time she has acted in a feature film,” Fleming said. “It’s the first time someone else has been her — Sandra Oh — and it’s a big deal for me because she is me, right?"
Giving her avatar over to an actor was understandably nerve-racking for the Vancouver filmmaker.
“Oh my God, it was so hard,” said Fleming, who premiered her film at the Annecy Animation Festival in France in June 2016. “Of course I lucked out in that Sandra is such an amazing actor and she treated Rosie just like she would prepare for any other character. She took such care with her.”
Fleming found her animated self — or maybe her animated self found her — in 1988 when, while studying at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, she was run over by two cars, was in a wheelchair and “pretty much incapacitated.”
“People wanted me to drop out and go to a beach in Mexico and just recover, but I just wanted to learn to be an animator," said Fleming, whose previous film work includes The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003), The French Guy (2005) and I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010).
Window Horses is a sweet, interesting, thoughtful story about a naive Vancouver poet who finds herself invited to a poetry festival in Shiraz, Iran. The journey is a big one for the young woman whose life has been curated by her overprotective, but loving, grandparents.
In Iran for the poetry, Rosie soon discovers herself and a big, broader, multi-racial world. The latter, not surprisingly, being key to the story.
“I’m mixed race myself. My mom is from Hong Kong and my dad is Australian. I’m super-mixed. I was born in Japan. I am an immigrant to Canada,” said writer-director-producer Fleming.
“So I’ve always been interested in stories of others and where you come from because who you are and where you come from has everything to do with the geopolitics of the time.”
Iran has been a place Fleming has wanted to learn more about.
"There was so much negative towards the culture,” said Fleming, who began this journey in 1996 after she dated an Iranian man. “I was struck by my ignorance and also by all this unspoken pain and I wanted to understand more.
“I saw also the similarity between Chinese and Iranian culture; they are both so ancient and they both have this huge connection with poetry. And the poets from millennia ago are still learned by schoolchildren now,” added Fleming, referring to the likes of the 13th-century Sunni Muslim poet Rumi.
“It’s relevant. It’s a cultural knowledge that we perhaps don’t have in our very young land ourselves. It’s a deep cultural knowledge, and poetry is like this code that ties us together for thousands of years.”
Fleming, through her long film CV, secured a list of top-notch voice talent.
Joining Oh is Don McKellar as an annoying and, as it turns out, insecure German poet. Ellen Page is Rosie’s talkative pal; Kristen Thomson is Rosie’s mother; Nancy Kwan and Eddy Ko are the caring grandparents and Shohreh Aghdashloo lends her incredibly soothing voice to the Iranian women’s studies professor Mehrnaz.
You like the characters (yes, even the weird German poet) in Window Horses. Despite being presented through a cartoon lens, there’s a real care to the interactions, interactions that Oh had a big hand — or rather, voice — in cultivating.
“Sandra insisted on acting with everyone in the film. She was there. That is totally unusual. People are acting with each other,” Fleming said. “Those are real relationships.” The film has been a favourite on the festival circuit, winning the Vancouver International Film Festival’s best
Canadian film award and making the Toronto International Film Festival’s Canada’s Top Ten list.
So with success under her belt, has Fleming been thinking about more adventures for Rosie?
“For sure she is going to go on to do stuff in the future,” said Fleming, adding: “But Rosie, I think, is going to take a vacation now.”