Toomas Beneath the Valley of the Wild Wolves
Chintis Lundgren (Estonia, Croatia, France)
Fans of Chintis Lundgren’s Cristal-nominated 2017 short Manivald will be happy to know that the popular repairman from that film is starring in his own short this year. “Toomas came to be as a side character in Manivald, and he seemed interesting enough to have a film of his own. We (me and my co-writer Draško Ivezić) looked at him and tried to think, why is this hot washing machine repairman going around and seducing everyone? How does this work out with also having a wife and kids at home? Was fixing machines always his job or is he doing this for some other reason? There was a lot of mystery and possibilities around him and that was very inspiring for me!”
The Estonian animator says she was also inspired by the sexploitation movies of Russ Meyer. “After the very quiet and held-back film about Manivald, I wanted to make something more crazy and wild, so I decided to play around with B-movie conventions. Of course, Meyer’s movies have a lot of boobs, I concentrated more on wolf-butts!”
After coming up with the short’s concept in November ’17, Lundgren and her co-writer spent about a year composing and polishing the story. “I thought the layout would never get done because we made so many changes to the script after starting production,” she recalls. “Finally, the animation had to be done very quickly because there was no more time left. Altogether, from concept to final image, it took us a year and a half.”
Lundgren says she’s trying to create a universe of characters, and wants her films to be interconnected. “It was challenging to build this new story in a way that it fits together with everything we know about Toomas from the previous film. We would come up with some ideas that would seem cool, but if it clashed with who Toomas was and what he did in Manivald, then there was no way to keep that.”
Talking about her early influences, Lundregn says seeing the classic Priit Pärn films (Triangle, Breakfast on the Grass) as a kid, really had a big impact on her. “I also saw Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog so many times in my childhood that I’m sure that left a mark, too!” she notes.
Lundgren says she loves being an animator mostly because of the flexible wakeup times, and all the crazy animators she meets at various festivals. And the one thing that she would love audiences to take away from her great new film? “Fixing washing machines isn’t that simple!” she says with a smile.