Leaving the Homeland
The upcoming European 2D-animated feature The Crossing takes a poetic look at the saga of immigration.
The upcoming European 2D-animated feature The Crossing takes a poetic look at the saga of immigration.
Abrother and sister escape mysterious forces in an unspecified Eastern European country and try to find a better life in a new world in the beautiful European animated feature The Crossing (La Traversée). The 2D-animated feature, which is produced by Les Films de l’Arlequin (France), Balance Film (Germany) and Maru Film (Czech Republic) is directed by Florence Miailhe (Conte de Quartier, Hammam) and penned by Marie Desplechin. Miailhe was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about her bold new venture in a recent email interview.
“I wanted La Traversée to be both a migration story, and the tale of an odyssey,” she says. “The film tells of the flight of two children trying to escape persecution. I draw on both the story of my own family, who had to flee Eastern Europe, and those of all exiles, past and present. The film is based on testimonies and memories left by those who fled their homeland.”
Miailhe mentions that she wanted to tell this story of exile in a poetic, fabulist way.
“I am very inspired by the structure of the
“The film tells of the flight of two children trying to escape persecution. I draw on both the story of my own family who had to flee Eastern Europe and those of all exiles, past and present. It’s based on testimonies and memories left by those who fled their homeland.”
— Director Florence Miailhe
tale, which tends to a universality while allowing the expression of a singular imagination,” she notes. “The first chapter may remind viewers of certain fairy tales where the children are abandoned by their parents. In these stories, the heroes must go through a series of trials to fulfill their destiny. The Crossing is an adventure movie, and the paintings help give it a timeless dimension.”
A Long Journey
The director says she has been wanting to tell this story for over a decade. She wrote the script for The Crossing with her longtime collaborator Marie Desplechin and presented it at the Premiers Plans festival in Angers, where it won the Best Screenplay in 2010. Dora Benousilio, a producer at Les Film de l’Arlequin, was immediately interested, but production financing was a big challenge.
“During these 10 years, I returned to the project to refine it,” Miailhe notes. “In the meantime, immigration has become a hot topic and other partners committed to our movie … Thanks to the tenacity of Dora Benousilio, we had the opportunity to start production of La Traversée in February 2017. Now, we plan to release the movie in 2020.”
Miailhe says the production reflects the subject of the film: It crosses borders and is divided between France, Germany and the Czech Republic. In France, the animation is done by studio La Ménagerie (near Toulouse), and animators in Prague and Leipzig also support the production.
As she has always done with her short animated projects, Miailhe uses oil painting, sand painting or pastels, filmed with cameras. “For this project, we work in animated oil painting on glass,” she explains. “The animation is done under camera, image by image. This allows us to have a very illustrated rendering style that evokes the way memories and mental images work. The color is used for its symbolic and dimensional qualities. Each chapter of the film has its own range of colors. They correspond to both the events and emotions of the characters.”
The paintings are done on different levels of glass trays. Then, a camera is placed above those glass levels to photograph the images.
“We call them banc-titres in French (translates as animation stands),” the director explains. “Fourteen of these animation stands were made for this film. The backgrounds are on the first level, and the characters, lines and colors are on three other levels. This avoids unwanted mixtures of colors and creates transparent effects in some instances. We try to animate all the elements (characters, smoke, rain, snow, etc.) at the same time.”
Sharing Her Personal Style
One of the biggest challenges for Miailhe is transferring her personal, intimate technique to the other animators working on the movie. She says, “It was necessary to preserve the lightness of the painting and the randomness of the brush strokes. I wanted to give the other animators the ability to choose the lines and the acting nuances of the characters while maintaining a unity in the film.”
However, since the animation was spread out in three different countries, it was difficult to communicate and correct the various styles of animation. “Sometimes I had to communicate in a language that is not mine,” Miailhe notes. “I tried to have a real presence at the different studios, but I could not be with the animators as much as I would have liked.”
Nevertheless, the director says she loved seeing how everyone followed her techniques and ideas, while being true to their own artistic instincts and methods. “I loved seeing the film come to animated life as the different sequences were animated,” she says. “It’s a real pleasure to be able to replace the animatics with a finished plan. I saw it being built little by little over a long period of time. Altogether, the animation took about 18 months in the Czech Republic, seven months in France and 11 months in Germany.”
When asked about her personal take on the global animation scene, Miailhe is cautiously optimistic. “The animated feature film landscape is dominated by digital and CG animation, which leads to a standardization of graphic images, and a technicalization of the art form,” she notes. “What I can hope for is that when the public sees The Crossing, they’ll remember that other animation forms exists. Using more traditional methods, we are animators, artists and technical experts. Behind each shot, an animator is able to express her/his vision.”
Once the movie hits screens around the world, Miailhe hopes audiences will identify with the central characters and sympathize with the drama of exile, abandonments, loneliness and persecutions.“This film has a strong emotional charge, and I hope we will succeed in making the audience feel it, too,” she says. “I also hope they will like the visuals and respond to this technique that is rarely used in animated features today.”
And the most important lesson Miailhe learned from The Crossing? “That it is a complicated, exhausting process, but it’s all worth it!” ◆
The Crossing will be released in spring of 2020. For more info, visit www.filmsdelarlequin.com/en/project/the-crossing or www. maurfilm.com/the-crossing.