My Sunny Maad: Making an Animated Film That Doesn’t Feel Like Animation

This story about “My Sunny Maad” first appeared as a part of the particular animation part within the Awards Preview challenge of TheWrap’s awards journal.

Czech filmmaker Michaela Pavlátová has directed animated shorts, together with the Oscar-nominated 1992 movie “Reci, Reci, Reci…” She’s additionally made two live-action options, 2008’s “Deti noci” and 2003’s “Faithless Video games.” However she’d by no means made an animated characteristic till “My Sunny Maad,” an Afghan-set story that was a shock Golden Globes nominee.

And regardless of the success of the movie, which additionally gained the jury award on the Annecy Worldwide Animated Movie Pageant, she didn’t discover the transition a simple one.

“I assumed it might be the tip of my profession,” Pavlátová stated of her first makes an attempt to jot down an animated characteristic. “A characteristic is so totally different from a brief, which you may make with a really small staff, or by your self. An animated brief will also be symbolic and stylized and experimental, however I usually thought of an animated characteristic to be somewhat bit like an costly product. After I tried to jot down a characteristic story on my own, I had no success and I felt unhappy and helpless.”

However she was interested in “My Sunny Maad,” a e-book by Petra Procházková a couple of Czech lady, Herra, who strikes along with her Afghan husband to Kabul, the place she experiences the large tradition shock of residing in a patriarchal and repressive society.

“It was a theme that had nothing to do with animation,” she stated, “and I knew that if I may respect the drama of the story, it may enchantment to a wider viewers. I wished to make a movie the place folks would neglect it’s animated.”

To create the look of the movie, Pavlátová needed to discover a fashion that might be reproduced by different animators. “I began with my fashion of tough sketches, however I noticed that the animators couldn’t do this,” she stated. “Then I began to make the fashion extra life like, as a result of I assumed {that a} life like story wanted life like characters. However that was a mistake, and it was not my fashion.”

She discovered a compromise that allowed her to give attention to what actually her. “I like to not make metaphors, however to make faces,” she stated. “To specific the temper of the character with easy instruments, like a blink or an eyebrow going up and down.”

Pavlátová struggled to retain the e-book’s humor, which comes below darkish circumstances. She toned down the cruelest sections from the novel, made the protagonist’s husband extra likeable and embraced the intimacy of a narrative informed from the viewpoint of a lady adjusting to a society that gave her nearly no company. (The movie is about in 2004, when the Taliban was not in management and issues had been barely extra liberal for girls than they had been earlier than or after.)

“In most of my movies, I don’t like fantasy tales,” she stated. “I like life like tales based mostly on observing day by day life. And on this case, I might be inside a household that I may by no means be a part of besides via Herra.”

See quite a lot of “My Sunny Maad” photographs, from sketches to completed stills from the film, beneath:

Learn extra from the Awards Preview challenge right here.