Director Giovanna Ferrari and Cartoon Saloon bring Celtic mythology and feminine resilience to life in the hand-drawn short that reimagines Ireland’s spiritual connection to nature through a fearless young girl’s mythic journey.
For decades, many churches in Ireland were cold and harsh places for women and children.Alongside an aversion to female leadership, many scandals have come to light associated with the country’s old, church-run Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries, where stigmatized, unwed pregnant women were sent away to give birth, then have their babies taken from them.
Stories from these mothers, and the children they lost, continue to surface today as the harsh realities of that practice are being scrutinized.But Cartoon Saloon filmmaker and 2D animated short film director Giovanna Ferrari is hoping to inspire Irish women by drawing inspiration herself from Celtic roots and the fireside stories of Brigid, a goddess of Irish mythology.Referenced by Christian scribes in the 9th century in , Brigid is noted as the goddess of life, spring, fertility, and the one “whom poets adored,” “There’s been a big reckoning with the Irish Catholic church,” says Ferrari, previously known for her work on .
“They shunned women away.Many of those women’s babies were lost or thrown away.And this wasn’t hundreds of years ago.
This was the 70s and 80s.I know women who have been in the Magdalene laundries.I know people who had their children taken away.
But Brigid has always been very present in the life of Ireland, and I wanted to explore this connection between femininity, folklore, and nature.” , showing at Heartland International Film Festival in Indiana on October 14, follows the harrowing journey of a young girl with flaming red hair, not unlike Brigid’s own famous mane.When the water mysteriously disappears from the well in a warrior clan’s village, a fearless child descends into the belly of the earth to retrieve it.is the story of a child in search of a challenge, and a goddess in search of a champion.
The short film, produced by Cartoon Saloon in association with BCP, Herstory and Fís Éireann, is animated using TVPaint and Photoshop.Check out the trailer: “The respect and appreciation for life and nature are not political,” says Ferrari.“It’s something we should all care about regardless of where we come from.
There’s a lot of division in our world with religion and the immigration crisis and we’re destroying each other instead of joining together and helping our planet heal from the damage done by our wars and global warming.” Named after another goddess in Irish folklore deeply rooted to the land, tells as much of its story through visuals as it does through action.Throughout the young Éiru’s journey to retrieve water and destroy their rival stone and tree clans, the film dances between the human soul’s natural and peaceful connection with nature and the violent war that rages between natural elements.The flaming wills of women are the foundation of and visualized through Ferrari’s 2D animation and line work that’s in constant motion. “Animating in this style is really my cup of tea and it comes from working in France, where they wanted to be really rough with the animation,” explains Ferrari.
“I’m not wild about pose-to-pose, clean animation.I had the chance to listen to some Irish folktale storytellers while working on this and it's amazing because it's such a fluid experience listening to them.It’s a transcendental experience, like being lost on a river.
You're getting swept away and I really wanted the movie to feel like that.” She continues, “I did use a more boxed-in character style for the men and the clan warriors, where it felt like they had less ability to move and change.We actually animated those guys using Moho, so they felt like puppets.But for Éiru, she’s more of a work in progress.
So, rather than having a very static, hyper-controlled style, I wanted to create a contrast between the fluidity, roughness, and vitality of Éiru versus these secondary characters.” Ferrari notes that, because the team was small, they were able to keep character designs loose and improvise certain art choices as the production went along. “A lot of it was instinctual,” says Ferrari.“And we wanted to keep the possibilities open.It was also smart that we kept the animation rough because it was less work for the cleanup team.
We kept the key drawings pretty much as they were.They just had to erase a number here or an “X” there.But most of their time was spent on the in-betweens rather than spending time on cleanup.
It made the whole process much more fun.” While the characters were straight-forward, the biggest challenge with ’s art and animation was with the film’s backgrounds. “We didn’t have a ton of people, so we had the art director Áine McGuinness doing most of that job,” says Ferrari.“It was very few people.And we wanted to include a lot of charcoal in the art, but there’s always a limit after which working with physical media like that can become impossible.
You just don’t always have enough time or resources.” As much as Ferrari wanted to stay true to the nature of the film – keeping the rules fluid and the possibilities endless – the director had to find a balance between her ambition and what was possible for their short film crew to pull off. “We also didn’t have a ton of time to test things out,” notes Ferrari.“So, as much as we would have liked to do more in charcoal, we had to pick and choose because we didn’t have three months to test and composite.A lot of our backgrounds were hand-drawn and modified in Photoshop.
We did use a lot of charcoal, and our fire was animated on paper and then reworked in comp.So, we managed to have that material feeling that we wanted, but we had to compromise in other areas.” There’s a scene where Éiru is underground, surrounded by mycelium, or fungus.Ferrari initially wanted all the mycelium to be drawn with charcoal. “But it would have been very hard and nearly impossible timewise,” says Ferrari.
“We ended up having to do it all in TVPaint, and I reckon most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.The effect is still there but I know it’s not real charcoal and that hurts a bit.” Creating a film about the wild, unbridled spirit of a child on an adventure through the untamed land of Ireland is an interesting task when filmmakers are still very much restricted by time and budget.The irony wasn’t lost on Ferrari. “There’s still this thing called ‘reality’ that surrounds us, even when we’re working on a story like this,” admits Ferrari.
“At the end of the day, we always had to make the choices that made the most sense and that was the hardest part.” But still, that wild nature breaks through even the toughest barriers.“While we were making the mycelium in TVPaint, it was a weird thing because, when you start to draw it out, or paint it out, these secondary shapes just automatically would happen and it was tough to control,” shares Ferrari.“At a certain point we realized there was no way to completely control it and there was no way to tell exactly where every branch would go.
The ones that would interact directly with our characters we spent time to get those how they needed to be, but the others we let be wild and accidental.” The production process with the mycelium, to Ferrari, spoke to the beauty of the project and the message of the film.There are things to control and there are things to set free and finding that balance requires a real connection with the people and the world around us. “The way we see people we consider ‘the other’ really can drastically change the destiny of all of us,” says Ferrari.“The world is designed to connect.
Look at the mycelium.The entire world is designed to connect, and we just have to do that.It's not that difficult, actually.
Whether you’re Irish or not, Catholic or not, explore the layers of this film and see that we owe it to our children to stop dividing ourselves.We need to pull ourselves up and just be decent and just cooperate and just work together and just face the difficulties that are coming for us that are universal and are hitting us all.That's what I hope, that we all do what we are designed to do, and connect.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.
She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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