Heading a new wave of regional Canadian cinema alongside collaborators Matthew Rankin and Miryam Charles, Félix Dufour-Laperrière is carving out a niche as the animation virtuoso of the bunch. With his previous features premiering at Venice and IFFR, he received his biggest showcase to date last month, in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, for his eerie mind-bender Death Does Not Exist [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Félix Dufour-Laperrière
scheda film], which was made in co-production with France and Luxembourg. Upon its competition screening at Annecy last week, the director talked us through the animation process, and what appealed to him about the film’s anti-capitalist radicals, who are bent on overturning the established order. 

Cineuropa: How have you found the response to the film in Annecy, compared to Cannes?
Félix Dufour-Laperrière: Good question. The stress is different. For its world premiere at Cannes, it was a privilege to actually pass that threshold, to bring a film so rooted in the culture of the animated image, deeply adhering to an animated mise-en-scène, and share it with the general cinephile crowd in Cannes. The movie is polarising in certain ways, which is part and parcel of its themes and its formal approach.

In Annecy, they know about the making of such movies. They know, and they look out for the craftsmanship. On the other hand, it's a crowd that likes to laugh. And this film isn't funny! But it was a very good screening – the tension was there, the energy, and the viewers were paying lots of attention. If it doesn’t please everyone, then that’s part of the deal.

Your previous work has some rigorous documentary elements alongside the animation. What made you pivot to this more spectacle-driven film, with its young, relatable characters?
I wanted to explore this tension between acting and not acting, between violence and the care we have to show for the things we love. I thought that a more structured storyline would be a good approach. And, for example, my next film is even more narrative-driven – I’m working even harder on the narrative arcs just to explore different things. But it depends on the project.

Why did you want to centre the film on a militant cell, motivated to protect the environment? Were you inspired by groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion?
They definitely think about the climate emergency, but it's also an anti-capitalist emergency. In their mind, and in my eyes, it is totally linked. I tried to create a certain level of intensity, so the viewer can ponder the same question of loyalty and honouring our connections, while protecting what we love.

I wanted the lead character, Manon, to recognise something of herself, a shared part of her, in the older woman who’s the cell’s ultimate target. That's what makes her impossible to shoot. And that also shows in the formal approach, where the characters are strangely integrated into the backdrops. They don't detach fully, because they're part of the context.

How did you prepare and then create the very oneiric animation style?
We made it on a modest budget of €2.8 million. It's a lot of money to buy a house with, but it's a normal – or let’s say low – budget for an animated feature. But honestly, I feel that the qualities and flaws of the film have nothing to do with the budget we worked with – we gave our all. The flaws are our fault.

In the development phase, I worked alone for a year and a half with my main animator, Yoo-Jin Park. I did the first backgrounds, and we made a pretty precise animatic. Afterwards, we had a team of 25 people in Montreal for just under three years and we had 15 people in France for eight months. We did 12 drawings per second on a graphic tablet. Everything is hand-drawn, and we didn't use any live-action references. We love the instability, the imperfections and the unpredictability of drawing.

Each sequence has its own limited colour palette. And I like the idea of the story, character, background and ideas lifting up off a colour field sequence. This tension between figuration and abstraction has something to do with the radicalism of the characters’ beliefs, in my eyes. It reveals things whilst erasing something.

Which animators in particular inspired you to work in this field?
My gateway into animation was Jan Švankmajer, the Czech surrealist. So, as a young man – of 18, maybe – loving cinema, but not being very strongly drawn to the commotion of a live-action set, I was lucky enough to stumble upon him in the local DVD shop in my small town: the work was handmade, yet so powerful. I thought, “Oh, you can make those powerful things alone in a camera room. That’s insane.” And luckily, we have a very strong tradition of animation in Montreal, with the National Film Board and the Cinémathèque Québécoise.