This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
OINK is the first stopmotion feature film that was ever made in the Netherlands. Together with producer Marleen Slot I bought an old garage and we changed it into a 600m2 stopmotion studio. It's my debut film as a director and it premiered during the Berlinale as Opening Film of Generation K+.
OINK is a film about growing up and relationships and trust. The relationship between Babs and Grandpa, but also the one between Babs and Tijn. And Margreet’s relationship with her father, Grandpa Tuitjes. Everything is at stake all the time and that’s what makes the story so thrilling to me.
Also the Dutch element in OINK is very important. It should be recognisable as a typical Dutch landscape. It should possess a certain degree of cosiness while at the same time being structured and designed. I always remember Alex van Warmerdam’s DE NOORDERLINGEN. The last time I saw that film was twenty years ago, but I still remember that neighbourhood.
Tosca Menten’s book OINK’S REVENGE on which our film is based, reminds me of Roald Dahl’s works. The book touches a theme that runs through Dahl’s children’s oeuvre like a thread: nice, sweet and ‘normal’ children are at the mercy of untrustworthy, creepy and weird grown-ups, out of whose grip they subsequently have to struggle. Time and again this has turned out to produce very funny, but also exciting and touching drama. This is how it works in OINK, too. The idea of Grandpa wanting to turn Oink into juicy sausages with his meat mincing machine is horrifying. But the tone in which the script is written by Fiona van Heemstra is light and funny. And the world of Babs, the nine-year old main character, is turned upside down when she blindly trusts her seemingly funny and sweet grandfather, thus putting at risk her friendship with her best friend, and Oink’s life. Until she realises who her grandfather really is and then she has to give her all to stop him.
The film is also concerned with the unconditional love Babs has for Oink, her pet, and her struggle to save Oink from going into the meat mincing machine on the one hand and her parents who would rather have Oink removed at once on the other.
In the films I make I always try to find a combination of humour and drama. OINK is ideal because it contains all the necessary elements. I made OINK on the basis of a live-action interpretation, giving the puppets true emotions and narrating the story the way it does makes one forget one is watching an animation film.