Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero are the directors of PSICONAUTAS, THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN, nominated for EUROPEAN ANIMATED FEATURE FILM 2016. The directors talk about their motivation to make the film, its look, how they worked together and what audience the film addresses.
What is PSICONAUTAS about and what was the initial motivation / idea?
ALBERTO VÁZQUEZ (AV): PSICONAUTAS is based on a comic with the same name that I drew ten years ago. The main starting point when writing the story was the arrival of hard drugs in the 80s in Galicia, especially heroin, which caused great havoc for the youth of my city and all of Spain in general. PSICONAUTAS is an intimate social story within a fantasy world. In fact, the whole story is a metaphor for adolescence, but other secondary issues such as pollution, poverty, mental illness, love and the possibilities of finding a better future are also addressed.
Can you explain how you came up with the style and look of your film and the kind of animation you used?
AV: The artistic approach of PSICONAUTAS maintains a strong connection to the world of illustration and the book. The backgrounds and landscapes have an expressive colour treatment based on limited colour ranges that escapes naturalism, incorporating textures and graphics of the artwork. At the same time, the compositions and handling of the camera connects more with a sketchy vision than cinematographic and they get that PSICONAUTAS is a different work with its own marked personality.
It is essentially traditional animation, that is, drawing by drawing, in a classic way. We believe that our film feeds on the classics to make a post-modern story, a kind of anti-Disney.
How was the work process from the first idea of adapting your own graphic novel to the finished film? And what were the main challenges along the way?
PEDRO RIVERO (PR): We started making a short film in which to test the graphic aspect and the animation. Meanwhile we were working on the script very carefully. To adapt the graphic novel without any change would give us a forty minutes movie, so we developed further the storylines of each of the main characters and deepened some subjects that the original work only hinted at.As for the graphic aspect, when moving to animation, we wanted to get the type of character designs used in the animated children series about animals to underline the notion of the fable.
AV: The differences between the narrative languages of the comic and the cinema are many: camera management, sense of time and rhythm, etc… For example, in a comic the main stylistic resource is the temporal ellipsis (between frames). Time is much more flexible, it is more like literature. In the animation it is necessary to explain more clearly what happens.
The story of your film is a dark coming-of-age story and at the same time reflecting ecological issues. What audience did you have in mind?
PR: It’s not a movie for a family audience, but we don’t think it’s only a movie for adults. Although some themes are hard for children we believe that its narrative makes it suitable to see and understand from 12 years old. And as for its genre, which frequents the fantastic, we hope it can have its audience among fans of that genre.
Can you describe how you work together as a directing duo? Do you have specific roles, talents, fields of work?
PR: Beyond the joint work on the script, Alberto worked in the art direction, storyboard and the character and background designs while I took care of the animatic and the co-ordination of the animation and other aspects of the production. But we continued working together on the editing throughout the entire production.
Who do you consider your influences – artists, animators, directors?
AV: Many and very varied: Roland Topor, classic fables, Werner Herzog, Expressionism, Romantic painters, Edgar Allan Poe, underground comics, The Simpsons, Gustav Doré, Lotte Reininger, Stephan Blanquet, Martin Rosen, John Fante, etc …
PR: Although you can trace influences and teachings of the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki and others in the graphics, for the script and the narrative we always had live action movies like those by David Lynch as a reference.
What do you think is unique about European animation compared to films from Japan or the USA?
PR: In Japan and the USA there is a very established animation production aimed at a loyal audience, while in Europe, apart from some exceptional high-budget movies that try to compete with the Americans for the family audience, there is no single model and the production is more diverse and independent. But this is not unique for Europe: low-budget and risky animated movies are made all over the world, including the USA.
