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| Sunburnt Unicorn Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
There’s a lot of great stuff at the Fantasia International Film Festival, but between the horror and the high-stakes thrillers, sometimes it can get a bit gruelling. Sunburnt Unicorn may also feature a fair bit of death and suffering, but it takes a poetic attitude to that, and it’s aimed at a family audience. Beautifully animated, it follows teenager Frankie (voiced by Diana Kaarina) after his life is literally turned upside down by a car crash. Waking up alone, he wanders through the desert in search of his father, and learns a lot about himself along the way. He gets help from assorted desert animals when he’s mistaken for a magical unicorn due to the fact that he has a shard of glass from the car embedded in his forehead.
Animation is an incredibly time consuming artform which requires a lot of dedication, so when I met director Nick Johnson at the festival I asked him how he fell in love with this subject to the extent that he could be confident of seeing it through.
“Let's see here.” He thinks for a moment. “I'm definitely one of those people who has many ideas burning in separate fires at the same time, and as much as I am a creative individual, and I let that passion guide me, I just know that timing plays a huge part in what ideas get brought to life and which ones have to keep waiting for their turn. So this was a unique opportunity where I had a studio which had a good budget and a good schedule in place, and we had a good working relationship, and when they said “We would love to work on a film with you,” I just had to go through that backlog and see what ideas would fit the budget and which ideas I could peel back layers of and get invested in something that was personal, but I knew I would still be in love with it after two years of work.
“Sunburn Unicorn was that idea. I was just like, ‘This is it. This is the right time. This studio doesn't really interfere much with the creativity of its artists, so I know I've got some free reign.’ Which is why Sunburn Unicorn goes to those weird places. So it was really timing and passion and patience that led this to happen.”
I ask if I’m correct in thinking that it’s digital animation that made it possible to complete the film in the timeframe the studio wanted.
“It is. I mean, I have a massive love for 2D. My background is in comic books, so 2D design and animation is definitely a priority for me. But realistically, to be able to work with 3D – we use software called Unreal, which is pretty new to the filmmaking and animation side of things – those things made this movie possible, to be able to get it done on time, look good, and give us scale.”
There are still some beautiful effects in the film. I tell him that I'm always interested in backgrounds in animated films, and I love the way that he captured the desert light and the different qualities of the sand and so on.
“I think one of the things I was worried about was like, I wanted to do a desert movie, partly because it's the perfect place for an introspective, surreal journey, but also from a budgetary standpoint a desert is much more affordable than to do than a crowded city, so we knew it would be more achievable in the desert. But my worry was that people were going to get sick of sand, sick of dunes, you know? Just walking across them. So how do we take what looks like a real desert and ease them into a desert that suddenly becomes surreal and becomes a little bit scary? And all of a sudden, you get the vibe that maybe we're not in a real desert at all, you know?
“I was playing around with landmarks like cliffs and rocks, playing around with colour in a way. Where when the film starts, it has a realistic feel to the colour. It's bright sun and day, and by the last confrontation, some of that bright, happy color is sucked out, and what you get is more abstract and emotional, raw. So, yeah, we were really allowing ourselves to get more abstract and emotional with our atmosphere and colouring to give the movie that extra juice.”
But then there are characters who seem more like puppets, they’re so three dimensional.
“I am a big fan of stop motion animation and specifically the way those characters are sculpted,” he says. “I'm a really big proponent of simple characters designed with strong shapes that echo their personality types. That's just my natural way of working as an artist. So I really wanted to bring those types of stylistic approaches into this realistic desert, but also give them a sort of tactility where kind of like our mission, our mantra was making our characters like toys come to life.
“I want an audience to look at these characters and not see them as digital things, but like toys come to life that they really just want to grab and play with on their shelf at home, hopefully in ways that would attract the audience and give the characters an iconic look. They all kind of have these wounds of sorts, and these wounds are very visible and integral to their design and integral to their personality and how they interact with the world around them.”
He apologises for rambling, but I tell him I like rambling answers – that’s often where the interesting stuff emerges. I ask him about how he saw those wounds, and the continual proximity of death in the film, affecting a young audience. Did he want to make those concepts less scary?
“Absolutely,” he says. “It is to introduce these concepts of loss, of hardship, of self sacrifice. I'm not trying to force parents and kids into uncomfortable conversations when they're not ready for them, but to show that every journey comes with these ups and downs and these feelings of loss. And knowing that even though we go through these crucibles in life, if we can learn a lesson from it and be open to it, we're going to come out the other side better and renewed and more appreciative of the people that we have in our lives.”
In cinematic tradition, the desert is the setting for westerns and other very male-dominated tales, but Nick has made a point of bringing women into his film.
“We've seen it many times before, the masculine hero conquering nature,” he says. “I really wanted to ask myself ‘How does a feminine voice change a story?’ I read a really great book called Cassandra Speaks about how a female perspective alters the way we tell stories. So that was my approach with this one, and that led creative decisions, such as trying to cast an all female cast, all female-presenting actors. The one condition or the one conceit I made was that we really tried to find the perfect voice for the Cactus King, but we just couldn't find the one that had the presence that gave us that imposing kind of dad or masculine or patriarchal figure.
“To have these incredible actors doing the voice of the tortoise, for instance, who's non-gendered, I really was excited to see what the female actors would bring to it. Kind of in the tradition of Nancy Cartwright doing Bart Simpson's voice. And then, of course, out of beautiful coincidence, stumbling upon Piqsiq doing a vocal performance at a folk festival, hearing their voices and the way they create music and having them be the voice and emotion of both Frankie and the desert. All of it came together beautifully to give us that unique feel.”
Piqsiq are an Inuit throat-singing duo. I remark that they seem perfect in light of the film’s focus on the scirocco as a line of communication uniting the creatures of the desert.
“Yeah, the air of the desert. I was thinking the voice of the desert, but also the movie is very internal. You could make the argument that it's all in Frankie's head after a concussion. And so this voice is also his emotions. It's his breath. That’s a more psychological kind of take on the music.”
There’s a point in the film when our young hero falls under the influence of a creature who seems something like a djinn, and the visual character of everything changes.
“Part of it is, while we were trying to do a different desert movie, we have to acknowledge the tropes of the desert,” he says. “I feel like every desert movie needs to have a sandstorm in it. They need to have an oasis. Part of me thought, to give people a satisfying desert movie, you have to have that oasis that they stumble upon. And like I was saying earlier, the movie's pure desert all the time. It's one emotion, it's one temperature. People can start to check out. But halfway through this movie, which is really dry and bright, you get this moment of rest, this coolness of water and birds.
“It would really shake things up and invest people. Those blue and purple colors, as well, would give us something new to look at. But by this point in the film, every time Frankie sees something cute or beautiful there's that turn. At this point the audience is like, ‘Not everything is as it seems.’”
We talk about the film’s première at Annecy, which he says was just beautiful, and its subsequent screening at Fantasia.
“Obviously we're overjoyed to be a part of these incredible festivals and so honoured to be at the table with these incredible creators,” he says. “I remember at one point being like, ‘Oh Nick, don't let this go to your head. Don't let this give you ego.’ The moment you're surrounded by these people and you're at the same festivals as DreamWorks and Disney, you're instantly humbled as well. You're surrounded by some huge corporations. You're also getting to talk with some of the greatest filmmakers of our generation. It's a humbling experience. It's an inspiring experience. And if there's one thing that is constant, it's that I'm learning from people: learning how to talk about filmmaking, learning how to make better movies. It's been a very educational process.
“I was particularly excited to be a part of Fantasia because genre filmmaking has been so important to me – as a modern filmmaker, but also growing up. Some of those genre films scared the hell out of me as a kid, like The Last Unicorn and Secret Of Nimh and Return To Oz. So to be a part of a genre festival that's not just focused on animation, I was excited because it gave us a chance to reach maybe a wider audience who wouldn't think of going to an animation festival. To be there, to be alongside these folks and presented here has been an absolute pleasure. And the audiences here, I'm sure you've heard, are so generous and so enthusiastic.”
In his day to day life he’s now helping to develop the next generation of talent, but it sounds like we’ll have other films from him to look forward to.
“I'm super lucky to have gotten a full time professor job at the Alberta University of the Arts, where I get to teach storyboarding, character design and comic books, so that's a my great, constant job. To be able to work with students is an absolute thrill. And right now I'm really just talking to people, planting seeds, coming up some really strong ideas. I don't know which ones are going to rise to the top, but I'm just looking at creating those opportunities when the opportunity arises. I've got a couple ideas in the bag that are just going to leap at their chance to come to life.
