Adam Elliot and Gints Zilbalodis are used to being underdogs. The respective directors of Memoir of a Snail, the 1970s-set Australian claymation feature about a hoarder with a mollusk obsession, and the Latvian, cat-based CGI adventure tale Flow know that the path to Oscar-worthy animation rarely runs through Melbourne or Riga. Yet their features, made for a pittance — Flow cost $3.8 million, Memoir of a Snail $4.5 million — are two of hottest contenders in this season’s awards race, facing off against such big-budget juggernauts as Pixar’s $200 million Inside Out 2 and the deep pockets of the studio marketing machines. Notes Elliot, “Netflix’s budget for an awards campaign is more than the production budgets of both of our films, combined!”
Elliot and Zilbalodis recently got on a joint Zoom call to discuss the joy (and agony) of indie animation, their hopes of cracking the Oscar shortlist and why they aren’t afraid of losing their jobs to AI. Says Elliot, “Audiences are always going to prefer something actually made by real people, whether it’s made with a computer or made with clay.”
You both grew up far from Hollywood. How did you get into the business of animated films?
GINTS ZILBALODIS I feel I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. My personality really fits well for animation. I think I’d be too anxious for live action. Animation gives me more time to make decisions and have more control, which is important for me.
ADAM ELLIOT I don’t think I have the temperament to be a live-action filmmaker. Animation is something I fell into at the age of 25. Before then, I was always drawing and making things — at one stage, I wanted to be a portrait painter — and I’ve always seen my films as extensions of my drawings. I think the thing I like about being independent, not being attached to a studio, is that I have a lot of creative control and creative freedom. I’d certainly love the money that would come from a studio, but Gints and I have a lot of freedom to experiment and tell the stories we want to tell.
ZILBALODIS I think it’s exciting that films like this can be made now in different places where there isn’t an established industry. We’re getting different perspectives and different techniques. I have a feeling that there’s more of this to come. It used to be you would only see this kind of experimentation in short films, but now there are a lot of these indie features being made, which is really exciting.
What has changed that has allowed this boom in indie feature animation?
ZILBALODIS I think it’s because these films have been successful. People are starting to accept that animation is not just for children and can be something outside the mainstream.
ELLIOT The climate has really changed. I was so glad when Guillermo del Toro in his Oscar speech [in 2023 for Pinocchio] said: “Animation is not a genre for kids. It’s a medium for art.” There has always been more sophisticated, more experimental animation out there. From the stop-motion point of view, digital cameras have made it a lot cheaper to make, so a lot of young people can do stop-motion now. But I also think the audiences have become more sophisticated and are looking for more challenging subject matter. That’s been helped along by things like South Park and The Simpsons, TV animated series that deal with subject matter that’s a bit more challenging. That’s great for people like Gints and I because it makes our lives a little bit easier. When I released Mary and Max 15 years ago, it was a very different climate. Now audiences are not only aware of films like ours, but they’re able to get to see them a lot more easily.
Do you think indie animation gets its fair due from the Oscars?
ZILBALODIS I wish there would be more attention given to us, even just people in the Academy watching our films, so they can evaluate us on equal terms. It’s hard with our budgets, especially our marketing budgets, to compete with the bigger studios. But it’s getting better. There’s often one independent film among the five [Oscar nominees]. I hope there’ll be room for more than one.
ELLIOT I think the Academy is becoming more open, just by the fact that its membership has risen over the past five or so years to include more people from outside of America. Cinema has become more global, and Hollywood is reaching out. But we always will have to compete against the mega studios and the Netflix marketing budgets. Netflix’s budget for an awards campaign is more than the production budgets of both of our films, combined! It just blows us out of the water.
If you did have a studio budget on your movies, what would you have done differently?
ZILBALODIS We would have had more time to do everything. We wouldn’t have been in such a rush. But having fewer resources can be helpful, too, because we had to focus, we couldn’t make any big changes late in the process. Some big studios completely changed their films very close to the finish line, which sometimes can mess things up.
ELLIOT I would just love to be able to pay my editor and my animators the money they deserve. Every film I’ve made, I’ve had to beg the crew to work for award rates. I would love to make a film where I still have creative control and freedom, but everyone gets paid properly. My film cost a bit under $5 million, but really it should have cost $8 million to $10 million if everyone had gotten paid properly. That’s what I’m searching for with my next film: a hybrid scenario where there’s money from anywhere other than just the Australian government. Creatively, our budgets mean we can’t do walking. Walking is very expensive [in claymation], so we do the stilted Muppet technique. That kills me. I’d love to do some proper walking one day.
Aside from financing, what was the biggest creative or technical challenge in making your movies?
ELLIOT The shot that was most difficult for us was the opening title sequence. It’s my Martin Scorsese Goodfellas shot where you have a moving camera, a minute and a half, without a single cut, as the camera goes through this horde of rubbish. We used a giant robotic arm with a very thin camera snorkel lens on the end. It took a month and two weeks just to glue all the snails together and another two weeks to animate it with the camera move. It’s probably the most ambitious shot I ever did, and there were certainly days where we were almost going to abandon the shot altogether.
ZILBALODIS We had a similar situation with two shots, which are each almost five minutes long. They were technically really, really hard to figure out because the animators are not used to working on something so long, to stay focused for such a long time, months and months, on a single emotion.
Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films
How do you feel about the state of animation at the moment, particularly about the threat of AI to this art form?
ZILBALODIS Actually, I think because of AI, people will be more interested in stop-motion. I think people will gravitate to handmade things. Of course in our film we work with computers, but everything was made by people. I think you can sense the difference. There’s like a soul to it, there’s meaning behind it. You can’t really replicate the human imperfections. AI can replicate things to make them seem, from afar, kind of believable, but I haven’t seen anything that really interests me or captivates me. I’m not that worried about it. I think the bigger industry, at least the cheaper side of the big industry, that kind of mass-produced TV series, have more to worry about. But I think for feature films and for storytelling, I’m not really worried because I wouldn’t go out of my home and go to a cinema and spend money to watch something a computer made.
ELLIOT I love going to [animation film festival] Annecy, and it’s never been more popular. There were, I think, 17,000 people there this year. When I first started going, it was 6,000.
I love watching short films at Annecy because I think that’s where cutting-edge animation is happening. The great thing is, there’s so much stuff that is handmade. I feel like the pendulum has swung away from stuff that’s super slick back to more hand-drawn animation and stop-motion. Annecy this year showed a couple of AI hybrid films, and there was a lot of booing from the audience. I think that’s a signal to these big AI companies that artists are aware of what’s going on. At the end of my film, I put a credit, “This film was made by human beings,” to say to the audience, “There is no CGI, no AI in this.” I have no idea where AI is going to take us — I don’t think anyone genuinely does — but I think there are always going to be audiences who are always going to prefer something that’s not synthetic, something that is actually made by real people, whether it’s made with a computer or made with clay
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
English (US) ·