Acclaimed Indie Filmmakers Get Candid About Their Craft In Miyu’s New Online Series

Miyu Distribution has launched Animation in Conversation, a new YouTube series that puts animation filmmakers in direct conversation with one another.

Instead of a conventional interviewer or prepared questions, the series invites artists to discuss their work, creative processes, and professional experiences. Episodes will be released on Miyu’s Bang Bang YouTube channel, already one of the best repositories of contemporary animated shorts on the website.

The debut episode features stop-motion wiz Anna Mantzaris, director of Annecy’s Jean-Luc Xiberras Award for a First Film winner, Please, and married filmmaking duo Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter, whose latest short, Cartoon Physics, follows their Oscar-nominated Negative Space.

The wide-ranging conversation touches on international co-production, raising children while making films, writing, puppet fabrication, and the often-unpredictable realities of stop-motion production.

Mantzaris explains that Please, which features more than 40 puppets, was constructed and shot across several European countries, a common practice for 2D and CG films, but uniquely challenging when working in a medium like stop motion. Sets were built in Sweden and Prague, while filming took place in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and France. Mantzaris could only spend about a week with each crew before directing most of the production remotely.

“I think what was difficult for me was that there were a lot of things going on at the same time,” she says in the video. “At the same time, I was making puppets and directing shoots in other places. I had to switch from the making brain, where you’re focused on this, to, ‘Which shot is this? Do I have to look at this? Is it approved?’”

All three filmmakers also discuss how parenthood has changed their approach to work. Mantzaris, who has four-year-old twins, says having children forced her to work more efficiently and gave her a reason to step away mentally from a production.

“Before I had kids, I could be very into the project,” she explains. “Now, it’s also kind of nice that you have to switch it off a bit. You go and pick them up, and you need to think about something completely different.”

For Kuwahata and Porter, family life fed directly into the story they tell in Cartoon Physics. The film originated with their young daughter’s discovery of a dead bird and her subsequent questions about death. They later combined that experience with a poem by Nick Flynn and their interest in the consequence-free violence of classic American cartoons.

The production gave the pair an opportunity to attempt physical stop-motion versions of familiar cartoon gags, including a character running through a wall and leaving behind a body-shaped hole.

“It was like giving ourselves permission to dip into those old tropes,” Porter says. “It’s been done maybe 10,000 times, and we were like, ‘Okay, let’s see if we can do it in stop motion.’”

Their daughter also became an active collaborator. Rather than asking her to perform scripted lines, Kuwahata created situations with cardboard props and recorded her natural responses. The filmmakers similarly used videos of her as animation reference. “In a way, the writing process was really a family business,” Kuwahata says.

The full video clocks in at 40-ish minutes and serves equally as entertainment, masterclass, and historical archive. We’re very much looking forward to watching future episodes of the series.