Oscar Shortlist Interviews: Director Giovanna Ferrari’s Favorite Shot From ‘Éiru’ (EXCLUSIVE)

We invited the filmmakers behind each of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts to share their favorite shot from their film and explain why it’s special to them.

Nomination voting starts on January 12 and runs through January 16.

Today, we’re sharing director Giovanna Ferrari’s favorite shot from her mythical Celtic short Éiru, produced by Cartoon Saloon. The hand-drawn short follows a young girl who ventures down a well beneath her tribe’s village to restore the community’s lifeblood after a sacred spring mysteriously dries up. Following whispers from long-forgotten gods, her journey is one of mortal courage facing down a divine reckoning. Lush, hand-painted textures and inviting lighting create a world that feels fantastic yet familiar.

Here’s Ferrari’s favorite shot, and why it exemplifies the team’s emphasis on storytelling:

This is one of my favorite shots because it encapsulates the kind of work we did on the storytelling of Éiru. In this moment, Éiru is exploring the underworld, lost in the mycelium, losing her bearings while following an eerie voice. She has lost the flame of her torch, which is metaphorical of her five senses being now free from the bias of her clan’s legacy (unbeknownst to her, since she’s still holding the torch as if it were a weapon).

Instead of using many different shots and angles to show Éiru getting lost and the passage of time, we created a framing device to partition the composition into three areas, creating spatial and temporal disorientation in the audience, echoing the inner state of the character herself. The animation is seen from three different angles as Éiru advances in the mycelium, and the change in size of the character is unexpected and confusing, recreating in the audience the same feelings the character is going through.

Éiru repeating her chant makes us immediately understand that the action takes place over time, while cutting the actual running time by two-thirds. The music and sound effects give us the impression that the voices whispering and Éiru’s breath are somewhat illuminating the mycelium rather than the flame of her torch (a symbol of her clan, now obsolete in her reality).

This shot comes back later at the resolution of the short, when the water returns. It is the same background, but now we see the three partitions all together at once, the water flowing through it without changing size or perspective, making it look healed and complete — finally a whole, finally coherent in both time and space. It now behaves like a normal place rather than a fractured one, and its reconstruction is a conduit for the return of the water.