Sweeping New Documentary ‘Walking With Animators’ Explores The People Behind The Craft Of Animation (EXCLUSIVE TRAILER)

For more than a century, animation has been shaped by artists whose work is beloved by audiences, even if their names are rarely known outside the industry. Walking With Animators, the new documentary from filmmakers Alexandre Poncet and Gilles Penso, aims to shine a light on those creators through an expansive portrait of the medium and the people behind it.

Premiering next week in Annecy’s Classics section – with in-person intros by special guests including Peter Lord, Bill Plympton, Joanna Quinn, and Hal Hickel – the feature gathers voices from across the animation world to reflect on the art form’s past, present, and future. The film is set to be distributed in France by Carlotta Films with Le Pacte handling international sales.

Ahead of the film’s debut, we’re excited to exclusively share the film’s trailer.

The scale of the project is remarkable. Walking With Animators features more than 70 interviews and references over 130 animated films and series, with support from studios and schools including Aardman, Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Netflix, Warner Bros., Xilam, Folimage, DNEG, CalArts, Gobelins, The Animation Workshop, Tippett Studio, and many others. The result is a sweeping snapshot of an industry told by the artists who have dedicated their lives to it.

For the trailer release, we caught up with Poncet, who discussed the challenge of assembling such a broad range of voices and why he felt the time was right for a documentary celebrating animation’s creative community.

Cartoon Brew: What was the moment when you realized there was a larger story connecting all of these artists you were speaking with?

Alexandre Poncet: Our previous documentaries, Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2012), The Frankenstein Complex (2015), and Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams And Monsters (2019), already explored the art of animation, but mainly in the context of live-action cinema. During the production of these films, we met with many animators, among whom were Paul Wee, Tom Gibbons, Chuck Duke, Ri Crawford, and David Lauer. After spending time with them, trying to understand their daily routine and their creative process, we decided that a film had to be made about the human beings behind the art of animation.

In 2018, while finishing Mad Dreams And Monsters, we decided to start filming interviews and studio tours for a then-untitled documentary. We didn’t want it to be a history lesson; we were more interested in an intimate portrayal of artists usually left in the shadows. After two years of work, we had to stop production during COVID. In the following years, between the consequences of the pandemic and the rise of AI, we realized that the whole industry had changed, and that the stakes of our narrative were much higher than what we had expected.

What drew you to step back from profiling a single artist and instead make a film about animation itself and the people who practice it?

Over the past 15 years, all our projects have materialized in a very organic way. Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan was the result of 8 years of research and a great collaboration with the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation. Our second feature, The Frankenstein Complex, was an unofficial sequel to Special Effects Titan. Our goal was to pay tribute to all the monster makers and visual effects artists who had followed in Ray’s footsteps. Phil Tippett was one of the main protagonists of The Frankenstein Complex, and his emotional journey through the digital revolution of Jurassic Park deserved to be told in a documentary and a book, which we made in 2019 and 2022.

We didn’t want to follow the same formula on Walking With Animators, which explains why the documentary is built on a huge ensemble. Considering that there is no voice over in the film, creating a one-hour-and-forty-minute-long conversation between our 70 interviewees was a pretty big challenge…

At a time when animation is facing rapid technological and industrial change, what do you hope audiences take away from hearing so many animators talk about why they create and what animation means to them?

Walking With Animators is the story of a collective human journey. The figure of the walk is omnipresent in the film because we really want the audience to understand that the history of animation was built on a succession of interconnected destinies. Every artist has taken the experiments of the previous generation a little further, and this transmission of the craft still goes on today – or so we hope.

Creating animated images is a journey in itself; a human being is making thousands of choices for days, weeks, months, or years, and the end result will reflect these human choices. Today, generative AI tools are promoted for their quick and easy results, but without the journey and the effort behind an image, does it still have the same value? The challenges that the latest digital revolution poses to the industry have become an important theme in Walking With Animators, and we have tried to address the subject with tact. We really hope that after watching the documentary, the audience will respect animators and artists in general, even more.