Considering that Bolognesi’s career up to now has been exclusively writing live-action character-driven Brazilian dramas, it made sense to ask what motivated him to make an animated feature in the first place. “It would be impossible with the budget that we had to make the things we did if I was doing this film in live action,” Bolognesi explained. “To travel in time, to write a scene with two hundred Indians from the 16th century fighting a war, then another scene where we see Rio in 2096 with space ships over the city – my producer would have killed me if I had written that.”
Rio 2096 is the culmination of his diverse personal interests—a childhood love of graphic novels and comic magazines like Heavy Metal and an enthusiasm for historical research. “Before writing the script I worked with a group of four students of history and anthropology on researching interesting little known facts of Latin American history,” Bolognesi said. “I decided to tell the story from the point of view of the Tupinambás, the natives who lived in Rio before the Europeans arrived, whose history is not so different from the history of the Indians from the United States, and use their true mythology as the dramatic arc of the film.”
For the animation process, Bolognesi decided against a paperless digital production in exchange for hand-animating the characters on paper followed by digital cleanup and compositing. “The animators were much more used to that,” he said. “When we tried to work on tablets, their work didn’t go so quickly.” And despite the animators’ desire to create animation on ones and twos, Bolognesi preferred threes and fours. “My team was used to working closer to the American process of full animation and very expressive characters, and I didn’t want that. I wanted something closer to the feeling of Japanese, Korean, and even the French process of character animation.”
“The real political fight for a better world can only be something good if it is motivated by love.”
When it came to the production design of the film, he continued to push for a more expressionist “graphic novel style” with less naturalism, even going so far as basing the look of each time period after a different season of the year. He gives much of the credit to the film’s art diretor: “Anna Caiado is the big talent of the film, and she realized very quickly the intention of the film and she did really a great job with a very small department of five [artists].”
The result is a passionate animated film that’s one part historical fiction and one part divine fantasy, and ultimately, a powerful story of love. “I think that the real political fight for a better world can only be something good if it is motivated by love,” Bolognesi said. “You love your people, you love someone, you love your children: that’s the reason why you should want to change the world.”
