Cannibals, Surrealism, And Solo Filmmaking Collide In ‘Gregor’ (EXCLUSIVE TRAILER)

One doesn’t have to look very far in Annecy to spot a Belgian artist. Represented in many of the titles in competition, from Iron Boy to In Waves, Belgians also bring their own projects to the lakeside event every year. At this edition, projects like Yugly, Luce and the Rock (series), and Anca Damian’s singular new short showcase the variety of the Belgian animation industry.

This unique Belgian spirit is also at the heart of Gregor, Manu Gomez’s latest film, which marks the director’s animated feature debut. We’re excited to share the film’s trailer, embedded below:

A hand-drawn 2D animated thriller with hints of horror and fantasy, Gregor has been crafted by Gomez alone, in a one-man-band approach that saw the director work on the film seven days a week for the last five years. A Belgian-French co-production by MGV Productions, Monkey Productions, and Bagan Films, Gregor is distributed by Next Film and comes to Annecy as part of the Midnight Specials selection.

Ahead of the film’s premiere on Wednesday, we caught up with the multidisciplinary artist to discuss his first encounter with animation, his latest film, and his thoughts on the animated medium.

Cartoon Brew: Do you recall when you first dabbled in animation?

Manu Gomez: My very first encounter with animated film dates back to my fine arts studies in the late 1970s. One of our professors offered us an introduction to filmmaking, and since we were studying drawing, it was animation filmmaking.

That’s how I made my first animated film with two classmates. It was a Super 8 film that had to be built around an object, namely a matchbox. Our film, Allumette, Gentille Allumette, garnered a lot of attention on the festival circuit. It even screened at a festival in Quebec, and I got to accompany it. It was my very first experience, and it was indeed very enjoyable.

From there, did you want to try the experience again?

Absolutely. What I love about animation is the total freedom the medium provides. When I work in animation, I don’t feel constrained. I don’t have to deal with investors or funding requests. I do have producers on this film, and I thank them because they helped the project come to life. But the way I work, these partners are there to help me, not to impose things on me. This freedom is truly what matters most to me, and why I love animation as a medium.

For a cartoonist and illustrator like myself, the desire to make animated films came almost naturally. I always felt animation was a necessary step for me in order to bring my own drawings to life.

You’ve been working in the medium for many years now. How has your technique evolved with new technologies and new ways of working?

To be honest, I don’t feel my technique has evolved that much. I still work in a very traditional way, and it’s important to me that it shows in my films, so people know there’s a human behind every frame and every drawing.

Of course, I now use a pen tablet instead of pencils and Photoshop, but my hand movement is still the same. In fact, this movement has been the same for thousands of years. Early cave paintings were drawn with the same sort of movement.

That said, I’m not against the use of new technologies if they can be of assistance. For this film, I didn’t use any AI, but I’m not fully against it. We just have to bear in mind that it’s a tool, nothing more. I don’t think people are that gullible, and from my point of view, they are also looking for the flaws and imperfections specific to human-made creations. Those imperfections are what make us human.

To talk about your film, Gregor, how did you come up with the idea, and what made you want to tell this story?

Originally, Gregor was supposed to be a short, somewhat gory film in the vein of what I’d already done. That’s kind of my bread and butter. If you look at Ubu, my 1995 stop-motion animated short made with meat, I enjoy creating these raw animations.

In my films, there is often a lot of dark, burlesque, trashy humor, but always with a dose of humor.

The idea of Gregor’s cannibals came from the same place, imagining the world’s untouchable degenerates around a table, devouring fresh human brains. That was the initial idea, and I gradually developed it, exploring all sorts of possibilities until I ended up with a 120-page manuscript. That’s when the idea of an animated feature film started to make its way into my mind.

Making a feature-length animated film is no small feat. How did you approach that process?

With my script and the desire to turn it into animation, I embarked on this adventure. That was five years ago.

To be honest, I hadn’t realized the amount of work that lay ahead. But at the same time, it was something I enjoyed, and something I truly worked on for five years, seven days a week, eleven months out of twelve.

Usually, I’m more of a multiple-projects person, going from one to another depending on my mood or inspiration. But for this one, I forced myself to commit to it and focused solely on the film for those five years.

So, everything we see on screen was drawn and animated by you alone?

Absolutely. And for me, it all comes down to this: if I want to express myself through drawing, it has to come from me in a very personal way.

There are animation filmmakers who are more like directors and who work with great artists, and that’s certainly their choice. But for me, they’re not the ones making their films. As far as I’m concerned, the time I would spend explaining to someone else what kind of drawing they should do, I’d rather invest in drawing it myself.

On the other hand, it’s obviously also a question of budget. I started with zero euros, and we ended with almost zero euros. So I wouldn’t have been able to pay people.

That said, I also teamed up with a producer, sound mixing engineers, and a composer for the music because those areas go beyond my skills.

How do you feel today, as Gregor is about to be discovered by Annecy audiences?

Both happy and relieved. Happy because being selected for this event, the biggest animation festival in the world, is the ultimate achievement.

But it’s also a relief. Working for five years, submitting the film to a festival, only to have it dismissed out of hand with a wave and a comment like, “It’s a sh** film” (which, incidentally, was the title of my previous short film, selected last year in the WTF section), can be very hard.

So I’m happy and relieved, and delighted to be here today.

As a multidisciplinary artist, what is it about animation that appeals to you as a medium?

Animation itself is the process of giving life to an inanimate object, a dead thing, quite literally in my case, since I animated dead meat in Ubu. I’ve animated marble, drawings, even toilet paper.

But it all comes down to breathing a soul into something. And that’s an incredible experience.