As long as Netflix keeps viewership figures hidden, we can’t know exactly who is watching I Lost My Body. One thing’s for sure, though: Jérémy Clapin’s cosmically strange feature about a severed hand in search of its body has two big fans in Phil Lord and Chris Miller.
Ahead of the Academy Awards, where I Lost My Body is nominated for best animated feature, Lord and Miller sat down with Clapin for a video interview. The pair, who won the Oscar last year with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (co-produced by both and co-written by Lord), clearly admire the way Clapin’s film expands the language of animation.
The feeling is mutual: Clapin credits Spider-Verse with carving out a niche for more adult-oriented animation, which I Lost My Body then filled. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about everything from his reaction to winning the grand prize at Cannes’s Critics’ Week — a first for an animated film — to the quirks of his production pipeline. A running theme is the ways in which the film subverts expectations of the medium. “There are no boundaries in animation,” says Clapin. “The only boundaries we have are from the industry.”
