The world's geography is not realistic. Geography is not real. Borders are only closed to people but they are open to products. There is another type of geography outside of this matrix. Because of this we noticed we were talking about much more than just Latin America. That was very important to put the film on another level. Based on this idea, we knew that we were not in this world any longer.
They didn't need to be specifically South American or Latin American. Instead we discovered we were talking about human beings in general. We realized that these are not issues only pertinent to Latin America: poverty, misery, consumerism, etc.
Making a film from the point of view of a young boy's eyes opened the door to another universe with lots of freedom and to explore a new dimension. This was achieved as I started doing things that were close to what exists in a child's universe.
We were in another planet and we were reaching for something closer to a fable. It was something fabulous. I started looking at the film as if it happened in another planet and that allowed me even more freedom.
I always told my team, "You have to believe that you are not in front of a computer, but that your canvas is a piece of paper. You have to believe this even if you have a computer in front of you."
I have the feeling that I didn't make it by myself, but that I was conducted by feelings that were completely different from those in my previous work. When I start making a film I don't know what I'm doing.
We discovered this halfway through the process. When we started making the film there were some lines of dialogue in Portuguese, but we then changed our minds. The film started from very specific issues in the world, in particular Latin America, but halfway through the journey we felt the necessity to have more universal ideas that were not so specific.
Looking through a child's eyes and knowing this was another planet, we decided to design the machines with eyes and bodies like animals, we also decided that this planet has two moons, and we decided that anything else we wanted to do was allowed. It was a new perspective to make the film.
We were breaking away from anything that linked us to this world, but by doing that those ideas remained even stronger. Fables represent the basis for what I wanted to say about human beings.
On another level this film talks about that. We had tremendous freedom while making this film. We never thought about marketing. It wasn't a film made to sell merchandise or products or to reach millions of people around the world. It was a film made to say what I really felt.
It's a film made in a very radical creative manner. It was possible because we didn't have to pander to capitalism. I think the film is also a humanistic cry for help for animation. It's a film [Boy and the World] with sensitivities completely opposite to what the market wants to sell.
The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.
The entire time I was following the feelings experienced by children, so the feeling of not understanding what adults say was very important to put the audience in this frequency to understand the world through his eyes.
I feel that joy is the basic emotion of life and of human beings. It's what supports everything. We are here to be happy. We are to enjoy "alegria."
"Airgela" is "Alegria" backwards and "Alegria" means "Joy" or "Happiness." This is a fundamental word in this film. It's very important. Symbolically "Alegria" is crucial word in the creation of this project. Although it wasn't present from the beginning, as we were working on the music it became symbolic.
I built the film [Boy and the World] this way. I gathered all the tools I usually use such as brushes, color pencils, crayons, watercolors, and everything else I found in my studio, and I put them on top of a table. I had this feeling of freedom and possibility like if I was this boy. I was using the boy's freedom to create this film.
I tried to exploit such freedom to create those drawings like if I was a boy. I tried to draw with that freedom and that love that I remember from being a child and spending a day drawing without worrying about whether what I'm drawing is real or strange.
I'm being sincere and I'm being human. I'm making mistakes or I'm doing things correctly, but I'm being human regardless. I'm talking about my pain and my joy, and I'm not saying it with words but mainly with colors and shapes. That's what I tried to do with the utmost sincerity and humility of a child.
From what type of software could help us make a movie faster to everything else regarding the textures. Some might think, "It's probably very easy to make a film with those textures," but it's much more difficult than what it appears to be. We had to discover a faster process because otherwise it could have taken us 10 years to make it.
A little bit more than 50% of what you see on screen is handcrafted and the other 50% was about emulating these textures on the computer. However, for us, when we were making it, we had to believe it was all handcrafted.
That was a very natural process because as I was creating the animatic I added music clips as reference of the kind of music I wanted in the film. These were from musicians like Naná Vasconcelos and Barbatuques, the body percussion group.
I draw things on the paper very freely but believing there is meaning to them already. There is already meaning in the colors, I don't need to be guided by words. I draw them and the meaning comes after. Every time we would start a new sequence we would change everything.
If I have a blank piece of paper and I draw a red figure, immediately this brings sounds and shapes to my mind. I tried to make a film in which every component supports the others while giving each other space and stimulating the creation of what's yet to come.
Is as if the music is another character or as if it was a part of this great opera. I also through about this project as a structure or as a sculpture made out of colors, rhythm, characters, and brush strokes, but with every single one of these always supporting one another.
We thought that using rap would draw a parallel with the protest music from the 60s and 70s that we found through the research for animadoc. When we thought about rap, Emicida immediately came to mind and we decided to call him to create this song bring the audience back to earth and put their feet on the ground. Emicida's song is the only one that has lyrics in actual understandable Portuguese.
