CEEA Talks: Jean-Claude Rozec & Leon Vidmar about TALES FROM THE MAGIC GARDEN “Autumn was the perfect season”
What if the story behind a production is almost as thrilling as the story of the film? It was MAUR film (Czech Republic) that secured the rights to Arnošt Goldflam’s book OF UNWANTED THINGS AND PEOPLE and with Artichoke (Slovakia), ZVVIKS (Slovenia) and Vivement Lundi! (France) brought together an interesting quartet of producers. In each country, the adaptation of one short story was launched, and then brought together in a narrative framework. The film emerged rather fragmented, and you could wonder if the narrative glue would be strong enough to keep all projects glued together. But the long wait was rewarded and the enchanting result premiered in the Berlinale festival’s Generation competition under its new title TALES FROM THE MAGIC GARDEN.
With so many production partners, you need a medium-sized minibus to get the entire team shipped to Berlin. We plucked two of the four directors off the bus for a chat. Jean-Claude Rozec (France) and Leon Vidmar (Slovenia) are responsible respectively for the overarching narrative, and the final story in which lonely old Bogdan joins a flock of birds in the sky for an incidental flight. They just saw their film celebrating its world premiere!
Jean-Claude Rozec: It was wonderful! There were 800 kids in the theatre, and their reactions were amazing. We only finished the film one month ago, so it was all very fresh – we discovered the final result on the big screen together with the audience.
But something was different in the premiere… There were less people dying than in the rough cut that circulated a while ago.
Rozec: We didn’t see that coming. In the initial version of the first short story, both parents got killed in a car crash. Now the scenes have been adjusted so that they are no longer dead. It was probably too harsh for the audience to have so many people dying in so little time, so the tone has been attenuated.
Leon Vidmar: In this complicated production set-up, many people are having a say. Probably some of them have asked for a less cruel storyline.
Can you explain the concept of the film in one minute?
Rozec: Tom, Susan, and Derek are for the first time visiting their grandfather after Grandma recently died. Granny was a master of storytelling: the kids gave her some ingredients that she then combined into a story. Susan feels the sadness of her brothers and tries to continue Granny’s storytelling ritual. Actually she is the hero of the film, tying the knots together among siblings. In this original set up, each short film is an adaptation of a story by Czech author Arnošt Goldflam, compiled in one overarching narrative.
What about that overarching story?
Rozec: It’s an original story, for which scriptwriter Blandine Jet picked some general elements from the works of Goldflam, staying through to the tone of his work. All short stories were developed separately by partners in different countries. My task was like a jigsaw puzzle, subtly connecting all the individual stories that apply to the sadness and grief of one specific character.
Because children at every age have different ways to deal with grief?
Rozec: For Tom, who’s only 6 years old, death is not yet a part of his reality. When he returns to Grandma’s house, he calls out to her even though he knows she is no longer there. His story, in which a catwoman takes care of two abandoned children, refers to a child’s greatest fear: the fear of being abandoned and left alone after the death of a parent. Derek is 10 and his story about a wild beast is a bit frightening, because Derek is angry and in denial; he refuses to grieve. The sadness in his heart he won’t share with others. The last story refers to Grandpa’s perspective, telling of an old man’s loss.
That story in particular poses the question of whether life is still worth living.
Vidmar: I am not that old yet, but even I can feel how with aging, you start asking yourself whether you still feel useful. In Slovenia, when people retire, they remain active, or take up a role in the community. I recently visited another country – which I won’t name – where it struck me how many people just stopped living at an older age, sitting at home, watching TV and being sad and angry at everybody. This is how I imagine the life of Bogdan, who has lost his lifetime partner. All the time they were doing everything together, and then all of a sudden she died. Now he still lives according to the same old routines, just for the sake of her. He is having breakfast and dinner as if she were still there, he goes to the graveyard to talk to her. As if the world doesn’t exist anymore and it’s just about his imagination of her.
Which reminds me of the film’s working title OF UNWANTED THINGS AND PEOPLE.
Rozec: This title was taken from a book by Arnošt Goldflam. It’s a reference to a box he filled with personal memories shortly after his father’s death. For a film, this title is perhaps less appropriate, but it fits nicely with the feelings these stories evoke.
One keyword I wrote down was ‘autumn’.
Rozec: The French title LES CONTES DU POMMIER (‘Tales from the Apple Tree’) suits the autumn season. For me it was mainly a matter of colours. I love orange and brown. The other stories were rather grey, to which I wanted to add my favourite colour palette. Autumn was the perfect season for me, not only aesthetically, but also in terms of content, with the dying summer, the dead leaves,…
Not to forget the scene in which the kids find an empty snail shell.
Rozec: That was a crucial scene for scriptwriter Blandine Jet, who is interested in how children understand grief and separation. The moment Tom finds that empty shell summed up the entire film theme for her, the understanding and acceptance of death, and how to transform this sadness into something meaningful.
Vidmar: Tom is exactly at the age when kids start asking questions about life and death. Already from the age of three, children seem to be intrigued by death in general.
This scene contains a beautiful sentence: “Never is a lifetime”. The stories seem to have a certain timelessness. Can you allocate them to a certain place or time?
Vidmar: Bogdan’s flat was probably renovated in the sixties, and hasn’t changed ever since. My gut feeling tells me this is the eighties or nineties. There is a digital alarm clock, but no digital phones. I try to avoid phones in general; what looks cool today might be old fashioned tomorrow. In my story, even the car looks timeless.
Another remarkable moment is the scene with the birds gathering around Bogdan. What’s going on there?
Vidmar: We sometimes joked a bit disrespectfully that basically Bogdan went into his backyard, took some LSD and started talking to the chickens. In the original story, Bogdan flies to Africa, meets a tribe of small people, he is crowned their king, and then returns. In the context of the film, this didn’t work, so we turned it into birds. Initially, he would end up on the birds’ throne, but more and more I came to understand that this wasn’t the way to go. There should be no king and no throne; his achievement is to become one of them. So they built him a huge nest.
He is still crowned with feathers.
Vidmar: Because all birds wear feathers, often in the weirdest colours. Moreover, this allows him later to connect with a little girl, passing on the crown to her as a gift. So it was not a daydream… he really has been somewhere out there.
The production rhythm for all four compiled shorts was very different.
Vidmar: Each short story was developed separately by a different director and producer according to their own work pace. The Czechs were the first ones to start, so I visited David Sukup’s set and met with the animators. Patricia Ortiz Martinez, doing the overall art direction, set the visual style, so we knew how to fit our parts into the bigger picture.
Czechia and Slovakia have a strong tradition in puppet animation. In what sense does this film carry on this tradition?
Vidmar: We don’t have this tradition in Slovenia. When discussing the animation style, we wondered if we were supposed to imitate these fast movements that are typical for the Czech tradition. As an animator – although I didn’t animate our own episode – I was educated in a contemporary stop motion style that looks more smooth. In TALES FROM THE MAGIC GARDEN, we didn’t need to aim for ultimate smoothness. Our animators got that message right, which resulted in a great uniformity throughout the entire film. It taught me that even smoothness has its limits, and that by adding a certain roughness, you’re also adding extra character. I found it a relief to work like this.
Rozec: As a student, I admired the films by Jiří Trnka, Karel Zeman, and Jan Švankmajer. I asked my team to remember some of those classics. Not because we wanted to imitate vintage animation, but it was about that feeling; the way glitches can be seen on screen, the roughness of the puppets, the motion that doesn’t need to be fluent all the time. It was a pleasure to animate so quickly and spontaneously.
You see it in the way the faces of the puppets are sculpted.
Rozec: It was important to keep it simple, as for the animators to concentrate on expressivity and motion. Little lips pinned to a head, and a line for eyebrows to make the eyes blink… That was basically the technique that I learned 20 years ago, it’s not often used anymore, but it’s still the best.
The haircuts look all natural, except Bogdan’s, who’s hair seems to be made of clay.
Vidmar: That’s not clay. Bogdan’s hair is just like the others, but it contains wires to have it animated when he is flying, having the wind blowing through it. Sometimes they broke, and I needed scissors and scalpels to try and isolate individual hairpiles, or to replace wires and then glue them back together. In that sense, the puppets fit beautifully to the overall scenery.
One last detail… You have the ultimate treehouse of my dreams!
Rozec: Indeed! Even as an adult, I wish I could have one like this.
Vidmar: You could even sleep in it!
Interview conducted by Gert Hermans for CEE Animation.
