The Molepire

Curious mole Tonda spends his days inventing a device that would allow him to see the world from above. Digging his way back home, after spending yet another day testing his invention, he finds a wooden box with a toothy winged being Emilka in it. The two share a common desire: discover the world and find a friend. Two creatures, the mole and the vampire, outsiders from different worlds not only help each other fulfill their dreams, they even become blood-bonded for life.

Director’s statement
A few years have passed since I first started thinking about The Molepire, which was always about an unlikely friendship. The initial impulse was to make a film for children during a time of fear and loneliness (themes that I explore in my live-action work) to show them that not everything unknown and new must be bad, and not every crazy wish is unattainable. With the birth of my now almost three-year-old son, this motivation became even stronger: Children have a right to positive and inspiring stories.

I remember as a child helping my grandmother set up devices in the garden to scare away or deter moles, and how I cried and refused to dig up molehills. It seemed absolutely wrong to destroy the little, defenseless creature's structures of dirt, which it only made to see what it was like above ground. The main character of our short puppet film is a mole named Tonda, whose dream is to leave his dark and lonely life in the dirt and finally experience the freedom that the world above offers. Freedom in the form of light, warmth, space... to experience all of this firsthand. He is fascinated by human things he finds while digging his burrows and tunnels. He collects them and, together with his firefly friend, uses them to make various inventions—the most important of which are artificial wings.

Tonda gains an unexpected friend in another outsider—a little bat named Emilka. Thanks to his curiosity, she gets her freedom after Tonda opens her little coffin—Emilka is actually a vampire! It turns out that, just like him, Emilka also longs for a friend, and she can help Tonda more than it seems at first glance. We spent a lot of time during development discussing the film's final scene, where Tonda's own wings grow thanks to Emilka's bite. The current version feels significant to Tonda's character: Tonda offers himself up because he wants to help Emilka. She sacrificed herself for him when she threw herself into the scorching sunlight, and he now wants to altruistically repay her kindness. He doesn't know he'll "get" anything in return; he does it simply because he believes it's the right thing to do.

During development, we also decided to completely abandon the substitute for speech between the two characters (which was originally supposed to be in the form of bubbles with simplified drawn animation) and instead tell the story entirely without words. I think this will make The Molepire cleaner and prevent it from being unnecessarily descriptive and explanatory. This way, nothing will distract the child viewer from the core of the story.

I'm very glad that the visual side of our project is being led by Bára Anna, whose successful puppet film Love Is Just a Death Away is intended for a more adult audience, but in its story of cute puppets set in the unpleasant environment of a landfill, it also resonates with our theme in a way. In The Molepire, we want to combine the technology of stop-motion puppet animation, which will be used for everything underground, but above ground, we will combine our puppets with live-action filming. I think this could further highlight the contrast between Tonda's "ordinary" world and his "dream" world. At the same time, because Tonda's home will already be full of real human things, the transition won't be too jarring. Our initial tests confirm this, and as a reference for combining these techniques, we are using the film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021), which was nominated in 2023 for a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) and an Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Animated Film.

The Molepire is a film about friendship, but at its heart are other themes as well: that our external differences don't mean we have nothing in common, and that even if we look terrifying on the outside, we can be kind at heart. Also, that we should be brave and curious, and most importantly, that no matter how crazy our dreams may seem, they don't have to be unattainable.