Awards-season roundtables tend to follow a familiar script: studio-backed films, rehearsed talking points, and careers recaps that move along well-lit, well-funded paths. Our Oscars chat did not.<\/p>\n
Instead, we gathered five filmmakers whose animated features were made independently, on shoestring budgets, and with no established pipelines to guide them. Their films span documentary, rotoscoped historical drama, DIY CG musical, autobiographical family portrait, and hand-drawn Western fantasia \u2014 and in some cases took more than a decade to complete.<\/p>\n
This is Cartoon Brew\u2019s Rogue Roundtable.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The directors behind Endless Cookie (Seth and Peter Scriver), Boys Go to Jupiter (Julian Glander), Dog of God (Lauris and Raitis \u0100bele), Black Butterflies (David Baute), and Slide (Bill Plympton), joined Cartoon Brew for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about how these films were developed and produced, how they found their unique looks, and what the directors learned along the way.<\/p>\n
The roundtable brings together filmmakers working in radically different styles \u2013 hand-drawn, CG, rotoscoped, documentary \u2013 and at vastly different stages in their animation careers. In the end, the filmmakers behind all five films share a common reality: they each made their films without studio infrastructure, without guaranteed marketing, and with no promise of wide distribution.<\/p>\n
For David Baute, director of Black Butterflies, the journey began in 2013, and in live action. \u201cI consider myself a documentary filmmaker,\u201d Baute said. \u201cI\u2019ve always worked in social, political, and environmental documentary.\u201d Living in Spain\u2019s Canary Islands, Baute has long been immersed in the realities of migration and climate displacement. \u201cMy grandparents emigrated to Cuba. My parents emigrated to Venezuela. Migration has always been part of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baute and his team filmed climate migrants across the Caribbean, northern Kenya, and India, but eventually reached a point where parts of the story could no longer be captured with a camera. \u201cThere were experiences \u2014 exploitation, homelessness, violence \u2014 that we could not ethically or practically film,\u201d he said. \u201cBut they were essential to understanding what happens after migration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Animation became a way forward. \u201cI still believe Black Butterflies is a documentary,\u201d Baute explained. \u201cIt simply uses animation as a tool to tell the truth.\u201d Every visual and sound detail in the film is rooted in real documentation. \u201cWhen the women sing at night in the film, that is their real singing. We recorded it during production.\u201d<\/p>\n
That blurring of documentary and animation resonates strongly in Endless Cookie, an autobiographical animated documentary directed by Canadian brothers Seth Scriver and Pete Scriver. The film took nearly a decade to complete, following Pete\u2019s family in real time as their lives, and the film itself, expanded. \u201cOne advantage of animation is that you can exaggerate and make fun of things,\u201d Seth said. \u201cYou can draw your family in funny ways and still be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the long timeline came with its own challenges. \u201cWe started animating when the kids were really young,\u201d Seth added. \u201cAnd then suddenly they\u2019re older, their voices are changing, and you\u2019re like, \u2018This is insane.\u2019\u201d Still, animation allowed the film to evolve naturally. \u201cThe story kept interrupting itself,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd eventually we realized that was the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Julian Glander, director of Boys Go to Jupiter, the leap from shorts to feature was less a strategic move than an act of curiosity. \u201cI genuinely didn\u2019t think it would play theaters,\u201d Glander said. \u201cMy goal was just to finish it. Maybe screen it at one festival and put it online.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, the film went on to screen at more than 50 festivals and in cinemas across the country, driven by its distinctive CG style, DIY score, and deeply personal tone. \u201cI came from illustration and DIY music,\u201d Glander said. \u201cSo the question was, what if a feature film could be like a novel \u2014 where one person\u2019s fingerprints are on everything?\u201d<\/p>\n
That philosophy extended to the film\u2019s music, animation, and design. \u201cI wanted to do it myself because I wanted to,\u201d he said plainly, calling himself selfish. \u201cWe brought that \u2018figure it out yourself\u2019 mentality from being broke musicians. If no one\u2019s doing sound, you do sound.\u201d<\/p>\n
Latvian brothers Lauris and Raitis \u0100bele brought a different perspective with Dog of God, a rotoscoped historical horror-drama rooted in real events from near their own hometown. Initially conceived as live action, the film pivoted when animation opened new possibilities. \u201cWith live action, you are limited by what exists,\u201d Lauris said. \u201cWith animation, you can go anywhere \u2014 a medieval castle, hell itself \u2014 it\u2019s all possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rotoscoping, however, came with its own hard lessons. \u201cWe only truly learned how to make a rotoscope film after we finished it,\u201d Raitis laughed. \u201cOnly then did we understand what movements work, what breaks, and where you need to limit yourself.\u201d The result is a film that balances realism with R-rated abstraction, never straying too far from its physical roots.<\/p>\n
Rounding out the group is animation legend and two-time Oscar nominee Bill Plympton, whose hand-drawn Western-inspired feature Slide continues his decades-long commitment to independent animation. \u201cI just love drawing,\u201d Plympton said. \u201cEspecially bad guys. They\u2019re so much fun to draw.\u201d In fact, he estimates there are \u201cabout 200 bad guys\u201d in the film.<\/p>\n
Despite his long resume, Plympton emphasized that his motivation hasn\u2019t changed, and it\u2019s never been money. \u201cI barely get by,\u201d he admitted. \u201cBut it\u2019s magical to see your drawings move on a big screen with music and voices. That pleasure is what keeps me going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Together, these five filmmakers represent a side of animation that never gets the attention it deserves.<\/p>\n
Our full Rogue Roundtable expands far beyond what we could have covered in a single article \u2014 conversations about craft, failure, sound design, funding gaps, and creative freedom \u2014 and we\u2019re thrilled to share it. We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Awards-season roundtables tend to follow a familiar script: studio-backed films, rehearsed talking points, and careers recaps that move…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-361780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}