Still: Water Girl - Sandra Desmazières

In Sandra Desmazières’ mesmeric short animation, Mia, who is now old but still dives every day for oysters and urchins, looks back on a life in which she always craved, but was always denied, a child. 

Water Girl* is small in story terms but vast in its evocation of Mia’s water world. It’s a film in which her memory of love (and all its tenderness) merges with her memory of the sea (with all of its movement and colours), all set beneath sumptuous Asian skies and vivid sunsets. It is also a film about the emotional void that Mia is desperate to fill. In her dreams, she may swim in a sea of pregnant women, but she is destined never to swim as one of them. Eventually, as she liberates a giant whale from the trash-filled net it drags along the sea floor, she also frees herself from her burden of childlessness, before assessing one last time the setting sun. 

Dutch producer Richard Valk (Valk Productions) is an avowed fan of co-production –  “there is almost no other way to do animation films anymore,” he says – and was introduced to the project by his friend Olivier Catherin who, in turn, paired Valk with French production company Caïmans Productions. 

“What attracted me directly was Sandra’s style of working. Every frame is hand-drawn and hand-coloured with old-fashioned pencils.”

“You don't see that so often anymore. There is of course a lot of 3D and 2D animation made by the computer. But the handmade approach is rare. So that is what really attracted me. Secondly, of course, I loved the way she built the story without any dialogue and with dreams sequences.”

Valk and his colleagues oversaw the colour grading on the project, in the process meeting all of director Desmazières’ very specific requirements.

“She had a sort of colour template in which she said how, for example, the shirt of this woman needs to be red. But not any red, but 242 Cadmium Red,” the producer recalls. “All the woman’s clothes, all the parts of her ring all had a specific colour, and so we used hundreds of different coloured pencils.”

“And then we had to [apply] a lot of coffee, because then we could create the right skin tone. We even had to have a particular strength of coffee to get the exact skin tone.”

Valk stresses how the directors he works with bring something very personal to each project, whether they be the late Rosto, Robert Jonathan Koeyers, Hisko Hulsing or Adriaan Lokman. This was very much the case with Sandra Desmazières as well.

“They're all people who want to tell a personal story that is almost a hundred per cent connected deeply with their being an artist,” he says. “In this case, Sandra has a very personal story that I know can touch a lot of people - the wish for a child. That is, I think, why I chose make it.” Ironically, Valk has recently produced another film with a theme that seems diametrically opposed to Water Girl, but which will also chime with wide audiences. “It's called Unlearning Motherhood, also a short animation, which asks why is society pushing younger people so much to have children, and why is it not acceptable not to have children?”

Would it have been possible to create Water Girl using AI, I ask Valk. No, is his definitive answer. 

“This specific style is only possible when it is handmade. I can say that very clearly because I have done a lot of research lately for another project, Danse macabre by Hisko Hulking, which uses oil paintings for the background, and takes a lot of work. Specifically for that project, we tested if we could recreate parts of these paintings with the help of AI. It was not possible. Not at this moment, maybe in one year, maybe in two years, but at this moment it's not at all possible to recreate this kind of feel with AI.”

 Put simply, AI cannot yet replicate the delicacy or sense of nuance that hand-drawn, hand-coloured animation can deliver (although for Danse macabre it is used as a complementary tool).

“It's difficult to describe. It's like years ago when I was working with 35mm or 16mm,” Valk finds an analogy. “Then ARRI came along with the first digital camera that, ok, really looked a lot like film. But still, it was not film.”

Watergirl is written and directed by Sandra Desmazières and produced by Caïmans Productions (FR) in coproduction with Animais (PT) and Valk Productions (NL). Festival distribution is handled by Studio Wasia and sales by L'Agence du Court Métrage. 

Find out more about the Dutch line-up at Cannes here.

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*film supported by the Netherlands Film Fund