Still: Cartoon Physics - Ru Kuwahata & Max Porter

The stop-motion film Cartoon Physics is rooted in a number of factors. One day, directors Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter were in the garden when their small daughter discovered a dead bird, with ants crawling across its eyes. It was a harsh sight that they didn't quite know how to explain to her, until they read a poem named Cartoon Physics Part 1, by US poet Nick Flynn, which contextualises the process of living via a child’s wonderous, cartoon-like view of the world.

In their film, Ru and Max re-imagine the scene. The mother is determined to shield her daughter from the experience, in the same characters in cartoons are shielded from pain or bounce back from adversity, all the time defying the laws of physics and biology. Eventually the mother comes to accept that protecting her child from the realities of the world is futile, and at the end of the film, the pair bury the dead bird.

It’s not a sad film, far from it. Rather, it is both life-affirming and funny, as we see the child’s imagination played out in cartoon form. Yes she can draw a door on a wall and walk through into a world where all disasters require a hero, and where you only hurtle down to earth when you realise you’ve made the mistake of walking off the ledge. Also, in this cartoon world, if the daughter jumps she will always be saved.

Directors Ru, who is Japanese, and Max (US) are old friends of Ka-Ching producers Joost van den Bosch and Erik Verkerk. They were looking for a co-production partner to join Miyu Productions (France) and Hélium Films (Switzerland) on the projects. Van den Bosch and Verkerk were big fans of their previous work, notably their Oscar-nominated short Negative Space (2017, and also based on a poem, this time by Ron Koertge). They eagerly agreed.

“Of course we are all in this age where we are likely to have small children so that's why the subject of this film really spoke to us,” says Van den Bosch. “It is about how to parent. What do you tell the children? What do you shield them from? And how sometimes it's perfectly okay to let them see the world as it is, because they will always perceive it in a different way than you think it is.”

He and partner Verkerk also loved the intertextual, self-reflective aspect of the film. “They try to explain it all within the world of cartoons and how that world works in the child's brain, which is something that we really like as well as we make a lot of cartoons. And we are also big fans of stop motion, as well as of Max and Ru of course. So it was really a no-brainer when they proposed to us that we co-produce this film.”

Funding Cartoon Physics was also a no-brainer for the Netherlands Film Fund who supported the project with a €50,000 minority co-production grant.

“The word that we had was that they were really happy to support this film, because they were all very touched by the story, the outlines and the images. We felt really supported by the Film Fund.”

The grant enabled Ka-Ching to send Jasper Kuipers, “one of the most talented motion animators from the Netherlands,” to the Miyu studios in France. Some of the film’s puppets were built by Pedri Animation in the Netherlands. The CGI VFX shots were handled by Capybara in Utrecht. All the music and sound effects/mixing were completed by Bram Meindersma and mixed at Posta Audio in Amsterdam, while some of the compositing was undertaken by Dutch professionals Balder Westein and Peter Mansfelt.

The film will world-premiere at the upcoming Annecy International Animation Film Festival, after which is hoped it will travel widely. “Max and Ru have a track history of over a thousand festivals with their films, Oscar selections and everything. So we're kind of hoping we can follow along that path.” Broadcasters already on board are RTS (Switzerland) and ARTE. “After that, it's very much open for distribution and sales,” Van den Bosch signs off.