Still: A Dog's Life - Sophie Olga de Jong & Sytske Kok

A Dog’s Life, by Sophie Olga de Jong & Sytske Kok, is a film about curiosity. It is also a film about death, and its inevitability, and how to come to terms with it. When Grandma’s dog Stella dies, granddaughter Luna helps with the burial. But for Luna, this throws up more questions than answers. What is really happening beneath the earth when you’re dead? When Grandma declines to answer, Luna is tempted to see for herself what’s going on six feet under…

The idea for the short animation came from a real-life event when the dog of co-director Kok’s parents died. Her two young nieces helped to bury the animal in “very natural, very organic way.” But as the weeks passed, the girls became more and more curious.

“One of the questions was ‘can we make a little hole to see how she's doing down there?’” remembers Kok. “And then the other one after some time asked, ‘can she only eat sand now that she's down there?’ That was, in a way, fascinating, but at that moment I thought, maybe there's some kind of a horror idea growing in their minds.”

Kok comes from a Catholic background but was determined not to impose any kind of religious rationale on an answer. At the same time she didn’t want to avoid addressing the issue altogether. Who knew what further thoughts were brewing in the minds of the girls? Kok therefore decided to give form to her dilemma. The resulting short film is selected for  Annecy 2026 short film competition, after celebrating selections for Cinekid and International Trickfilm-Festival Stuttgart last May.

Co-director Sophie Olga de Jong equates working with Kok to playing table-tennis.

“Sytske writes a little bit, or a first draft, and then I start drawing. Then sometimes it happens that I visualise something completely different and Sytske takes inspiration from that. So it's like ping-pong. We go back and forth. We have a different starting point. But it works very well together.”

One of the pair’s key stylistic choices for the film was to utilize two primary colours - orange and blue - which makes for a highly dramatic rendering of the tale. “We both tried, in various ways, to visualise the spiritual side of death and the material side of death,” De Jong explains the colour palate. “We wanted to have both sides in a literal sense - above the ground and below the ground. So I tried to find ways to visualise that in a conceptual way, and also within the animation when, in her contemplative moments, the grandmother’s orange outline moves, and she becomes partly transparent. So there’s the warmness of life and the coolness, maybe the spiritual side, of death.”

Both filmmakers underline that the nine-minute film, produced by Peter Lindhout for Spotted Bird with festival distribution handled by Kaboom Distribution, is the perfect length for the story they are telling.

“In the animatic stage, that's when we started to time the drawings, and we were very much focused on creating a right balance between making it emotional but not sentimental, and having comic relief. There's so much to the timing of the animation, and in the editing as well,” says de Jong. Also, the pace was very important, adds Kok.

“It was essential that it didn't run too quickly, because you need a slow pace at some moments in the story to really let all this emotion, or the thoughts that you have around the subject, to sink in.”

After A Dog’s Life’s selection for Annecy, the filmmakers are hopeful of subsequent distribution deals (especially if festival prizes are forthcoming) and to entice a sales agent.

In closing, the directors underline once more the effectiveness of their modus operandi, stressing the sense of organic growth develops out of their individual skill-sets.

“We complement each other,” says Kok. De Jong offers a corrective. “We complete each other,” she ends.