I was able to finally watch this beautifully animated film and the aspect I was interested the most was how the animal characters would be portrayed and animated.
Having animated few different animals during my previous years at university, I’m always fascinated by the approach every single studio or animator takes to bring the character to life. Generally speaking, I know that sometimes a good level of anthropomorphism is required for the audience to engage with an animal we might not necessarily be familiar with in terms of body language. In my work I’ve tried to opt more for realism when depicting animal emotions but I found I was not necessarily giving them the attributes specific for a certain species. For instance, my graduation project was about a couple of foxes and at the time my research mainly involved sounds and the anatomy, but was unable to observe foxes at a close distance, and that affected the overall performance.
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse’s animal representation works extremely well for the story line. Even though they are quite stylised and make the audience always aware of the fact that they are drawn, they are animated in an almost hyper realistic way, except for the Mole. The realism is broken only when some of the animals intimately interact with the boy, such as when the Fox puts his paw on the Boy’s knee to comfort him. There’s a scene when the Boy, the Mole and the Fox first meet the Horse and he starts playing with them in the most horse like manner, which is beautiful to watch but also very clear emotion wise, even though people may not be familiar with horse behaviour.
The illustrations found in the original book rely heavily on body language to convey emotions: we often see the Horse nuzzling the Boy when reassuring him and when displaying affection, and looking down towards the Mole and the Fox with his ears forward when listening to them. I love how these details have been adapted into the cinematic version. I almost thought that the lipsync was unnecessary and that the dialogue didn’t need to be animated. Animating a lipsync on a horse must have been challenging: I remember reading about Dreamworks Spirit’s director explaining the choice of having no taking horses in the film as they couldn’t link facial expressions and mouth movements together, so he opted for the eyes and body language to convey the characters’ emotions. In this film, we almost see the opposite: there’re no eyebrows or detailed eyes to portray emotions, so a lot is conveyed through dialogue and body language. The lipsync is minimal, and in some scenes it was hard to actually see the mouth movements.
