With this issue’s quarterly Top Ten Visual Effects/Animation Chart and related coverage, SHOOT thought it apropos to seek out director Mikey Please who’s known for his distinctive brand of stop-motion animation. Please burst on the scene just a few years ago with his Master’s thesis film, The Eagleman Stag which earned a slot in the 2011 Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase. The animated short then went on to screen at Sundance, win the Short Animation BAFTA Award and land on the Oscar shortlist.
The Eagleman Stag is a darkly comic stop-motion film centered on Peter whose obsession with the fast pace of time seems to escalate all the more as he ages. As we see most of this man’s life pass before our eyes, he does everything in his power to slow the passage of time.
“The concept of time being relevant to age has been something that’s interested and bothered me for as long as I can remember and is partly what led me to make this film,” explained Please in a 2012 installment of SHOOT ’s The Road To Oscar series. “Many of the early scenes are direct memories–such as being four years old and getting angry at having to wait a quarter of my life until my next birthday. I have a very vivid memory of comparing a day to an acorn and a week to an apple, then later downsizing the apple to a plum…Peter’s job as a taxonomist [a classifier of bio-diversity] is more a reference to the way in which he himself perceives time. He looks at the glorious expanse of the animal kingdom and puts it into neatly labeled boxes just as he looks at his experience of time and treats it with the same unwavering logic–an exponential increase of pace with age. That said, there is certainly a strong similarity in his mildly reticular nature to that of an animator, and perhaps myself. Maybe therein lay the attraction.”
Also in 2012, Please was awarded a three-month fellowship in Tokyo by the Japanese Center for Cultural Affairs. During this time, he developed the script for another stop-motion short, Marilyn Myller, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, winning the award for Best New British Animation. And last month Marilyn Myller, was nominated for the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
Director Please is also active in spots and branded content via affiliated studios Hornet in the U.S. and Blinkink in the U.K.
SHOOT: What did the inclusion of Marilyn Myller in this year’s Sundance Shorts program mean to you personally as well as professionally?
Please: Sundance is a pretty special place. Though no doubt there’s plenty of actual bona fide business stuff going on, it’s an artist-led event. For it to be this internally renowned and hugely respected industry savvy, kooky-artist event still blows my mind. It’s a huge accomplishment. Going as a filmmaker means you get to see a really wonderful side of it. Lots of gentle ego massaging and general good-time having amongst this extremely talented group of people. Everyone’s spinning a penny on the tip of their nose or breathing fire from a beer bottle whilst riding a unicycle. When The Eagleman Stag screened there, it marked the beginning of a fairly drastic transformation in my professional life. The film went from being this obscure little thing my mother liked to being shown in front of nearly 1,000 cinema audiences around the world over the next couple of years. It’s not bad going for an indie short. Actually, I think a big motivation for making another short was simply to give me an excuse to go back to Sundance. Maybe it’s less like the crazy circus and more like that warm, soft scene in The Snowman, when the snowman flies the little boy to lapland to meet Father Christmas (Robert Redford) and all the other snowmen and women (filmy people) are there having a massive party. Yep, it’s more like that.
SHOOT: What inspired Marilyn Myller and please provide a synopsis of the film?
Please: Marilyn was developed during a three-month residency in Japan in 2012. I started by working with some pre-existing scripts, trying to wrestle them into something that I felt confident enough to dedicate a year of my life to. But over that time, the actual process of being locked in this tiny room on the 34th floor of a Tokyo skyscraper trying to devise something earth shattering and profoundly beautiful, became more interesting that the scripts themselves. It’s such a weird process and I think anyone who’s ever made anything, from baking a cake to giving birth, on some level can relate to that feeling; of expectation and reality and the difference, good or bad, between aspirations and what we actually end up with. So the film slowly morphed into a meditation on what it means to make something. It’s a pretty personal piece of work; it feels odd to talk about it, but I guess that’s the point and hopefully what makes the film interesting.
SHOOT: What’s the appeal of the stop motion animation discipline for you?
Please: It’s direct. It’s expressive and beautiful. All the obvious things. And I think there’s still a whole world of unexplored potential there. The fact that so few people actually work this way, and do it well, makes it all the more appealing to me. It means you can be truly innovative in very simple ways. To solve a problem and realize, hot dang, I’ve never seen this done like this before. That’s a buzz hard to beat.
SHOOT: How has your advertising work at Hornet and Blinkink informed your work in shorts and for that matter your feature film, Zero Greg, which is currently in development?
Please: Well, I haven’t actually done a great deal of advertising work, and to be honest when I have it’s been the other way around. The short personal projects have informed the commercial work, keeping things fresh. That’s why it’s so important to keep that kind of work alive, as a space to experiment and fuck up and it not really matter so much. It’ll only be your precious feelings that are hurt, not your kneecaps. That said, I just did an ad using 3D printed replacements for the first time, so that was pretty exciting.
Zero Greg is kind of its own thing, but yes, everything is feeding into that monster. I’d say that every bit of work, commercial or otherwise, is something that informs Zero Greg. I’m on the umpteenth draft of the script. It’s taken a long time but it’s worth it, to get the writing completely solid.
This is by far the largest piece I’ve written on my own and the biggest challenge of my career to date, but with a little luck and a heck load more work, the most rewarding.
