This is the first one that you have done that isn't an Irish story.
We thought that this story was really interesting. We thought that it mattered to tell the story so that children on this side of the world could experience what it might be like for kids on the other side of the world, like refugees, and what kids are going through in different parts of the world and how they might be able to help. At the end of the day it is still just a story about a young girl who kind of has an argument with her father at the start and then just needs to get him back so that she can apologise. That's the way that I've always looked at it. She's just mad to get her dad back. So it's a very personal film, but with very universal themes. I can't really recall how much of that is in the book, but Nora kind of liked it as she is just rebelling against her dad and doesn't like stories anymore and then she has to rediscover her storytelling to keep the family entertained and to keep their spirits up and her own spirits up at the end of the movie.
One of the beautiful things about the film is that dual narrative. That fable that runs through it and the two different styles of animation used.
I guess that's a thing that we have done in the past as well. We've had two styles within the movies sometimes as an escape, or in The Secret of Kells it was when they were thinking about what had happened in the past then we would go into a sort of cut-out style. A lot of people told stories and the stories came to life in a different style. On this occasion it was more to get us out of that real world Kabul. Usually our films are quite illustrative and we had gorgeous designs for Kabul and the backgrounds, but they really just too beautiful in one sense. We realised that we wanted Parvana to be very much in the real world. Nora wanted it to feel like she had to look around corners and we had to choose perspective, which we didn't have a lot of in our previous films, to kind of add a bit of tension and that she is in a real place where trouble could come around any corner. And then when she's telling stories we wanted it to be so colourful and be a lift from that to reflect what her imagination is flying away to.
The animation has a folded paper look to it.
Yes. We had some brilliant concept art done here with a paper cut-out style. It was based on some Persian art that we had seen that was very flat and cut-out. And we thought "wouldn't it be interesting to animate in cut-out". There was an amazing artist Janis Aussel, who was a paper cut-out animator that we thought was amazing. We did some character designs by Reza Riahi, who was the Iranian art-director that we had, and then she translated a lot of those into paper cut-out style. We tested animation on the paper cut-outs but realised that it would take 10 years to do with actual paper cut-out, what with all the multi-plane cameras. So we produced that style digitally using Moho and the guys in Studio Guru in Canada did an amazing job reproducing the lighting that you might have. They created light at the edge of the paper and the bumps in the paper. They really made it look like paper cut-out, which was great as that was the effect that we wanted.
How did that division of labour work between Ireland, Canada and Luxembourg?
In Ireland it was all of the boarding and Nora worked with Anita Doron on the script, and then the character designs and art direction was all
24 CinÉireann / May 2018