“A lot of documents have to be prepared in connection with the financing of a movie. Of course, a script, a budget, cast and crew lists, but often a director’s statement is also required. I tried to squeeze something like this out of directors Richard and Karsten, but neither of them was particularly motivated to invest a lot of time in it. So, I decided to do an interview with both of them, and the transcript is the director’s statement of this movie,” says producer Chantal Nissen.
Young panda bear Ping’s best friend, Jielong the dragon, is kidnapped and brought to Africa. Ping follows her without question. After a dangerous ocean-crossing he reaches the faraway continent, totally unknown to pandas. There, our unlikely hero with a big heart, relying on his wits and some new found friends, needs to rescue Jielong from an evil lion and his henchman.
Interview by Chantal Nissen with Richard Claus and Karsten Kiilerich (in 2020
What is the origin of the idea and the story?
RC: I have a 6-year-old daughter (note: she is 10 in the meantime), and besides reading all kinds of stories to her, we are also inventing stories together. Her favourite characters in our own stories are baby-animals (in human terms probably her own age), which are most of the time from Africa. Seriously, the idea to tell a story with African animals was born this way. The next thought was to add a hero who would be a “fish out of water”, and that might have to do with myself. Then Chantal Nissen came up with the panda bear, who we subsequently designed as a role model for toleration and tolerance. In this context
I might want to mention that my wife is from Kenya and both of my kids are “donker”, as the Dutch would say, and toleration and tolerance are terms which play a big role in our life.
KK: Richard brought the idea to me. He wanted to create a fish out of water story and send a Panda to Africa. It’s a wonderful and colourful combination with loads of options for drama and fun. Richard has been living in Africa for a while, so it might have to do with that. He loves that continent and he presented the idea to Edward Noeltner, the CEO of Cinema Management Group. They are a sales agent who is willing to engage in the development of ideas that they like. The animated movie “Loving Vincent” is one of them. It turned out to be a good choice, and let me add, we all worked together on the creation of “The little Vampire 3D”.
How did you work on the script together?
KK: It’s been a real fun journey. We know each other since “The Ugly Duckling & Me” and we also did “The Little Vampire 3D” together, so we connect, and that’s an advantage. You really have to be able to swallow a camel or two… or let me rephrase: You really have to be open-minded and communicative. If you try to protect your own idea because you are vain, then forget about it.
RC: Our practical collaboration (after having just exchanged thoughts) started with the second draft of the screenplay. We were working together in the same room in Copenhagen for a week. First, we made decisions what to keep and what to change, and then we went back to a new step outline. By the way: it is better to go “back to the drawing board” all the time for a new and hopefully better version. If you just make changes here and there in the same script, it will always remain the same script. That may be a way to polish dialogues or so, but not if you seriously want to change things. We were working act after act. We discussed, then I was writing the new step outline, then Karsten wrote a quick and first version of each scene, we discussed again, and then I took the scene and wrote a revised version, we discussed again and agreed on what the scene should be like.
KK: Sometimes you really have to accept input from co-writers even though you like your own ideas better. In the case of “Panda Bear in Africa” it really went smoothly. Neither Richard or I need to prove our own genius. We work for the film and we understand what the other guy is saying, kind of.
RC: Obviously our skills to write English dialogues are somewhat limited, and we knew all along that we would need someone to help us with that.
What did screenwriter Robert Sprackling contribute?
KK: Robert worked with us on two versions of the script. He is a very experienced and competent scriptwriter. He came up with a series of ideas that expanded the storyuniverse and took the outline to a higher level. We had quite a lot of conversations on email and Skype and Richard went to London several times in order to discuss the material with him.
RC: Robert is a very energetic person with very strong opinions. He forces you to have a good reason for everything in the story. That was sometimes hard, because you started to get used to certain things, of which you thought they would work, and you were happy about them, and then he comes and questions everything again. But like our hero Ping: Sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone if you want to achieve something, and that is what Rob forced us to do.
KK: Robert also put the final dialogue lines to the paper. We decided to do the script in English and Robert has a pretty obvious advantage being English himself. Of course, we had intense discussions concerning the content, but I can honestly say that we always landed on our feet and we always found a common direction.
RC: Robert worked on lots of scripts. Besides his credited work he did tons of polishes and re-writes for all kind of well know animation studios. It was clear that with his experience he would not limit himself to some dialogue polishing, nor did we want to limit him to that.
What has changed in terms of content in the story in the various versions of the script?
KK: First it was more or less a road movie. Then we added a kidnapping. Then we decided to change our dragon, in order to make it a real Chinese dragon, and this again affected the story. In the meantime we defined the tone of the film and worked out the relations between the characters. On top of that a lot of things were revised. Scenes changed places and the ending was reworked. Don’t forget: Three different writers from three different but all European cultural backgrounds worked together.
Is it only about entertainment?
KK: May I quote the Danish poet Piet Hein? “Taking fun as simply fun – and earnestness in earnest – shows how thoroughly thou – none of the two discernest.” I don’t think you should limit yourself to only creating an entertaining movie. If you do not have an element of earnest the movie will probably not be entertaining either. You simply need to address the doubt, the bad consciousness and the fear of the characters. Otherwise, you will end up with a one-dimensional movie, and that’s neither interesting nor entertaining.
RC: …and by the way, what’s wrong with entertainment? Children and their parents definitely don’t go to the movies to get bored. Yes, we want to make an entertaining film, a fun and funny adventure, which will also be accessible to families with smaller children. But there is also a deeper message in our film about diversity and friendship, crossing the boundaries to “the others” and learning to understand them. Although the film has no human characters, we will ensure that the film’s young audiences can easily identify with our main heroes, which at first glance seem exotic. The panda bear Ping and the dragon Jielong will take the audience with them on a spectacular but also enlightening journey.
Why does the story need to be told?
KK: Let me put it like this: I do not think that the human race would stop breathing if we will not tell this story. On the other hand, it’s a new and never seen combination of a panda, dragons and African wildlife. It’s an interesting friendship story between creatures from different backgrounds and different worlds, they learn to communicate, to accept and respect each other, become friends.
RC: The subject of strangers/foreigners/refugees is one of the big issues of our time. Demagogues around the world build their cases based on prejudices about “the others”. Understanding and acceptance of “the others” is the underlying theme of Panda Bear in Africa”, and in a way this theme was also beneath the surface in the story of “The Little Vampire 3D” as well.
KK: I guess moviemaking is all about giving the audience a fresh and unseen adventure and some food for thoughts, and I certainly think that this is what the audience will get when they go to the Cinema and watch “Panda Bear in Africa”, follow our panda Ping on his journey…
RC: …who is a lovable, polite and resourceful character, who protects his old friends and finds new friends under the most unlikely circumstances.
Can you say something about the characters?
RC: We have a great variety of animal characters, which obviously represent humans: From a small and fast spoken talapoin monkey to a gnarled orangutan sailor, from an angry hyena to a spoilt lion prince. And because these are animals, and it is animation, and it is bigger than life, all these characters can speak in their own and very special characteristic way.
KK: Panda Ping, our protagonist, has to overcome unlimited challenges and he has to learn to trust himself. Being a panda in far-away Africa is certainly challenging to the limit. Jielong is a young female dragon and she is kidnapped, with another level of problems, especially since the power-seeking lion Shakeel believes that dragons spit fire, but Chinese dragons can’t do that. And then there will be a huge gallery of supporting characters in our movie, from rhinos to meerkats, from jackals to elephants and giraffes.
RC: The characters and the story are inspired by fables of animals and fairy tales, which exist in all cultures around the world. We know about old Dutch animal stories from the Middle Ages, for example “Van den vos Reynaerde”, and there are also more contemporary works, like the stories from Anton Koolhaas. In this tradition, Dutch human characters, human values and conflicts are embodied by a variety of anthropomorphic animal characters.
What is the theme?
KK: Friendship… understanding and acceptance of foreigners. And add to that: the willingness to ignore your own needs and go to the end of the world to protect your friends.
RC: Also coming of age. And not only for Ping, our main character, who has to “man up” to achieve what he needs to achieve, but for Jielong too, who dreams to be a grown-up dragon from the beginning and in the end learns what a grown up dragon can do, for example flying.
Why so far from home, why China and Africa?
KK: Thank you. That’s a nice question. We are doing animation. We are not limited by anything. Only by our imagination.
RC: We hope and know that our film will have a bigger audience outside the borders of the Netherlands or the borders of the co-producing countries than inside these borders. It is common knowledge that animated films in general travel better across the borders of their country of origin than live action feature films. That is one of the reasons why I am enjoying making animated films. But this is still a very European film. Although the story is not set on the European continent, the values on which the film is based: tolerance, respect, openness, acceptance and understanding of “the others” are very European
values.
KK: It’s fun to go places. The settings in China and Africa simply are wonderful to watch, to be in – and we travel the Indian Ocean. We wanted to bring two worlds together, the Chinese pandas, dragons and the orang-utan and all the African animals. Different animal characters meet and resolve misunderstandings between their different viewpoints.
Does the film play today, in the present time?
KK: Yes and no. It is a no-time universe, and then again it is set in a kind of pre-industrial time, a time without mobile phones etc.. Our talking animals have a limited amount of gadgets, they can sail a boat, but we do not see a car or anything like that. You can say that time is not important.
RC: We were actually discussing if the film should be set in the past, being a period film, in connection with the first exposé. We came to the conclusion that the question might be irrelevant. When is the famous fable of Guy de Maupassant about the raven and the fox set? In the 19th century? I don’t think so.
How does “Panda Bear in Africa” differ from other, for example American animated films?
KK: We are not copying anyone, and just based on our experiences and backgrounds, which are different from other filmmakers in other countries, what we are doing is different too. The style and the aesthetic aspects of the films we are making won’t jump to the foreground, but that does not mean we are not thinking about this. What makes us different from a lot of American films is that we are socially and politically aware, don’t repeat racial, social and gender clichés over and over again, and we always try to avoid fake emotions. And there is something we hate very much, and that is Kitsch. It is a German word, but I don’t think I have to translate it.
RC: In connection with the “Sehgewohnheiten”, which I mentioned earlier, the films from the US studios are setting certain always evolving technical standards, which we can’t ignore. An example: Although it is expensive and time consuming to work with characters with digital hair and fur, and it would be better for our budget to avoid that, there is no way that we would make this film and the characters don’t have hair and fur. We will obviously go much more stylized with our characters, than say the new “Lion King”, but
we would not get away with a look like “Madagascar” from 2005. We are 15 years further down the line and if we make a film with a panda bear hero, he needs to be fluffy and cuddly.
What are the challenges in making this film?
KK: There are a lot of technical challenges when you work in animation. Everything has to be planned very carefully. If the characters are not designed and rigged properly the animation won’t work. If the sets are too big and heavy, you cannot work in them and so forth.
RC: All of our characters are four-legged, each of them with different running, walking, climbing styles. We need great character sheets with emotions, expressions, poses from Patrick Schoenmaker and for the animation we need to produce in pre-production an archive of walking and running cycles for the characters, and a whole variety of poses for each of them, plus blend-shapes for their facial expressions. Also, our characters have a lot of hair and fur, we have vast landscapes, lots of sets, water, you name it, and many, many characters.
KK: Every second in an animation movie is expensive. You cannot just put up several cameras. You cannot just shoot a scene several times. As a consequence, you cannot go back and re-edit an animation movie if it is not working. You have to have a very precise vision when you begin the work. You have to produce the movie before you produce the movie. Let me try to explain. Based on the script you do the storyboard and then you edit the animatic. This takes place before you start animation, and there is no way back. The
animatic has to be strong in the early phase. If it’s not, you won’t find out till it’s too late.
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