The film, featuring music and narration by Gavin Friday and artwork based on original illustrations by Bono, retells and transforms Prokofiev’s 1936 symphonic fairytale into a story about a 12-year-old boy coping with the pain of losing his mother; short debuts October 19 on Max.
20 years ago, Irish singer-songwriters Bono (Paul David Hewson) and Gavin Friday developed a punk-flavored book retelling of Sergei Prokofiev’s orchestral masterpiece Peter & the Wolf as a way to support the Irish Hospice Foundation, which works to ensure the best end-of-life and bereavement care through advocacy, education, and services like Nurses for Night Care and their Bereavement Support Line.
The foundation’s mission paired well with the story of a young boy coping with the deep pain from losing a beloved parent and the two singers–as passionate about philanthropy as they are music–felt Peter’s journey deserved to be told again but this time in animation.
Releasing on Max Thursday, October 19, music company BMG and Emmy-winning London production studio Blink Industries has produced a black-and-white music-driven short film, 2D-animated in real-world environment models, of Prokofiev’s 1936 symphonic fairytale. The story, narrated by Friday, follows a grieving 12-year-old Peter, now in the care of his grandfather after enduring the loss of his mother. Upon hearing stories of a wolf on the loose, Peter decides to explore the vast meadow and forest nearby to try and find the animal himself. Along the way, he encounters creatures who help him on his quest, while contending with hunters aiming to win a prize for capturing the wolf.
Check out the trailer:
Executive produced by Alistair Norbury and Stuart Souter for BMG, with Blink Industries’ Benjamin Lole and James Stevenson, the film is directed by Blink’s Elliot Dear and Stephen McNally. Dear and McNally were just finishing school when Bono and Friday released their original book, but were excited by the chance to help tell this emotional tale again and showcase the wide range of Blink’s animation skills while teaching children how to heal after tragedy.
We spoke with Dear and MacNally about how they got involved with the project, their adoration for the real-life models and practical effect techniques used by the Blink team, and how the visuals added an emotional depth to the story to highlight Peter’s connection with each animal in the film.
Victoria Davis: There have been a number of visual and musical adaptations of “Peter & the Wolf” over the last 80 years, including one by Disney in 1946. What drew you both to the idea of not only adding a new adaptation to an already long list of retellings, but also revisiting this particular version for a second time after 20 years?
Elliot Dear: We met with Alistair at BMG, because they were looking for somebody to help realize this as an animation. We thought that Blink Industries would be a perfect fit with our kind of sensibilities, eye for mixed media, and our traditional and slightly non-traditional ways of putting animations together.
VD: So, what was the first step in this translation process? How much were you both involved in the brainstorming and dictation of how this would be adapted to animation?
ED: Despite all of our best efforts, we couldn’t track down the original audio file from 20 years ago. So we had this 29-minute mp3 recording taken from the original CD, with Gavin’s voiceover, and that was the brief; to take that and turn this into a movie you can watch. But, of course, music and narration don’t always translate exactly to the screen.
What we found was that the character of the duck would be mentioned, and then there was four minutes before the next thing happens in the story, like before the duck moves to the other side of the pond, for example. We went, ‘Hang on. What are we going to build visually in those four minutes?’ The real exercise was to think of character dynamics and things that could happen in those spaces. It’s a really unconventional way of building a story and writing. And it did force us to get creative and engineer certain elements of the story that certainly aren't in the original, such as the flashback that you see in the film.
Stephen McNally: We also re-recorded some of the instruments that were under Gavin's narration and eventually used AI to remove his original voiceover so we could re-record that as well.
ED: That also allowed us to tweak some of the things he was saying, and it gave us a little bit more freedom, in terms of the action that was happening on the screen.
VD: Speaking of this story’s thematic richness, one of the things I found interesting was that it was first commissioned in the 30s to introduce children to an orchestra’s different instruments. Now, in this new version, it’s being used to introduce children to all these complex emotional themes. Did you notice that parallel right from the beginning? Did you try to match an instrument to an emotional theme in this film?
SM: We were thinking of it as each of the characters, rather than being just an instrument, would be paired with an aspect of Peter's personality, like when he’s playful or when he's morose, or a bit clumsy. And the wolf represents his fear of death and his grief.
ED: We're quite proud of the scratchy, chalk image of the wolf superimposed over what is essentially a quite elegant wolf beneath. It works really well thematically but also came from a constraint at the beginning of the project that we turned into a thematic solution. Bono’s original illustrations are very energetic and quite raw. Gavin Friday would describe it as “punky artwork.” And the language for that wolf was very different than the language for Peter. We wanted to try and get these two characters to sit next to each other, but without clashing.
So we decided that and the things Peter projects onto the wolf emotionally, we would project onto it visually.
SM: It also allowed us to have Peter drawing a lot in the film, and animators love drawing drawings.
VD: Is the wolf perhaps the most clearly recognizable and most closely resembling character from Bono’s original artwork?
ED: I think it probably is, yes.
VD: And making the film black and white, with a bit of red throughout, did that come from Bono’s original drawings as well?
ED: That spot color is a nod to Bono’s artwork to try and keep the fidelity to his original stuff, because we had to make a lot of changes. I'm sure he wouldn't mind us saying that the illustrations that he did originally would not animate in an appealing way. Or, at least, it’s not something you could watch comfortably for half an hour. And that’s not a diss.
In order to make a story with characters that are expressive, and have depth, emotional range, and nuances, very stylized and scratchy illustrations aren't going to do that job. To make that artwork move, it's going to have a very aggressive look to the animations. So we spent a lot of time adding appeals to the characters, bringing them down, and then trying to understand where to put that energy back into them without scratchiness. Steven did a lot of work with the animation team and the cleanup artists to pull that off with the line work.
SM: We had this idea that when the motion of characters gets more rigorous, the lines would get more erratic. For example, the bird’s wings, when she's in a rest, they're quite smooth and precise. But, when she flaps her wings, there’s a sweep across the screen where you get these amazing motions of the wrist that give you a real sense of energy and vitality to feel a bit like early drybrush techniques they used to use to get motion blur in painted animated cells.
VD: How did you decide to combine 2D animation with these real-world surroundings?
ED: It’s just a lovely way to work. And you get lots of depth from the scenes, and dynamism. If I had to pin a thematic reason to it, you could say that it shows Peter being out of place, at that age and with his grief. But, essentially, it just looks really nice. And it makes it makes it stand out. It’s a unique way to work that you don't see very often.
SM: Quite a lot of what we do is very craft-based. 2D animation is such a supremely craft-based thing. And then all of the props that our production designers and art directors were coming up with are exquisitely crafted, down to the wooden armchair in the sitting room having just a little more ware in the place where the hand rests on it as someone picks themselves up of the chair. There are immense levels of detail, love, and energy put into these tiny little models. There are amazing things in there to be seen.
And some really set the mood. There’s a doily hanging over the TV which, as a small child, is the most depressive thing. It’s this declaration that you're never going to see TV. There are lots of those little details that are all character-based and very much about saying who these characters are without getting too overt. Like in Peter’s mother’s room, where there are posters of horses on the walls that are clearly leftover from a childhood that she's left long ago but have been kept in a little bubble of time.
ED: There’s a kind of familiarity with that stuff. And when you see something as a model, versus a painted background, it's very present and you're very much there with it.
VD: What’s the process when it comes to animating in that hybrid style? Is it basically just filming the model and then later 2D animating on top of it? Or is it a bit more nuanced?
ED: I'd like to think it’s more nuanced, but essentially is just that. There was a very thorough storyboarding process that went on for months, and there was a lot of fine-tuning done there.
We also had these beautiful design sheets filled with buildings and objects and things and our modelmaking team took those and made them real. We discussed scale and how we were going to achieve those things, which is where the director of photography comes into the conversation. But once the once the models were made, it was time to shoot them. Then after shooting it was time to animate.
VD: How did you nail down the scale and proportions while shooting? Obviously, the 2D characters weren’t there to help with the photography and angles.
ED: We had these two crude stand-in models–a big one and a small one–to represent the character and its size to help with scale, as well as lighting. So we would give the animators two versions of each shot; one clean without the character model for them to animate on, and another with the character model for them to use as a reference to see where the light would show up on a character and where the shadows were cast on the floor.
They could also see any kind of perspective or distortion that would happen with them being close to whichever lens we were using.
VD: Before we wrap, this is a score that has a long history, and this particular project has a long concept history. You’ve gotten to work with talent like Gavin Friday and Bono in this ode to animation, music, and storytelling. There’s so much woven into this film. What was the most rewarding part of this process for you both?
ED: I need to be honest. All the rewarding things about this project didn't really come from the material, for me. As with all animation projects I work on, the joy comes from working with such amazing talent. And it is really amazing when you see the work the model makers have done, the skill of the 2D animators and their cleanup, and our collaborative work with Gavin on the writing. I just love seeing everyone do their part.
SM: I agree with Elliot… to an extent. I did grow up on “Peter & the Wolf” and love it to bits. And somehow, I'm not sick of the tune after hearing it nonstop for two years. But, as Elliott says, the craft of it is really something.
There's a shot towards the end of the film, where Peter is finally having one nice day. And he's being wheeled around the back garden in the wheelbarrow by his grandfather. It's an elaborate shot. There's a moving camera and Elliott was puppeting this wheelbarrow on a stick around the set. That shot went to our animators who spent an excruciating amount of time trying to capture the moving perspectives, the shifting characters, the weight shifts in the wheelbarrow to correspond together. But it was so gratifying to see Peter and grandfather have one happy moment in what's been a really hard time for them. Evoking those emotions through these layers of craft, down to the tiny stones flicking as the cache runs away, blows me away.
In addition to the debut of the animated short film, there will be a same-day Peter & the Wolf DK book release from Bono and Friday, along with an official soundtrack releasing Friday, October 20. A digital single was released globally today, October 17, with an official lyric video for “There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of” from Friday
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
