FILM #46 SPECIAL ISSUE / ANIMATION / THE UGLY DUCKLING AND ME / PAGE 6
A FRESH TAKE The director Karsten Kiilerich is curious to see how purist Hans Christian Andersen devotees will take to The Ugly Duckling and Me, A. Film’s zany 3D-adaptation of Denmark’s national author’s most famous fairytale. BY CHRISTIAN MONGGAARD
“We started working on The Ugly Duckling and Me right after Hans Christian Andersen finished the story,” Karsten Kiilerich says, laughing. That’s an overstatement, of course, but when A. Film started developing a film based on Andersen’s best known fairytale, the writer’s bicentennial (he was born 200 years ago last April 8) was still way off in the future. The film, which has a budget of 5.6 million euros, went through a lengthy development phase,
The Ugly Duckling and Me
in which the Danish Film Institute also played an important part. At this writing, A. Film is finishing the so-called Leica reel, an animated storyboard that will eventually become a 3D-animated feature running 80 minutes. Kiilerich, who is co-directing with Michael Hegner, says that he and the producer Per Holst originally envisioned making The Ugly Duckling and Me as live action with talking animals. “Per had just seen Babe and thought it was hilarious. So we were supposed to make the film like Babe, using animatronics, live footage and computeranimated moving mouths on the animals.” Anyhow, 3D-technology developed faster than the project. At one point, they even considered using computer-animated figures on real backgrounds. “We tried all sorts of
things but eventually scrapped it all in favour of doing everything on the computer,” Kiilerich says. “This way we can sit here, in the comfort of our studio, and keep fairly regular working hours. We can make all the thunder claps and lightning and snow we want to. I’m not saying it’s always all that easy, but we can certainly control and manipulate things a lot more than if we were knee-deep in mud in a duck yard trying to shoot an egg hatching. We can make our characters do exactly what we want them to do.” BUDGET LIMITATIONS
Terkel in Trouble, A. Film’s first 3D-animated feature, was made quickly and inexpensively, and it was a big hit in Denmark last year. Though the lessons from Terkel are not immediately transferable to The Ugly Duckling and Me, a bigger and more complex production, the film was still a valuable learning experience for Kiilerich. “These are different characters,” he says about The Ugly Duckling and Me. “They are more sophisticated in their construction. There’s more cinematography in it, you might say. We were originally planning with a budget of 10-11 million euros. But Terkel in Trouble taught us how to build on the cheap, plan out an entire universe and avoid various problems, so we were able to cut the budget by almost half. 5.6 million euros is still a lot of money, but the budget is pretty low considering the kind of visuals we’re after. And of course, it’s a fraction of what American movies and big European productions cost. “I think the future will prove us right in trying to make these films on a sane budget. Clearly, we can make inexpensive 3D-films. We proved that with Terkel, which cost just 1,45 million euros. We can make great pic-