Animation director Mascha Halberstad: ‘It’s only right when I have to laugh myself’

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Even before the premiere in Berlin, Mascha Halberstad’s new animated film had already been sold to fifty countries. Fox and Hare save the forest appeals to a broad and international audience, just like the previous film by the Dutch director. One of the strengths of Halberstad’s films is that not only children are giggling and screaming in the cinema, but their parents are also watching and chuckling.

Fox and Hare save the forest is about a forest that is flooded because the evil Beaver has built a dam. Residents Fox, Hare, but also the boar Ever and characters such as Meermin, have to take action because their friend Owl has suddenly disappeared. The story is based on the children’s book by Sylvia Vanden Heede with drawings by Thé Tjong-Khing, but received a generous dash of ‘Mascha sauce’, as Halberstad’s producer Janneke van der Kerkhof calls it. What does ‘that sauce’ or humor consist of that makes Halberstad’s youth films so popular? The director explains four ingredients.

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1 A range of accents

“For me, the voices are the most important thing in an animated film, that’s where the humor lies. At least with dialogue-driven films like the ones I make. In many animated films, the voice-overs are recorded separately. I like to bring voice actors together and let them improvise based on the scenario. If I start laughing or am moved by a scene, then I know it’s going well.

“For example, I experimented with actor Rob Rackstraw with the voice of Ever, a boar in a slightly too tight leather suit. The dialogue simply wasn’t funny until I asked Rob to say it with a German accent. Then everything fell into place.

“I really like accents anyway. In many countries its use in youth films is now complicated, for example in Flanders and France for educational reasons. I think that’s a shame: those accents make it rich, all the characters come from other parts of the world, so it’s nice to have a richness of sounds. For example, the rats, Bever’s henchmen, in the British version have a very heavy British, Peaky Blinders-ish accent.

“The fact that voices are so important to me means that I find dubbing my films quite complicated. In fact, every time you record voices you enter a new creative process, which involves checking whether accents and jokes still work. You just have to hope that this is handled well in other languages.”

2 Enlarge

“I was asked for this film adaptation because I had previously made the TV series based on Vanden Heede’s books. I personally like Roahl Dahl-esque humor with evil characters. Fox and Hare save the forest is a fairly conventional children’s story for my taste, so I tweaked it a bit. I have enlarged the characters a bit and given them an ‘edge’. For example, Bever, the bad guy in the book, has a ‘little castle’. I wanted that to be a giant castle in the movie. Then storyboarder Gijs van der Lelij noticed that beavers are aquatic animals and we should do something with them, such as adding slides to the castle. I thought: ‘Too crazy’ and screenwriter Fabie Hulsebos incorporated it into the screenplay.

I have enlarged the characters a bit and given them an ‘edge’

“Many visual jokes in the film arise from these types of interactions. For example, Fabie invents that the character Meermin always interacts with a goldfish. Personally, I think that’s just not enough, so I respond with: ‘That must be a puffer fish, they sometimes blow themselves up.’ Whereupon Gijs realizes that you see Meermin putting that fish in her handbag at the end of the film. I think it’s a brilliant joke.”

3 Adult interludes

“Children respond very much to action in youth films – for example, I notice that in this film they find it very funny when the rats drag Fox and Hare into a bathtub. You also see that many commercial children’s films and series focus entirely on action, with lots of screaming and shouty voices. But when I used to go to the cinema with my son, I often thought: ‘Hello, I want to have fun too’.

“So I also add moments that I and adults find funny, but that are actually ‘superfluous’ for the story. Like the scene when Ever is standing alone digging a strange hole to hold back the water and having an absurd conversation with the rats. It’s one of my favorite moments in the film, but of course children don’t understand why it’s there at all.

“I always strive for the right balance between humor and emotion. For example, I found Bever to be a difficult character, he had to be narcissistic and selfish, but also charming at the same time, otherwise you wouldn’t go along with him. When you see him standing alone on his dam at the very beginning of the film, which he has built with so much effort but cannot share with anyone, I hope you also feel some emotion.”

4 Not too cartoonish

“The animals already had human features in the books, partly due to the beautiful drawings by Thé Tjong-Khing. We wanted the animations in the film not to be too cartoonish, but subtle and human. When making my previous film Grunt I learned that it helps if animators have reference videos in which real people play the scenes. Bee Yours in Haas Jasper Kuipers, who directed the animation, played all the scenes in advance, recorded them with his phone and gave them to the animators. For example, when you see Owl relaxing in the Beaver Castle with a cocktail in hand, it feels like something very normal, but of course it is not.

“Someone, in this case Jasper, has thought about how you can make something like this look natural. Just like the real ‘game scenes’, when Vos explains to Bever that he wants to return to his friends. Moments like this quickly become bland or pathetic. The fact that this does not happen is due to Jasper’s playing and of course also due to the previously recorded voice-overs, because this gives Jasper ideas about how he can play something. It’s a kind of snowball effect.”

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