Title : "Cinema Rex" Israeli Animation Directors Mayan Engelman and Eliran Peled interviewed about their award-winning short
link : "Cinema Rex" Israeli Animation Directors Mayan Engelman and Eliran Peled interviewed about their award-winning short
"Cinema Rex" Israeli Animation Directors Mayan Engelman and Eliran Peled interviewed about their award-winning short
By Alexandra Bowman
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| Mayan Engelman and Eliran Peled (Mikel Peled) |
A few days ago, via Zoom, I sat down with Mayan Engelman and Eliran Peled, co-directors of Cinema Rex, a short 2-D animated film and recent winner of the Canal + Youth Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, to talk about their desire to expand it into a feature film, as well as storytelling, character design, marketing, adapting historical events in film, and the future of cinema in light of COVID-19.
As an introduction to them and their short film, I'll quote the press release that came with an offer to interview the two film-makers -
Co-director’s Mayan Engelman and Eliran Peled’s animation short Cinema Rex focuses on two kids who form a close friendship through their mutual love for cinema. Cinema Rex was actually a real cinema that was working between 1937-1939 in Jerusalem, one of the only businesses at the time that was co-owned by Jewish and Arab owners. This stunning film screened online as part of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and was the winner of the Canal + Youth Award.
Jerusalem,1938. In a divided city, two kids from rival sides meet at Cinema Rex. He speaks only Hebrew, and she speaks only Arabic. They will manage to form a true friendship based on one magical language, cinema.
Award winning director and producer Eliran Peled has directed 14 shorts including Happy Birthday Mr. Brown (2018) which screened in over 40 festivals, was a finalist in the Open Toronto Festival 2019 and won the Best Short Award at the West Hollywood Awards 2018. Peled is the youngest director ever in Israel to receive the main government fund to direct his first feature film Euphoria-Victory Year. Currently, he is a producer on the Israeli TV show Dear Diary and in pre-production for a new documentary TV series. He is also working as a producer and content developer in the Israeli production company Sumayoko, which produced the Cannes Series winning show On The Spectrum. Eliran served in Cinema Rex as also writer and producer.
Cinema Rex is a proof of concept for a feature length film that is now in at the financing stage, currently looking for international partners.Alexandra Bowman: Would you both mind speaking about the major stages of your production process, even though it's still continuing? How does one go about sitting down with a studio and with a team and creating a film?
Mayan Engelman: It was quite an experience. I used to work alone and I used to do everything by myself. So was actually the first time I created something with a partner and with a team. So it's a very unique experience for me to have so many people coming with us and working with us to make our dream come true. But at first it was only me and Eliran working on this short film for about three years and then the rest of team just came in the last year. So it was a long journey, and very creative and super interesting. It went so slow, because in Israel, the animation industry is still in its diapers, you can say. So it was very hard to organize the right budget for what we wanted. Eventually we did the short film and we are looking forward to do the full film.
Eliran Peled: I agree with Mayan. It's really a very different process than when you want to do an animation film in the States. You need to have a great script, and then you go to one of the big studios and with the right agent, you can get the packaging around and like get it made. Here, there is a huge amount of talents in Israel, but we really hope that this film now, and the Annecy award, will help us to get the engine started on the Israeli animation industry. But because we don't have that industry, and the way that we finance cinema projects in general, not only an animation, is very different then how it's being done in the States. So it really took us a lot of time to get the financing and the funding in order to do the proof of concept on the level and with the professionalism that we wanted to do. So, it's a very long process and we pitched it a lot. We need to win a lot of competitions, get grants from government funds in order to get to where we are standing right now. So it was an exciting journey, but a very, very long one in that manner.
AB: From which groups did you get grants? You said government funding. How did that work?
EP: Israel financing works a bit like the European cinema financing way. It's less like in the States, with studios and private equity. Here, it's the government. They have cultural funds and they give financing to projects. That mean that you don't only need to pitch your project in the best way, but that you always need to convince a lectors of the government funds to give you financing. But we got funds from a four funds in Israel. We got support from the JCC group in New York. We got some private equity in the end, in order to get that. But you know, people in Israel don't really like animation; animation is very expensive, especially if you want to do something that is cinema quality, you know, commercial quality. So it was a long journey for Mayan and me to really understand how to pitch it in the best way, because you cannot compare the cost of animation and live action. And, you know, it's really different worlds. So it was a big process not only to understand the project that we wanted to do and how we going to tell it, but also to explain and bring to our journey more people, like artists as well as our amazing team, but also to get the support and the trust of funds and private equity in Israel that don't really know how animation works a lot of the time. So it was, it was quite challenging, that aspectAB: Sure thing. And of course that begs the question why animation? If live action is so much cheaper and maybe easier, why choose the medium of animation to tell this story?
EP: That's Mayan’s favorite question of all time.
ME: I’m an animator and I’m coming from the animation world, not the live action world. So I get this question so many times and I always ask back, ‘why not animation?” I understand that it's quite expensive but it's such a wonderful medium. To get to the eyes of children with such a complicated message, it’s required to have this dreamy touch [about] a sensitive journey of children so that animation was the right medium to do it. Honestly, this is my language. This is what I speak. I cannot do films in live action. I love them, but animation is a way for me to communicate, so our [project] together was naturally going to be animation. There was no question about it.
EP: I want to add on that, for this film, especially when you want to create this word and tell a love letter to cinema, there is no better medium. I think you can see it from the proof of concept. You see it, then you see how it flows and in live action that will never work in a million years. But I do think that anything could work in animation. It's like a language and you need to decide, ‘What's the best language to tell your own story?’ But I think that, especially in Rex, there's really no other medium that you can tell this kind of a story in.AB: I often say, when a child sees an animated film and a live action film right next to each other, and even if the live action film is more appropriate for what they'd be interested in, they'd go to the cartoon ten out of ten times.
EP: Cinema Rex is actually our proof of concept for a feature length film that we are now in the process of financing. It's a film about the power of cinema to unite enemies in cultures and to tell the story of two kids, a 10-year old Jewish boy and a 10-year old Arab girl that meets at the same cinema in Jerusalem in 1938. And although they come from different sides of the divided city, they form a social friendship that is based on one common language, which is the cinema. And we did the short film right now that won an award, the Canal+Youth award at the Annecy festival, which is the first time an Israeli film ever one at this festival. So it's really very overwhelming, honestly. And yeah, it's our pretty much our love letter to cinema. We both really love the medium and we live in Israel so we have an option, to tell a story that is part of our culture and part of our story and identity, and to combine it with our passion and love for the cinema is a great opportunity.ME: As Eliran said, our story takes place in Jerusalem, which is a divided city since forever. To find a cinema right in the middle between the Jewish community, and the Arabic one, and the British police -- to find this special place inside of this madness -- everyone is fighting all around, and this place actually served as a place of sanity where people could come and watch films together. So Jerusalem is a very harsh place and animation gave us the option to set this story in such a unique and sweet way – two guys with children – and also to deliver this message to children, to use this option to have this message come from their own.
AB: So how did film and cinema affect both of you as children: personally, culturally, and with regard to your relationship, your community and country, which is a big question... It's like five questions in one.ME: I'm an artist, so I love drawing more than talking. So animation is such a natural place for me, and to tell a story about communication and bringing people together, and delivering our message to the world... my first language is animation so it was the best choice for me personally. And also I feel like I'm coming to animation… I didn’t know actually what it was until I studied it at the academy. So I fell in love with it; since I was a child, I just wanted to do stuff like that. So Cinema Rex is just the best movie I could [aspire to show] how to bring people together.
AB: And of course you're working for Netflix now on a movie that's confidential, so that I can't ask questions about it. Mr. Peled, I pose that same massive question to you.
EP: So honestly, cinema is pretty much my favorite thing of all time. [As long as I can remember, going to watch films and going to the theater is pretty much a huge part of my life. In normal days, before all the coronavirus, I usually go between two to three times a week to the cinema theater. I’m like Mayan and I talk a lot and I'm very out there. And for me to cinema is a bit like Rex in that it's like a bubble of sanity. For me, since I can remember myself (i.e. as long as I can remember), it was a bubble of sanity. I come from a very big family, a very communicative family, and I was working pretty much since I was 14 in manual jobs. And to me always the cinema was this kind of like a bubble that I could go into and have my silence and gather my thoughts in a way. Honestly, the past few months where since, you know, it sounds tragic, but since I don't have it, I understood really how much it was a huge part of my life. It sounds silly, but it's a huge part of my life. Suddenly something really important for me is missing, which is an important feeling. You know, in the past few months I had an option to re-evaluate the power of cinema in my life and how much it is really like a drug to me in a way. It's like the only place that helped me a deal with each day of reality. So with that, I could really relate to the characters in the film, in that they go into the film and they are really sucked into the cinema and the engaging story. It's a privilege, first of all, to be Mayan’s partner in this project, and it's a privilege to get an opportunity to tell this kind of a story, because I do think that as a kid, I was like them. So it's awesome to do something like that [story].AB: It is. There was an interview with Pete Docter, who’s the Chief Creative Officer at Pixar right now, and he talked to the Washington Post and said that, with all these theaters being shut down, you’re “missing a check-in with humanity.” I know Steven Spielberg is particularly miffed too, about how theaters are getting shut down, and how you can’t sit and gather with so many other people who you don’t know. Because sitting in your living room with your family is one thing, and that’s wonderful, but when you gather all those people who are coming from so many different backgrounds, that’s another unique experience.
ME: Basically, we took it from the Hebrew story about Cinema Rex which is based on real children living during this time. All this story is based on them. Yeah, why ten years old?
EP: The feature film starts when they are nine. Before starting, Mayan and I talked about Martin Scorcese’s Hugo -- they are nine, ten years old -- that’s the age that they are not too young to understand what is happening, but they are not 13 or 14, where with a friendship like that they would automatically consider the romantic context. Those are the ages when you show friendship, it’s all about the friendship in a way, but it is an age where you do understand your surroundings. I remember myself as a nine-year-old in Israel, you do understand the political situation, you do understand what it is like to be living in a divided country, in a way. So I think, for us in the context of this film, it is the right age to put heroes that decide to be friends, even though they know all the background to the fact that they come from different sides, they know that this friendship may be considered provocative. So it’s really made them heroes in a way because they need to take action. If they were like, five-year-olds, I think that the film will feel much more different, because it’s characters that do things because they don’t understand what’s wrong about it, in a way. I think when you’re nine or ten or eleven, it’s exactly the time. I have really small brothers. I remember seeing them at nine and eleven, something maybe for kids being raised in Israel, you start to understand the situation that you’re living in during those ages. For me, I love to write characters in those ages because it’s exactly the right balance between characters that know a lot, but still don’t know everything. Their points of view are still not closed. In the feature film, we have the adult characters, but the nine-year-old, the eleven-year-old, they can still change, they can still try to understand the boundaries. The adults have their limits, their world, what is what. I think that’s why we went with those ages.
AB: The children who are going to see your marketing materials and gorgeous character designs, they’re going to love it, but they’re not going to be the ones buying the tickets. So how did you create the film, create the marketing materials, to appeal to parents. And along those lines, what demographics or ticket-buyers are you marketing Cinema Rex to?
EP: I think it’s quite early to talk about tickets because we are right now financing the feature film. But when we started to talk about and really settle the timeline and consider the visuals, we wanted to give it an old Disney-2D kind of vibe.AB: The best vibe. The best vibe by far.
EP: Yeah. I think that when you think about the best animation films, it’s like, some of the Pixar films--I think all the time about Ratatouille or The Iron Giant. I’m obsessed with Brad Bird. You know what he does in his film, if you take a kid, you will have fun with all the adventures and what he tells, but if [as a director] you respect the kids with the story that you tell, the parents will like it as well. When you see Inside Out, I took my little brother and he was enjoying the shenanigans. I was crying at the end. I think that what we’re trying to do with Rex is--it’s a very complex story, it’s a love letter to cinema, there are a lot of things that will attract an adult audience. But for kids, it’s a magical story about a great friendship that is being formed through imagination, through adventures. I think there’s really something for anyone here.
AB: Absolutely. It’s kind of like what Walt Disney and Don Bluth both said at one point. You’ve got to respect the ability of young children to handle more sensitive, violent--not too much--or intense material because they can take more than you’d expect, and sometimes if you go walk up to the line, you can actually really help them prepare for the real world, or engage their imaginations. Like, Snow White, of course, freaked out kids in the theater. That was a whole, I think, scandal at the time, or something like that. And The Secret of NIMH is terrifying for anyone of any age.
AB: And I was going to ask--so, it’s 19 minutes long. Do you have 24 frames per second?
ME: 24.
AB: 24, gotcha. Well sometimes it feels like people don’t understand that 2D animated films… to get one second, someone had to sit down and draw something 24 times. Every time we watch a movie downstairs, especially over quarantine--we’re doing that a lot--at the beginning of films I want my entire family to know that this is a masterpiece. And each second took someone like three days or more of their lives to do. I don’t think a lot of people fully appreciate the amount of work that goes into creating a cartoon. Again, to choose the medium of animation is no small decision. It’s a ton of work that you’re putting on yourself. It speaks more to the conviction that you felt in your project.
How did you design your characters? The kids are adorable, and I thought the shapes that you had in the adult father figure were really interesting. How many people helped design those characters? What were you thinking about you designed them? ME: All the characters, I designed. It was one of the first things done. I did Moeiz (the Jewish boy) and I did about nine options, and we just chose one and went with that. The first design was the first one chosen, and it showed the way we were going to do the whole movie. So I just designed everything accordingly to Moeiz. And yeah, we didn’t have time, I just did it really fast. And we didn’t have much time to think too much. We just did it in the most instinctive way.
AB: What do you both think is the future of the movie theater as an institution? And conversely, what do you hope is the future of the movie theater? Or maybe they’re the same.
ME: Right now, we wanted to send it to the [Annecy] festival, and it was the first time it came to be an online festival. Me and Eliran thought, “Ok, it’s going to be bad, what are we going to do about it?” And Eliran said, “You know what? Maybe it will be OK because then we will have the chance to get more eyes on the film, because in the actual festival, there are so many films run at the same time, and probably we wouldn’t as many eyes on our film as we want.” So we’re really hopefully to have had more viewers. I think, the online, for me, actually, it was less good, like I prefer ten times more to sit in the festival to watch films, so… I think it’s good for animation, that we have the possibility to screen online, on our phones and televisions, but nothing can replace seeing film in the theater, [as] the vibe and the energy around you is so important.AB: Your film isn’t about someone pulling out a phone and experiencing film with someone on a phone, your film was about going to a theater.
EP: I’m very optimistic, usually, but you know, it’s a very weird year. I feel in the past few months that a lot of feature films went out directly to streaming, and you saw that a lot of the films did not get the buzz that was expected. You didn’t get the number of viewers. There were a lot of big comedies that went directly to streaming. It really showed to me the importance of cinema nowadays to create the buzz, to create the conversation regarding a film. If I learned something out of these really weird six months that we are all dealing with together, nothing could replace the joy [of cinema]. TV did not kill the cinema, so coronavirus won’t do it. It is a very weird year, but I think that once there will be a vaccine or something like that, people will come back to the cinema because it is something that is culturally inherent in most of us nowadays. Streaming is amazing, the content they are bringing out, things that would have never been made years ago, but they could exist together with the cinema. I don’t think they could replace it. I think the past few months have actually proved it in a way.
The whole interview can be seen on The Hilltop Show on YouTube -
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