Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated Dutch director Nina Gantz has revealed further details of her ambitious new project, Once Upon An Egg. The animated feature has a budget of €9m and is set to become the biggest stop-motion animated feature in Dutch film history.
The project, pitched at NLWave26 in Utrecht on Friday, is produced by Dutch outfit Keplerfilm. Delivery is set for 2029 on the project, which will be made in English with a dubbed Dutch version.
The story follows two city pigeons who embark on an adventure to find somewhere they belong after being turfed out of their home above an Amsterdam chip stand. Other characters include a turtle dove working in the city’s red light district and a group of menacing seagulls with anger management problems. The narrator is a cockatoo. An abandoned egg also plays a key part in the plot.
“These stories are all woven in and the film shows how we deal with people on the edge of society, because that is really what pigeons resemble,” Gantz said.
Once Upon An Egg is an eco-conscious project which will be made using waste material wherever possible.
“We are planning to make everything with waste material. The sets will be made with stuff that otherwise would be thrown away, either from the clothing industry or factory materials that they don’t use any more,” Gantz told Screen.
The director said that the puppets would be made out of “little scraps of textiles,” and that gloves would be used to create the birds’ wings.
“We are showing the hidden world of Amsterdam bird life,” Gantz explained.
This will be the Brighton-based Gantz’s debut feature, following her award-winning shorts Edmond and Wander To Wonder. Elation Pictures is the UK partner on the project. UK-based puppet-making and animation studio Mackinnon and Saunders (best known for their work on Corpse Bride and Fantastic Mr Fox) is also involved.
DutchFilmWorks is already on board as the Dutch distributor and a Belgian coproducer is shortly to be announced.
Long gestation
Once Upon An Egg was first hatched seven years ago when Kepler founders Derk-Jan Warrink and Koji Nelissen watched pigeons skirmishing with green parakeets (“newcomers but taking over the city”) from their first offices in an old school building in downtown Amsterdam.
They earmarked Gantz (a graduate of the UK’s National Film and TV School) to direct the film.
“We just called her and said we really, really want to make a stop motion film and we really want to work with you,” the Kepler principals said. “She is one of the most precise and most ambitious directors we have worked with. She is never going to do something she doesn’t like.”
The producers said that Gantz has put her stamp on the project. “The film is totally different from how we started it and it is now totally her film.”
Kepler has secured €1.8m in Cinescoop funding from the Netherlands Film Fund (the initiative to support higher budget films) as well as the Netherlands production incentive, worth up to 35% in eligible costs, and an MG from DutchFilmWorks. €4m of the budget is now in place.
Robert Alberdingk Thijm is working on the script, which is still in development, and the filmmakers are currently producing the “animatic” (the rough visual draft of the project).
“It’s high budget but is low budget for animation,” Warrink commented.
The filmmakers pitched the feature at Cartoon Movie earlier this year. They already have strong interest from sales agents and distributors.
Keplerfilm was founded in 2016. It is best known for live action dramas including such titles as Cannes Caméra d’Or winner Armand and Pink Moon, which gained a special mention at Tribeca. It was also behind Mike van Diem’s box office hit, Our Girls (presented at NLWave last year). The company made short animated feature Catastrophe in 2017.
The outfit has a large slate of projects in development including a new Mike van Diem feature and Floor van der Meulen’s Happy Days. Starring Renée Soutendijk (Spetters, The Fourth Man, Sweet Dreams), this is a dark drama about a grandmother who reaches breaking point and becomes a danger as she tries too hard to please everyone around her.
Kepler is also developing Boudoir Blue, a new feature from Ena Sendijarević (Sweet Dreams, Take Me Somewhere Nice) about a young writer who moves into a tiny Paris apartment to write about love, but dating-app encounters and an obsession with an unavailable painter turn her romantic experiment into an increasingly surreal trap.
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