Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated Dutch director Nina Gantz has revealed further details of her ambitious new project, Once Upon An Egg, showcased at NLWave in Utrecht.
The €9m animated feature is set to become the biggest stop-motion animated feature in Dutch film history.
Produced by Dutch outfit Keplerfilm, delivery is set for 2029. It is being 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.
“The film shows how we deal with people on the edge of society,” says Gantz.
She reveals Once Upon An Egg is an eco-conscious project.
“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.”
The puppets will be made out of “little scraps of textiles,” and gloves will be used to create the birds’ wings.
Born in the Netherlands, Gantz is now based in the UK. Once Upon An Egg will be her debut feature, following her award-winning shorts Edmond and Wander To Wonder. Elation Pictures is the UK partner on the project, and 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. A Belgian producer is also joining the project.
DutchFilmWorks will release in the Netherlands.
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 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 recall.
“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 affirm Gantz has put her stamp on the project. “The film is totally different from how we started it and is now totally her film.”
Kepler has secured €4m of the budget so far: €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
Robert Alberdingk Thijm is working on the script, which is still in development, and the filmmakers are now producing the “animatic”, the rough visual draft of the project.
“It’s high budget but is low budget for animation,” Warrink suggests.
The filmmakers pitched the feature at Cartoon Movie earlier this year and say they now have strong interest from sales agents and distributors.
All about Kepler
Keplerfilm was founded in 2016. It is best known for live-action dramas including 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 van Diem feature and Floor van der Meulen’s dark drama Happy Days. Renée Soutendijk stars in the latter as a grandmother who reaches breaking point and becomes a danger as she tries too hard to please everyone around her.
Kepler is also developing Ena Sendijarević’s Boudoir Blue, about a young writer who moves into a tiny Paris apartment to write about love, but a series of dating-app encounters and an obsession with an unavailable painter turn her romantic experiment into an increasingly surreal trap.
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