by Johannes Wolters

Hisko Hulsing, born in Amsterdam in 1971, is arguably the most famous Dutch animation film director today. The multi-talented artist not only directs but also writes, paints, and animates,composes and arranges the music for man odfhis own films. After graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in 1995, his two short films, Seventeen (2004) and Junkyard (2012), caused a sensation in the animation world. In 2015, he and his team contributed the animation segments to the Kurt Cobain documentary „Cobain: Montage of Heck,“ directed by Brett Morgen. The documentary was acclaimed worldwide and received seven Emmy nominations. Hulsing’s work has become known to a wide audience through the Amazon Prime streaming series Undone (2019) and the episode „A Dream of a Thousand Cats“ (2022) for the Netflix series The Sandman; both projects were nominated for an Annie Award.

Hisko Hulsing’s latest work, the short film „Danse Macabre,“ which will have its world premiere at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival at the end of June, is a stunning visual exploration of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Allegro from his 10th Symphony. The short film is based on approximately 79 of Hulsing’s original oil paintings, which were brought to life over 11 years in an elaborate and innovative concept by an international team of artists from the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Hungary, and South Africa.

The film will be available on Arte’s media library on June 25 and will be broadcast linearly on the night of June 26 as part of the magazine Kurzschluss.

Interviewer: Johannes Wolters

For the record, for everybody reading this, I personally think your film is a masterpiece. You had me glued to the screen for all its five minutes. It’s simply great. I am not so much interested at the moment in the technique, which is certainly groundbreaking. I do not want to know how you did the movie. I would like to know why you did the movie?.

Hisko Hulsing: But I am also happy to talk about techniques. But regarding the „why“: this film is really, I mean, with all the efforts going to creating the content of the film, I think it is about the resurrection of fascism, I would say, which is happening all over the world right now.

I’m really fond of animation, whe animation connects with music, in a way that really clicks. And this is it. It is like Shostakovich told you, hey, do a five minute short about the rise of fascism, because I had that in mind.

Hisko Hulsing: Well, the thing is, I think the film is more about Stalin, actually about Shostakovich’s life in the Stalin era. So using the word fascism… maybe I should not do that so much, because it is too narrow, it has more to do with the militarization of society, like what has been happening for the last 11 years in Russia. So when I rewatched the moving storyboards, the animatic that I made 11 years ago, I noticed I did not change any shots. It’s still the same, even though all the film funds wanted me to change it, because they thought I was promoting war. I was like, what are you talking about?

Watch the Animatic of „Danse Macabre“ from 2017

Interesting point. If you do an anti-war film, you can easily make it into a pro-war film.

Hisko Hulsing: I think that not a lot of people will understand that. Anyway, 11 years ago, Russia took in the Crimea from Ukraine. And there were already these things going on in Donetsk. And I was a bit confused, I found it strange that everybody was so silent. The whole European Union didn’t really act – like „thoughts and prayers“. You know what I mean? I found this weird. And at the same time, I was following what was happening under Putin. And that, to me, seemed like a form of fascism. Like he was talking about making, – what Trump later repeated -, making Russia great again, he was dreaming of a Russian empire like in the old days. And then they would even make big statues of some Vladimir, something from the 15th century, like, we are reviving all these demons from the past – that are demons for us, but they are heroes for them. And I thought, well, that is interesting that you can see it in real time, how they’re building up this whole military thing where they want to occupy other countries and suppress their own people. But the interesting thing, I saw the Russians interfered with some referendum in the Netherlands about a treaty between the EU and Ukraine. So, we were actually already noticing it here, how the Russians were infiltrating western democracies. And then, of course, you had the Brexit. Since then we have seen a rise of rightwing extremism and autocratic regimes and openly fascist parties all over the world.

True!

Hisko Hulsing: Anyhow, so Shostakovich, he was living like in the late 30s, during the Great Terror. Millions of Russians got deported, locked up, killed under Stalin, because Stalin was completely paranoid. And Shostakovich, he used to lay in his bed every night, fully clothed, with his suitcase next to his bed, with all his stuff in it.

Because he was convinced that he would be arrested and deported. And during that time, a little bit earlier, he wrote the Fourth Symphony, which was never performed, because it was too avant-garde. So, his Fifth Symphony had as undertitle, „An Answer to the Just Criticism of the Party of the People“, something like that.

So, why I’m telling this is: because he always had to walk this thin line between being the Soviet hero or being killed. That’s kind of a difficult position to be in. But if you listen to his music, you can hear that in everything he made. You can hear the very, very dark undertones. But you can also hear things that are almost like propaganda, like the Seventh Symphony, that is about Leningrad fighting the Nazis. So, there is always this ambiguity, I would say, between darkness and euphoria and a lot of other emotions. And this particular piece, – he wrote it just after the death of Stalin – a lot of people think that this four and a half minute piece of music is a terrifying portrait of Stalin. I am not so sure about that. But I think what you can hear in the music is the combination, this ambiguity is already in there. You hear panic, you hear fear, you hear terror. But you also hear, it is very, let’s say, what is the right word? Passionate? Exciting also, you know, it’s also a kind of pushing things. It is very, I wouldn’t say euphoric, but it does, you know what I mean? I have to find the right word.

There’s something attractive in that!

Hisko Hulsing: Exactly! It is almost like you are feeling drawn into something. I use that in my film. So, if you’re not very smart, you could think that I’m trying to build up a feeling for „let’s go to war!“ But what I am showing: in the film there are musicians, like the muses, who are leading this dark army to some kind of light. That is more kind of a cynical thing to say, but I’m using the music as an element within the film.

So, you have the drummers, you have the violin players. They are all part of that music. The way the film is structured is that this dead soldier or sleeping soldier is brought to life by the music actually, by those muses. And while he is coming to life, he turns to a skeleton right away. So, once the soldier is coming to life, he is a skeleton already, you know. I mean, the soldiers who are now being sent to the front in Ukraine, the Russian soldiers, they are dead when they are leaving. They have still a couple of days to live. They are already dead. And I am following the music of Shostakovich, the first part has almost like a fascist kind of imagery. It is very orderly. It’s almost like Leni Riefenstahl, the first shots. And then, then you have the marches. They are very orderly. But then, of course, then it descends into chaos. First, they start attacking humanity as a whole, killing everybody. And then that orderly thing turns into absolute chaos, where they start dancing drunk over bodies of people and hang their own muses. Because that is also what always happens in wars. It might start off with ideologies, but in the end, it’s just like, what the fuck, you know. Let’s just kill everybody. Exactly.

Like Shakespeare said: „ Let slip the dogs of war“ – the atrocities of war that are inevitable.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah, great. And I think most wars end up in anarchy. And when people are in an anarchistic state, the worst things happen because they want to survive and they just become beasts. That is kind of the film in a very simplistic way. I mean, there is a lot of other things. But I have to be careful not to explain the film too much, because there is a lot of layers in there that I want people to find out for themselves.

For me, it was like, you show us a side of ourselves, of the human condition, that we avoid to look at, that we are all able to go to war very easily. And we do not want to face the music, so to speak. We all have that in us and it needs to be tamed. It needs to be educated. It needs to be, simply, it needs to be avoided.

Hisko Hulsing: That’s true. Absolutely, I agree. But my producers, they are trying to promote the film as an anti-war film. And I think that is too simplistic. I think that Ukraine has the right to defend themselves to Russia. They should defend themselves, in my opinion. Yeah. But this is quite different from the motives of countries like Russia, who have no real reason to invade that country. That is a different kind of motivation. So, I am supporting the Ukrainians – but the film is about the way people are being sort of drawn into this way of thinking that this is heroic or good for their mother. For the glory and all those things that are so fucking horrible about war. And I think, I mean, I don’t know your age, I’m 54. I’ve been very lucky of having lived without any war in my life, you know.

Yeah, me too.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah. So, that is good. But once there is a similar situation here, I do not know how I will behave in such a situation. I have no idea.

I had two parents who had to deal with World War II at a very young age. They taught me about war and that I should do everything to help not to let it happen again.

Hisko Hulsing: Well, that is a very German thing. I think that the Germans are almost overly correcting the faults of their grandparents and parents and became almost… I mean, I love it. That is why I love Germany so much. There is so much like guilt about what happened, you know. Even by people who were born like 40 years afterwards, which is somehow a shame. But in a way, it is good that the Germans are so aware of the past that they become so anti-war, you know. But I think it has to change a bit. It has to change.

Well, at the moment, I think many Germans have forgotten about it.

Hisko Hulsing: And there are parties now on the rise like the AFD.

I would have loved that we would live in a time that when your film would have come out, everybody would have said, yes, we know, we are all against war. Another anti-war film, so what? But now in our modern day reality your film hits the zeitgeist on the nose and comes at the right time.

Hisko Hulsing: That is true but that is pure coincidence.  And I actually, I took out some stuff lately in the last half year because the times changed. I was always looking at the right wing people as sort of closet fascists. They were not really openly about it. The times have changed. People are openly… I mean, they are like Elon Musk giving the Hitler salute. Tha is like being openly fascist. I mean, he says, he did not do it, but we all saw it. He did it twice, you know. So he is openly fascist. So that is why I took out some stuff in the beginning. The opening shot with the millions of violin players and then that stage, there used to be those bowls on top with all the fires as with the Olympic Games in 1936 in Nazi Germany. I took them out, things like that, because I thought, no, this is getting too fascist. I mean, it has to evoke those images, but it cannot really be like a „Triumph des Willens“. So I took it out because suddenly I realized that now there are people who like that kind of shit. I made it more universal, actually.

There’s a very famous Disney short film from the 1940s.

Hisko Hulsing: Donald Duck? You mean the Donald Duck one? That’s very funny.

There’s another one: „Education for Death“, a Silly Symphony from 1943, it’s a not very typical Disney, its a „Why we fight“ film and also an anti-war film, where we see how the Germans are getting ready to march to the sound of music into a big grave.

Hisko Hulsing: Oh, that’s interesting.

It is a film very much hidden by Disney because it’s really taking a point and saying Nazis are bad people and the way they make German soldiers forget about free thinking and just march into war and therefore marching into death. It’s a brilliant short film and I was very much reminded of it when I saw your film. You should see that.

Hisko Hulsing: I never saw it. Why are they hiding it then?

Many reasons, it is so dark. It’s really dark for a company that is selling joy, sunshine, laughter and things like that. It was done for a very special purpose to show the Americans that the Germans are now the enemy and they had to deal with them. And that’s a interesting thing, because the Second World War is almost something like a „just“ war. It’s a war you can defend. It would be tough to make an anti-war film about the second World War- You have to fight it because of the agression and the atrocities we Germans did there, it was/is neccessary to fight the Nazis. The other big war, the First World War, is on the other hand a war that is almost incomprehensible. And you can’t understand it if you look at it closer because so many people die for nothing.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah. It is like a horrific dream. I was in the north of France 20 years ago or something. And that was a place where in the First World War, we came into a forest, little forest, and there were a lot of still a lot of holes in the ground from the bombs, you know. And there was a little sign. It said, well, there was this German general or French general. I don’t know. And he promised his soldiers that they would take this position in 24 hours. It took a year and 100,000 soldiers were killed on that field. They were just like, you know, cannon fodder. They were brought there from both sides and died, died, died. It is a fucking, it is an apocalyptic nightmare. You know, that is what I call this film. It is not really an anti-war film, it is an apocalyptic nightmare.

And also, I use this term apocalyptic because I use very common imagery from, you know, the writers of the apocalypse from the Bible. I am a fourth generation atheist, so I never actually read it, but I know about it. But because the problem right now is that there is a lot of people who are actually thinking in an apocalyptic way. So people like Peter Hegseth, whom I did not know 11 years ago, but there were other people. He thinks that the Middle East is some kind of holy fighting ground for him, that Israel should be for the Jews and Palestine too. I know Germans have a different opinion about it, but I have become a fierce critic of the Israeli government.

Well, me too.

Hisko Hulsing: I noticed a lot of Germans are changing their opinion too, but I mean, I understand why they were always so pro-Israel. I was always like, Palestines and Israelians both have their reason to be there. But right now, I think the Israelis are behaving like fascists actually, to be honest. There are also people like Peter Thiel, you know, I think he’s German or something.

Yes, you are right.

Hisko Hulsing: He has kind of these apocalyptic ideas. So not Trump himself, but the people around him, some of them. And that is very dangerous because they are almost pushing the end of times with their weapons, it’s horrible. When I started making the Moving Storybook, the animatic which was 11 years ago, I was not just listening to the music of Shostakovich. I was also reading philosophy. Books from John F. Gray , who was, at that time, he was like sort of comparing the democratic, the humanist way of thinking with apocalyptic thinking. Or Francis Fukuyama, he spoke in the early 90s of the end of communism, the end of history, that was kind of an apocalyptic way of thinking, like, are we all going to this higher goal? And that is not how history works. All those ideas got into this film. Nobody will ever find them out unless I talk about them, but they’re in there.

I was thinking about this tragic notion that the survivors of World War I told themselves this is the war that ends all wars.

Hisko Hulsing: Did they say that?

And it took only 20 years to get another one.

Hisko Hulsing: This summer I went to, we traveled to Berlin through Eisenach, because Bach, that’s where Bach lived. And my wife’s a musician, my son, too, and we’re all Bach fans. And then we went to Weimar. And I suddenly realized that, oh, man, they had such, those people, the democratic government in Weimar had such good principles, but they didn’t understand enough about human nature and about how they were, the way they were defeated. I know a bit about that history, but I didn’t know they thought it would end all wars.When I showed people the animatic, I’ve showed it to a lot of people – also in Kiev, by the way, four years ago in an IMAX theater – many of them were reminded of World War One.

Because I used all these brownish colors, people would always associate it with the First World War. And that could be because I, first of all, when I was young, we visited my grandfather who was kind of a communist resistance fighter. And me and my brother, – my brother is a very good graphic novelist, a comic drawer, Milan Hülsing – we would always sit on the ground and study all those illustrated books about the First World War. I think that might have been an inspiration too, like seeing all those works.

Here in Germany our imagery of the First World War, almost everything is coming from „All Quiet on the Western Front“ by Erich Maria Remarque.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah, I read it a long time ago.

And it’s about living in the trenches and therefore it’s always muddy and brownish.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, all the images that are there, are black and white, and the photographs became sepia brownish. And then I read, – I am half Czech, and I read, of course, the brave soldier Svejk, the good soldier Sveijk from Hasek. And Céline, you know, I read „Journey to the End of the Night“ by Céline. That is also about the First World War. But this film, „Danse Macabre“ is not particularly about the First World War, it’s about war in general. It could be about today, but the imagery is maybe for some viewers a little bit old fashioned. When I was doing the animatic people kept telling me: soldiers are not marching anymore and they use drones. And I thought, well, first of all, it’s not true.

Did you ever look up the Chinese propaganda movie films? They have these marches. I mean, it is incredible. They are marching much better than the Nazis. I will not start a competition here (laughing) No, I’m joking. But what I’m saying, it is not gone. You know, the Russians have their parades. Well, they do not have soldiers to march anymore. And the Chinese, they have their parades. Those parades, the marching, it is also the illusion of being completely in control, organized. We do not have that in Western Europe because we have the wrong associations with that kind of militarism. But it is not gone. It is still there. Trump tried it, but he did not worked it out. So it is hard to make such a film. I mean, if I would have used drones in my film, it would be ridiculous because in 20 years there will be something else, you know. And there is the imagery we have from wars through books, monuments and paintings.

In the end, people are dying and people are doing the killing. Even if they fly drones.

Hisko Hulsing: Exactly. It is the best metaphor you could choose. That has always been my point also when I communicated with film funds. I said, okay, modern warfare might look different. But in the end, if you compare Gaza to Dresden, you do not see any difference. It is just because both were completely obliterated. So in the end, everything looks the same. That’s the official meaning of the word Danse Macabre. It’s like the death is the big equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. In the end, you will all be the same. So that is kind of the same with wars.

Have you been influenced by Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel or artists in this kind of tradition?

Hisko Hulsing: Well, I am a big fan of Bruegel, especially. Bosch too, of course. But he was fucking crazy. That’s such a weird genius. It is really hard to be influenced by somebody like that because it’s so unique. But I have been influenced by many, many artists. And Peter Bruegel is one of my favorite painters. That is correct. And the 17th century Dutch painters and Velazquez. When I made my mood boards for the film funds, et cetera, I would always name Francisco Goya. I am not a big fan of Goya, but I always named him because he is the first one that was sort of making chronicles about the war with all its atrocities. And so I used it to convince the film funds, you can make art about this. And then I always used Fantasia from Disney, this has a big influence because of course, I mean, „Night on Bald Mountain“, especially, and then also „Fantasia 2000“. The last segment about the Firebird. I think that that has been very, I mean, it is a little bit too kitschy for my taste.

But the drive and the timing! It is a great short film.

Hisko Hulsing: It is fantastic. It is very well directed by Paul and Gaetan Brizzi from France. I’m sure they are musicians, like me, you know, they have to, it is so perfectly timed and everything. So that was very influential. And then the other film is Pink Floyd, The Wall of course, with the walking hammers. But those films have been very influential when I was young. But then talking about influences, there is so much, you know, I’ve been so influenced by music, but mostly by live action films. Roman Polanski is one of my biggest influences, you know, films like The Tenant or Rosemary’s Baby. So it goes on and on and on.

When I first saw the trailer you put out, I immediately thought, this is so bold, the moment when the guy, the skeleton is galloping through the town. I think it’s really tough to make a film, an anti-war film, without making something attractive about war. There are historic examples where they recut films to change the mood from anti-war films to pro-war films…

Hisko Hulsing: I already saw a TikTok film where they recut scenes from my film and use some kind of hip hop under it. So, that’s a problem. It’s well done, actually. And I’m okay with it. But I have to be careful with that. That’s true. But on the other hand, you know, they are all skeletons. So, I went to an exhibition two years ago in the Netherlands about fascist art. And so, I was very glad that I went, because if people will accuse me of that, I will tell them, look at fascist art under Hitler. It was all about beautiful, strong, healthy men, not about skeletons. The women, they were all there just to make children and do the householding. And it’s a completely different kind of imagery. I mean, the imagery that we have of Second World War and Nazi Germany is not comparable to the imagery they received from their propaganda.

Yeah, there is a fantastic painting of Hitler as a medieval knight.

Hisko Hulsing: Oh, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And this backfired to me so much, because when I saw that, I immediately laughed out loud, because it was so funny.

Hisko Hulsing: It’s a caricature already. Yeah, exactly. You can’t make fun of it, because it’s funny itself. Yeah, I know. I see what you mean. At this moment, I’m not so worried anymore. I was worried for a long time that people might misinterpret my film. But the thing with that monkey soldier that is destroying the whole town, I mean, if you look at it, so what I try to sort of tell in that part is that that is the problem with humanity. We are still kind of primates, but we are primates with with very developed technology. And this technology is still developing in an exponential way. But the human kind is not developing in an exponential way. We are actually getting dumber in a way, like as a human species. So that is what I tried to illustrate there, that like these soldiers that are being dropped, and they are just running like animals, like monkeys, and end up in a nuclear explosion. So there are all those ideas in there. And I am sure that some people will misunderstand it. But that is with all art, you know, you can never tell.

I would like to know how it all, how the kernel of the idea came into your mind 11 years ago. How did you come up with the idea?

Hisko Hulsing: Well, first of all, it was 11 years ago when I started. But in the meantime, I directed Undone, two whole seasons, and I did an animated episode of The Sandman on Netflix.

Which we talked about, this very nice idea that cats are eating humans.

Hisko Hulsing: (laughing) That’s also an interesting thing, I didn’t write it. It’s from Neil Gaiman, but it is sort of up my alley. Well, anyhow. The idea to „Danse Macabre“ started after „Montage of Heck“, the film about Kurt Cobain. I made animated sequences for that. And that film became very big. That was, you know, Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. It was Universal Pictures, HBO. It was shown all over the world and got seven Emmy nominations. And there was this rapper called Kid Cudi. He’s a hip hop artist. And he ended up making „Entergalactic“  years later. But at that time, he was not doing very well. He was in a very dark place. But he saw „Montage of Heck“ and he loved it so much that his manager wrote me an email if I was interested in cooperating and if I preferred business class flight to LA or first class. I was like, okay, I can do that. And they put me in a great Hotel at Hollywood Boulevard. And so I was going to the sound studio every day with Kid Cudi  who was recording his new album, to listen to his ideas and see what kind of visuals I could come up with them. And the visuals were very demonic. He was not doing very well. He later… he got over it. Now he’s very happy and famous. But at that time he was not doing very well. And his ideas were very dark, it was more about his inner demons, in the end we never made that film.

And when I came back in the Netherlands, I thought, well, there’s actually a piece of music that evokes this kind of images with me. And that is the second movement of the 10th Symphony from Shostakovich. I already had those images when I was 20 years old , when in there you hear this kind of the violence that sounds like horses. Well, if I closed my eyes, I saw exactly what I would make in this film. I can listen to music in an abstract way, but I also very easily get images. I have read two biographies of Shostakovich and saw a lot of stuff on YouTube – so I know a lot about him and also I am a trained musician, like my wife and my son. I saw some early music sheets that he wrote when he was 16 or 15. And then he wrote next to a line of music: this is where the soldier comes out. This is where the soldier is coming out of his place. He was describing the music in visuals. So I know he also had a very visual mind. I’m pretty sure. I’m just sure about it. So if people want to accuse me of blasphemy, they probably will. They definitely will. But I will tell them, just listen, we cannot ask. We have the rights from the Shostakovich estate, by the way. But Shostakovich cannot answer these questions. But I am sure he was thinking in these kind of ways. I mean, it is clearly a march. It is a march. You cannot really see it in any different way. And itis also clearly about terror and panic and death and chaos.

So, maybe I use different images then he had in mind, but I do not feel bad about it. And so I started storyboarding. There is nobody on this planet who has heard that piece of music more than I did, I think 2000, probably 3000 times, literally, because I would sit there and just listen to it. And it was a very hard process. I would never make more than two drawings per day, which is not a lot for your storyboard. You have to do at least 10, or sometimes 60. I made many storyboards for other projects. But here, it was different. Because first of all, I wanted to keep on thinking about what I was drawing. And I wanted to keep on thinking about what my story would be about, because I did not have a clear outline for the story. I didn’t have a script, I just started with music. And then while I was drawing storyboards, I was developing my ideas for the whole structure of the film and for the ideas. So that is also why I worked them out pretty well. Because I know, when I do that, it gives me more inspiration than when I make a quick sketch. It is hard to explain, but it is sort of feeding my own brain.

Sorry? This is your way of doing it?

Hisko Hulsing: Yes, feeding my own brain with new inspiration. And then it was very hard to get a structure in the film, because the problem is that it is four and a half minutes. And on Minute 2:10, that is where I already put in the nuclear explosion. So I got there because it does not follow a three act structure, this music doesn’t follow that kind of structure. So the climax, the biggest climax is in the middle. Therefore I was completely stuck for many months, I did not know what to do after that. I had many ideas, but they all proved wrong. Till my producer called me and he said, Hisko, what are you doing, we have to deliver the moving storyboard in two weeks! And suddenly, the whole ending came out of my head. You can compare it to writing a script. But this was purely done with visuals, never in writing, always completely in sync with the music – in my brain, at least. And this had to tell kind of a story.

My first encounter with such a way of storytelling is The Old Mill, again, a silly symphony by Walt Disney from 1937, by the team of Walt Disney. It is „just“ music, it’s an atmospheric thing. If you see it, there seems not much story in it. It is only a night at the Old Mill. And there is a thunderstorm.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah, I know. Beautiful things happening. It is unbelievable. Beautiful. I think I agree with you. I mean, there is still a lot of good animation today. But I think that the early days, like the Max Fleischer films, and the early Silly Symphonies, the early Disney films, that was when animation was at its highest peak, in my opinion. And you do not have to agree, but that is my opinion.

I have seen your film, I would disagree.

Hisko Hulsing: Okay, thank you. But the like, telling a story with purely images and music, it can be so powerful, especially with animation. You can do with live action in a way. Like my film Junkyard , you could tell that with an actor. But I just enjoy those old Fleischer and Disney films the most where everything has a soul, everything is moving. You can watch them over and over again. Or a film like „Father and Daughter“ from Michael Dudok-De Wit. That is one of my favorites, because it is a story but there is no real, very logical flow to it. So you can watch it over and over again, because every time you see it, you see different things. And that is what I like about, about animation the most. But you were asking something different.

What was the next step after having finished the storyboard and the animatic?

Hisko Hulsing: The next step was like, usually, the process is, well, I don’t have to explain it to you. You know: the backgrounds are separate from the characters, of course. And so, for my films, for „Junkyard“, and „Seventeen“, and all those films, I made hundreds and hundreds of beautiful paintings (for the backgrounds). I like them. But the subject (the character) is of course always missing, it’s always like an empty decor. And I got fed up with it. I know that my paintings are good, but they will always be seen as background paintings, which is kind of a shame. So I thought, let’s just turn it around. Let’s just paint the whole scene. So I started painting with the characters in them. Every shot started with a painting like that. That’s not completely true, because later last year, I had to hurry up a little bit. And I started doing them without the characters, but like, like half of them or something are with the characters in them. But I didn’t have any idea how to approach it afterwards. It was just like, it’s a bold move. In a way, I was like, okay, I want it to look like this. I don’t know how, but I’m going to find out. And then we did a test with projection mapping with Polder Animation, which I was pretty happy with in 2017.

2017? You are a very patient man.

Hisko Hulsing: The test was okay, but it would be very expensive. So it was not possible this way. Then I did Undone, two whole seasons.  And then after that, I got UTA represents me. It’s the biggest talent agency in LA. And they connected me with Netflix, Amazon, Sony, Blur Studios, all those big studios. I couldn’t imagine myself going back to making a short film. At that time, I thought I was a big man.

And so I pitched it as an anthology – as a part of an anthology, a Fantasia like anthology, but Fantasia for adults. So once I started talking about that, some of them got really enthusiastic. I remember, there was this woman from Netflix and there and she said, „Do you want to do Fantasia? Look behind me“. And there was actually a poster of Fantasia hanging behind her. And then when I would show the clip, I saw their corners of their mouth go down, like, „Oh, this is not what we want to do“, you know. I mean, they didn’t see the commercial potential in it. So nobody wanted to do it. I thought well, I then I have to do this short myself again, which saved the project. Because if I would have done it as one part in an anthology, it would never had this quality. Because now I was forced to, I mean, I’m involved in every detail of the film, you know, so really every drawing goes through my hands to retouch it. And I’m briefing people in a very detailed way. So I could make this film as a short film director, which makes it much better when than when I would have been just some kind of supervisor on the project. So there were four countries involved, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Hungary. And even a studio in Africa that was working together with a friend, Gao Shan. And so I would have these weekly zoom calls, briefings where we would discuss every shot. And the starting point for every shot was either the storyboard and the live action recordings that I did, or the painting, depending if the painting was finished or not. So what I’m saying is that this film was helped very much by the fact that it’s a short film. The problem with short films is that there’s never enough money. So I always end up with depth. That’s just part of the game when you make short films. But yeah, it’s worth it. I think, I hope.

Are you able or allowed to tell me a little bit about the budget? Of course, you can’t be paid for all your time, which you put in as it seems to be a passion project.

Hisko Hulsing: The budget? I can tell you. One of the biggest passion projects I was ever able to lay my eyes on. In the end, you had to pay people for making it. So there were four producers. And I can tell you this. The total budget was 470,000 Euros. That is a lot of money.

Really? Only? 470,000.

Hisko Hulsing: Yeah.

It looks much more expensive.

Hisko Hulsing: Oh, really? Thank you. Thank you for that. Well, I have to tell you this. Listen, I am pretty sure that Autour de Minuit  did not make any money. There were so many people working on the film. I cannot imagine that they did not put their own money in. My own producer in the Netherlands, I think he is also sort of bringing in part of his fee. The Hungarians did not get any money from the state. That was still during Victor Orbán´s gouvernment, of course. And they put in their own money. It’s all their own money. But it is a passion project for a lot of people, actually, in a way. I know the Hungarians, that was Cinemon Entertainment, Reka Temple . She just was very enthusiastic about the film. She said it’s a very important film and we want to participate in it. And then they put in 25,000 euros of their own money. So it is a passion project on every front, actually. And I mean, all the people got paid, you know. But I think at some point people realized that it was going to be special and they did their best. And also Stein Louisse, who helped me with the Stable Diffusion ComfyUI, that whole part, he was the only person in this part. And he did not make a lot of money either, because he started developing these new techniques two and a half years ago together with me. And I do not want to know what he got paid, but barely enough, you know. And he was great, it was such a hard process because he had to program all the time, do trial and error over and over and over again. Sometimes I would approve something and he would then weeks later come back and say: „Well, I’m not satisfied. I’m going to try it again“. So that’s very, very uplifting, you want to work with those kinds of people who are just so like: „No, it’s not good enough. I have to do it better“. So I was very happy with that.

You must be a great communicator to make people work that way.

Hisko Hulsing: I always think if I would have such a thing in my mind, it’s very tough to communicate and to bring everybody on the same page. We have to do it that way because then the impact is the best. Yeah. I think it’s a matter of experience. Well, I have a lot of experience now because I directed Undone, of course, which was six hours of animation with 200 people working on that. And on „Dream of a thousand Cats“, there was also 150 people working. So I got better at it. And I think, okay, I am not manipulative First of all, people notice right away that I know exactly what I want. And a lot of directors do not know exactly what they want. And then people get insecure. I have made storyboards for over 120 advertising companies as a commercial storyboarder. There’s like a balance between being very precise, but giving people creative freedom. If you get that direction, then people flourish because they know what is being expected from them. But they also know they can elevate it. And that is what I learned from being working for other people: especially older art directors understand this: that they give you some precise parameters where you can work within certain parameters, but within that you have freedom. And then I flourished as a storyboard drawer, because I would really feel it is mine. And I made it mine. I think that that is the way I approach people that I give them freedom, some freedom. So they can thrive when they make it.

Is it hard for you to let it go, to give your brain child to other artists and they enhance it and they bring something to you from that side?

Hisko Hulsing: Well, it is hard. It is hard when people are not competent. And you find out during the process that not everybody i as good, but it’s especially nice when people are elevating it. And so you never know. It’s kind of an unscertainty, no, how do you call it? Uncertain process. So it is not easy. You give it to people, you try to give as many tools to work with, like reference material, because I filmed the whole film with actors and musicians first, and then I cut it. So the film was cut based on the animatics.

So they already have all that reference. So they have a lot of stuff to work with so I’m trying to control it as much and at the same time giving them some freedom. I like people who are proactive who just do things that I did not ask for and then: oh wow, I did not think of that. That was so great when I directed Undone that I always thought that the more people work on a project the more it got dumbed down but that’s not true per se because when you’re on a set with 30 people there’s 30 brains and there’s more than one brain so you get all these inputs and if you know how to use the inputs then you get a better product, a better project. But in the case of my film it is a little bit different because I knew so well what I wanted so I could not give people too much freedom actually.

I personally would give you the academy award just for this the trailer! Very rarely I see something so really new. I was really grateful. I saw the work you put in every frame.

Hisko Hulsing: You see the work yeah but also you, because we’re connected on social media, you already saw the paintings through the years so that makes a difference too. And if you are interested in the „How we did it“ I made a Making-Of Video that explains the production pipeline en detail.

Danse Macabre

 

A Dream of a thousand Cats, Cobain, Danse Macabre, Entergalactic, fantasia, Fantasia 2000, Father and Daughter, Fleischer Studios, hisko hulsing, Kid Cudi, Kurt Cobain, Michael Dudok De Wit, Montage of Heck, Night on Bald Mountain, Paul and Gaetan Brizzi, Reka Temple, Silly Symphony, Undone, walt disney