***This article originally appeared in the March ’22 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 318)***
It has been over 20 years since Nunavut director Zacharias Kunuk received numerous awards and glowing reviews for his live-action feature Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Now the 63-year-old filmmaker is back in the limelight with a beautiful animated short titled Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice, which received the FIPRESCI Award at Annecy and the Best Canadian Short prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival last fall. The meticulously crafted stop-motion project follows a young female shaman in training who travels to the underworld to visit Kannaaluk (The One Below) to find out why one community member has fallen sick.
“Ever since Christianity came from the other side of the world, shamanism has been the opposite of European belief,” Kunuk tells us in an email interview. “So when I was growing up as a child I never heard people talk about shamanism; my parents were on the Anglican side and it was forbidden. I felt we needed to record and hear more of these stories, so our future generations can learn about our traditional beliefs that existed long before Christanity.”
Kunuk points out that he is always trying different ways to tell his traditional Inuit stories. “I believe the stop-motion medium fit the story,” he explains. “It gave us the freedom to show things on screen that we could never do with live action. It’s really liberating as a storyteller to have these tools. We can imagine and properly show the stories, spirits and world of Shamanism as it has been told and described to us. We showed it at the schools in Igloolik, and the kids loved seeing animation.”
Magic of Dragonframe
According to the director, The Shaman’s Apprentice took about three years to make and about 50 people worked on Kunuk’s short altogether. “I had a great team of animators to work with and I was amazed at what they could do,” he says. “They used Dragonframe software for the stop-motion capture and a camera made by Ximea that was very small (1” cube), and a set of old C-mount cine lenses. The motion control was done using Cognisys, ARC and Berkey motion-control gear, along with some other custom built pieces. Our lights were fully LED, made by Fiilex, and also a custom-built programmable LED light to make the qulliq lighting.”
The puppets used in the short were about 10 inches tall and the largest set — the Husky cave — was about six feet tall. The ice tunnel depicted in the project was around 10 feet long and the main outdoor set was a big foam-snow table that was eight feet by eight feet.
“Our main challenge was to get the details right,” says the director. “The set, puppets, clothes had to be in our Ammituq style. I get obsessed by the details and want everything to be right, but with animation you can’t change things so easily during production. Everything has to be planned and ready to go, and there are no last-minute tweaks.”
There were also visual details that needed to be adjusted as Kunuk learned more about the culture. For example, the director had planned to use a ladder for the scene where the characters visit the underworld. “But in that time, they had no idea what a ladder looked like, so I had to find that detail from my Elders.”
The director says he is quite pleased with the results of his efforts. “This is the second time I have tried animation, and I’m really happy with our co-producing team. They did a great job! I hope our short opens eyes to what has been closed by European religion. After all, here in Igloolik, it has been inhabited for over 4,000 years and European religion only arrived here 200 years ago!”
Visit shamansapprentice.com or isuma.tv/movies/angakusajaujuq for more info.
Win a Funko X Lilo & Stitch Prize Pack!
