How Director Priit Tender Unleashed His Imagination in the Oscar Short-listed ‘Dog Apartment’

This article was written for the March '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 338).

Estonian director Priit Tender’s animated short Dog Apartment is one of 15 titles that landed on the Academy Awards’ Best Animated Short shortlist this year. The surreal, stop-motion project from the animation veteran has already won the top animation prizes at the 2023 Stuttgart International Animation Festival and Bulgaria’s In the Palace International Short Film Festival.

What immediately comes to mind after viewing this imaginative curiosity is whether you’re watching a dog dreaming it’s an apartment, or if this humble abode is dreaming it’s a dog. No matter how you interpret this animated treat, Tender has crafted a beautifully detailed world where a former ballet dancer named Sergei deals with the strange situation of living inside a top-floor unit that displays all the mannerisms and characteristics of a furry, barking pooch. When mealtime rolls around, Sergei drives off toward the local butcher shop, past a wasteland decimated of its trees by a hatchet-headed rooster.

With absurdist nods to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, ShadowMachine’s Robot Chicken and the Brothers Quay, this highly original stop-motion jewel hails from Estonia’s Nukufilm, the world’s oldest continually operated stop-motion studio.

Soviet Surrealism

It’s natural to think that the genesis for this project was a series of bizarro dreams or nightmares brought on by a tainted meal, but its origins actually have a literary seed.

“The film was inspired by a poem — To Be a Dog-Apartment by Estonian surrealist Andres Ehin,” Tender explains. “I translated his game of words into characters and created my own narrative for them. So, no nightmares this time, only Soviet surrealism.”

Surrealism is used here in all its disturbing shades to seduce viewers into Dog Apartment’s lunacy for a memorable escape. “There’s an aspect of surprise when you use hyperrealism and all of a sudden mix it with some dreamlike elements,” says the director, whose past animated projects Vares ja hiired, Orpheus, Frank & Wendy and Kitchen Dimensions have also received prizes at the Annecy, Hiroshima and Encounters festivals through the years. “The same classic principle worked in the early days of surrealism, and it works now as well.”

Stop-motion is a painfully precise art form to work within. Yet, Tender considered it to be a stronger medium to deliver the world and themes he had conjured up in his head after reading Andres Ehin’s poetry.

“The world of 2D animation is full of metamorphosis, squash and stretch and all other shapeshifting tricks,” he adds. “To replicate the similar effects with real materials (the barking sink, for instance) was a challenge worth taking. The final result came as a combination of 2D thinking and stop-motion executing.

“Before the film, I was contemplating on the theme of nostalgia quite a lot. Like some older people who have good memories of the Soviet times (which were actually horrible). What is this phenomenon of sweetening up the past that our brain produces over time? Building the realistic, Soviet-looking sets and having a main character who used to be a stage star in his past was an exploration of nostalgia for me.”

Tender’s 14-minute short being named to the Oscars’ shortlist carried with it great creative joy and a symbolic prophecy unveiled in deep slumber.

“A few days before the shortlist announcement I had a dream,” Tender recalls. “I was walking by the Japanese coastline with a friend and suddenly a lot of seals came out of the sea. They were black and wet and shimmering in the sunshine, playing around on the beach. I woke up with a happy feeling. I think this dream predicted the good news about getting into the shortlist, so I was not too surprised. I tend to take my dreams seriously.”

The unsettling film’s overall concept came with several practical obstacles to define its tone, emotions and direction, something the Estonian filmmaker tackled with a rare gusto.

Mixing Art and Reality

“It’s an act of constructivism: For dog-apartment, you just mix an apartment and a dog; for a rooster-axe, a rooster and an axe also,” the director explains. “And finally, if you have a house that behaves like a dog you come out with a logic question — what and how does this dog eat? And then you invent a man who lives in that house and takes care of it. Finally, you come up with a sad story that fits him. I don’t easily get inspiration from animations, more from documentaries and live-action films.”

Dog Apartment’s sense of scale is what sells this weird environment, and Tender made sure that he employed the full scope of the historic studio’s workspace. The care and attention paid while constructing the puppets resulted in a professionally rendered yearlong endeavor.

“I wanted to have a huge landscape on which a human being seems tiny and insignificant,” Tender says. “That’s why we used the maximum space that the Nukufilm studio could offer — 6×6 meters for the big set. I modeled the heads of the puppets in plasticine, then the puppet builder took it over and cast it to silicon [and] made the metal structure also. It took a while to find the right kind of fabric for the suit of the main character, as he had to be able to dance and his clothes had to be elegant but also flexible. There are a million details to make a proper film puppet.”

Adding to the absorbing elements of Dog Apartment is the freaky film’s rich soundscape and sound effects that range from the oddly discordant to the randomly familiar.

“The sets are built with great realism, so I wanted the soundscape to be something close to a documentary film rather than animation,” he notes. “For a documentary you just record the sound on location, but in animation it took a lot of labor and endless sound layers to build such an environment out of nothing. I chose to use music only in specific places where it comes from a car radio or someone playing cello. Swan Lake heard in the cowshed is the only musical moment in the film and is thus meant to work as a stronger contrast to the mundane sounds.”

For Tender, the most gratifying aspect of this production was the generous creative support from his team members and the collective enthusiasm at Nukufilm. And, of course, seeing the end result of the film. “It took a while to get there, but I was happy,” he concludes.

For more information, visit nukufilm.ee/en/arhiiv/dogflat.