Director Aline Höchli Introduces Us to Her Cavity-Causing Creatures in the Highly Original Sundance Short, ‘Caries’

This week, the attendees at Sundance Film Festival are treated to a wide variety of animated shorts from around the world. Among the eclectic collection this year is an unusual, unpredictable and instantly memorable 2D-animated short by Aline Höchli, titled Caries. The new short by the talented Swiss animator (Why Slugs Have No Legs, Kuckuck) introduces audiences to very small shamans who believe they are creating art inside the mouth of a TV newscaster.

We had the chance to chat with the creative artist in a recent e-mail interview:

Animation Magazine: Congrats on your fascinating new short. Can you tell us a bit about how the odd and intriguing idea for the short came about?

Aline Höchli: It started during the production of [Why Slugs Have No Legs], as I felt the need for a change. Everything revolved around the insects in their skyscrapers and I wanted to enter a completely different world. I don’t remember exactly how the oral cavity came about. Anyway, my father told me and my siblings stories about brushing our teeth to keep our mouths open when we were little. It was sneaky bacteria that he fought with the toothbrush. And that certainly had an impact!

That world was the starting point for this film project, which is not always the case in my work. I played with different elements that I found captivating: there were submarines and gold teeth and mines for a while. At the beginning, the focus was on the theme of belonging and peer pressure. This changed in the final draft to the more invisible dependencies and responsibilities — a topic that I see in hindsight preoccupied me a lot in my everyday life. And as soon as the storyboard was submitted, the global pandemic broke out ,and I was even more preoccupied with it.

When did you start working on it?

I worked on developing the project in 2019 and started production in 2020. In the first lockdown, I received the funding approval, which was a huge relief — I can’t imagine how else I would have found a job during this time. So most of this movie was made at home in the living room. At the beginning it was a wonderfully quiet working atmosphere, and towards the end, it became claustrophobic!

How many people worked on Caries with you and which animation tools were used?

There were two people who mainly worked on the images: I painted the backgrounds with watercolor and animated straight ahead with ballpoint pen on paper and colored the figures with ink and watercolor. Only the shaman’s boots are in acrylic ink to make them bright yellow. That was a lot of work for Stefan Holaus. Stefan was responsible for the compositing and the digital additional animation: an important part of his work was to edit the animation layer so that the watercolor that flowed over the outlines blended plausibly with the colors of the background. But he was also tasked with ensuring that the lines of the animation remained a rich black, and the yellow acrylic paint on the boots completely covered some of these lines.

In addition to this Sisyphean task of tracing the boots, Stefan also helped with the coloring and participated as a co-producer. [We mainly used Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Dragonframe as line testers.] We were accompanied by Samuel Schranz’s title music, which he recorded for the animatic at the very beginning of the project. When he came back four years later to score the finished film, we had become so attached to the music from back then that we persuaded him to painstakingly recreate the old sound file. So there were three of us in the main, but in post-production the voice actors and specialists joined us.

How long did the whole project take to complete?

Finishing Caries took what felt like an eternity; almost five years without the development work. I’m embarrassed to admit it and I can’t say exactly what took so long. The planned production time was two years. The readers of Animation Magazine might be understanding. But I think some of my friends and family started to wonder. When I told them what I was working on, I was asked a few times, “That sounds very similar to the movie you made two years ago,” and I had to explain that it was indeed still the same project!

What would you say was the toughest part of the whole experience?

Spontaneously, it was not to lose my nerve that the project was not finished for so long. I love variety and don’t really appreciate long production times: That’s why I learned a lot for my approach to future films. At least I do tell myself so for comfort.

What are you most pleased about Caries now that it’s out on the festival circuit?

That it was finally finished? (I’m joking.) For the development of the story, I tried out various ideas and it took me a lot of effort to choose from the many possibilities of what could happen in this world. In the end — although it contained a lot of things that I had thought about — it turned out to be completely different than expected. I like these moments when you surprise yourself; afterwards, I secretly had the feeling that my work was completed, even though I rationally knew that it had only just begun.

Therefore, the finished film is something special for me above all because of the many traces of other people that have flowed into it: Stefan’s work, Samuel’s music, the voices and so on. And how the former vision in my head is now something tangible that can be seen and heard by others. I love having as much autonomy as possible, but in the end, stories only really come to life in the collective.

Who are some of your animation heroes?

That’s difficult for me: I’m enthusiastic about the great diversity and I wouldn’t want to miss anyone, so how can I pick someone?

In a way, everyone who takes the time to animate or express something is my hero. I see us humans as an interwoven web of exchanged thoughts and ideas, rather than as islands. We cannot do without each other, even if we are not all equally visible. Of course, there are individual works or people that particularly inspire me at certain moments, but all the films that annoyed me for example — where I thought it would have been better to have done it completely differently — influence me just as much, to be honest.

When did you know you wanted to work in animation?

It was a hugely important goal for me to find a job that didn’t feel like a mere fulfillment of duty; I’m just so passionate about being alive. But it wasn’t clear exactly what that could be, and I remember the big crisis that the career choice was.

In short, the foundation course at the Lucerne University of Arts was the crucial factor for studying animation. I was truly enthused by all the workshops and disciplines in the course that we were taken through in speed. And animation, as Basil Vogt introduced it to us, seemed like an excellent opportunity not to have to choose one of them and to be moreover able to work narratively. The fact that this is my work now, which generates income, is very fortunate though and not just my decision.

What is your take on the global animated short scene?

I think animation has the advantage — possibly also the disadvantage — of visual abstraction. Many of the things that occupy us as humans are quite abstract concepts, and animation is very good at capturing this visually.

There’s also something very poetic about the short film format: You can or have to leave a lot unexplained, especially when you tackle big themes, giving the viewer a significant role as the one spinning on. I imagine this is probably reflected in the scene, that people who appreciate these aspects stick with this format. On the other hand, the short format is also cheaper to make than long animation films: the voices represented may be more diverse and able to experiment. But that’s just my guess: I just left my living-room and need to get to know a lot more people before I dare say anything about the global scene.

Do you have your next project lined up?

Yes, I do. It’s a calmer story with a completely different technique: cut-out animation in front of an etched forest backdrop: I’m currently working intensively with different shades of green. Let’s see if I can finish it faster this time — at the moment the delay is only half a year!

You can find out more about Aline Höchli and her new short at karies.koloss.al. You can also watch Sundance Institute’s interview with the filmmaker on YouTube here.