The new animated feature Kensuke’s Kingdom is one of the many highly anticipated features making their debut at the Annecy Festival this month. Based on the best-selling children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo and adapted for the screen by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the 2D-animated pic centers on the adventures of a young boy who is shipwrecked on a remote island and discovers he’s not alone when he encounters a hostile old Japanese soldier who retreated there after World War II. But as dangerous invaders appear on the horizon, it becomes clear they must join forces to save their fragile island paradise.
Directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry, the film’s voice cast includes Sally Hawkins, Cillian Murphy, Raffey Cassidy, Aaron MacGregor and Ken Watanabe. Producers for the film are Emmy Award-winning producers and founders of animation studio Lupus Films, Camilla Deakin and Ruth Fielding, co-founder of Working Title Sarah Radclyffe, Barnaby Spurrier, co-founder and CEO of Align Adrian Politowski and Senior Vice President Martin Metz, award-winning producer Jean Labadie and Anne-Laure Labadie of Le Pacte and Academy Award nominee Stephan Roelants of Melusine Productions.
Ahead of Kensuke Kingdom’s world premiere at Annecy as part of the feature film competition, Boyle and Hendry discuss the project in an exclusive interview with Animation Magazine:
Animation Magazine: Can you please tell us a bit about how you got involved with the movie? When did you begin work on the project?
Kirk Hendry: Producer Sarah Radclyffe, who optioned the book and had long been passionate about turning it into a film, got in touch after seeing some work I had made for the World Wildlife Fund. I was developing a project with Neil at the time and suggested he come on board too.
Neil Boyle: We first became attached to the project in 2012, and for several years we shopped the film around to various financiers and production partners, piecing together early concept design, and in 2017 doing a teaser trailer. We were finally greenlit to go into pre-production in 2020, and we delivered the completed film in 2023. So like the story we portray in the film itself, it was quite an epic adventure just getting the film made!
What do you think makes this movie stand out from other animated features today?
Kirk and Neil: Kensuke’s Kingdom is a rare beast, in that it’s a proper adventure story full of action and excitement, but at the same time it is also extremely gentle, with a complex emotional core. These two things don’t often sit side by side. It also includes a really important ecological message for our times. To have all three of those things — adventure, emotion and a timely message — that plays well to all ages, is a tremendous gift.
What were some of your biggest challenges as you set out to adapt the story for the screen?
Kirk and Neil: One of the biggest challenges — but perhaps also the most fun — was to find ways of telling our story with the minimum of dialog. We approached the film this way for two reasons. The first is because it’s a film about people and other animals who do not share a common spoken language: Michael is an English boy who cannot speak Japanese, and Kensuke is a Japanese man who cannot speak English. And none of the humans can communicate verbally with the animals. So we had to find ways for our characters to show, rather than speak, their emotions. The second reason for minimizing dialog is that we both are fans of very visual storytelling. We love to play with composition, camera blocking, body language, production design, color palette, sound design and the musical score, the combination of which we feel gives the audience the strongest cinematic experience.
Can you comment on the visual style of the movie, influences and inspirations?
Neil: When Kirk and I first read the script, we both started talking about Sergio Leone and David Lean, because it seemed obvious we would need a big, hot, Cinemascope landscape into which we could put our tiny, lost figure of Michael! We also both share a love of the Spielberg and Zemeckis movies we grew up on, like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future, which are beautifully crafted and exciting films, which seem to have universal appeal, and can be enjoyed by anyone of any age.
Kirk: We often reference matte paintings from the golden age of Hollywood and beyond. The not-quite-real artifice of it all that allows you to readily suspend your disbelief. They are full of charm that is often missing from digital photoreal matte paintings commonplace in contemporary films. We also took inspiration from the sketch work of Japanese artist Hiroshige for our Nagasaki flashback sequence. The simplicity in the line and the use of negative space in the environment is beautiful, and contrasted nicely with the rich style of the rest of the film.
Which animation tools were used to create it?
Kirk and Neil: Quite a lot of our initial character design was done old school, pencil and pen on paper. For storyboarding we worked in TVPaint. Layout was a combination of Photoshop painting, photographic elements, with 3D enhancements using Maya and Unreal. All the 2D animation was animated, assisted and painted in TVPaint, and the film was composited in Nuke.
What were your biggest challenges?
Kirk and Neil: When we were finally greenlit to jump into production we were a month or two into the COVID pandemic lockdown. So we had to find a way to make the production move ahead smoothly and efficiently, with 300 people working from their little offices and bedrooms at home! It was quite a huge challenge, not just for us but for many productions at that time. But we had an exceptionally good production team at our side who really ironed out all the problems. In the end I think we all decided that being isolated in our own houses was probably the best way to make a film about being isolated on a desert island!
Can you tell us your ballpark budget?
Kirk and Neil: Around 10 million euros.
Are there any particular scenes that you fell in love with?
Neil: We have a scene in the film where we see the logbook of our 11-year-old lead character, Michael, magically filling up with his drawings that represent all the adventures he and his family are having on their voyage. We knew we wanted real children’s drawings in there, not ‘fake naive’ drawings done by sophisticated artists, so I roped in my own three children to do dozens of sketches for us, which they chipped away at over several weeks. When I watch this sequence it’s fun for me to see their drawings appearing in there, supported by the magnificent score by our composer Stuart Hancock. Anyone who works in film knows that you’re always doing long hours, and often working weekends and so forth, so to get my own family involved for a little bit was a nice way to share in the fun.
Kirk: All off the tearjerker scenes are my favorites, and there are many! The Nagasaki scene always leaves me with a lump in my throat. But I think the goodbye scene is the one I’m most pleased with. We worked very hard on that to get it right, to make it ebb and flow in a satisfying way over five minutes with minimal dialog. Big shoutouts to our editor Richard Overall and composer Stuart Hancock who really glued it together so seamlessly.
What do you hope audiences will take home after seeing the movie?
Kirk and Neil: I think we’d love audiences to leave the theater feeling that they have been fully entertained, and perhaps dabbing away a bittersweet tear, but also pondering the message of the film. It was always Michael Morpurgo’s wish that we hold true to his message of hope, and the idea that ‘family’ — blood families, chosen families, and the wider family of humans, animals, and the natural world — is something to be respected and cherished. And I really think we have successfully achieved that.
Kensuke’s Kingdom is a Lupus Films production, presented by BFI, Film Fund Luxembourg and Align in association with Jigsaw Films, Melusine Productions, Le Pacte and BumpyBox, with the support of FFilm Cymru Wales.
