Sunburnt Unicorn is the only North American feature at this year's prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.Supplied
A puppetlike youth with a crystal horn travels through a parched desert where the animals can talk but struggle to survive, while the eerie soundtrack plays Inuit throat singing. Sunburnt Unicorn, a first feature from Calgary animator and comic-book artist Nick Johnson, is nothing if not original. Maybe that’s why it is making its debut at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France June 12, coincidentally the only North American feature on this year’s lineup at one of the world’s leading animation markets.
“If you have a finished animated film, that’s the first place where you submit,” Johnson said. “Because Annecy is so notable that if you get in, the odds are pretty good that other festivals will be attracted to what you’ve made.”
Inspired partly by Johnson’s own memories of adolescence as a time of both fear and wonder, Sunburnt Unicorn is a coming-of-age story about Frankie, a teen looking for his father – and parental approval – after they are separated by a car crash. His horn symbolizes his conviction that he will be loved for being unique, while the setting is a desert for both thematic and practical reasons.
“This is our internal desert, this is inside of Frankie. I was trying to think of a landscape that was gorgeous but also dangerous, primal and raw – that emotional state,” Johnson said of a setting that includes both Southwestern red rocks and classical European ruins. “You’ve got rocks, you’ve got extreme weather and you have animals that are all desperately doing everything they can to survive. As a background, it was really rich with visuals and themes.”
It was also much simpler, and therefore cheaper to animate, than a complex urban setting. When Calgary’s Squid Brain Studios invited Johnson to pitch in 2021, he wanted a project that could be rustled up quickly. (After he completed the script in 2022, the film was produced in a mere 18 months, wrapping last March.)
Against the simple desert background, featuring a parched landscape that is sometimes almost photographic in its realism, Johnson inserts eccentric characters who might be mistaken for examples of stop-motion animation, which uses physical figures and objects. In truth, the entire film is digitally animated.
The contrast between the realistic background and the cartoon-like characters is very purposeful: “Our goal was to make the characters look like they were marionettes. It makes a them a little more tactile. If things are too soft, too computer-generated, you can have a disconnect with the audience.”
Johnson teaches animation at the Alberta University of the Arts, and the project gave him great classroom material, as he led his students through the process of turning his 2-D drawings into 3-D figures, working with a computer animator.
In film, the desert is a macho place, to be conquered by Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name and Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia. Johnson was determined to feminize this desert and, with the exception of the villainous Cactus King and Frankie’s gruff father, all the characters are voiced by women, including Diana Kaarina as Frankie and Kathleen Barr playing the wise tortoise who guides him.
Kathleen Barr voices the wise turtle that guides Frankie, the lead character of Sunburnt Unicorn.Supplied
Meanwhile, the soundtrack is provided by the Inuit duo Piqsiq. Sisters Tiffany Kuliktana Ayalik and Kayley Inuksuk Mackay create an eerie sound without the benefit of any instrumentation – although in some places their voices were filtered on a synthesizer.
Johnson had been struggling with the soundtrack until he happened to hear the duo at the Calgary Folk Festival.
“I didn’t know who they were. I just lay there on the grass and let the music wash over me, and something in me unlocked. I realized this isn’t a math problem – this is a story that could make people feel something.”
He felt the breathy sound of throat singing would evoke Frankie’s inner journey, and the B.C.-based Piqsiq turned out to be happy to work on their first soundtrack.
“It feels like you have this very internal voice, the breath really connects to humans, to people and emotion. And their music also was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. So thematically it was really working,” Johnson said, citing the notion from Canadian literature that nature is a source of both pleasure and terror.
The film is intended as a family feature, but Johnson, recalling the fantasy films of his childhood – such 1980s classics as The Secret of Nimh and Return to Oz – thinks young audiences should be able to tolerate darker themes en route to the film’s optimistic ending – once he gets a distribution deal. He is awaiting word on another dozen festival submissions, but in the meantime, he is just happy to be going to France.
“Making animation is really expensive. A finished film alone is a challenge, and then being able to exhibit it: miracle No. 2.”