January 6th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
Director Stephen Vuillemin’s A Kind of Testament is on the 96th Annual Oscars Best Animated Short Film shortlist. One day, a woman discovers online that someone has taken some of her social media posts and turned them into animated video clips. It gets wilder from there. Vuillemin takes me through the thought process behind it all in this Animation Scoop Q&A. (This email interview was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: This is a very specific and intense story. Where did the inspiration come from?
Stephen Vuillemin: I started making the film when I was 30. I was trying to give my life some meaning: I almost stopped going out, and instead, I was making the film, alone. I did that for five years by myself, and then with Remembers, a very cool animation studio in Paris, for one more year, until the movie was finished. So I guess the story is pretty much a reflection of that process: it’s about someone who “sacrifices” their time to make animation, and it questions whether or not it’s a good idea. I was also interested in confronting fiction and reality. In the movie, there are two characters, who both produce images. One is a younger woman, who shoots selfies, and one is an older woman who makes animations. Most people tend to consider photos (especially this genre of photos) as a representation of reality, and animation as fiction, but in the film, it’s not that clear. The story about the woman making the animations is made up, but since the animations exist (and you’re watching them), at least the part about “someone spent a lot of time making these animations” has to be real.
JM: How did you want to build suspense over the course of this short?
SV: I thought it was important to keep the viewer interested!
JM: What fascinated you about exploring your lead character?
SV: I thought of the situation before thinking of the character. I think it’s difficult to make a character-based short film.
JM: How did you visually approach the bold second head twist in the bathroom scene?
SV: I tried making her look like a skull. There’s also a progression in the character’s costume’s intensity climaxing in this scene (the costumes were chosen by fashion designer Kerhao Yin). In this scene, she’s wearing a Prada shearling coat. That was a lot of work to animate (all of the hair had to be animated, hand drawn). We did this scene at Remembers, I’m very grateful to the animators who helped make it.
JM: Tell me about choosing to censor some specific names and other details.
SV: There’s two levels of fiction in the film: the animations, and the subtext of them, given by the voiceover. I wanted the voiceover to sound as real as possible, as if it was a podcast, in contrast with the extravagance of the animations. So I assumed censoring the names would help make it sound more real, as if there were real people involved (and not characters).
JM: Why did you want to include a clip of “The Simpsons”? (One of the best TV shows ever!)
SV: It’s like Russian dolls: there’s you, watching the movie, and then there’s the voiceover, telling you about the animations, and in the animation, the character is watching “The Simpsons”, and then the Simpsons are watching “Itchy and Scratchy”. I tried to imbricate as many fictions as possible, and “The Simpsons” was the only example I knew of cartoon characters watching cartoons.
JM: How would it feel to be Oscar nominated for “A Kind of Testament”?
SV: It would feel good indeed! Fingers crossed!
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