January 8th, 2023 
Jackson Murphy 
Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis are no strangers to the prestige of the Academy Awards. Tilbis was on the Best Animated Short Film ballot for 1991’s “Strings”. She and Forbis were nominated for 1999’s “When the Day Breaks” and 2011’s “Wild Life”. They’re in contention once again — on the 2023 Oscar shortlist for The Flying Sailor. They spoke about their experience making this “based on a true story” short. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Amanda Forbis: It feels really good.
Wendy Tilby: It’s a strong year. We feel very pleased to be part of it.
Jackson Murphy: Where does the true story for The Flying Sailor come from?
WT: True but obscure. Hopefully we’re making it less obscure. We were in Halifax, Nova Scotia about 20 years ago, and we happened to be at the Maritime Museum [of the Atlantic] there. And they have a whole area devoted to the Halifax Explosion. Canadians are [fairly] familiar with it, particularly since the 100th anniversary was a few years ago. It happened in 1917. It was a catastrophic event. Two ships collided. One of them was full of explosives. There were many terrible stories, but there was one tiny blurb we read about this one sailor who was launched by the blast, flew for two kilometers, landed in a green space uphill, naked except for one boot, and was basically fine. We thought, “Holy smokes! That’s an amazing story.”
We had it in our minds for many years. We made our film Wild Life in between, and a lot of other things. We thought it was time to do another film. We looked at that story and thought it had a lot of ingredients that were interesting to us. We liked that the story itself is quite simple and is really about his trip. What would it have been like to be that sailor in the air? What would he have been thinking about? It’s essentially a near-death experience. You could just go to town with that. We based our story on near-death experiences. We read lots of accounts. A lot of them are the same: describing the sense of time slowing down, fragments of memories, you see dead loved ones. The best part is this sense of bliss and becoming at one with the universe. Your physical self starts to disappear. It’s really quite a lovely thing… the white light.
JM: It’s amazing you had the idea to use this story for about 20 years. This was finally the time. How did you realize it was time and this story was necessary to finally be told?
AF: The question of, “What was the trip like?”, was tantalizing enough so that we hung onto it for 20 years. We did some preliminary work on it about 20 years ago, and it was quite different than it ended up being. We originally envisioned having fish be a much bigger part of the film. When we started to put the film together, the fish killed the pleasure of the momentum of watching the sailor.
WT: It was distracting from the subjective experience of the sailor.
Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
AF: One of the images that held us all that time was this idea of a pink, naked guy floating in the sky. It’s funny those ideas that get their teeth into you and hang on for a long time. And that was one of them. It wasn’t even much more formed than that until we started production.
WT: But we knew the slow-motion part was a big aspect — that we were expanding time. There was something about his flailing motions that would become bailletic in that speed. There’s something poignant and beautiful and funny about that… but not so much that it distracts from the tragedy, which the situation is… so we were trying to walk a fine line there. I think we’re attracted to things that are kind of terrible and beautiful at the same time.
JM: You capture the perfect tone. Part of that is the music. Part of that is the way we see him fly. And the word “poetic” came to my mind when I watched it.
AF: Thank you.
JM: So it was tricky to find that poetic balance, so it would be okay for everybody to watch this?
WT: It wasn’t really because it’s kind of, naturally, what we do, but we were worried about it.
AT: But we did have a few agonies that I find funny in retrospect. One of them was the cigarette. Was that too funny in the context of this terrible event? And should it be lit at the end of his journey? We also knew that Haligonians are quite sensitive about the Halifax Explosion because a lot of them had relatives who went through it. Honestly, [there were] people picking bits of glass out of their scalps until the end of their lives, or had been blinded by it. It’s a tender, important subject to them. We didn’t want to be jerks about it. Ultimately I’m interested in that little bit of discomfort I think the audience feels when they laugh when the clothes come off, and then when he proceeds over the sky you think, “Oh, this isn’t that funny.” I like that little bit of discomfort. I find that interesting.
WT: We also didn’t name Halifax. We wanted it to be more generic. We wanted to speak to anybody — an international audience — without familiarity with the real event.
AF: We didn’t want the audience to feel like they had to know the event in order to understand the film.
WT: Or that it was a document of the event. It’s about one person’s experience. It’s really subjective and personal.
JM: What you do so well before we see him go flying is bring us into this place, time and feel with the music, the way he’s walking down the street and that explosion itself. How was it bringing us into it and crafting that explosion?
AF: The prologue, where you see him on the docks… it was very important for us to make it as concise as possible because it wasn’t really the story to us. We really wanted to spend the time with the explosion. We just wanted a very tight, concise, description to get us from A to B. We decided to make it cartoony in nature. Because there’s dynamite in there, and everybody’s watched enough Wile E. Coyote to know that…
WT: Dynamite is not a good thing, but also not fatal…
AF: …We would set-up this light tone of, “It’s just another day in Cartoon Land”, and then switch it completely when we get to the explosion. The explosion was a melange of digital images and hand-painted stuff, stock footage and a big mess of things. It inherently looks more like an abstract film at that point. We wanted that explosion to be different than a Hollywood explosion. And we wanted it to feel visceral. We put you in there with him through the sound, and the redness is meant to be an abstract suggestion of how he’s feeling.
WT: Music, as you mentioned, was extremely important, when you talk about walking that line of humor and tragedy. We worked with Luigi Allemano, who’s a friend of ours in Montreal. He was wonderful. It was very collaborative. We knew that once he was in the air, we wanted to take him through various states of mind. It was really tricky to get it — beautiful, poignant… we didn’t necessarily want it to be straight-up classical. The sound effects were a very important layer. One of the hardest parts was the descent, or the plummet to the ground. He nailed it.
AF: The sound for the explosion was extremely taxing to me. Wendy spent a lot of time doing the rough edit. We went into the mixing studio, where they have the volume set really, really loud. And it’s in [Dolby] Atmos. We had to listen to that thing over and over until it was almost intolerable. At one point the mixer, Jean Paul Vialard, sent us out of the room and said, “Just leave it with me for a while.” He shaped it a little further, which was great. That was the toughest part of the post production.
JM: You do such a great job of bringing together sound, story and emotion. I watched this on The New Yorker’s YouTube channel. My mother has loved the magazine for a long time, and it really supports artists and artistry.
WT: If we were to turn the camera around, you’d see stacks of them everywhere in the house. (laughs) We’re devoted readers. When we saw it was on The New Yorker site, we thought, “Okay. We can just quit now.”
AF: “We can just die now.” (laughs)
JM: This short is all about memories. What’s the biggest memory you will take away from this experience?
WT: That’s interesting. The making of it… a lot of it was just the two of us sitting here batting away at it. You get your little thrills along the way. It’s a lot of work but you get your rewards when one of us does something that’s wonderful… or from Anna Bron, this animator from Vancouver.
AF: She’s a good animator.
WT: She did the clothes coming off. The way fabric animates is quite a very specific skill. When we saw it, it was exciting. We loved it. For me, the biggest thrill is always music recording. Music recording is more instant gratification, and we work in a world of delayed gratification all the time. You go into the recording studio, and I’m in awe of the musicians. They’ve barely seen the sheet music, and they sit there and play. And I tear-up just thinking about it.
AF: For me, what I found really interesting… was that making the prologue was miserable compared to making the sailor’s journey. I remember that experience with such affection, and how loose and undemanding it was, structurally, compared to the prologue, which was very set and persnickety.
WT: It’s real narrative and it has to make sense. Once he’s in the air, we could change the editing.
AF: It was very freeing and lovely. For the prologue, we had to get the camera angles right and pick the exact right one.
JM: Yeah, you had the freedom to pace the sections of him flying how you wanted to, and that’s great.
AF: Exactly.
JM: If you’re nominated and get to go to the big, 95th Oscars this year… what would it mean to you… to possibly be up on stage for this short?
AF: How about terrifying? (laughs) The nomination is a lovely thing to have.
WT: We’ve been there before. We feel like we’ve been ramping up to this for quite a while. You can’t help but get wrapped-up about it. I can tell you that: Having been there before in that theater in that seat when the envelope is read — when your name is not called, it’s a real mix of great relief at not having to get up there and make that speech… and disappointment.
AF: Yeah.
WT: National Film Board of Canada is behind this and has been working very hard, and we can’t help but feel that we’ve let them down. But in terms of our creative egos, it’s not that big of a deal.
AF: Or that’s what we tell ourselves, anyway.
WT: It’s not going to define the film whether we are nominated or not. The important thing is when people give you feedback and say it meant something. It’s a ride.
AF: It’s a ride.
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