December 17th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
Even Mice Belong in Heaven is a new stop-motion feature now available on VOD and Digital. It’s about a mouse named Whizzy and a fox named Whitebelly who end-up… in Heaven. As they journey through different lands in the sky (including a dazzling amusement park), can these enemies actually become friends, and will they be able to find eternal happiness? This offbeat, visually impressive and tonally deep animated dramedy comes from directors Jan Bubenicek and Denisa Grimmova, along with producer Vladimir Lhotak, who spoke with me on Zoom. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: I love this film. It is so unique. I would love to know, first of all, the fascination you have with this story and the book that it came from.
Jan Bubenicek: The story is based on a book written by Iva Prochazkova, a Czech author quite popular in this region — not only in the Czech Republic but also by our neighbors. It’s a children’s book, so it’s very thin. Denisa found it when our sons were four and two years old. Now they are 15 and 13. (laughs)
JM: Wow.
JB: Because Denisa is a painter and an illustrator and also director of animations, from the first moment she said this is great for animation. Everyone told her “No. There are too many characters. There are too many environments.” We don’t live in the United States, so our conditions are different. “It will be a very, very expensive film for our conditions.” But Denisa wanted to shoot it! [Denisa laughs.] So she was looking for colleagues, and she found Vladimir Lhotak, our producer.
We are a couple, but in the beginning Denisa was looking for someone. In the end, it’s me! Denisa likes the book very much because it’s a beautiful story for preschool children. The book is much simpler than the story of the film. What we like with the story is that it’s about very complicated topics like the loss of a loved person. It’s about overcoming differences, obstacles, anger and fear. Especially in these complicated times, it’s really good for children.
JM: And trust is another big theme in this that really comes through. Denisa, what were your goals with trying to take these themes and show them to children, who may not yet be exposed to concepts of death and Heaven — and for adults as well?
Jan Bubenicek, Denisa Grimmova and characters
Jan Bubenicek, Translating for Denisa Grimmova: From the first moment [I] loved the book because it’s beautifully written. The storytelling is really warm and kind. It’s not dark. We knew that one day you have to communicate with your children about such topics like death and the loss of someone. This book is really great because it does it with such humor and very easily. Very natural narration. [I] loved it because [I] knew we had to tell our sons one day we will die and how to do that. We all know that for kids it’s not a problem to talk about death because they are just curious about everything in the world. For us, this book… helped us in this communication. But it took some time to finish [the film], so… we have another [son] who’s six [years old], so now the film is for our third son. (laughs)
JM: I went to the film’s website, which is very nice. Did you officially start production — making the animation on this — about three years ago?
JB: We moved to the studio… I think it was Autumn 2018.
Vladimir Lhotak: Yeah. Basically we greenlit the project in early 2018 and started the prep and we started shooting in December 2018.
JM: Wow. Making an almost 90-minute stop-motion movie in just about three years’ time is very ambitious and very successful. How was the production for you?
VL: Well, honestly speaking, this is my very first experience with animation as a producer. I had to learn a lot of things [along] the way. Even from the stages of development it was quite challenging to talk to everybody and persuade them that we are the team that can make such an ambitious project with quite a limited budget. The budget of the film is about $4 million. It’s something that can be considered low-budget considering what the story is about and how many sets and characters we have.
In a way, the only way to finance such a production in Europe is a European co-production. So we made it together with partners from France, Poland and Slovakia. We split the production, in a way, which is also a very positive thing about animation, that you can actually outsource bits and pieces and put it all together. The whole organization and planning of the stop-motion sets was a big challenge because there wasn’t any such project before in the Czech Republic — and I would say not even in central eastern Europe, in our region.
So we were looking around and we were lucky that through our friend, we managed to visit the set of Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs”, which obviously is a totally different scale studio production. It’s 60 sets and 40 animators parallel. But it was super meaningful for us because we really got [an idea] of how these things are organized and we even bought some of the equipment from them after they finished the production, so it was super helpful. And then we organized the shooting in this style of the international stop-motion productions: try to shoot the film as fast as possible, trying to combine as many sets and animators at one time. Otherwise we would be shooting it for five years and it’s very difficult for the producers and the artists to keep this long interval of a creative process. In the end we had 11 sets and cameras. Usually we shot with six, seven or eight animators maximum parallel. It was a small production from the international point of view but still pretty complex to organize from our point of view.
JM: Small production but big impact, especially the final act. I love the “movie of your life” scene.
VL: Basically the whole process in Heaven is therefore reconciliation with who and where you are, and you can receive this option to try everything again and again and again, but you need to purify yourself. And this is a recap of your past life. It’s a great tool for how to bring even more emotions to the end of the film.
JB: There’s some difference from the book that our first script writer had the idea of Whizzy watching Whitebelly’s film. Our script writer wanted to show Whitebelly as a hidden hero. She found a way that Whizzy watches [Whitebelly’s] film because her life was much shorter, so that film was shorter. And I think it’s one of the most important moments in the movie because… many people tell us, “Who is Whitebelly? He’s just some stuttering guy… stupid and without any character. Why is he in the story?” And this moment is so strong that I think everything [makes sense] at the end.
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