On the Oscar shortlist for the upcoming Best Animated Short Film category is Passenger (“Pasajero”), from director Juan Pablo Zaramella. A man boards a train and discovers a lot more about himself and society. This is a short about behavior, rewards, consequences and much more, as Zaramella explains. (This Animation Scoop interview was conducted as an Email Q&A and was edited for length and clarity.)

JM: I think we can all relate to the story. I’ve been a train passenger often throughout my life and have witnessed all kinds of things. What inspired you to come-up with the story of “Passenger”?

Juan Pablo Zaramella: The origin of the story was exactly that: It started one day. I was waiting in a train station. I travel a lot because of my work, and like many of my colleagues, I spend the time drawing or taking notes in my sketchbook. I’m often in front of social situations, sometimes as a protagonist, sometimes as a spectator. I took a series of notes about those events and started to explore them until I found a main character that worked as an epicenter: it’s not me, it’s not somebody in particular. He could be the whole society.

JM: Why did you decide to make it mostly a world of white?

JPZ: I felt the need to focus on the internal feelings. The environment was important only on a superficial level, just to set up the context: a man alone outside the society at the very beginning, then a potential point of meeting with others, and the consequences of people crossing each other’s limits. Sometimes, as animation producers, we are tempted to overload everything with a sophisticated color palette, attractive textures and complex shapes. But sometimes we realize that it could go against the narrative. It was the case, and in searching for that clearness, I ended up removing almost all the color, part of the volume, and I finally ended up limiting the gestures of the characters. I’m very happy with the result.

JM: What were the challenges of making these characters move?

JPZ: The main goal was to have enough precision. I didn’t want perfection, but I knew that paper was difficult to control in stop motion because I made a sequence with this technique in a previous short. For this case, my colleagues from Zumbastico Studios, which had made a TV series with paper in the past (Paper Port), suggested I use aluminum complex, a material that looks almost like paper but allows you to control the animation very well.

JM: Was it tricky having many of the characters, at one point, give the middle finger?

JPZ: It was a reason for debate in the team, because it could limit the film to adult audiences. But the main goal for this movie is exploration, so we didn’t care a lot about commercial possibilities. The tricky part of producing shorts is that you can’t speculate with the idea of commercial success, but it is at the same time its great advantage. You can take risks without losing too much, giving the film the ingredients it deserves. In this part of the story, I needed the character feeling a general rejection of the rest of the passengers, with or without reasons. Not just an angry gesture, but something that clearly crosses the limit of social correctness. And the contrast between that rejection and the subsequent general laugh of the passengers with something that he can’t understand should be the trigger for his internal catharsis.

JM: I love that you show us how you made the characters during the end credits. Why was this important?

JPZ: During the period of production, I usually showed advances to other people outside the team and colleagues, and I found that many of them believed that it was made in CGI, maybe because of the technical cleanliness. (And I intentionally cut the characters imperfectly.) So I had the idea of including the explanation of the technique within the credits. This functioned both as a closing of the curtain and a greeting from the team that made this film by hand. As part of the audience, I love to have technical clues about the movies I like, and I wanted to give this possibility to my viewers.

JM: How did you capture the specific sounds of the movement of a train? You did a great job with this.

JPZ: With Ceci Castro and Hernán Kerlleñevich, the sound designers, we recorded sounds of everyday objects and processed them to make them fit with our train, and then they worked hard using them both as foley and as music, following the internal feelings of the main character. They created a subliminal score, reflecting the annoying situation that the main character experiences deep inside through the accents, tones, notes and levers on the wagon sounds. Like the treatment of the image, there is a functional minimalism there.

JM: Do you believe the main character is selfish or just misunderstood?

JPZ: He is definitely selfish, and it’s why he misunderstands the rest of the society and becomes paranoid. When he tries to be part of the society it’s not because he understood the joke or the social codes, it’s just because he wants to be okay with himself.

JM: Juan Pablo, if you had the choice, would you rather be alone on a train ride, or on a train filled with people?

JPZ: Haha! It’s a very funny question. I can’t identify myself with the main character, but I mostly prefer to be alone, like him. And ironically this fact was one of the main triggers to start creating the story: the contradictions between the personal space and the public space, depending on each character’s situation.

JM: You’ve been directing animated shorts for a long time, winning awards at Annecy and the Woodstock Film Festival (near me in NY) for “Luminaris”. What would an Oscar nomination for “Pasajero” mean to you?

JPZ: It would be not only a big honor to be nominated, it is also the biggest visibility for my film, my career, and mostly my next project, a feature film (my first feature) that it’s already in development (“I Am Nina”). Producing independent and author animation worldwide is difficult, and specially in Argentina and Latin America, where we feel ourselves like the Quixote fighting with windmills. Along my career, festival awards were a big boost to create awareness about the importance of supporting this kind of animation. The Oscars have that, plus everybody, absolutely everybody, your parents, uncles, friends, neighbors, knows them perfectly.