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.
Charles Solomon’s Animation Year End Review 2023
Although he wrote them in 1859, Charles Dickens might have been thinking of animation in 2023 when he penned the celebrated lines, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”
Although the worst of the COVID pandemic had passed, the animation industry, like the entertainment industry in general, faced uncertainty about releasing strategies and box office earnings. Some films scored record-breaking successes in America and Japan, and earned critical raves. But there were also stunning critical and financial flops. Viewers returned to theaters in droves for Super Mario Bros. Movie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but they ignored Ruby Gillman: Teen-Age Kraken and The Amazing Maurice. The prolonged strikes by the Screen Writers Guild and SAG/AFTRA halted production for months; many animation artists joining the picket lines in solidarity. The future role of AI hung over the industry like a malign specter.
Looking over a year that see-sawed between Light and Darkness, I’m presenting the 11th annual awards for the year’s best and worst, named for the ultimate animation APM, Mikiko “Kuromi” Oguro.
“Suzume”