Czech Stop Motion Film ‘Mum Is Always Right’ Gets World Premiere + Trailer
Skwigly
Surely each of us carries in our heads the sentences that our mothers repeated on and on: If you keep picking your nose, you’ll grow a trunk. Or: If you eat watermelon pips, a watermelon will grow in your belly. UMPRUM student Marie Urbánková asked around and collected about a hundred similar “child traumas”. Then it was just a small step to the subject of her graduation short animated film Mum Is Always Right.
“I have a friend who was told by her mum that she must not pee in the sea, as it will burn her if she does. To this day when she is 26 she doesn’t dare to pee in the sea, even though she knows it´s nonsense. It occurred to me how many similar nonsensical statements must there be,” the director explains her intention, and adds: “When I was wondering what to do for my dissertation, I wanted to take something completely simple and fun. I was much inspired by the film Enough (dir. Anna Mantzaris, 2018), I admire its sheer simplicity and wit.”
The film Mum is Always Right is animated by the stop motion technique on a multiplan table (an animation table with a number of glass panes on top of each other, with which the whole image is composed). As animator Marie used colored paper as the main material thus following up on her last film The Concrete Jungle (2019). “In her new film, Marie did not work with silicone puppets, but she tried out puppets made of paper. These do not behave as flats but as three-dimensional puppets. In other words, paper hands move in space, not just on the animator‘s glass table,” says Mária Môťovská, the producer from MAUR film.
Marie Urbánková is a talented animator, artist and illustrator. Her short film The Concrete Jungle has been screened around the world at dozens of festivals (e.g. Monsters, Klik Amsterdam and Hiroshima). She has long been dedicated to illustrating children´s books and she was the artist for the animated series Kosmix (2020).
The film Mum is Always Right is intended for adult viewers, but it will also entertain children. “Primarily I‘d like the film to be funny, but at the same time make people think a bit – maybe subconsciously – about what we tell children”, adds Marie Urbánková.
The film had its world premiere on April 3 at Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and the Czech premiere will be at the International Festival of Animated Film Anifilm, and then it will travel to the International Film Festival for Children and Youth competition in Zlín.