What is the film about?

A groupd of creatures are abducted from their natural habitat.

What influenced it?

Fleischer Studios, Persepolis by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, Black Hole by Charles Burns, Fantastic Planet by René Laloux.

A little background information...

‘All You Can Eat’ deals with the topic of overconsumption in the 21st century. Instead of animals, cartoon characters are being used as products of the modern society and the way it is being constructed. Within the film, the boundaries between the colourful, jolly cartoon world and the dark, dystopian human world, are strongly emphasized. This contradiction serves also as a depiction of the climate change we are going through, between the black and white atmosphere of a metropolitan city against the blue mountains of the joyful cartoon world.

The story is about two non-binary beings who are trying to escape together from the factory that they are being taken to. We are not just dealing with an Orwellian scenario where humans are just evil voracious consumerists, but also the decimation of the whole cartoon community as they are being taken from their home and consequently caged. Fear and terror are depicted in the eyes of the cartoons, as they realize what is happening to the rest of their tribe: they are being eaten alive.

How was the film made?

The whole film was done with TVPaint Animation 11, along with a Wacom Intuos graphics drawing tablet. The humans were rotoscoped from live action footage. For lighting and the city, I used a lot of Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya. The image sequences exported from the 3D software, were imported in TVPaint in order to draw cell animation on top of the movement in order to make the environment match the characer design. In the end, the final compositing was done in Adobe After Effects.