What is the film about?

A young king had a dog for a best friend, until one fateful day a hot dog van came speeding down the street…

What influenced it?

Bill Plympton, Ralph Bakshi, Terry Gilliam, Adam Eliot, Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, Jim Woodring…

A little background information...

Inspiration of the story

A few years ago, an acupunctor told me that I was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler! Nobody can say if it’s right or wrong, and who would want to know that? I do not!

Around November 2013, I randomly discovered a very interesting text who was next to a picture of Hitler in a park holding the hand of a little girl:

“Do you understand how scary this picture is?
I’m Jewish, so I’m perfectly capable of understanding that what he did was just…..well, there are no words for it. But let’s not round it up to simply Jews that got killed. It was six million people that died in those camps.
But you let that roll over in your mind for a while and you are going to forever see this man as a monster, but that’s not what he was. He was someone who thought he was truly doing something right for his nation, no matter how shitty he was doing it.

This is not a monster holding hands with a little girl.
This is Adolf Hitler, a man, holding hands with a little girl.
Yeah. It’s very scary. It really is. Do you know why?
It’s because you’re seeing that he wasn’t, in fact, a monster. You’re seeing in this picture that he was a man. He was a man, and that’s really the saddest part of it all.
As a History major who specializes in the history of early modern Europe, I’ve studied a lot of dictators in detail, not just Hitler. The number one mistake anyone could ever make in history is making the assumption that only inhuman monsters are capable of doing terrible things. 

Stop dehumanizing Hitler just so you can reassure yourself that “normal” humans aren’t capable of doing bad things. Hitler liked children and dogs, he was a vegetarian and he cried like a little boy when his mother died. I’m not saying he was a good, innocent person, but when you stop attributing human characteristics to historical figures like Hitler, it’s how you overlook people just like him in real life, and it’s how people like him end up back in power.

That’s the real truth: Human Beings are scarier than any ‘monsters’ out there because we’re all born blank slates and BECOME our legacy.” http://jchelseaw.tumblr.com/post/39643026376/lauriejuspeczyk-221becquerel

In December 2013 I read a book called La Part de l’Autre (The Part of the Other) by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt; it is a biography of Adolf Hitler within a parallel fictional biography of Adolf H., who became someone nice. According to Schmitt, “If the jury from Vienna’s Art School would have accepted Adolf Hitler the shape history would have been different today”. It is interesting and scary to see what made him become the man that did these atrocities.
This book was really hard to read; at some points I found some similarities between him and me, I even had some pity and compassion for him. I have to admit that I was relieved when I finished the book.

I wanted my animation to be about this serious subject without sounding sanctimonious!

How was the film made?

Made in 4 months, in a garden shed in Cambridge, with love and passion, listening “the beards” and ” fat freddy’s drop” and eating dry fruits and carrots.