What is the film about?

A coyote loses his wife and children from an attack of wolfs. Anguished from human emotions he‘s trying to process the experience. Besides grief and delusion, evil takes up more and more space.

What influenced it?

I was inspired by so much TV animation, movies or comics from my past. I grew up with a lot of Hollywood action movies from the late 90s that were all about good versus evil, betrayal, vengeance and violence. And I loved Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry as a kid (I still do today). So fictional violence on TV was for me fascinating. Although Tom & Jerry was not bloody violence, they still hurt each other in a funny and entertaining way.
But I remember, when I watched Ghost in the Shell in the 90s and a guy got his head blown away from a gunshot, I was shocked. I didn’t think that you could do that to a cartoon character so it was a revealing moment for me. After that I was more into animations or Anime for an adult audience like The Simpsons, South Park, Akira, Happy Tree Friends, The Ren & Stimpy Show or some of the Adult Swim stuff like Superjail and so on…

A little background information...

My interest was to create a character who is getting pushed aggressively into a corner that he can only break out from with violence. So his violent action in the story should be a cathartic moment. I was also fascinated by mythological figures and religions like Voodoo or Santeria that are about existing parallel worlds. So I created this demon that wants to make a deal with the Coyote and also pushes him to the violent action in a world that the Coyote could physically and mentally do.

How was the film made?

I was mostly thumbnailing the story and picked up the images that I wanted to be important and evolved it again from those favourites. After that, I made an animatic and then a teaser to explain what kind of feeling the film should deliver. I took a break from my idea and worked as an animator on different films for other friends in Switzerland. A year and a half later, my producer from YK Animation Studio and I worked on the storyboard again and the animatic. So we produced Coyote with pre-production, animation and post-production in 11 months but I was working on the idea on and off for maybe 2 years. It felt very healthy for me and for the work. Softwarewise we used TVPaint for the animation and for the post-production Adobe After Effects and Premiere.