The Night Boots

Bluesky

When you’re young and you have limited knowledge of the world, all sorts of things seem possible. Adults, casually making jokes abut werewolves as they sit at the dinner table, forget how scary that can be. Sent of to bed because tomorrow in a school day, Eliot is too nervous to sleep. The full moon shines bright over the forest. Something is moving out there. He can’t sleep and he doesn’t feel safe anywhere, so he decides to put on his boots and sneak outside.

The bulk of the film follows Eliot’s adventures in the forest, where he makes a new friend, an odd little creature with a charmingly earnest personality. Together they go looking for a monster, see some very strange things and make discoveries that have more to do with who they are than with what’s around them. Most importantly, they find a friendship that seems set to change Eliot’s feelings about night-time forever.

One of this year’s Oscar shortlistees, the film was produced using a pinboard, an exceptionally rare form of animation. Created in the 1930s, it has only ever been mastered by a handful of people, and The Night Boots’ Pierre-Luc Granjon was one of the lucky individuals selected for training when a conscious effort was made to pass along the skill so that it didn’t die out. The instrument involved utilises literally millions of pins which can be pushed in or out of a board to differing degrees. It is then lit from one side, with image emerging from the shadows that the pins create. The process is slow and laborious, but perfectly suited to this particular story.

Why is it that most humans instinctively fear the dark, at least as children? It’s not just that we can see less overall, but that what we see is less certain. In an environment like a forest, it’s easy to conjure all sorts of nightmarish things out of the shadows. Granjon’s forest is fuzzy and mysterious and full of strange possibilities, the pinboard creating something a bit like a series of charcoal sketches, but more unstable. The nature of the technique is such that no image can be precisely duplicated, so the landscape changes in subtle ways as characters move through it; and this, in its way, makes it seem much more realistic, more alive.

The characters themselves are simple in design, but highly evocative. Eliot’s eyes are dark pits, yet somehow soulful. The connection he builds with his new friend is delicately realised, like the joy that the pair of them find in simple things. The Night Boots is just peculiar enough to be thrilling, but tender and adorable, something to be brought back out for kids to enjoy again and again on special days.

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