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| Yuck! |
A perfectly captured slice of childhood, immediate and vital but far from superficial, Loïc Espuche’s Yuck! (or Beurk! as it is known in French) is one of the final 15 animated short films in the running for a 2025 Oscar, having made it onto the shortlist despite intense competition. It’s rare for a simple 2D film to get this far, which should let you know right away just how special it is. I met Loïc at an animation showcase where he discussed the film and the ideas behind it.
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| Yuck! |
“Yuck is the story of Léo, a seven-year-old boy who, like all of his friends on the campsite [where they are spending their summer holidays], screams ‘Yuck!’ each time he see a kiss. And it's easy to see when two people are about to kiss because their lips start to shine in pink with sparkles. And so Léo is so disgusted, but he has a secret. When he looks at Lucy, the little girl standing next to him, his own lips start to shine. And so it's a movie about the beginning of feelings, but also about the fear of other people’s gaze. And also about the way to find your own secret garden.
“This idea came in during the screening of one of my previous shows and it was in a theatre full of children. It was the story of a soldier who goes up to war. At the beginning of the film, he gives a little kiss to his fiancée, to say goodbye. And at this moment, all the kids in the audience started to say ‘Oh yuck! It's so disgusting, I cannot watch it.’ And so it brought me back my own childhood, and that's why I wanted to do a movie about kisses.”
Trained at EMCA and l’École de la Poudrière, Loïc has had an impressive career to date, contributing to 2020 Oscar contender I Lost My Body and directing a TV mini-series and several other shorts.
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| Yuck |
“I’ve been drawing since I was a child, so I feel really comfortable with this,” he says. “The drawing is also a way to abstract the stuff and make it more simple to focus on what is really important for me. I wanted that especially in Yuck, where I use only solid colors except the effect on the lips. Also, I go naturally to 2D animation. All the team were roommates for more than five months, and so we needed to be close friends to do this movie. A lot of my friends are good 2D animators, so that's also why I chose this technique.”
Animation aside, what makes the film stand out is the wonderfully spontaneous, unselfconscious quality of the performances.
“We recorded real children,” says Loïc. “We recorded them with a boom. That way they were free to move and really concentrated on their play. Each child was unique. Noé [Chabbat], who plays Léo, the main character, intellectualises a lot, so I could direct him very precisely. On the other hand, his little brother [Enzo Desmedt] plays like a child who's really in his own world, and everything's very spontaneous with him. “I think a large part of directing the actors came down to casting, because all the kids were super talented!”
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| Yuck! |
Yuck! has a lot to say about prejudice and about shame more generally. It's rare to see these subjects handled in such a positive way. Was that one of his priorities in making the film?
“I was a very shy kid,” he says. “As a child I really felt the pressure of other people's gaze, and I think that's part of the reason why the film is about prejudice and shame. But with a subject like kissing and the very ‘pop’ concept of pink lips, it was obvious from the start that the film had to have good vibes.
“In general, I love it when films draw us in as viewers with a light, fun atmosphere before revealing deeper issues. I love that there can be a journey between tones within the same film. That's what I tried to do with Yuck!”
