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| A Crab In The Pool |
“The movie is a about a brother and a sister in a poor neighbourhood in Quebec, Canada,” says Alexandra Myotte. “It's on a very hot summer day and you can feel there's a lot of tension between the two. And I'm going to spoil the movie a little bit right now to explain what it's about.”
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| A Crab In The Pool |
She’s speaking at an Amination Showcase event where she has been invited to meet members of the press because the film in question, A Crab In The Pool, has been shortlisted for the Oscars. Co-written and co-directed by fellow French Canadian Jean-Sébastien Hamel, who voices the boy, Theo, but is unfortunately not free to join us. It also engages the vocal talents of Élisabeth Gauthier-Pelletier as big sister Zoe – but there is much more going on in it than sibling rivalry.
“It's a very personal story. It's a story about cancer, and I had breast cancer seven years ago. And luckily I'm fine today, so I can talk with you guys. So I'm happy about that. And Élisabeth Gauthier-Pelletier, his mother also had breast cancer. She's also fine. She's good. And we are also together as a couple. So he was also living the disease with me at the same time, and that's how we got the idea for the movie. I'm sure that there's a lot of people here that are also affected by that disease.
“The two characters are basically the two of us. I’m more like the teenage girl. I live in fear of what my body is doing. And the little boy is more like Jean-Sébastien, who is a witness to what's going on and a little bit pushed on the side also, because usually all the attention is on the person who is sick. Sometimes the person that is next to that, they're a little bit forgotten. So it was a bit of a difficult subject for us to tackle, but we wanted to bring imagination to in it and some humour, so it's not too heavy to watch. I think we were able to strike a balance between the two.
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| A Crab In The Pool |
“It was very important for us to show the bond between people. At the end of the screening, people from the audience come to see us and they tell us ‘Oh, my mother is sick,’ or my sister, my brother, because I think, you know, cancer, unfortunately, it's a very universal experience. So when we can bond together, I think it is very important. And we felt like we could do a good job.”
As well as dealing with her fear of cancer, and the shadow of bereavement, the girl in the film is facing the usual difficulties associated with growing up. She’s interested in boys, but there’s an uncomfortable scene in which one of them mistreats her. I ask Alexandra if she was interested in comparing the experiences of cancer and objectification, and she nods.
“Absolutely. We wanted to show the contrast between wanting to grow up, be an adult, a woman, attract someone you like... but at the same time having unwanted, almost brutal attention and trying to navigate those emotions.
“Of course with Zoe, there is another layer, as breasts are associated with disease and death. We wanted to show all the contradictions we face as women when we grow up.”
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| A Crab In The Pool poster |
The film was made with very limited resources but she’s proud of what her small team has managed to achieve.
“We're super, super indie in the sense that we have almost no budget, so we were basically a team of two people. It's just me and my co director, Jean-Sébastien. So we did 95% of the job ourselves. The script, direction, the animating, the editing, even some voice acting was done by us. It was about 4,000 hours for the whole thing, so it was a lot to put on our shoulders. That's why we chose this style of animation that was very minimalist and very simple to draw, because obviously we cannot compete with bigger studios. And we decided that the story was the most important part of it - but, you know, we wanted to have an animation that was dynamic, and to use every trick in the animation book to make it interesting too.”
It certainly stands out, and on 23 January – a little later than originally planned, because of the damage done to Los Angeles by wildfires – we’ll find out whether or not it gets an Oscar nomination. Alexandra is clearly nervous, but thrilled that it has the chance.
