Online exclusive
In My Double Life, Kiwis – and some international guests - share the side hustles, hobbies, dual careers or career pivots that keep them busy. Today, Antony Elworthy talks about working as a character animator, designer and illustrator on stop-motion films, TV shows and commercials, including Corpse Bride, Coraline, Frankenweenie, The Boxtrolls, Isle of Dogs and local TV series Kiri and Lou.
When he’s not making Oscar-winning movies, the father of four sons is at home in Christchurch, illustrating children’s books, advertising storyboards and private commissions. He has just published his first children’s book, The Strange and Unlikely Tale of Montgomery, the Mysterious Bird of Mystery.
“I was at design school in Wellington, studying illustration and animation, when I first saw Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers and it dawned on me, ‘someone made that with their hands, so maybe I could do that, too’.
By then, I was in my 20s and onto my second degree, after giving up architecture, which didn’t pan out for me, so I was a late-comer to animation. For a lot of the people I work with, it’s been sort of a passion since childhood for them. I was a late bloomer.
I made my own film called Sink, which was not a good film. It was, in fact, quite a bad film but it was my first and a bit of an experiment. Someone saw it, thought it had potential and put me in touch with Luke Nolan who was making a movie called Life on Ben which was about bacteria that live on the skin of an adolescent boy.
Kind of gross, but the perfect medium for stop-motion, where you can really zoom in on things. The film was never finished, but we revisited it a few years later and made a mini web series with Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi doing the voices of Gordon and Gloob (two creatures on Ben’s skin who go on a stop-motion journey).
In the early-2000s, I wanted to go to the United Kingdom. I had this naive idea that I’d just be able to go over there and start working in this industry because it would be easy to find work. I did a lot of door-knocking and eventually found work in a similar industry, making props and things for parties. It wasn’t a healthy sort of job – long hours, little pay – so I was pretty happy when I got an animation job.
That came down to luck. The director who gave me a job - on a show called Dr Otter - told me he gave me the job because I turned up just before lunchtime, showed him my show reel and when he asked if there was anything I was particularly proud of I said, ‘not really, but I think I could do better with more experience’.
The crew were all going down to the pub for lunch and he liked that I tagged along. Thereafter he used to call me ‘The Kiwi Chancer’. It was a foot in the door. From there, I met a couple of people in what is essentially a small and specialised industry that, for the last 25 years, people have been predicting will die out. It is, after all, an antiquated way of doing things and there are much easier ways to make animation.
But there’s a very loyal group of people around the world who just love working this way and watching these kinds of things. There are not many things you can look at today, in terms of media, where you can see and feel the hand of the person who made it. There’s a sort of tactility, and the worlds are ones that people really believe can exist.
A couple of years later, I was working on a nice little series called The Koala Brothers, but they were losing all their animators because a Tim Burton film was about to be made. That was Corpse Bride, which became this massive production that everyone wanted to jump on. When I got the chance, I jumped, too.
In kids’ television, you might be expected to do 10-15 seconds per day; on a film, each animator – and there can be up to 30 – makes around 5-8 seconds per week. The Corpse Bride was a whole new level of stop-motion and at the time, very few of us had ever worked on anything quite like it.
When my partner and I had our first child, we came back to Christchurch. We’ve had a base here ever since – so for about 18 years – and the projects have kept coming. We went to Portland, Oregon, to make Coraline and, more recently to Lyon in France to make Ma Vie de Courgette. We were there for summer and it was a nice place to live.
There have been a few moments when I think, ‘I’ll have to get a real job’ but the work has continued. This time round, when I had some slack in my schedule while working on a film, I decided to use the time to try to write a picture book that I would be able to illustrate.
Let’s just say writing a picture book is much harder than I realised, and I really don’t have the gift for brevity. So, I kept writing and I really enjoyed the process. I love coming up with ideas and the imagery. The idea for this story came from journeys I’d take with my kids; we’d be driving and I used to tell them stories of the adventures I had before they were born.
The stories would always involve me getting into some absurd predicament and they never knew whether to believe me or not. This particular story, The Strange and Unlikely Tale of Montgomery, the Mysterious Bird of Mystery, was one of those. I’ve set up a framework with the story told by an old man to his grandson. Most kids will have an old person in their life who is special to them, and I wanted to portray a tender and playful relationship between a grandparent and a child. I like imagining an adult reading the book to a child, and both of them finding things in the story that they can relate to.
So, I hope to write other books but right now, we’ve just made the fourth series of Kiri and Lou and we’re about to start shooting a feature film. That’s going to keep me busy for a while.”
The Strange and Unlikely Tale of Montgomery, the Mysterious Bird of Mystery, by Antony Elworthy (Walker Books), is out now.
