Winning awards at Anima, Palm Springs, SXSW, and more, Nina Gantz’s remarkable short film Wander to Wonder has emerged as one of the standout successes of the 2023/24 festival circuit. Notably, it is the only animated film to reach the nominations stage for this year’s Best British Short at the BIFAs. The stop-motion tale follows a trio of tiny performers from a beloved children’s television show as they struggle to navigate life after the untimely death of the show’s creator. Through extraordinary craftsmanship, the film offers a unique and poignant exploration of loss, blending humour and sadness in perfect harmony. Intrigued by its surreal yet deeply relatable narrative, we invited Nina to DN to delve into the making of Wander to Wonder.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
I think it was 2015 when I saw your National Film and Television School graduation film Edmond, which of course went on to win a BAFTA in 2016. So what have you been working on between Edmund and Wander to Wonder?
Okay, so it was eight years in between and that’s exactly how long it took to make Wander to Wonder. I started working on Wander straight after film school. I was on a plane with Simon Cartwright – who also studied at the NFTS and made a wonderful film, Manoman – and we were already talking about this new short. I had to recuperate from Edmond for a while because it was quite an intense period. I think I slept four hours a night for like five months at film school so I wasn’t immediately ready to make another short.
But the thing was Edmond did so well that I got this prize from Canal+ to make another short so I knew I was going to do that. I was excited about it but I also needed a bit of time to step away from short filmmaking and also earn some money because I was pretty broke after film school. So while I was developing this idea with Simon, I actually got signed to the production company Blinkink in London and I got the chance to work on some commercials, which was very nice. I also learned a lot about the industry, how to work with a bigger team and with experienced, talented people, which was really great because with Edmond I felt so on my own. It was good to get that experience and I did some title sequences and stuff for friends. I basically did everything that I could say yes to and that I had the time for while I was developing this script.
Well, it’s great to have you back in the world of short films! So why now? Why did it take so long for Wander to Wonder to come about and why are you telling this particular story?
It took eight years because it’s an ambitious idea and we needed a lot of money to make it. Stop motion is quite costly, you need a big studio for a long time and lots of people so we needed money from four different countries. It was a co-production and that is quite an amazing puzzle you have to make because all that money that comes from different places, you have to spend it there as well. So in the end, we ended up making the puppets in the Netherlands, shooting it in Belgium, doing the post-production in France, and I live in England so I did the animatic and the modelling all in England and a voice record in England. That puzzle took very long, but also to fit the story to the budget. It went from 20 minutes to 15 and now in the end it’s 12. The last cut I made was very big. It was a very different story at 20 minutes to 12 minutes.
We ended up making the puppets in the Netherlands, shooting it in Belgium, doing the post-production in France, and I live in England so I did the animatic and the modelling all in England and a voice record in England.
Simon came off the project at some point because it had been five years and he had to go on to other things. I was still clinging on like the characters are doing in the film. I just needed to make it more of my own and also you, as a maker, change over eight years of trying to make it work. My interest shifted from a story about the TV presenter keeping the puppets captive and I became way more interested in the story of the three characters and how their relationship was after the creator died and how they survive in this big world. So that was quite a big change. I made the animatic three times, which also takes time on its own to get right. That’s how it ended up costing a lot of time.
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Can you talk a little bit about the title Wander to Wonder?
It was actually called Beyond the Purple Mountains for a long time, which I still also love, but I wanted a title to work for the TV show that the characters are in as well as for the overall story. It also needed to work for the storyline at the end, which I won’t say too much about. I didn’t want two different titles, one for the TV show and one for the film so I changed it to Wander to Wonder.
The film finds this perfect balance between humour and sadness. There are situations that are quite bleak, but they’re also funny and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There’s also real empathy for these characters. Did that happen naturally when you were writing the film or was it something you had to work to get right?
No, it’s quite a natural thing, actually. Really it’s about grief and how people cope very differently with that but I feel you can only tell those kinds of stories with some lightness and humour. By making the characters small you’re already doing that. But then also, they don’t know what they’re going through and they don’t know themselves so well, and that’s where the humour sometimes comes in, the humour in the sadness. It’s one of my favourite kinds of humour. It’s interesting because while I was filming it, I thought I was making quite a funny film, a lot more funny than in the end when I look at it, and it’s because you care about them so much. In the end, it’s actually a bit darker than I thought it would be. When you film it all separately you’re like, “This is fun” but then you put it together and you’re like, “Oh yeah, no. You really do care for them”.
I’m the ant fucker and I’m quite proud of it. I think it’s important to ant fuck a bit. Not too much, but as long as it’s important for the story.
I see a lot of films trying to deal with grief and loss and you’re always hoping to see something new and different. Wander to Wonder definitely provides that. It’s quite a surreal film if you try to describe it, yet it also feels very grounded and authentic. You really buy into these characters and feel for them and their situation.
Yeah, it was important to me to make it feel authentic. Because you’re creating this fantastical world where you just have to accept that these miniature people are living in a real world it’s quite important to get that right. Otherwise, the audience starts looking at inconsistencies and thinking, “But how did they come to this world?” With a short film you want people to focus on the right line of the story so it’s important to get the detail right. For instance, at some point in the film, they open a gherkin jar by swinging it in a system against the wall. In animation you can open a gherkin jar in any way – you could just let it explode or whatever – but I wanted that system to really work so we actually recorded it for real. We made the system and then we slow motion recorded it to see how it moved and how the gherkins came out. Those kinds of details are quite important! My Dutch friends call me ‘mierenneuker’, which is like a nitpicker, I guess but it translates to ‘ant fucker’. So I’m the ant fucker and I’m quite proud of it. I think it’s important to ant fuck a bit. Not too much, but as long as it’s important for the story.
Stop motion is one of my favourite types of animation, I absolutely adore it when it’s done well. What do you think makes stop motion and the story of Wander to Wonder such a perfect combination?
The story inspires me to use a certain technique it’s not the other way around, usually. I knew that this story would really work for stop motion in combination with live action. Of course, I could have just filmed real people on a green screen and that would have worked but I think it’s the extra level of storytelling when you are using stop motion. I wanted to use that kind of ‘story within a story’ because we’re making a film about a kids’ TV show with miniature puppets, and in those miniature puppets are actually little humans but those humans are stop motion. It makes this whole world quite strange, It really brings something to the story. But also, the sensibility of it works really well.
I love the work of Ray Harryhausen and although you look at it now and you can totally see the techniques, you can still believe the story. It brings this nostalgic feeling to it, which was perfect for this film. So, I tried to not hide the technique too much, but it ended up much more realistic than I actually thought it would be.
I absolutely adore the character design. Did the characters always look the way they do now or was there an evolution to their design?
It was a very big evolution for me. Stop motion characters are usually a lot bigger than the characters you see here but because I wanted to put them in a real setting and use real props, I needed to make them a certain size. Otherwise, they just looked like they were small babies walking around, it just didn’t give the same cuteness to it so it meant that I had to make them much smaller than usual. I knew I needed a lot of expression from them because that’s where I felt like it was useful for the story. This meant that I had to use a 3D printing technique, which I had never used before, and I was a bit scared of. I’m a stop motion, traditional animator, I’m scared of computers and so I knew it wasn’t something I could do myself. That’s when it starts being difficult because then you have to get other people involved and you don’t know what it’s going to look like. It’s also very exciting of course because you get to learn a lot from all those people. I sculpted the puppets first in clay quite big and then we 3D scanned it to put that into the computer and then shrunk it. That was when Blink helped me with some people to make 3D models of those puppets and then we made the facial animation.
Stop motion characters are usually a lot bigger than the characters you see here but because I wanted to put them in a real setting and use real props, I needed to make them a certain size.
I’ve got a whole library of faces. Not very many because I wanted to keep the snappiness of stop motion. That process of working with other people always turns out to be something different than you thought. I thought they might be way more sculpted and that you’d almost see fingerprints in them but they became more human. I think in the end that’s good because they really do need to connect to the live action character in the film. They need to feel like they’re of the same world. You don’t want to question that because if they were not too human, then you might have thought that it was all in his head. It’s a whole journey and it took four months or something to get it right.
I believe this was your first time working with actors in a stop motion film as well. How did you get the best performances from your cast, and how did you work with them to bring the characters to life?
I’ve worked with actors before sometimes just to get the reference footage for the animators but this was the first time I worked with dialogue and I found that quite tricky. I don’t like dialogue that explains the story too much so all the dialogue in the film is not very expositional. I really wanted to get it right! I got some amazing people involved and it was so nice to see what they brought to it. I never expected what an extra level they could bring to the film. For instance, Mary was played by Amanda Lawrence, who’s an amazing actress and has an amazing expression. When she does her monologue, for instance, she did it with so much more feeling than I ever thought and I can’t imagine it now without that.
I was very happy to get Toby Jones involved as well, who to my surprise, said yes to it! He was the first person we asked and I had actually already sculpted one of the puppets to look quite a lot like him even before he said yes. He liked the idea and the script and yeah, he nailed it of course! He comes from a theatre family. I was keen to use theatre actors because what they were doing felt like a bit of a stage show. Also, he was able to show off his knowledge of Shakespeare in that role. Making him do that as a bad actor was quite fun because that character thinks that he’s a great Shakespearean actor.
Then there’s Neil Selvage who’s the only live action character, I found him a week before we were supposed to be shooting. I was in the van with my set designer and I was like, “I don’t have an Uncle Gilly yet” and then she all of a sudden said, “Oh, an old friend of mine that I went to school with has a dad. He could be perfect for this.” And yeah, he said yes. He came to Belgium and he was so great. He really brought this gentle sweetness to it, which I think we needed for this character in the film. Of course, in a previous version he wasn’t, he was very different. He put one of them in the microwave!
I was very happy to get Toby Jones involved as well, who to my surprise, said yes to it! He was the first person we asked and I had actually already sculpted one of the puppets to look quite a lot like him even before he said yes.
There’s a kind of retro feel to the aesthetic of the film, from the opening scenes when it feels like it’s shot on an old 4×3 VHS camera to the world they live in. Did you always intend for the film to have a nostalgic quality to it?
Yes, that’s where I naturally go to. I hate iPhones in films and fancy laptops so it’s quite hard for me to even think of a film that would have that in it. But it also worked for the story because I wanted you to feel when looking at the sets there was a big history there, that they’ve been doing this forever and ever. That was important to me. And also that the TV show might have been going on for a very long time. I think that really helped the story.
Despite tackling themes of loss and isolation, I feel at the end of the film, there’s actually a sense of hope. What do you hope your viewers take away from watching your film?
I hope they feel something at the end of it and they felt for the characters, that’s my most important thing. It’s hard to say what I want them to feel because from what I’m gathering after film viewings, everyone takes something different away from it and I like that. But overall, that they have a sense of hope because if a big event happens to you, it’s important to move on at the end and look to the future. This sounds quite heavy of course, I do think it was important for the characters to have that look to the future at the end. Ultimately I want people to have felt something. I would hate it if people just think it’s bland. I’d rather people being not very happy with it, hating it. Obviously, I’d rather people love it.
How do you follow up Wander to Wonder, what’s next for you?
I am already working on two feature films. One will be a family film and one is for adults. The one for adults is a mix between live action and stop motion and the family film is fully stop motion so that’s quite exciting. I’m developing those, which is a nice place to be.
