With this posting – and a quick portrait – I would like to express my gratitude towards Michael Dudok de Wit. The filmmaker agreed to an interview for my master thesis about Nonverbal Expression in Animated Movies – as Timothy Reckart also did.
The Red Turtle: No dialgue in 80 minutes
Dudok de Wits film The Red Turtle has been a great inspiration for me. I absolutely adore his style.
I was curious about the process of making a whole animated feature film without any dialogue. Was it Dudok de Wit’s intention at the very beginning to use this beautiful thoughtful silence as in his previous animated shorts? Also, I wanted to know what it means to him to tell a whole life story in verbal silence. The director wrote, that the story had a few lines of dialogue at the beginning. But then, for this particular, the voices didn’t feel right. That the moment this decision was made, he felt a huge relief.
‘Though it would be challenging, the story would now take on a subtle, mythical quality, which is a quality that I really wanted to explore‘ Dudok de Wit wrote. And he succeeded, indeed.
Father and Daughter
Father and Daugther was the first movie I’d seen from this extraordinary artist – and it touched my heart.
Michael Dudok de Wit: My short films and the short films of many other filmmakers are dialogue-free. I was therefore well aware that, though the verbal language is one of the popular languages used in filmmaking, it is not necessarily an indispensable language.
The interview with Michael Dudok de Wit was a huge enrichment for my thesis, which was rated as very good. I am very thankful and happy that I was able to get in touch with such a great artist.