We chat with the director of animated short Penglai, Momo Wang (creator of Tuzki), about her inspiration for the incredible creatures she's designed, her thoughts on working with Scarlett Johansson, and more:
Despite the fact that nominations have not yet been announced, Penglai is a short film generating lots of Oscar buzz, and with good reason. Penglai tells the story of a fisherman who, after catching a fish with many torsos, seeks a fabled island of the same name. The story is told through fantastic narration by none other than Scarlett Johansson, but it is the short film's distinctive blend of art styles that makes it a must-see.
Momo Wang: I have been drawing since I was four or five years old. One day, I drew goldfish in my drawing class, and I took that drawing home, and I put it on the wall; I was really happy with it. The next morning, at five or six A.M., I woke up, looked at that drawing, and the fish became alive. They started to swim, circle by circle on the wall, and then went back to the drawing. That was a really impressive moment for me, and I remembered it for many years.
You mentioned the creatures; there are so many beautiful ones in this short. Were they out of stories and legends, or did you invent any of them for Penglai? Momo Wang: I used traditional Chinese painting with Tibetan thangka mixed with pop art, because the story is both modern and traditional. It's a story about a young guy who saw a UFO in early China, so I wanted to make the visual design, the art style, the music, and the story Western-meets-Eastern and traditional-meets-modern. So for the art style, we used traditional art mixed with pop art.
Momo Wang: Years ago, I read a story from a 9th-century Chinese book of short stories. There's one story in that book where a young guy was hiking and met a person from the moon who shared a lot of knowledge that nobody knew at the time. Now, when people look at the book, they think, "That young guy in early China probably he met somebody who time-traveled." I feel that's really interesting, so I mixed that story with my goldfish experience.
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