Attending a work-in-progress presentation of The Inventor was high on my priority list at this year’s Annecy Festival. I first learned about it back in 2020 when director Jim Capobianco (writer of Ratatouille) talked about it during a Walt Disney Family Museum virtual event. Inspired by a hand-drawn animated short he directed, the film is a stop-motion/hand-drawn hybrid film about the final act in Leonardo da Vinci’s life when he left Italy for France. Jim Capobianco was unable to attend the presentation, which was led by co-director Pierre-Luc Granjon, animation director Kim Keukeleire, line producer Kat Alioshin, and executive producer Ilan Urroz.
(FOLIASCOPE/ Ilan URROZ/ LEO & KING)
Although the film has been in production for several years, animation didn’t begin until earlier this year with around 25-minutes completed (the total runtime will be 1 hour 15 minutes). Stop-motion animation is being handled by Foliascope in Valence, France out of a warehouse that previously sold pools. Now the largest studio for stop motion animation in Europe, one of the biggest initial challenges was creating the metal armature each puppet uses. This was a scenario where the team had to look for expertise outside of France as a sturdy armature is necessary to avoid wobbly puppets. Given the expense of these figures and the crowd-funded budget, the team was able to save some money with female characters who wear dresses and therefore didn’t need legs underneath. We were shown test animation of how these characters walk with a glide.
With a small team, the studio was divided in such a way that eight sequences could be animated at once. As a result, eight puppets of each of the lead characters had to be created. As in a stage production, secondary characters play multiple roles in the film through costume changes and puppet redressing. Jim Capobianco’s hand-drawn designs had to be adapted for stop motion and budget restraints also limited the number of locations the team could build, which is still at an astounding 52 locations. We got to see some behind-the-scenes photographs from the studio, including the massive scale of the film’s castle in comparison to bicycles ridden to work by the team. Jim had specific notes about the color and design of the custom-built props and sets, which were worked on by talented artists from French theater and opera.
The creative team behind The Inventor is pushing the limits of stop motion animation on the film, resulting in more cartoony movements than you typically see in the medium. The team partnered with Dassault Systems to create machinery based on da Vinci’s designs. With just 6 months left in production, The Inventor is on target to be released next year. The footage looked incredible, shown in small bursts of short sequences set to voice work from the film’s cast, which includes Stephen Fry, Daisy Ridley, Matt Berry, and Marion Cotillard.
Click here for more coverage from Annecy Festival. Visit TheInventorFilm.com for more information on this project.