Joanna Quinn & Les Mills Discuss Coming Back to Beryl for Animated Short Nominee, ‘Affairs of the Art’

We are used to studios coming back to certain beloved characters when it comes to our animated features. Once an animated character has burrowed his or her way into our hearts, it’s hard to let them go. We want to see more of them. What are they up to? For Joanna Quinn and Les Mills, nominees for the delightful Affairs of the Art, checking in on Beryl was a no-brainer.

Affairs of the Art doesn’t look like other animated shorts. It’s bolder, naughtier, and has much heavier bosoms.= Beryl narrates how everyone in her family is obsessed with something, and that translates to Quinn and Mills as well. Beryl spends a lot of time telling us how her sister went from a death-obsessed child to a successful taxidermist. Mills, the film’s writer, even took inspiration from his own son for the role of Beryl’s son.

We pull the best material from our own lives, but Affairs of the Art turns the naughty humor right to the edge. We aren’t used to see odd children doing experiments on rats or a girl becoming obsessed with Vladimir Lenin, but Affair‘s perspective is fresh and hilarious. We need more films like this.

Awards Daily: Your film is really about embracing the obsessive side of you, so I was curious what you were both obsessed with at the moment?

Les Mills: Well, I can tell you what she is obsessed with is what Beryl is obsessed with. It’s drawing.

Joanna Quinn: I am obsessed with drawing…

LM: It can be two o’clock in the morning, and I have to pry her away. We could be out anywhere like a restaurant or a college jazz festival, and she’s drawing all the instrumentalists. She will put them all online, and she loves to do that.

JQ: And he’s obsessed with Hitler documentaries.

LM: No, I’m not!

JQ: (laughs) Well, he likes history.

LM: I’m obsessed with documentaries, but my background is in fine arts. I went to school at Rutgers, and I spent time in New York City. I love that part of America. The obsessions in the films are all based on something. Colin, the son, is based on my brother who is the epitome of hyper-obsession. Some of the things in the film are actually what he’s into. He wrote a book about the screws of the world.

JQ: He actually met somebody who bought it.

LM: From an early age, he had an obsession about Holland. Everything he bought was Dutch. He was who I based Colin on, and he is the one who found the pigeon. He actually built the coup. I went to art school, but he was a design draftsman to create pipes for chemical work. I couldn’t not base someone on him in the end. People like the character.

AD: I wasn’t sure how much was based on actual people or things. A line that jumped out at me was when young Beryl was drawing the teacher with her breasts out and the hair sticking out of the stockings. That has to be based on someone in real life, right? It’s so specific.

JQ: It was.

AD: Really?! (laughs)

JQ: She was my teacher. She was always very serious, and we couldn’t take our eyes off her legs. Her tights were very furry…

AD: It made me think that maybe I could draw something about my teachers. What was the importance of not shying away from adult themes in animation? Some people assume that animation is only for kids or families, and it’s really not. Affair of the Art has mice being tortured, decaying food, little girls dreaming about Vladimir Lenin, and, of course, the large breasts out in the final scene. Do you ever have any reactions to those moments from your audiences?

JQ: To us, that’s normal.

AD: It’s honest, I think.

JQ: Having shown it, some people are like, “Whaaaat?’ They might think it’s spooky.

LM: Well, the one man said it was spooky, because of the dead body in it.

JQ: But it might also be the giant bosoms?

LM: There’s a lot of women of that size in the world, and they never get represented ever. It’s rare. They always have to be super thin or tall or they have to be doing something special. Beryl, as a character, is not like that, and she is a big, bosom-y woman.

JQ: (laughs) I think the difference is that we make our films, so we don’t have to conform. We’ve also had control over the funding as well. We’ve had, in the past, television companies paying, but they mostly let us get on with it. This a co-production with Canada, but we put 75% of the money into it and they joined after we started. They were thrilled with what they were doing. Had we been making this film for, say, an outfit who might be worried about content, then we might have had problems. It’s not until now that a wider audience has been seeing it. It’s at home with festivals, but you see more of a wide reaction (laughs).

AD: I love your style of animation, because it feels so alive.

JQ: It’s all hand-drawn on paper. I draw quite quickly, so I think what makes it feel alive is that I don’t tidy it up too much. If I make a mistake, I don’t take it off. I rub it into the drawing. It gives it a different energy of a mess (laughs). It then gets scanned, and we have to make sure the mess isn’t lost.

LM: It’s not mess. They’re your dynamics.

JQ: It then gets colored, and then we have to put textures on it to make the colors to not look shiny. It can be a laborious process, but I animate as quickly as I can to make it feel immediate. It can’t feel labored. I make sure that I can see the key drawings, but the in-between drawings help with the movement.

AD: I love Beryl so much. Why do you keep coming back to her in your work, and do you know where you want to take her now?

JQ: I love drawing her so much.

LM: She’s familiar to you.

JQ: Oh, yeah. She is quite fragile in one way. She can be insecure, but then she goes for it. It’s a mixture of self-doubting and strength. That’s a nice thing to try to do while you’re animating–to make her act. Trying to show that in her face. That’s what I love about her character, and I can enjoy the expressive side of her.

LM: Well, where is she going next?

JQ: Well, she’s slimming down to get into her Oscar dress. She will slim down, and maybe no one will recognize her?

LM: I’m sure they will.

AD: I do too.

Affairs of the Art is streaming through The New Yorker‘s Screening Room.