Liam LoPinto On Mixing Memories with Animation for ‘The Old Young Crow’

“After my mother passed, we moved from Iran to Tokyo. The trains…the streets…the people…Everything. It all spoke a different language.”

Everything about Liam LoPinto’s award-winning short The Old Young Crow is a sensory experience. It makes you reach back into your own memories and compare them to the ones on screen, but, most importantly, it yanks on your heart to the point of aching. LoPinto’s short is a film that mashes together live action and animation in a way that we have never seen before.

Crow centers on Mehrdad as a boy but the above quote is spoken when Mehrdad is an older man flipping through the pages of his sketchbook. Young Mehrdad finds solace in drawing and sketching in a graveyard when a chance encounter with a woman named Chiyo will change his life forever. I was surprised to learn how much of LoPinto’s experience went into the writing of his film.

“I was studying abroad in Tokyo and spending a lot of time sketching in part because I was working on a sketchbook to apply for the character animation program at CalArts,” LoPinto says. “I was often sketching in a graveyard, because it’s quiet, atmospheric, and, most of the time, there are interesting things to draw. One day, I was sketching, and a big crow lands on the grave opposite me, and it was a big, big bird. I had an idea of a boy sitting in a graveyard sketching this crow. I saw the kanji underneath the grave, but I couldn’t read it. I thought it would be interesting about tying these two things together. That incubated for a few months and then the Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, passed away that year, and I went to a retrospective of his films. They showed films like Where is the Friend’s House? and one that he wrote called Willow and Wind. They almost feel like fairytales, too, in the grounded way that they were filmed. They are both about Iranian boys on missions to go from one part of their village to another and the consequences of that.

I knew that I wanted to make it an Iranian boy in Tokyo, and people would talk all the time about how proud they were that we had Iranian cinema in Japan. It’s the first time, I think, that I was proud of my own heritage and my own diaspora. All of these people are inspired by filmmakers and creative people from the same place that I am from. I wanted this Iranian boy sketching in a graveyard to  draw upon me reclaiming my culture here in Tokyo, so it’s about one Eastern culture affecting my perspective on my own Eastern culture.”

Mixing the forms of live action and animation were not just essential on a story level but on a practical level for filming. What we leave with, though, is how much the animation is the driving force of the story. It takes our hand and never lets go.

“On a practical level, I didn’t have a lot of footage of Tokyo as a city,” he says. “I didn’t have good footage on a grave. How do I recreate that? We had photographed the grave in front of us to act like our pseudo-grave in the film. My initial process was to do some CG for the kanji that we see in the film, and then, out of another crazy coincidence, the family of that particular grave had shown up. They were cleaning the grave and changing the flowers and we all just stood there and watched them. I kept apologizing and they were so kind and reassured me that it was okay to film there. They thanked me, actually. I was so taken aback by that, and I wasn’t going to photoshop over this grave–that would be so disrespectful. I then thought that I would drawn this grave in the sketchbook to go with this fictionalized film. A lot of it became out of practicality.

I didn’t have a shot of him reaching into the sketchbook, so I wanted to figure that out. I had a friend help me out since she is so good of hand animation–that sequence was so hard to color, too. It ended up tying in so well with the timing with that scene. When I showed my friends and family footage of what I was working on, that piqued their interest. I wanted to establish the rules of this world and that this animation is coming from this book. It can’t be this lawlessness–it has to be grounded–because people will think that it’s a gimmick. At the end, you need to feel that this way was the only way this story could be told with this blend of the mediums.”

Whenever we see the sketchbook, it’s mostly shot from above so we can see the entire thing all at once. It feels like the book holds its own secrets–even to the person who wrote it. It’s alive. There are watercolors, different styles of drawing, and the pages fold and open up on themselves. It’s like it’s playing hide-and-seek. I was thrilled when LoPinto pulled out the sketchbook of the film and showed me some pages.

“When you see him sketching in the film, you see him doodling in a childlike way, so, years later, when I was constructing the book, I wanted to make an art piece out of them,” LoPinto says. “For instance, if he was having a bad day, he would put it into the book organically and trying to find the specificity of that. Cultural references likes rugs and journal entries in Farsi are in here. There are hints and notes of him trying to write in Japanese. This is stuff that you don’t really see in the film, but it’s stuff that I need to put in there for my own sake so that even when you’re flipping through, it’s tactile. Texture is so important. He might draw what he ate that day like a beef bowl or maybe tahdig, which is a Persian rice dish. For me, I needed all these things to feel alive and as if he was going through his entire life through this book.

You have this beginning shot where he says, ‘This whole tale is for my mom.’ This kid has a fascination with death after his mom’s passing, and he’s sort of clinging to this fascination with death while he is in this new country. He finds the idea of the spirits to be very comforting, and he doesn’t reject it. That’s why he is able to go on this adventure and this spiritual reclaiming of his grief through this Japanese family’s tale, and that’s all reflected in the sketchbook. This book tells what is happening through a child’s lens.”

A marvelous aspect of The Old Young Crow is how it never coddles its viewers and never shies away from mature themes. Mehrdad is very young when he loses his mother, so he has to confront those emotions in his own way. We shouldn’t hide strong emotions from children with films or other media because we are afraid of tough conversations.

“I appreciate that we can talk about this,” he says. “With immigrants, there is trauma and the grief, and I think so many of the films that we make, as First Generation, use children to show that we are in that trauma and not reflecting on it. For a lot of young people, especially immigrants, we kind of neglect to talk about “the after” of the depths of that trauma. How do you process that as a young person? You see this kid as an old man. Not directly, but you see the childlike play of his table set. If you do a screengrab, you are going to see things like Tintin, but you’re also going to see Detective Conan if you look really closely. All of these eclectic things from his childhood still live in this old man with crayons. It’s important for kids to understand the importance of reclaiming your own culture and your own identity. Your own stories are going to transcend more than the period that you’re in. When you’re older, you’re going to be actively reflecting, and the best thing you can do is embrace who you are. That’s the sketchbook. He is pouring all of his days–it’s not just the good ones–in there. Years later, he will know there is something there to be understood and re-understood and contextualized, and, as a result, his life is looked at through all these different lenses.”