KENSUKE'S KINGDOM
FEATURE FILM
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“A magnificent contemporary odyssey.”
-TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT
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SCREENWRITER:
FRANK COTTRELL-BOYCE
BASED ON THE BOOK BY:
MICHAEL MORPURGO
DIRECTORS:
KIRK HENDRY / NEIL BOYLE
PRODUCERS:
SARAH RADCLYFFE / CAMILLA DEAKIN / BARNABY SPURRIER / STEPHAN ROELANTS
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT:
FRAMESTORE
ANIMATION: NEIL BOYLE / AUDE CARPENTIER
3D ARTIST: BARRY GENE MURPHY
COMPOSITING: KIRK HENDRY / SEAN MARTIN
/ JASON JE-EUN SHIM
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From Cartoon Brew:
 Kensuke's Kingdom is a 2D and mixed-media feature film from industry veterans Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry. When we first previewed the film in 2015, it was still early in development.
At last week’s Cartoon Movie market, it was one of the most attended presentations.
Based on the bestselling novel by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo and adapted for the screen by screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce (Millions, Hilary and Jackie, 24 Hour Party People), Kensuke’s Kingdom is about a ten-year-old boy who washes up on a tropical island, where he discovers he is an intruder in the domain of a mysterious Japanese soldier named Kensuke, who lives there with a family of orangutans as his companions..
The action/adventure film is being developed by producers Sarah Radclyffe, Camilla Deakin (whose Lupus Films who have just realased the film of Raymond Brigg's Ethel & Ernest), Barnaby Spurrier and Stephan Roelants.
Kensuke’s Kingdom has strong themes of ecological conservation and respect for the environment, including a climactic showdown with poachers who are trying to overtake the island, and directors Boyle and Hendry have spent time investigating the best approach for visualizing the natural world onscreen. They’ve come up with a solution that balances organic elements with digital compositing, and which is both unique and visually striking.
“The natural world is an essential character in this story and one thing we were keen to achieve was an organic feel to the environment,” said Boyle, whose animation credits include The Thief and the Cobbler and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. “We wanted to use reality, rather than model builds. We wanted it to look damp. With our test sequence, we filled it with many objects we found on the forest floor or rocks we pulled out of the Thames. They all had their own wonderful slime, cobwebs or dead bugs that you could never production design. We were curious to see what we could just find in nature and use.”
Added Hendry: “Something that we have been focusing on in the last few years is the creative blend of mixed media. We like to see how the things we love can inhabit the same space — the charm of 2D hand drawn characters, the depth of photoreal worlds, the character of miniature environments, matte paintings and the random nature of filmed effects footage.”
The goal is “to do as much of the film as possible as partial miniature sets with found objects, then extended with matte paintings” Hendry explained to Cartoon Brew. “We just like the look. It’s random, organic and connects with the theme of the piece. It’s different — and its more fun to work this way.”
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“C'est super!”
-SYLVAIN CHOMET
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AGENCY:
UK FILM COUNCIL
WRITER / DIRECTOR:
KIRK HENDRY
PRODUCER:
LYDIA BARRAS
NARRATOR:
BARRY CLAYTON
MUSIC:
JANINE FORRESTER
DESIGN:
KIRK HENDRY
CHARCATER ANIMATION:
MICHAEL BURGES
3-D:
FLO RICHER / VIKTOR BERG / TOM TENNANT
/LLYR WILLIAMS
/SAM MILLER
/AMINATA JOSEPH
/SHAUN WHORISKEY
COMPOSITING:
ROSS MACDOWELL
/ PETE BAXTER
/ MEITAL MISELEVICH
/ LEWIS DARBY
/ VIKTOR BERG
/ STUART FORTUNE
/ RAVI VISWAMI
SOUND:
LUKE HATFIELD
COLOURIST:
LEE CLAPPISON - LIPSYNC
MASTERING PRODUCER:
KEVIN PHELAN - LIPSYNC
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER FOR TH1NG:
DOMINIC BUTTIMORE
EXECUTIVE TO UK FILM COUNCIL:
AARON YOUNG
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 Made with support from the UK Film Council's 'New Cinema Fund', JUNK tells the story of a boy with an obsession for junk food and the importance of following your gut instinct.
After premiering at the Annecy International Animation Festival in France, JUNK has had official selections at over 100 film festivals around the world. It has gone on to win numerous prizes along the way including The Creative Circle Awards (Most Promising Newcomer), Festival du Film Merveilleux et Imaginaire in Paris (Best Screenplay and Best Music), The Pentedattilo Film Festival in Italy (Best Animation), as well as nominations for 'Best Short Film' at the British Independent Film Awards, British Animation Awards, Rushes Soho Shorts.
Interview about JUNK with Flip Magazine -
FLIP: What's behind the story?
Kirk: Well, I guess it stems from living in cities my whole life being surrounded by concrete. How virtually every part of daily life seems man-made or pre-packaged. It's no big social statement, more that some part of my genetic memory craves mud and green things and when it does, my daily surroundings seem completely insane. It's as if my genes have adapted reluctantly.
FLIP: Why did you chose to tell the story in silhouettes?
Kirk: I had previously made a film called Round that was made entirely with hand shadows, so was a big fan of the drama of silhouettes. I had made the animatic for 'Junk' without tying it to a particular style. Then I saw The Adventures Of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. After seeing Achmed, I got excited about doing that cutout/lightbox style with computers. It became an exercise in lighting that has been very useful ever since.
FLIP: How did you create the film? It has a mixed media look to it.
 Kirk: That's right, it is a mixed media film. Thrown in there are silhouette cutout characters, live-action effects footage shot against black (snow, sparks, rain, milk-in-water-clouds etc) thousands and thousands of cut out photographs, 3-d models, miniatures, all set up in 3-d space and made to look like it was shot in-camera. That was the goal anyway. That seamless blend of mixed media is something I think is very exciting about the future of animated films. To move beyond them being either simply hand drawn, stop motion or CG. They can be anything now, with charming new styles coming through driven as much by accident as by the inventiveness of the film makers.
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Interview with French magazine Khimaira.
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From 
With so many tonal turns in the story this year, Hendry suggested the team hire a composer to score the film, weaving in ‘The Impossible Dream’ melody from last year into the drama. The result is a bespoke orchestral score recorded in the iconic Slovak Radio Building in Bratislava by award-winning composer Stuart Hancock.
From 
London-based production company HUSH and director Kirk Hendry created the most ambitious promo to date for the ITV show, working with Stockholm VFX house Goodbye Kansas. Hendry and the Goodbye Kansas team completed the extensive work in just eight weeks. Using a mixture of keyframe and motion-capture techniques, the animation experts brought the pirouetting polar bears to life entirely in CG.
WWF-UK's “Save the Cerrado” film exclusively uses hand shadows to tell its story and raise awareness of the devastating effects of commercial agriculture in the Brazilian savannah of Cerrado.
The campaign is trying to protect one of the world's most unique ecosystems from deforestation caused by rapidly increasing soya production. Large areas of natural savannah woodland and forest are being lost to the production of a crop which in many cases is then sold for export to the UK, Europe and Asia.
Kirk says: “I had the good fortune of working with Serpico before and he was happy to come over from Argentina to help with WWF's campaign. When we began researching the Cerrado together, we were fascinated by the strange variation of life there - just more bizarre than you could make up yourself - and how we might bring these creatures 'alive' with nothing but Serpico's two hands. The process of studying their anatomy and movement gave us a real connection with these wonderful animals by the end of the production. ”
Made for the annual National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) campaign, these two films highlight the danger of not wearing a seatbelt and uses the 'Click It Or Ticket' message to communicate the statistical probability of being killed in a collision when not wearing a seatbelt.
Kirk says: “The agency saw our film JUNK, and thought the silhouette shadow-play style with its fun use of mixed media ideal for their campaign. With all the deaths occurring in these spots, I think the agency saw that you could tell the story in this technique with the requisite amount of humour.
Kirk says: “I was lucky enough to be invited to work on this project as lighting designer and lead compositor. It was my first job with Sylvain and he was full of many fun, irreverent ideas - just like The Simpsons!
From the 
The sequence was met with lots of laughter by Matt Groening and longtime producer Al Jean, who called the experience a ”dream come true.”
“We were totally surprised that these openings caught on so big.” Jean explained, “We’re really pretty easy with these guest couch gags. We just approach people that we admire and say, ‘It just has to have a couch’, and ‘make what you want'.”
The animated Carmen clip was directed by the acclaimed French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet.
Chomet gave the cartoon his signature evocative style. Widely regarded as one of the best animators in the world, his films The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist were both nominated for Academy Awards.
