Dec 9, 2024

2025 Academy Awards Short Contender: “A Bear Named Wojtek,” directed by Ian Gardner

Cartoon Brew spotlights an animated short film that has been nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards.

In this issue, we present “A Bear Named Wojtek” by Scottish filmmaker Ian Gardner. The theatrical release of this short qualified it for an Academy Award.

In this heartfelt and wonderfully animated 30-minute film, Ian Gardner tells the story of Wojtek, the famous bear at Edinburgh Zoo. A Bear Named Vojtek follows the fantastic journey of this orphaned brown bear who was adopted by Polish soldiers during World War II and brought to Edinburgh, where he is believed to have played a key role in Italian military operations at the Battle of Monte Cassino. The film is a British-Polish co-production by the Illuminated Film Company, Studio Miniature Filmowa, Vojtek Animation, Animation Garden, and Running Rabbit Films.

Cartoon Brew: How much of your storytelling was inspired by history itself? And what difficulties did you encounter in weaving the story of this bear soldier between fact and fiction? I think it is possible to at least be true to fact in animation, even if it is not “accurate” per se. We have shared the film with a number of Polish cultural associations in the UK and have been sobered by their reactions. Based on their feedback, we are confident that we have struck the right balance between what we need to include in the film to make it palatable to a general audience, while still paying homage to their experiences and memories.

The biggest challenge was to compress the real-life politics of a complex world into a short film. To convey these details, we chose symbolic or metaphorical sequences, many of which are unknown to the average audience, and which I fear may have been influenced by the jingoistic war films of my youth. We began the film with the intention of making it a warning from history, but sadly, world events overtook us during its production and it now feels like a reflection on contemporary events. The whole story was fascinating. As for whether or not Vojtek the Bear had a cannonball at the Battle of Monte Cassino, I honestly don't believe it. For me, this ambiguity makes the story suitable for animation. It becomes important to express symbolism and emotion.

What is it about this story or concept that grabbed you and inspired you to direct this film? The seed goes back to my childhood. My late father (who lived through World War II) was always watching war movies of a certain age. So stories about war, especially World War II, were always present in my life.

Later, as a student at the Glasgow School of Art, I was very fond of sketching animals. On a visit to Edinburgh Zoo, I was drawn to the polar bear enclosure. I later learned that the enclosure was home to Vojtek the Bear, a famous bear from World War II. My interest in animals evolved into a consideration of how we mythologize animals in order to understand and communicate human nature. So I was drawn to the symbolism that Wojtek came to symbolize as the embodiment of Poland. Stirring this melting pot together were two major referendums in the UK over the past decade. One was the 2014 Scottish independence vote and the other was the 2016 Brexit vote. Both campaigns touted the recognition of national identity and had different approaches to voting voters. The Scottish vote included everyone who chose to live in Scotland, whereas Brexit excluded immigrants. The tone of the “Britain can go it alone” campaign to leave Europe and the allusions to World War II resonated with the tone of the films I had seen with my father. Therefore, I felt compelled to attempt to redress the balance and recognize the sacrifices made by other nations for our freedom during World War II and the respect that should be paid to their descendants now living in the UK.

What did you learn about the production, filmmaking, creative aspects, or subject matter through the experience of making this film?

We hope that our core team of Scottish creatives (myself and other award-winning writers such as Will Anderson, Rachel Bevan Baker, and Ross Hogg) can learn from this feature film, as well as from the international co-production (this time with Polish with Filmograph) so that they can begin to make this film, based on a strategy of intentional personal growth. Ideally, producing a feature film in Scotland would further strengthen and sustain the talent pool here. Before we began production, I knew we needed a robust and practical pipeline. And our production manager, Rebecca Warner Perry, was key to developing this pipeline. My other instinct before starting production was to work with people more talented than myself. From the script to the final scoring, everyone involved elevated my vision and created something more than the sum of its parts.

Prior to production, I delved deeply into the world of the subject matter, historical background, and characters. My writing residency at Fontevraud Abbey also helped me to focus on this, and I worked really closely with Kristina Iver, a survivor of the Russian invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 who emigrated to the UK after the war. She published an album about Wojtek and also had an exhibition about bears. I found the research phase to be the most difficult because it is so harrowing to immerse yourself in the horrors of that time. However, I know that the stress I found is nothing compared to the experience of those who currently live in conflict zones.

Tell us about how you developed your visual approach to this film, why you settled on this style/technique, and how it shaped your final work. I have always wanted to create a tribute to his style of animation. Recent developments in digital animation software have made it relatively easy and quick to achieve a sense of his style. Buck's hand-drawn “dapple” process, achieved by applying prismacolor colored pencils to matte cells, coupled with a commissioning policy that has long favored an innovative approach to digital aesthetics, I always thought it would be impossible to replicate it within the funding opportunities available I always believed that it would be impossible to do so.

However, TVPaint has allowed me to create brushes that produce a series of “dapple” marks with a flick of the wrist, saving me a great deal of time in my artwork. The color palette for each sequence was monochromatic in order to minimize the variation of colors to match in each frame. To ensure there was no confusion about the source of inspiration, I asked Frederick Buck's collaborator, Normand Roger, to compose the music. He is very generous and incredibly humble considering his accomplishments.