Jan 4, 2025

Oscar Nominee Interview: Director Trill Cove on Her Favorite Shot in “Maybe Elephants” (Exclusive Interview)

Cartoon Brew invited the makers of the 15 films nominated for this year's Academy Awards for Best Animated Short to share their favorite shots from their films and why. Each film is listed in the order the materials were received.

This piece features “Maybe Elephants,” directed by Trill Kove.

“Maybe Elephants” is an animated 2D short co-produced by the Norwegian studio Mikrofilm and the National Film Board of Canada. In the film, Oscar-winning filmmaker Trill Kove, winner of “The Danish Poet,” recounts her memories of her childhood in Kenya in the 1970s. Her happy recollections clash with her mother's attitude, which often leads to melancholy and restlessness.

Kove recently spoke with Cartoon Brew about the making of this short film. Below, she shares her favorite shot from the short and why it is important to her:

“Maybe Elephants” is also autobiographical, based on my family's memories of living in Nairobi in the early 1970s. We were from a small town in Norway, but Nairobi was a vast metropolis and we had to get used to driving everywhere we went. My parents often chauffeured my sisters and me around, and we had friends who had cars, so many of my memories of Nairobi were of cars and passengers.

In this shot, it is nighttime in Nairobi and my parents are driving a teenage girl somewhere to meet a friend. The city lights flicker on and the parents look a little worried as the girls in the backseat change from children to young women. The coming of age ceremony is happening behind their parents' backs.

I chose this shot because it encapsulates one of the central themes of the film: the emotional distance between the parents and the children, even though they are physically very close. It also shows the beginning of detachment: the parents are in the driver's seat for a while, but eventually the children leave one by one.

This was a fun shot to animate. When applying makeup, the action is usually slow and repetitive. But since these girls were in a hurry and the shot was relatively short, things had to happen fast. We decided to animate their make-up sessions in a time-lapse style, so that the girls would be able to see the action as it happened. This added to the ridiculousness and created a lot of backseat activity (10-second makeovers).

Read other entries in the series: