No villains exist in director Torill Kove’s Oscar-nominated animated short, Me and My Moulton, but if anyone comes close, it's the seven-year-old narrator's architect mother and father in their bohemian turtlenecks, whose nonconformist way of life makes it difficult for the girl to fit in with her peers in their small Norwegian suburb. But maybe it was for the best: those same parents, or rather their real life counterparts, raised Tove to study architecture and when it didn't work out, encouraged her move into the animation world, where she would win an Academy Award for The Danish Poet in 2007.
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The short, which is now available to watch on demand as part of the 2015 Oscar® Nominated Shorts Collection, is heavily influenced by the protagonist's parents' profession, from the bright, 60's art scene color palette, to the cross-sectioned buildings that resemble schematics. In one scene of the semi-autobiographical short film, the narrator and her sisters are dressed in bright orange stripes, purple waves, and blue polka dots, and her dad quips, "You look like an installation at the Contemporary Art Museum!" His comment is a great way to describe the style of the short as a whole: Tove's flat, simple lines and vibrant, eye-catching colors make Me and My Moulton look like the animated great-grandchild of a Matisse cutout.
In her previous stories, My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts and The Dutch Poet, her trees evoke the simplicity of a child's coloring book. Kove wanted something a bit more sophisticated for Moulton, since she felt it to be more of a grown-up's film than its predecessors: "The film is a little too sad, or maybe too dark for the young crowd, and then there's an age group for which I think it just simply isn't hip enough," she explains.The trees, in particular, benefitted from Kove's lifetime of art and architecture training. Kove tells The Creators Project, "I had a really hard time with trees in this film because I didn't want them to look like trees in my other films, and they never really looked right."
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After an attempt to delegate the shrubbery sketches to an assistant didn't align with her vision for the film, Kove found herself going back to the basics. "I looked at my very early sketches from my storyboard where my trees were just basically a line with these kind of curly cue-y doodles on top, and I thought, 'That actually looks like the kind of tree I'd like to have,'" she recounts. "They were never far from home but I had to make a big tour to find them."Kove cites her family not only as a source of her ideas about architecture, but as a wellspring of emotional material from which to build a story. Both My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts and The Dutch Poet follow characters based on her relatives, but Tove took that trend and amplified it for Moulton. "We sometimes have secret thoughts about the people we love the most. We can't really share them because it wouldn't do any good," she says. "Then what do you do with them? Well they just kind of sit there and fester and I think it's when you're older you can deal with that and you can intellectualize it away."
That's what makes her films so personal, Kove says. Her art is the best way she knows to verbalize those secret feelings, freeing herself from them. The fact that she does it by emulating her parents' bohemian style only adds another layer of charm to a very charming film about a girl, her parents, and a bicycle called Moulton.
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