The Rooster, the Crocodile, the Night Sky and its animator

Eimhin McNamara, a young animator from Lisdoonvarna has just returned from a whirlwind trip Stateside. There he attended the International Animated Film Society awards (the Annies) at Royce Hall in Los Angeles before going to San Francisco for a screening by one of his heroes.
In Hollywood, Eimhin’s short film The Rooster, the Crocodile and the Night Sky was nominated for an Annie, the animation industry’s equivalent of an Oscar. On the night, however, Eimhin and the project’s director, Padraig Fagan, missed out on the top prize to Seth Green’s Robot Chicken: Star Wars 2.5.
The pair attended the ceremony with the support of the National Film School and were representing Dublin-based animation studio Barley Films, where they had interned in 2006 and where they have worked on projects since.
“The ceremony was interesting enough. William Shatner was hosting it. It was like the mini-Oscars, it was funny,” Eimhin said.
The Lisdoon native then visited San Francisco where he attended a screening of a project Russian animator, Yuri Norstein, had been working on for almost a quarter of a century.
“He was one of the main inspirations for the look and feel of our film, so it was nice closure to give him a copy of the film. He screened 20 minutes of his latest project which he has been working on for 24 years,” Eimhin said.
Compared to that labour of love, The Rooster, the Crocodile and the Night Sky was completed relatively quickly.
Pre-production work on the animated short began in January 2007 with production starting in September of that year before it was finally completed in August 2008. In total, Eimhin worked on the project for over a year-and-a-half.
“We were working on this in college and after we graduated. There were lots of awkward technical things that kept slowing us down,” he explained.
The animated short is dark and funny, comprising a feast of textures, something which took time according to Eimhin.
“There were characters made from cardboard; there was a Super 8 film of blue velvet that was the night sky and the background was a collage of things but there was also oil on glass…We wanted it to look like it was animated under the camera. I spent two months cutting cardboard with a scalpel and painting it. For the rooster alone, there were 987 parts,” he said.
Working on such intricate pieces of work was challenging but after four years of studying together, Padraig and Eimhin had developed “a rapport”.
“It got a bit heated sometimes because we knew we were just trying to get it done so any disagreement was never personal. It was always a case of what would make the film better. I wouldn’t make decisions, I would tell him what would work better from a technical point of view but I wouldn’t make the decisions because it needed to be directed by one person,” he stated.
From the first moment, The Rooster, the Crocodile and the Night Sky’s references to the age of silent film and to Westerns, alongside very contemporary elements, is apparent. Expressive animation is Eimhin’s main area of interest.
“There is a really nice feel to expressive animation. I am a big fan of Igor Kovalyov. His work is hand drawn so it is a line character and it is atmospheric. The type of editing and the pacing is closer to art house cinema than to Warner Brothers cartoons…The kind of animation I am interested in is a bit more progressive, where people do new things, not keeping to the same old stuff.
“Pixar make technically excellent films but they are telling stories in the same way as old Disney films were,” he said.
The use of colour is pivotal in the short too. Colourscapes vary from vibrant reds and oranges to blues and grimmer black and white moments.
“You can use colour to focus the viewers attention. The start is like a traditional children’s cartoon. When it goes to the factory, it is a bit greyer and a bit more Kandinski. Then, at the factory, it is more like German expressionist cinema where we are doing things with shadows and moving things around in the screen and the editing gets faster. Looking back we were trying to do too much. There were all these things that we were trying to get it and at times we tried to shoe horn them,” Eimhin said. 
“You have the feeling this short is the last one you are ever going to work on, so you save nothing. You have to approach each one as if it is your last. You have to throw everything at it. It is easier to cut it back than add to it,” he continued. 
Even though he didn’t study art at school, Eimhin believes animation was the right career for him.
“I used to be interested in maths and sciences. I would have always read a lot and would have drawn a lot as well. Animation brings the sciences and the arts together because there is a really technical process involved in it. I had applied to Ballyfermot [College of Further Education] but they said I’d need to do a foundation course. Dun Laoghaire [Institute of Art, Design and Technology] offered me the course. I decided at the start of sixth year I’d apply for it but at that point, I couldn’t take the Leaving Certificate art course so I did the preparatory work and the portfolio in my spare time and bits of life drawing in sketch books,” he said.
Outside of his animation work, Eimhin is also interested in another art form.
“I like to dance. There is something very immediate about it. Animation is all about movement. There is something very immediate about dancing but it is not like animation where it takes weeks to get 30 seconds of motion,” he said.
Recently The Rooster, the Crocodile and the Night Sky and another project Eimhin was involved in, Donkey, were both selected to screen in competition at the 20th Cairo International Film Festival for Children taking place from March 4 to 11.