Creator

Denis Do

Denis Do is a French animation director whose first feature, Funan, is set during the Khmer Rouge period.

Denis Do is a French animation director whose first feature, Funan, is set in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.[1] He directed the digitally hand-drawn film himself, storyboarded it and had part of the production made in Cambodia.[1] Funan won the Cristal for best feature at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2018.[2] He has spoken about making animation that carries personal and historical stories.[3]

Career

Denis Do studied image and drawing at Gobelins, the French animation school, and graduated in 2009.[2] With others he directed the graduation film Le Ruban, a love story set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[2] Before directing, he worked on storyboards for NKI and Supamonks Studio and on background layouts for Rémi Chayé's Long Way North.[4] He had not directed a short film before Funan.[1]

His next film, Sorya, is listed among his projects, with Sébastien Onomo of Special Touch Studios producing and Thibault Kientz Agyeman, the composer of Funan, set to write the score.[2][5]

Funan

Making the film

The idea of making Funan a film came in the spring of 2009, in his final year at Gobelins, when a friend suggested it; he had first thought of it as a novel or a comic book.[6][7] He began his research in July 2009, after graduating. He read histories and autobiographical novels, among them a novel by one of the Cambodian actors in The Killing Fields, and he drew on testimonies and memories of the Khmer Rouge years.[3][6] He wrote the screenplay with Magali Pouzol and treated the storyboard as another part of the script, drawing it on evenings and weekends while he waited for funding.[1][8]

The film was produced by Les Films d'Ici and made with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro and Harmony.[4] Production was split among six studios in four countries. The Cambodian partner was the studio Ithinkasia in Phnom Penh, where young Cambodian artists worked on the film. Before Funan, Do has said, Cambodia had no animation industry. Ithinkasia's chief executive, Justin Stewart, raised funds in Cambodia and arranged six months of animation training for the team, with Patrick Pujalte hired to help train it, and Do spent two weeks at the studio.[1][4] He edited the film himself over the last five or six months of production.[7] The team first aimed to release it in April 2015, the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh, but funding and production pushed it back.[7] He finished it one week before its premiere at Annecy.[3]

Story and style

Funan is set in April 1975, as the Khmer Rouge take power. It follows Chou, a young mother separated from her four-year-old son, as she tries to bring her family back together through exile and forced labor in work camps.[3][7] Bérénice Bejo voices Chou and Louis Garrel voices Khuon.[6] Do calls it fiction based on a true story, with many situations drawn from real accounts.[7] For storytelling he merged two historical figures into one woman who orders her son to shoot the heroine.[7]

He chose hand-drawn 2D animation, shaped partly by his love of Japanese animation, and chose animation over live action so that no actress would have to represent the real person behind the story.[4] He kept the character designs realistic so the film would not read as a cartoon. Wide Cambodian landscapes that dwarf the characters alternate with close shots of their feelings, and the backgrounds are based on the Cambodian countryside of today.[3] The film leans on stillness and facial expression rather than action, and Do has linked that restraint to the lack of freedom under the regime.[1] He wrote the musical themes first and built the picture around them. The sound design sets the life of the Cambodian jungle and 1970s music against a cold military theme for the Khmer Rouge.[3][6]

Do has said he did not want the film to be a list of Khmer Rouge crimes. He wanted it to build empathy, to avoid gratuitous violence out of respect for the victims, and to show some Khmer Rouge characters as people capable of guilt or compassion.[3][7] He links the title, the name of an early state associated with Khmer civilization, to the idea of a civilization's birth and its possible collapse.[7]

Release and awards

Funan won the Cristal for best feature at Annecy in 2018 and then screened at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival.[2][4] In October 2018 it won the jury grand prize and the audience award at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles.[1] GKIDS opened it in New York on June 7, 2019, and in Los Angeles on June 14, followed by a wider release across the United States.[7][6][9]

Works


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Cartoon Brew
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 CEE Animation
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Deadline, Funan Director Denis Do Portrays The Human Side Of The Khmer Rouge Regime (December 7, 2018)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Toon Boom, 10 questions with Denis Do, director of Cristal Award ... (2018-08-08)
  5. ↑ IMDb, Denis Do news
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 The Moveable Fest, Interview: Denis Do on Drawing Out the Tragic Past of Cambodia in Funan (June 7, 2019)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 Collider, Funan Director Denis Do on Choosing Empathy over Violence for His Story
  8. ↑ The Hot Pink Pen, Funan details Cambodian genocide with stunning animation (June 4, 2019)
  9. ↑ The Cambodia Daily, The Khmer Rouge in an Animated Movie (June 7, 2019)
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:35.