Love At War
Interview and article by Christina Roman
There are currently 15 seconds of the animated film Love At War. And those 15 seconds involved 155 hand-drawn watercolors and over 350 hours of work. But that’s the job she signed up for, as Noella sees it, to be an animator.
“That’s why animation is very hard and it’s not for everybody: because you need to be incredibly, blindly enamored with it. You need to love the process. And for me, what makes it worthwhile when I work on something, as much as it’s a pain in the ass and I hate it sometimes, [is] when I see the final result - when you see your characters come to life - that’s the best feeling in the world.”
Noella Borie David is a New York-based animator whose projects are often inspired by a dizzying mix of sources, but always have a seed of something that feels intensely intimate at their core.
Luckily, she has no qualms about pulling back the curtain on her process. In the case of a series of watercolors (“..inspired by...what? What triggered it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember…”), she describes walking into a gallery show of fine art of photorealistic erotic watercolors and being blown away. Of course, she quickly befriended the artist, Reuben Negron. His erotic art combined with a current boyfriend’s suggestion to pursue a cartoony style and Love’s A Bitch was born. In that series of drawings, Noella captures the experience of partnership through her own hopelessly romantic perspective – each image is directly representative of a man in her life and still recognizable to anyone she has dated. They also feel familiar to everyone who has lived the highs and lows of dating: you know these men too.
Perhaps that is what helps give each project the bit of magic she is chasing. “You see these things or these characters that came from nothing, and suddenly they come alive. They come alive in front of you. I think that’s what makes the magic and that’s what makes it worth it for you as an animator.” Because, while her characters clearly do not come from nothing, they also have an uncanny ability to embody something universal.
That balance is at the heart of her most ambitious project to date – Love At War.
Love at War, like everything else, grew from Noella’s diverse background, and the art she consumes. She grew up in France, near the Swiss border, in a house full of books and movies. Like all children, she was enamored with Disney movies – perhaps her first exposure to animation. “My mom always tells me that when I was 18 months old, she was surprised I would watch Dumbo from beginning to end. I was just stuck on it.”
She later chased her passion to Japan when she was only 18. “I left for Tokyo because I was obsessed with Japanese animation when I was a teenager, and like most teenagers, you get in that phase… It speaks to you more as a teenager, so I went out there.”
Finally, she ended up in New York with fluency in four languages and as a self-described world citizen. And it suits her.
“I’m European, so I’m going to tell a story that’s influenced not just from here but it’s going to be influenced by France, by Italy, by Japan, by China, by all these stories that I accumulated on the way. So my stories are definitely not traditionally American in the sense… it’s not exactly A, B, C plot points. It’s not necessarily what you would expect the character to do.”
The story that inspired Love At War is directly rooted in Noella’s European identity. It came from Noella’s grandmother; at the end of World War II, as the Americans were marching into a liberated Paris, she joined the celebrating crowds and a young American soldier, not more than a boy himself, delighted her with some sleight of hand and her first kiss. That scene stuck. “I told [the story] to a friend and her reaction was ‘oh you have to do something about this because it’s such a beautiful story.’”
But it didn’t work until she combined it with the story of La Foule by Édith Piaf: a girl and boy pushed together by chance and the surging of the crowd. At last she had her script, but now the style was eluding her– it could not be too realistic because then it would quickly turn dark. Inspiration struck again when she was re-introduced to The Thief and The Cobbler by a friend’s documentary. The original masterpiece, “not Disney’s reedited version,” she points out quickly.
“I thought, ‘oh wait a minute that’s the aesthetic I want.’ That’s the aesthetic I want for Love At War. I want that type of animation. I want to make that kind of masterpiece. [Maybe] not spending thirty years on it… so I started drawing more in that style. If you see the early drawings of Love at War you can totally see The Cobbler in there.”
And as Noella fine-tuned her concept, the multicultural influences became more and more apparent. She wanted something that was universal, while being truly unique to her style. “I’m changing everything. You recognize Paris. You recognize Americans and you recognize these symbolic things, but everything is becoming a fantasy… something I always loved about old cartoons is they always had such dark references to real things, to adult life, but as a kid you couldn’t tell.” And so, the Nazi soldiers became wolves.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when she saw, of all things, a commercial for a mall. Though, to be fair, it is one of those beautiful stories that makes you tear up and is warmly animated with a mix of real-life three-dimensional scenery and flat hand-drawn characters.
“It was beautiful… I thought that was so cool and I wanted to try that technique and that’s what triggered it originally. And that’s usually how I get all my stuff done. You see something, you see a movie, or a commercial, that’s done in a certain way, and you really dig it and you just want to do the same thing. You know?”
With all the details considered, she set out to make the 15 seconds that would serve as a teaser for the film as she sought investors. The 15 seconds that took hundreds of hours to complete. Each frame was hand-drawn and watercolored and then carefully cut out so that they could be placed into the hand-constructed world of tiny stone walls and stamp-sized newspapers and filmed in stop-motion. You can see how it is a labor of love.
Perhaps it is an effect of her worldwide upbringing to envision something at once so intimate in content, unique in execution, and global in appeal. “It’s a love story. It’s a very basic love story… but at the same time there is something very unique about it in the way I tell the story and in the way I present the characters.”
It’s a love she wants to share. She envisions Love At War without much dialogue, a fantasia “so [that] everybody can watch. You don’t have to worry about understanding. You can just show everything through the picture.”
Even after the hours of dedication she poured into creating a picture that only lasts for a fraction of a minute, she is not planning on stopping. It is just the beginning. It will one day, if her tenacity is any indication, be a feature film - and one she hopes will find an audience as broad as her inspiration. “I want the world to be aware of the work I am doing.”
