The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (film)

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Directed by	Peter Baynton Charlie Mackesy
Written by	Jon Croker Charlie Mackesy
Based on	The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Produced by	J. J. Abrams Matthew Freud Woody Harrelson Jony Ive Cara Speller
Starring	Jude Coward Nicoll Gabriel Byrne Idris Elba Tom Hollander
Edited by	Aidan Bennett
Music by	Isobel Waller-Bridge
Production companies	Apple Original Films Bad Robot Productions NoneMore Productions
Distributed by	Apple Studios (United States) BBC One BBC iPlayer (United Kingdom)
Release dates	24 December 2022 (2022-12-24) (United Kingdom) 25 December 2022 (2022-12-25) (United States)
Running time	34 minutes
Countries	United States United Kingdom
Language	English

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a 2022 animated short film directed by Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy and written by Jon Croker and Mackesy and, based on Mackesy's 2019 novel of the same name. It features the voices of Jude Coward Nicoll, Gabriel Byrne, Idris Elba and Tom Hollander as the four titular characters, which revolves around the developing companionship between them during the wilderness on a spring day. The film explores the themes of humanity, empathy and kindness.

In early 2020, as the novel became a bestseller, several producers attempted to acquire the rights of the novel for a potential screen adaptation, which was later acquired by Cara Speller, who collaborated with Matthew Freud for producing the film under their NoneMore Productions banner in their first production. J. J. Abrams also produced the film under the Bad Robot Productions banner. The animation was done remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 120 people from over 20 countries working on the film. Since the illustrated book had a loose and unfinished quality of styling, Baynton and his animation team wanted to match using pencil ink for the characters, which had an intricate detailing and watercolor-inspired texture in the background.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse was released in the United Kingdom through BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Christmas Eve (24 December 2022) and internationally on Apple TV+, as an Apple Original Film, the following day, which coincides the Christmas festival.

Production

Development

"We’ve had different forms of hardness, you know, whether it’s pandemic and isolation or whether it’s economic I think everyone’s just feeling exhausted. It seems to me that if we’ve ever needed kindness, we need it now. And I don’t think there’s any human on Earth who couldn’t use a bit more kindness or comfort or hope or a healing. It was lovely to read from people’s messages during the pandemic about the book and I hope that film can do something similar in this time."

— Charlie Mackesy

In 2019, Charlie Mackesy published the illustrated graphic book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse based on his sketches that posted on Instagram about conversations between the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. The novel was the bestseller, with over 250,000 copied being sold in early 2020, and several producers tried to adapt them into feature-length works, until he was asked by producers Cara Speller and Matthew Freud to adapt it into an animated short. Speller discovered the book without having the knowledge, but really liked the book after reading and felt like there is much of the material that could be adapted into a cinematic piece. Hence, she came in contact with Mackesy and Freud to discuss about the short-length adaptation.

Speller felt that "it was always really important to me right from the start that Charlie be at the center of any team that we put together to make the film. You can tell immediately from the book that he has incredibly strong instincts about what works. To me, it didn’t make any sense to try and make that without having him so closely involved." She and Freud, then started a production company titled NoneMore Productions, to bankroll the film, and J. J. Abrams also produced the film under the Bad Robot Productions banner, also joining with Woody Harrelson. Speller found fascinating on how Mackesy, "even though, he obviously created those characters and knows them better than anyone, he learned an awful lot more about them through the process of making the film".

The film was directed by Peter Baynton and co-written by Jon Croker, with Jude Coward Nicoll, Gabriel Byrne, Idris Elba and Tom Hollander voicing the four titular characters, in the film. Nicoll's casting was a challenging for the creative team, as he was a newcomer to acting, and was selected among the 300 people auditioned for the role. He added "We were looking for a certain fragility and vulnerability in the voice of the boy. We wanted people when they heard the boy’s voice to have the instinct to try and take care of him or try and protect him [...] He announces to us right at the start of the film that he’s lost and he’s looking for a home. We all felt incredibly protective of the boy. And that was the quality we were looking for in the boy’s voice: a very soft, very gentle unconfident-sounding voice." Baynton said that "he found this sort of lovely rapport and musical relationship between the voices of Nicoll and Hollander". It was felt like how the duo sounded easy to imagine recording their voices together in a studio, although both the actors recorded separately due to the pandemic.

Animation and design

The film had an international crew of over 120–150 people coming from over 20 countries. Production began during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, hence each member had to work from their home. Speller built the team in the same way, as building team on a production, as "you’re always looking for the most talented artists you can find; it doesn’t matter where they are in the world, as long as you think they’re the right fit for the project and for the team". She called it as one of the "phenomenal effort" as each member had gone above and beyond in an imaginable way. Mackesy felt that making the film was so moving, as "it was largely a journey of kindness and friendship, We’ve all become friends. And so I will always love the process as much as I do the product. And whenever I see it, I can pause the film at any point, and I will remember instances of deep conversation – and occasional argument and disagreement, but always in kindness."

Baynton added that, "Charlie’s drawing is underpinned by a great knowledge of anatomy, even though, he draws extremely quickly and quite impressionistically, you can tell he knows horse or boy or fox anatomy so well. For the mole, it’s a little bit different." He added that the challenge was translating the exquisite illustrations into hand-drawn animation, and "to find a way of drawing the characters that enabled us to nuance performances that could communicate the subtle emotions that we wanted to express". Since Mackesy had loose and unfinished quality of style, hence the process involved drawing the anatomically-correct characters in a pencil line and going over the top in the loose ink, to give it the fullness shape, and the background was done in a hand-painted style to resemble Mackesy's watercolor texture. The animation team led by supervisors Tim Watts, Gabriele Zucchelli, Setareh Erfan and art director Mike McCain, worked tightly on detailed models and during the art and storyboard process, he encouraged the artists to find the looser way of inking, that was about "finding that very fine line that sort of drifts around the characters".

On the design of the characters, Baynton said "one of the first things I remember, where you have these very realistic and well-proportioned horse and fox and child, and then this strange, little, graphic mole with tubular circles on this black triangle nose. Like a little doorstop. It’s a very charming aspect of what Charlie created, that sort of contrast. In order to animate, we went back to the book, and developed that naturalistic, as non-cartoony as possible approach for the boy, the fox and the horse, and then a bolder animation for the mole."

Music

Isobel Waller-Bridge composed the film's score, who felt the music was "really Charlie’s energy, I think that really sort of fed the score, as well as the actual material from the book. They’re so closely related, as you can imagine. So it was just listening to Charlie, honestly, the way he speaks, the way he looks at the world, and then paying close attention to exactly why he made the book and why he felt it was an important thing to make the film. So the music was really just an extension of that energy and everything down to the instrumentation and the choice of the piano that felt really, really important. A lot of those important choices came from Charlie as well, which felt like the right way in." The sound design and music happened simultaneously and the score was written even before the film was completed. The orchestra portions were performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra with Geoff Alexander conducting. The 18-track album consisting of Waller-Bridge's score was released on 23 December 2022 by Sony Masterworks.

Release

In October 2022, it was announced that Apple Studios would distribute the animated adaptation of Charlie Mackesy's illustrated graphic book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2019) as an Apple Original Film internationally, with the exception of the United Kingdom where it was released by BBC. It was promoted with two trailers being released on 9 and 12 December, and a two-minute clip was debuted exclusively on Collider on 21 December. The short film premiered first on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Christmas Eve (24 December 2022), and streamed worldwide on the following day through Apple TV+.

Reception

Critical response

Emily Bernard of Collider gave four-and-a-half stars out of five, and said, "Fans of Mackesy’s book will be utterly delighted to see that the hand-drawn illustrations translate beautifully to the screen without losing any of its neat-yet-messy aesthetic. Because the lines are literally pulled from the pages of the detailed original work, the movie feels less like a short film with a progressing story and more like a moving book. It doesn’t have the same pacing or plot propulsion that a typical short would, but that just adds to the charm of it."

Accolades

The film is currently being shortlisted for Best Animated Short Film at the 95th Academy Awards.

External links

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse at IMDb