Director Janice Nadeau Pictures Loss Through a Child’s Eyes in ‘Harvey’

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An imaginative boy comes to terms with the loss of a parent in Harvey, the beautifully animated NFB (National Film Board of Canada) and Folimage short, directed by Janice Nadeau. The project, which is one of the eight titles selected for the Young Audiences Competition at Annecy, is based on the graphic novel by Hervé Bouchard and illustrated by the director herself.

“The story was so rich that I wanted to expand it into an animated film,” says Nadeau. “The image I often use to describe my relationship to Hervé’s original story is a house with many windows: whichever one I open, there’s always something to inspire me.”

Nadeau worked in two techniques — traditional 2D hand-drawn animation, with the characters drawn in pencil on paper, augmented with charcoal and colored digitally in TVPaint, and paper cut-outs on a multiplane animation stand. She drew all the backgrounds on Arches paper, augmented with charcoal and colored in Photoshop.

A Different Third Act

The director points out that she wanted to stay true to what she felt about the main character’s story, rather than be completely faithful to the original work. “The book has an open and ultimately quite violent ending: the child disappears because his father can no longer see him,” she notes. “It’s a kind of symbolic death. Before I illustrated his book, I had asked Hervé Bouchard about the meaning of the ending. He replied: ‘It’s up to you to choose your interpretation.’ So I took that liberty, not with the book but with the film, and came up with an epilogue.”

Springtime in Quebec was another source of inspiration. “It’s not a green spring, with buds flowering and clothes that smell like sunshine after drying on the clothesline,” explains Nadeau. “It’s a gray spring, ‘because there is still snow on the ground and the trees are still naked,’ as Harvey’s dad explains. So I infused the film with that particular grain, with light dustings of charcoal, the sidewalks covered in bits of gravel, the snow melting and forming streams in the gutters, and everything lit by this gray light. The colors are weathered and faded. The rooftops on the houses are topsy-turvy, made of repeating geometric shapes and patterns, and I sometimes removed parts of their structure as a kind of graphical echo of the father’s absence.”

Another reference point was the film within the film — The Incredible Shrinking Man and its protagonist, Scott Carey, informed the aesthetic choice of black-and-white with cut-out shapes, sponged with ink and surrounded by darkened halos.

The director says her own childhood also played a part in the creative process. “I remember that as a child, I had this feeling that adults lived in a space that was above mine, so I used that in the film, for example when Harvey imagines his dad driving his car in the sky, or when the lozenges fly off his sweater. I also looked through family photo albums and I chose the color palette for the film based on the somewhat faded colors of those photographs. And finally, for all the characters’ costumes, I was inspired by the pages of the mail-order catalogs that every Quebec family had when I was growing up.”

Nadeau one of her favorite parts of the experience was working with her talented team. “In the first few years I was pretty much alone in developing the project, until some people very carefully chosen by my two producers, Marc Bertrand and Corinne Destombes, came on board,” she notes. “They included lead animator Claude Cloutier in Montreal and Marc Robinet, who played a similar role in Valence.”

She also mentions that she actually loves the time that animation requires. “There is a whole set of activities to be performed (researching, sketching, writing, drawing, animating, flipping pages, coloring, etc.) and it all takes shape in a very-large-scale project that you then get to share with others, whether it’s your collaborators (for example, sound designer Olivier Calvert, our composer Martin Léon, editor Oana Suteu, and Ryan Hill and Laurent Lemaire, our voice talents) or members of the audience at a screening.”

The filmmaker hopes Harvey will have a positive impact on the audience. “The message is that you should trust your own image of your loved one,” she explains. “Harvey’s dilemma is that after his dad is gone, everyone tells him what his dad was like, but when he puts all those descriptions together, they don’t make sense to him. So Harvey must listen to his own voice to keep a distinctive image of his father inside him.”

For more info, visit nfb.ca.