Behind the scenes of short animated film The Kite

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The Kite is a short animated film for children about the loss of a loved one, directed by Martin Smatana.

You can watch the movie here:

The Kite deals with the issue of death, but it does so in a simple metaphorical and symbolic way on the relationship between the little boy and his grandpa. It explains that none of us are here forever and that all living creatures must die, but also to show that death doesn’t mean the end of our journey.

A little boy visits his old grandfather in the countryside and they fly a kite together. They are both made out of layers, which symbolize their age. The boy has many of these layers. He is perspective, because he has all his life before him. But grandfather, on the other hand, has already lost most of his layers and he has only few left. As he gets older, he also gets thinner, and at the end of his life, he is as thin as a sheet of paper. One day, the wind just softly blows him away and takes him up to the sky...

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As boy sometimes flies high in the clouds, he sees little fields from above. We made them look like a patchwork blanket, because when I used to visit my grandparents during the summer holiday as a kid, they had this patchwork blanket, and I used to sleep under it.

During the building of the sets, we visited probably every second-hand shop in Prague. We bought a lot of cheap clothes with different patterns and colors to be used in the film, because there are four different seasons in the entire film, and each has its own color palette. Also a lot of our friends donated their old clothes to the film, so we could re-use them instead of throwing it to trash can.

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The Kite was premiered at Berlinale 2019, selected to semifinals of Student Academy Awards, included in the Film Collection of MoMA and won over 60 international awards.

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Director: Martin Smatana
Screenplay: Martin Smatana
Screenplay Consultants: Philip LaZebnik, Anna Vášová, Ivana Sujová
Producer: BFILM – Peter Badač
Co-producers: BFILM.cz (CZ), FAMU (CZ), CeTA (PL)
D.O.P.: Ondřej Nedvěd
Art Design: Martin Smatana
Animation: Martin Smatana, Martyna Koleniec, Piotr Chmielewski, Łukasz Grynda, Matouš Valchař, Stanisław Szostak
Editor: Lucie Navrátilová
Image Postproduction: Michal Šabík
Sound Design: Viera Marinová
Music: Aliaksandr Yasinski