Madagascar, carnet de voyage by Bastien Dubois: an animated short film, pre-selected for the Oscars.
After a senior year film at SUPINFOCOM, “AH” co-directed with Joris Bacquet and Simon Moreau, showing a little girl with her Alphabet soup, you now offer us a magnificent travel log “Madagascar,” a short film that has won prizes at a lot of festivals.
Its originality: combining several animation techniques. How were you able to work on so many different forms of animation?
Bastien DUBOIS: When I make travel logs, my style changes all the time from one drawing to the next, from one page to the next… From the very beginning I felt this would really enrich the film! I pushed the vice rather far, since I even used local animation crafts: embroidery, scrapped cars, etc. Changing styles for each shot was really a lot of fun: rather than repeating the same technique and using the same tools, I could continue to create the whole time the film was being made.
Were you able to distribute your film in Madagascar? How did the movie goers react?
YES! I went back to Madagascar a year ago to show the film to the musicians and inhabitants in the village where the action took place… It was an extraordinary experience! I went to the village and to the musicians (a godforsaken place…) to set up a meeting with them the following week, explaining that I was going to rent a bus and that we would all go see the film together at the movie theater in the nearest town (Antsirabe). The following week I came with my bus to the meeting place a few kilometers from their village, which was inaccessible by road, hoping they would be there… Actually, since their French was very basic and my Malagasy is limited to a few polite phrases, I wasn’t completely sure I would find them there. But everyone was there! The musicians hadn’t understood that we were going to see the film, so they thought that I wanted to do some more recording. So we loaded the kids, the grandmothers, the banjos and the base drums onto the bus and off we went! After a bumpy ride for half an hour, we made it to the Alliance française movie house: a hangar with wooden chairs and an unmanageable projector… We waited 45 minutes while the projectionist repaired it. But no problem: the musicians played us a little concert, and everybody began dancing! The kids and the grandmothers! The movie house director was bowled over. We still wound up seeing the film, and in the dark I heard them saying “Izao! Izao!” (That’s me! That’s me!). We watched the film again, and then I took them back home by bus. They thanked me warmheartedly: it was the first time they’d ever been to a movie!
Are you planning any other films?
Too many. Thanks for talking with me!
Official Website : http://www.bastiendubois.com/mada/
Sébastien - unifrance.org 
