Popular DJ, musician and composer Kid Koala (Eric San) has directed his first animated feature — the sweet “Space Cadet”, which opens in select theaters on Nov. 13. It’s based on his 2011 graphic novel about a girl named Celeste and her caretaker, a Guardian Bot. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity. Images Credit: Viva Kids)

Jackson Murphy:  Congratulations on the film. It is lovely, it is sweet, and I know the graphic novel for this that you did came out in 2011. So how much has this story meant to you over the past 15-plus years?

Kid Koala (Eric San): It’s meant a lot because… life is gonna life. So I wrote it, originally it was one of these moments in life where you just reflect. Basically, my grandmother had recently passed away, and then I was awaiting the arrival of my first daughter. And so my brain just went time travel. Back to the past, trying to remember all the special moments I had growing up with my parents and my grandma, and then also thinking, “Hey, this next new adventure with this little person who’s gonna join our circus,” and see where this goes. And actually, that same daughter is about to leave for college now. That’s how long it takes to make an animated film sometimes. The people that I’ve met and the artists that we’ve met and worked with on this project… it’s been a real blessing. I’m so excited for people to see what they’ve made.

JM: That’s great. There’s a lot of power to this story. You talk about memories. There’s a lot with memories in this. This is a dialogue-free film, and you show memories and use them as a guide throughout the story. How interesting of an experience was that for you, using memories, flashbacks, even in paintings — which is so smart how you do that — to show this story of Celeste and her guardian bot?

KK: It’s great because it’s a way to time travel quickly and kind of piece the relationship the robot and Celeste had together not in a fully linear way. You kinda understand that they have this special bond through these quick flashbacks. And if I were to think about my own childhood, it would’ve been these little small interactions where, say, my father all of a sudden told me that he could draw, and then showed me and taught me how to draw a battleship when I was a kid, I remember. And in that moment, he went from, “Oh, that’s just my dad,” to, “Wait, this guy is an artist? And what? He can teach me how to maybe draw?” And all of a sudden there was a paradigm shift in my young brain where that would happen. Or my mother teaching me how to craft things out of paper and binding a book for the first time. And those moments, if you ask my parents now, they’re probably like, “I don’t remember doing that.” But as a child, it literally started setting me on this path to pursue art. It’s amazing. So I think this film tries to celebrate sometimes those ephemeral moments you have when you’re growing up that really open the universe up to you.

JM: Absolutely. The power of creativity and those memories and connection with family members and loved ones. The Guardian Bot is taking care of Celeste, this young girl who goes to school for space exploration, and there are powerful reasons why. Were you always fascinated with space and going to the Moon and things like that when you were young?

KK: Not so much when I was young, but when I was in high school, I had a physics teacher, Mr. Bascom, and I remember he did this one lecture where he said, “Okay, understand that the light coming from these stars is actually several, sometimes millions of light years away, and it’s taking that long to reach your eye tonight. So actually, when you look up in the sky, you’re actually looking back in time.” And then everybody in the whole classroom just jaw dropped on the floor, and then the buzzer rang, and like, “Alright. Good. Have a great lunch.” I just walked out of that class saying, “I need to go for a really long walk and meditate on this.” But since then, the connectivity between past, present, space, the vastness, the meaning of life, your place in the universe, it’s all swirling around in my mind since that very lecture, actually. I think that’s when I started getting into the whole idea of looking up into the stars and seeing what it meant to me.

JM: You have this relationship that you show between Celeste and the Guardian Bot which is so sweet, and it’s so moving. Were there challenges in how you wanted to present that? What were your goals in presenting… this connection that they have before they have to separate a little bit into the story?

KK: I think the personality, because there’s no dialogue, it’s really about how they move, obviously. And finding their “language” of how they move was the first challenge. But once we realized how we were gonna do that that stayed true to the characters, and by that, I meant it’s a lot of actual… the restraint of animation. The first tests of animation were quite squash and stretchy with eyebrows jumping off the forehead and all this stuff. And then I realized, “I don’t know if this is the type of narrative that needs that kind of animation.” So it’s a little bit more restrained, I guess. But in doing that, it actually hits harder emotionally. So I think their characters, that was the biggest challenge… trying to find that initial, language of how they move. Once that would happen and all the animators understood that, it was beautiful what they were able to create.

JM: She goes on her mission and Guardian Bot stays behind, and there’s a lot that happens. I love the design of the characters. The design of the city, the look, the feel. They go to a diner. It’s very retro inspired. Are you inspired by that retro yet futuristic look that you present here?

KK: Absolutely. I actually have a diner booth in my studio that we bought off an actual diner that was closing, and we said, “Oh, we need that in our house.” And so that’s where we do most of our meetings in terms of drawing, sketching meetings, and stuff like that. But yeah the design I have to give it up to Corinne Merrell, who’s our art director, and Lillian Chan, who’s our production designer. They wanted it to stay crafted. So Corinne also worked on “The Little Prince”. She did all the paper sets for [director] Mark Osborne’s “Little Prince”. She makes things with her hands. Even though this is a CG movie, we’re all analog crew by nature. Lillian Chan, our head of story, is actually a hand-drawn animator by trade. Corinne was trying to design the spaces and even the apartments with the kinda crafted paper texture to it and would build them actually in real life as a starting point, and then try to figure out how to transfer that into the CG realm in a fluid way. So it’s nice.

JM: Very cool. I still think about that “Little Prince” movie over a decade later, and I think I’m gonna be thinking about “Space Cadet” as well. I would describe this movie as elegant. There is an elegance to the atmosphere, and especially the music. Obviously, that’s your expertise, right up your alley. Did you really wanna create this elegant vibe? Because I think especially for the parents and the grandparents who are gonna watch this, they’re really going to appreciate that feel to this film.

KK: Absolutely. There was already embedded in the scenes when Mylene [Chollet] was writing it, just to keep herself in the zone of the script… she would pick a certain song from the old songbook, say “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, or “Moon River”, or a tune like that. And that just kept her in the emotive zone while she was writing it, and then when it was time to score it, I had to do these sort of retrofuturistic versions of it with all of the gadgets I have in my studio. But then also I still wanted that kinda nostalgic timelessness to it. I invited some of my favorite singers on the planet — Emiliana Torrini, Karen O, Ladybug Mecca, Trixie Whitley, Meaghan Smith, Martha Wainwright — to come and do interpretations or write other moments of songs into the score. They have such beautiful voices of comfort, so I think it was the perfect match for whichever scene it was to have their vocal presence there in the score.

JM: The music is excellent. Celeste’s science and research, so important what she will discover over the course of the movie. Obviously, you need science and research when it comes to making an animated feature. What did you learn the most about this experience from a technical perspective, or what surprised you about this experience of making an animated feature?

KK: I was surprised at how much every department has an effect on the scene. So from the blocking, to the camera moves, to the animation, to the texturing, to the lighting, at any point they can completely change the whole feel or joke or poignancy of a scene. And so once everything was synchronized, I realized you just leave space for them to just make that scene the most poignant or evocative or funny or suspenseful. That was a new thing to me ’cause I came from drawing where you’re kinda doing the panel and the comic book. You pick the camera, you do the lighting, you have your key frame pose of your character. So in a way I thought it was all together. But on a production like this, it’s actually a different team of people who might be working on it eight months later. So the first time you’re seeing it, it might just be cubes and pyramids or cones or something moving around in a Z space. And you’re like, “What am I looking at right now?” It’s like, “No, this is your scene.” I’m like, “Ow.” So it took me a second to understand that. But then also in terms of timing, I think I went in more as a musician. I was like, “Hey, let’s try to keep the shoulders kinda swinging on the snare drums every two and four.” And then the animators would just kinda blink at me saying, “What are you saying?” I’m like, “No, just listen to the music. That’s the tempo of the walk.” And then learning that we have to speak in frames. So I actually became very fluent in frames. Every 16 frames, shoulder’s at the upper limit, and that’s kinda the timing. The swagger and all that movement I’ll leave to the animators, but the actual locking with the tempo in some scenes was done that way. And I thought that was a challenge but also fun to learn. (laughs)

JM: Are you excited to possibly direct more animated features? Do you have more stories ready to go? This was such a journey for you. Are you ready to go on another one with an animated feature?

KK: Absolutely. I think so. This was super fun, and I really think that the team that we put together for this… even at our wrap party we were saying, “I’m gonna miss everybody here.” It was such a wonderful experience working on this and creating this film together. So I hope so, absolutely.

JM: I think families not only are gonna go see this in the theaters, but also this to me feels like delicate comfort viewing for a lot of families who can watch it over and over again. What does that mean to you that families are gonna watch this over and over again and maybe get something new out of it a second time — and for kids to respond to this story like I think they’re going to?

KK: I come from music originally, so the idea of listening to an album over and over again is not foreign to me. In fact, the more you listen to a record, different songs start hitting differently and becoming your favorites over time. With this film, I hope it does provide comfort to anybody who needs it or is dealing with something like a loss or that grieving period, but at the same time that they laugh together as a family. If I think back to my first experience of watching a movie would be Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”, with my grandma and my parents and my sister all laughing, crying, and on the edge of our seats watching this story unfold. And even then, I was six or seven years old, I said, “You know, when I grow up, I hope I can make that energy happen somehow.” Whether it was through film or through live music, just that connectivity I felt. So absolutely, I hope people will bring their loved ones and watch it together. I think that’d be a great thing.