January 7th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
One of the fifteen 2024 Best Animated Short Film Oscars finalists is Eeva, from directors Lucija Mrzljak and Morten Tsinakov. A rainy funeral. A restaurant. Woodpeckers. And you should expect the unexpected. Tsinakov shared these answers to my Eeva questions, on behalf of himself and Mrzljak, for this Animation Scoop Interview. (This was edited for length and clarity.)
Q: How did you want to show the experience of a funeral?
A: Well, the funeral itself is just an introduction to the story and maybe not even that important. What we were mostly interested in was the behavior of Eeva and the people around her. The intentions of those around her are difficult to read – they seem to be good but maybe not quite genuine.
Q: What did you want to say about people’s emotions during sad times?
A: It often feels that some standard set of visible emotions are expected from people going through tough times, but everyone deals with difficulties in their own ways and sometimes it doesn’t make sense to others. How Eeva deals with those things might not make much sense either.
Q: How do woodpeckers fascinate you?
A: They have a unique shock-absorbing system in their skulls to prevent brain injury while pecking. They have long tongues to extract prey from crevices. They excavate their own nest cavities in tree trunks. They are very adaptable and live in various habitats, from forests to deserts. They understand Morse code.
Q: How did you decide on the specific color palette / the shades of red, green, blue and gray?
A: When it comes to colors we were very much inspired by Wong Kar-wai’s films and Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique”. We liked the strong reds and greens – most of the bigger surfaces are either red or green in the film.
Q: How do you hope “Eeva” surprises viewers?
A: It’s great when watching a film and the author has thought about something (anything really) in a way that you know would never have occured to you. If that would happen to somebody watching “Eeva”, it would make us very happy.
Q: What part of making this short challenged you the most?
A: Probably the visual side. Our previous films were much easier to make. In this one we had more details in every shot, some patterns and shadows that we decided to make manually because they just looked better that way and a lot of post-production: lights, blurs, textures and so on.
Q: What would an Academy Award nomination mean to you?
A: It would show that there are many people who liked the film and that they think it deserves some recognition. It’s always nice to find out that there are people who enjoy what you have created. We have heard a lot of nice things being said about “Eeva” and it makes us very very happy.
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