A new film by John Kelly is premiering in the animated shorts program at this year’s SXSW. It is called Retirement Plan and is about an Irish man’s midlife crisis. He imagines everything he will do when he retires and has “time.” Finding free time is a common problem among working professionals in the modern age. Work never really ends, and we are bombarded with many ways to spend our time. Kelly spoke with Immersive via Zoom recently about his journey with this film.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
What inspired this film?
I had a mild panic attack on a flight. I sat with my laptop, thinking, “Let me do something productive.” I looked at my inbox, and I had thousands of unread emails. It was a moment of reflection. I thought about everything I would like to do if I had more time: watchlists, software tutorials, more time with my kids, all the things I want to do in the house. I started to think, “When will I get to the bottom of all these lists? When will I retire?” It started and finished as a list. Along the way, I realized I could wrap this around a character.
How did the writing come about?
It had the guts of a heavy movie, so I turned to my friend Tara Lawall. She’s an advertising copywriter in New York and one of the funniest people I know. I sent her rough ideas of what I wanted to do. She made it a hundred times more comical, and I wrote the sad bits. We went back and forth with the tonal arc.
Guillermo del Toro once said, “Animation is cinema. Animation is not a genre for kids. It’s a medium for art.” I love animation but have always been a bit of a skeptic until I saw ‘Flow’ last year. How did you end up deciding on animation? Was this ever a live-action short?
I did think about live-action. From a practical point of view, the number of setups required would’ve been impossible for our budget. I studied animation, and one of the things they tell you in animation school is when you come up with an idea to justify its existence. Why is this animated? Animation can do a lot more than science fiction. It doesn’t have to be fantastical.
I think it was a deliberate attempt to handcuff myself and put some parameters on it. It’s very static. You’re observing this happening, letting this scene unfold. It’s inspired by deadpan photography, this sort of really reductionist observational approach. I have a graphic design background, and I decided less is more for this.
How long did it take you, and did you work with an animation company?
We got funding from an Irish Film Board program called Screen Ireland. They gave us a year to make it. There were just three of us working on it remotely. I worked with two animators – a husband and wife team. I would draw the scenes, hand them over, and they animated them quickly. We did it in order the way it appears in the film. The character deteriorates throughout the film. So the mood of our production, over three months, just became really sad. We set it in Ireland to portray the country in a way you don’t typically see in animation.
What informed the locations?
I wanted something that felt a bit more suburban. The beauty of animation is that you can pull in photo and visual references and then kind of collage them and rework them into something that’s as specific as you need. I think there’s a certain sort of Irish sensibility that we’re not big at talking about our feelings.
How’d you connect with Domhnall Gleeson?
I’ve admired his work for years, dating back to his early comedy work. He’s a brilliant leading actor. I felt it was an opportunity to tap into his comedy stuff. For an actor, it’s like two hours in a recording studio. I wrote to him, and I made a little video. That’s how I tend to pitch projects. That’s what I did for the funding. He was just really sweet about it. He was really into it and did it effortlessly, adding a lot more depth to it.
What were significant challenges in completing this?
The biggest challenge was finding the animation style. The animators I was working with are amazing. They were overqualified for what I was asking for. I wanted simplistic. They can do so much, but they got the style right away.
What kind of program was used?
We used a program called Moho, which is really interesting. It’s relatively new. I draw in Illustrator and then give them a layered vector file. They would animate it, apply a Photoshop brush to the Vector artwork, and then output it. What was really nice was that it didn’t need any compositing.
We built a huge reference library of lighting references. I was pretty keen on the style of the image changing over the course of the film to reflect the mood. It starts off quite bright and wide and becomes darker and narrower as we go on his journey.
Do you feel better about your midlife crisis now that you have a new animated short at SXSW?
I’ve never felt more energized about making work. I think it’s because of the accumulation of things. Building this methodology, creatively and technically, to make this was just a complete joy from start to finish. I can see the possibilities within this way of working to tell so many kinds of stories fluidly. I’m excited.
Retirement Plan premieres at SXSW on March 8th.
