"In , 3D animated anthropomorphic animals may populate the world, but the intricacies of their lives are unmistakably human. This approach is par for the course for the film's co-directors, the Brooklyn-based visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, whose bite-size episodic project captivated viewers during the early stages of lockdown in 2020-and landed them on our 25 New Faces of Film list the same year."
"With their feature debut, Bennani and Barki retain much of the "essence" of this past project, just with a much higher production value. The 3D animation is far from amateurish, and the real-life locations that they opt for were painstakingly replicated via the process of photogrammetry (more on that below). The filmmakers similarly voice two best friends-Barki stays a lizard, but Bennani instead takes the form of, per her co-director, a "very sexy" coyote."
3D animated anthropomorphic characters enact distinctly human complexities, blending personal revelation, improvisational dialogue and metatextual storytelling. The Brooklyn-based co-directors, Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, elevate a prior bite-size episodic project into a feature with higher production values and photogrammetry-replicated real-world locations. Bennani voices a Moroccan-born, Manhattan-based filmmaker who becomes creatively reinvigorated by confessional phone calls with her Casablanca-based mother. Those conversations, based on real discussions, address relationship strain following Bouchra's coming out as queer. The protagonist storyboards a fictionalized return to Casablanca, where reconnection, resentment and exploration unfold and relatives voice their animated avatars.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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