We’re working with the incredible Ari Folman on Where Is Anne Frank, which looks at a familiar story but in a totally fresh and powerful way, with the emphasis on making it accessible and meaningful to young audiences. We do 2D, 3D, rotoscope, stop-motion - we’re a multi-disciplinary studio.Ĭan you tell us a little bit about your upcoming projects?
We’re one of the biggest independent companies in the Netherlands, we have a permanent staff of about 25 people but that fluctuates with productions - it peaks around 100 people depending on the project. How many are employed at the company, and what are some of the animation tools you use in your projects? We want to tell stories about the times we live in, in visually striking ways – The Last Hijack was a film about Somali pirates which explores themes around globalisation and crime but in a really imaginative way – similarly with Undone we are pushing the boundaries of a traditional scripted series. We love interesting stories: We like to be innovative in our visual storytelling and mainly focus on contemporary tales with resonance in the world today. Can you tell us what makes an ideal Submarine project? You seem to have quite an eclectic slate of interesting, original animated projects on your current slate.
We produced many children’s series in co-production with broadcasters around Europe, and our work with the global streamers began in 2016 when we produced Mattel’s Wellie Wishers series for young audiences on Amazon Prime. From the start we had the ambition to work for a worldwide audience. Exploring the new language of visual storytelling that this gave rise to is really why we started the studio. We grew up at a time where production tools became digital, so it was a burgeoning of possibilities – all these genres that were quite separate now became easier to combine. That also speaks to our interests in the intersection of film, animation and graphic design, which has driven our creative work from the start. We also launched a website called “Forget the Film, Watch the Titles” – because of our love of title design and animation. Starting the company – Bruno and I loved design and graphic novels and wanted to use animation outside the confines of children’s programming and cartoons as a tool for storytelling. The studio really was born out of us applying animation to documentary and interactive projects and it grew from there.Ĭan you talk about your principle of breaking the boundaries of what animation can and cannot do? Some of our other initial projects include an interactive motion comic adaptation of The Killer by Matz and artist Luc Jacamon, before we moved into linear animation with children’s series Kika & Bob.
In the early 2000s, we made an animated documentary about the history of sneakers as cultural icons, using animation mixed with archive footage, which is an early example of how we work blending these tools. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the studio?įrom inception, Submarine has been a hybrid company mixing disciplines – blurring the lines between documentary, animation and interactive projects.