Jagna’s life is, above all, a technical prodigy, an ambition that its directors, the Poles Hugh and DK Welchman, they had already traveled in Loving Vincentthe animation that was nominated for an Oscar.
Now the Welchmans—who are a married couple and won an Academy Award in 2008 for their animated short, Peter and the Wolf—are redoubling their ambition: to put their painting style in motion. The life of Jagna, which opens in local theaters today, is truly another technical marvel. It was the film sent by Poland to the Oscars and was part of the official selection of the last Toronto festival.
“While The Life of Jagna incorporates the same oil painting-based animation technique made popular with Loving Vincent, the animation approach varied significantly,” the production notes say. “The core now is the epic story that Wladislaw Reymont wrote and the painting is the tool to attract viewers and immerse them in that rural setting of the late 19th century. “So instead of focusing on showing as many real paintings by an artist as possible, what we did was draw inspiration from the work of painters to help us create the mood and atmosphere of the novel.”
That novel covers almost a thousand pages that Reymont, who was the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1924, dedicated to telling a peasant story with touches of nineteenth-century melodrama. There is a good girl, Janga (Kamila Urzedowska), innocently involved in a marriage that is not good with a widower, who is in love with another man and has a terrible time. The town’s gossip, grudges and loves populate the story that takes place over the course of a year divided into the seasons, which merits a different palette that manages to maintain the surprise of the resource.
The use of oil painting on flesh and bones actors also allows a strange distancing, providing another look at the events and the difference of Loving Vincentwhich already seemed so cutting-edge, is notorious.
“Although the film is painted and animated, all the characters were previously played by actors who worked on sets specially built to simulate real places or with color schemes that were later replaced by paintings and animated with a computer,” it is officially explained.
The process is arduous. A 67×49 cm painting is painted. on the real reference image, with the established style of brush strokes, colors or level of details. This is animated by painting in the next frame the parts that have moved, with the brush strokes, color, and impasto from the previous frame. In the end, all the frames of the sequence are photographed with a high-resolution camera.
“Once the key frames have been created by the painters, the digital animation process begins which, based on the same style, adds some brush strokes to create the intermediate frames.” If in Loving Vincent four frames were used to generate one second of each sequence, in this case 12 were needed.
The pictorial style is an amalgamation of half a century of European painting in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. The artists who inspired them, they say, were Józef Chelmonski, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Jan Stanislawski, Julian Falat, Leon Wyczólkowski, Piotr Michalowski, Jules Breton and Jean-Francois Millet, he of the famous “harvesters”.
Scenes such as the dance at the wedding, a walk through the town fair (a sequence shot within a work of art), a storm or a battle achieve a plastic force typical of oil painting.
To achieve this, the Welchmans assembled a team of more than 100 artists spread across their Breakthru studios in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania and Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War halted production when illustrators were summoned to the front; Before, the pandemic had also been an almost insurmountable obstacle.
“We bought tickets for all the women, because the men were of military age and couldn’t leave the country,” Hugh Welchman told Deadline. “All the women came to the border. They were with their elderly mothers or their children. “We had to find them places to live, places for their children to go to school.” When the war left the capital BreakThru reopened the kyiv branch and resumed production.
The result is as surprising as that of Loving Vincent. But the size and origin of the story, the techno-craft work (an ultra-technological variation of the old practice of painting the first silent films by hand) and the dimension of the drama, make it a cinematic experience of those few seen.
