“I’ve just finished a Christmas film! I’m actually in my studio with all of my weird characters,” says writer, director, and animator Josephine Lohoar Self during our Zoom interview, holding up a comically modelled dog to the camera for me to see. “This one looks a little possessed.”
Self is currently in Berlin, developing the script and doing research for her next project, but she originally hails from Scotland. She, in fact, studied fine art at The Glasgow School of Art, and it was there that she found love in stop-motion animation. “I went into the course doing big figurative paintings and things like that. And, in my second year, I did a stop-motion animation module. That was where I was sort of like: oh, this combines all of my interests of working collaboratively [and] of combining moving image and sound.”
The subject of our discussion today is Self’s latest stop-motion short: The Fabric of You. Set in the Bronx, during the era of 1950s McCarthyism, the film explores love and loss, freedom and conformity, and escapism and tragedy in a non-linear narrative that features, as its cast, anthropomorphic mice (voiced beautifully by Iain Glen and Damien Molony). “Stylistically, the film is heavily based on Maus, in terms of using anthropomorphic mice-characters and using animals to translate human characters to translate adult themes,” Self says of the inspiration behind the film, referring to American cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel-memoir in which he, retelling his father’s experience as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, uses mice and other animals as his main characters. “I was really taken aback when I read Maus because when you initially glance over the style of the graphic novel, you think it’s gonna be for kids. I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by the story in [and the style of] the book.”
“I was also interested in memory,” Self continues, “so I was looking at a lot of animation directors like Satoshi Kon. He looks at time and memory and space, and how [memory] can be used to translate between time and space.”
This is perhaps the most interesting and nuanced element of The Fabric of You: Michael (Molony) spends the duration of the film haunted by Isaac’s (Glen) death and, upon seeing Isaac’s jacket draped over a chair, becomes consequently tormented by memories of their moments together. Jumping back and forth between the present to the past, the viewer sees the moment Isaac first walks into Michael’s tailoring shop, the moment Isaac tragically dies, and everything in between.
Indeed, one of those in-between memories is a sex scene between the two! “I think the most successful bit was the sex scene! That’s something that’s [elicited] the most reactions from people watching it because you don’t really expect it,” says Self with a laugh. “Some people laugh, some people think it’s really intense. And I intended for it to be a light—not [necessarily] funny—but unexpected thing in the film.”
Which points to Self’s higher prerogative as a filmmaker: “I see film as a tool for provoking people. And for The Fabric of You, I tried to turn people’s expectations of what they were initially thinking.” And regarding the queerness of the mice-characters, she adds, “For me, it’s kind of like an instinctive thing when making [something]: to not do the easy option and go with heterosexual characters all the time because I’m so sick of seeing representations of that in stop-motion. I was interested in doing a love story and how memory manifests itself when you’ve lost someone. And it was like, well, why not make the characters LGBTQ?”
It’s evident that Self’s goal as a filmmaker—indeed, The Fabric of You as a whole—is striking the right chords. It is currently cruising through the short film festival circuit, and, with a recent Scottish BAFTA nomination for Best Animation, the ultimate stop would be the Oscars. “It’s still playing at a couple of festivals, and we’re still waiting to hear back from a few. We’ve been approached by some distributors, more so for online platforms, but I think we’re going to wait and see what happens with [the Oscars and awards season] and maybe in the new year—the mid-new year—somehow put it online.”
Whatever happens, the goal, for Self, is to capitalise on the spotlight and to ultimately continue creating. “When I was coming up in art school, I didn’t really have any connections in the film industry. I was making my own work, but it was pretty amateurish and technically, well, bad. And then I applied for the Scottish Film Talent Network, and they were really good. They would give you money to make a film, but they also mentored you in scriptwriting. And so it was like, wow, I can really write a script! And it wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be. And that was how The Fabric of You came about: I applied for this money and got it, and [this movie] was made!”
“Fingers crossed I can keep making work!” Self says at the end of our chat. And if The Fabric of You is a testimony for anything, it’s the brushstrokes of brilliant, nuanced, and dare-to-be-different talent of its up-and-coming filmmaker, so, yes, fingers crossed indeed.
