Animator Chris Landreth, who won the 2004 Oscar for best animated short for his beautifully realized animated documentary Ryan, is going to the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (June 8-13) with a new animated short: chrislandrethThe Spine.

The Spine, which features the voices of Gordon Pinsent and Alberta Watson, follows up Landreth's unusual, surreal use of imagery to tell the story of an unhappily married but otherwise ordinary couple, Dan and Mary Rutherford, as they sit in a couples counselling session. Interested readers can read Landreth's blog and see a trailer here.

To make The Spine, Landreth again worked with producers Steve Hoban (Copperheart Animation), Mark Smith (Copperheart Animation) and Marcy Page (National Film Board of Canada). The Spine was produced by the National Film Board of Canada in association with Copperheart Animation and C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, with the creative participation of Autodesk Canada  and Seneca College School of Communication Arts.

Studio Daily's Debra Kaufman had the chance to interview Landreth about The Spine:

What gave you the idea for The Spine?

Over many years,I've seen people–sometimes friends, sometimes acquaintances, sometimes strangers–in these really bizarre marriages. I think many people see this. You see a really weird, perverse, unhealthy behavior between a married couple that have been together decades and wonder, what keeps them together?  In the film, you see Angela, who is also in the couples therapy group, and she sees Dan and Mary and this weird, bizarre dynamic and wonders, What's up? Why would you stay together?  In the case of Dan and Mary, she tries to answer that as I have often tried to do.  Dan and Mary are one attempt to answer that question. Hopefully in the film, you get that it goes deep into their psychology and emotions.

How did you develop it?

This was a two-year project. The first year was where we were doing development. Getting the story right was the biggest part of it. While we were working on getting the details of the story to work, we also got involved with character designs and models and CG models, getting them to work, and also getting the production in place. That meantn getting the financing, the support, getting the organizational stuff together. The second year was actually doing the production, spinepedal to the metal with rigging, modeling, animation, special effects, compositng.

What software did you use?

We used two platforms: Autodesk Maya and Houdini. We used Maya for modeling, rigging, texturing, animating. The bulk of the lighting/rendering was done with Houdini because at the studio we worked at, C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, there's a great deal of expertise in how to use Houdini. They're very much a  Houdini-based shop. I came in knowing a lot about Maya. We figured out a pipeline where we could work on the platform I'm very accustomed to using, all the way up until rendering. Most of the rendering was in the hands of these gurus at C.O.R.E. who know how to do this kind of stuff. We also used Shake.

How was the production work broken down?

There were four organizations involved. The NFB [National Film Board] are the producers of the film. As with Ryan, I worked with Copperheart Entertainment, a film company in downtown Toronto. They're very special in my view, a very unique film company in that they're very much into experimentation, animation, and their films reflect that. They have Splice, a feature film coming out that you'll see is one of the most ambitious films ever done in Canada. It's a special effects film but unlike any other you've seen. It's a deep, unsettling psychological story. Copperheart has been very ballsy in taking on stories like this. Last year, they were part of a controversy about Young People F*cking, a film [that the government wanted to cut off funding for]. It's an R-rated film, not X-ratedfilm, with a very cool story, very funny.

Another organizations involved in The Spine was Seneca College. They were involved in Ryan and they were involved in a much more intensive way in this film. All the animation in this film was completely done, 100 percent, by students at Seneca and it's the best animation I've had with any film I've done. It's an unusual thing to do for a film like this, an ambitious film. and it was all done by students.

The fourth organization was the studio we did the film at, C.O.R.E. We had a great deal of participation by the studio. Being on site was a big part. They had a lot of people involved in doing special effects, compositing, rendering. The students worked at C.O.R.E.

Things meshed together incredibly well. There was a four-month animation period and during those four months, this group of students was consistently ahead of schedule. At the end, they were 2.5 weeks ahead of schedule. We spent that time getting what was already good even better.

Tell me a little bit about this aesthetic you've developed of having physical bodies represent interior states?

I don't know if I developed the idea. It was there, for me to discover.  More discovery than development. What I discovered was that you could use this kind of imagery to add a layer to stories that would otherwise be poorer without it. In the case of Dan and Mary, there's nothing that extraordinary about their story: it's an ordinary couple together for 26 years that has unhappiness in their relationship. What I try to do is show is what I think is truly extraordinary about what is otherwise ordinary: the depth and complexity and messiness in that emotional state. This is the stuff that doesn't otherwise get shown. In filmmaking, the cliche is to show not tell. Showing this stuff is a shorthand–like Dan without a spine. Otherwise, that would take a lot of exposition that gets clunky and melodramatic. If you can avoid that by showing it visually, it makes the story a way richer experience.

After Annecy, where is The Spine going?

It's getting the festival premiere at Annecy in France.I'm coming right back and, at the end of next week, I'll be here for the Toronto World Wide Short Film Festival. The film will premiere there on June 17. Right after that, the end of that week, I'll travel to Australia for the Melbourne International Animation Festival.  Then I'll be at SIGGRAPH 2009, in New Orleans, the first week of August. The Spine will be in the Computer Animation Festival, as an invited, curated film. I'll also be doing a presentation there.

Is there a market for short animation?

Short filmmaking has generally been a ghetto filmmaking. I think it should change and I hope it does evolve. Traditionally the life of a short film is one of being in festivals. Occasionally it will open for a longer format film – one of the great things about Pixar is that they make short filmmaking an integral part of their filmmaking process. There's always a Pixar short film that preceeds their releases, like UP. Pixar is not a pioneer because showing a short film before a feature film was very common in early filmmaking. If anything, they're resurrecting that form, which is great, fantastic. It's one of the reasons Pixar is such a great filmmaking studio. They put a lot of emphasis into short films and realize it's a legitimate thing that audiences dig about short filmmaking. I hope to see that with more independent films.  I hope to see more of that kind of thing in the commercial movie-going scene.

That having been said, a film like Ryan did manage to transcend the festival circuit. It was shown on TV a lot. And in Toronto and a few other cities in Canada, it was shown as a short film before the feature.