Almost 18 years after his debut feature “Nocturna” won the Goya Award for Best Animated Film, Adrià Garcia is back to animation with “The Treasure of Barracuda.” Sold by Filmax, the film, which has its world premiere at the San Sebastián Film Festival (Sept. 19-27), is adapted from the eponymous book by Llanos Campos and follows a young orphan girl who accidentally ends up on a pirate ship led by the titular captain.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the Basque festival, García attributes the long break between two animated features (he directed the live-action “My Family and the Wolf” in 2019) to the time it takes to get such a project off the ground. The idea for “The Treasure of Barracuda” originated from renowned producer Valérie Delpierre at Inicia Films (“Summer 1993,” “20,000 Species of Bees”) during the pandemic, when García had the time to sit with it at home and think about the best way to approach the story.
“Even if the original idea came from Valérie, it was a good opportunity for me to dive in,” he observes. “It was a material I enjoyed. We’ve approached the story with a lot of freedom, but I wanted to preserve the worldbuilding of the book. [The original artwork] was what made me fall in love with the project. It was also an interesting challenge to have this reference but make it our own, to play with the spirit of the illustrations, which are these beautiful hand-drawn characters of wild proportions, some really funny characters.”
Originally, Delpierre thought about making the film in live-action. “They had never worked with animation before,” recalls the director. “When they came to me, they were already working on a version of the script, but weren’t quite sure if they wanted to go with animation. It felt right because the book already had illustrations and those fairytale-like pirates. All of it was there already, so it made sense to make it an animation.”
The treasure in the film can only be found by following instructions in a book, and, while not a single pirate is literate, the young orphan lovingly nicknamed Sparkie was conveniently educated by nuns and guarantees her stay on the ship by teaching her newfound crew how to decipher words on a page. In this, the beautifully animated “The Treasure of Barracuda” is about pirates, yes, but also a moving fable about the power of reading to promote connection and the importance and value of chosen families.
Commenting on what attracted him to the story, García says he found the idea of how pirates interact with children in this world to be “very special.” “These are not realistic pirates; they are not doing real pirate things,” he continues. “It’s an image that has grown through literature and movies, of pirates who are almost like children themselves. On the other hand, there was also the concept of reading and how to integrate that in the story, how the pirates learn to read, and how words go together. In this world, everyone can find a way to connect.”
“The Treasure of Barracuda” courtesy of Inicia Films
When assembling his team, García made a point of recruiting creatives from outside the world of animation. Art director Enrique Fernández is a comic book designer whom the director started working with many years ago, for example.
“He developed his career as a comic book artist, and I really liked what he was doing, even if we didn’t have the chance to work on a project of this kind,” he says. “For this, I approached him with some reserve because I wasn’t convinced he would want to do animation, but he really made it his own thing—this is what I wanted, people who bring their own thing to the project. I wanted to meet people whom I could learn from.”
When asked how much the world of animation — especially European animation — has changed in the almost two decades since “Nocturna,” García says it has “become something completely new.”
“When I started working in animation, there were only the big American studios like Disney,” he says. “Now, at least here in Europe, it is just so rich and so different. It feels like there are a lot of opportunities to find different ways of making things and different audiences to work with. It’s really encouraging. Seeing all these projects, you can’t help but be a bit humbled. There are people everywhere making things that look so interesting. It’s a very rich environment for animation right now.”
The filmmaker emphasizes that, while there are always crises and “there are not as many jobs and opportunities as we would like,” there are still “a great deal of interesting projects.” “And I don’t mean just the one or two big French projects we used to have,” he adds.
Will it take another two decades for García to release another animated feature? He hopes not, but for now, he is basking in the “huge relief” of being done with his latest.
“I want to get some distance from the project and just see the reactions. I don’t have expectations; what I have is a feeling of accomplishment because we managed to do what we wanted. I want to enjoy the moment. You never know what is going to happen to a film, so you need to try enjoying everything that happens when you go to a festival.”
“The Treasure of Barracuda” is produced by Valérie Delpierre at Inicia Films, with Álex Cervantes and Álvaro García at Hampa Studio in co-production with Raphaële Ingberg from Belgium’s Belvision.
