\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAlmost 18 years after his debut feature \u201cNocturna\u201d won the Goya Award for Best Animated Film, Adri\u00e0 Garcia is back to animation with \u201cThe Treasure of Barracuda.\u201d Sold by Filmax, the film, which has its world premiere at the San Sebasti\u00e1n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSpeaking with Variety <\/em>ahead of the Basque festival, Garc\u00eda attributes the long break between two animated features (he directed the live-action \u201cMy Family and the Wolf\u201d in 2019) to the time it takes to get such a project off the ground. The idea for \u201cThe Treasure of Barracuda\u201d originated from renowned producer Val\u00e9rie Delpierre at Inicia Films (\u201cSummer 1993,\u201d \u201c20,000 Species of Bees\u201d) during the pandemic, when Garc\u00eda had the time to sit with it at home and think about the best way to approach the story.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cEven if the original idea came from Val\u00e9rie, it was a good opportunity for me to dive in,\u201d he observes. \u201cIt was a material I enjoyed. We\u2019ve 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOriginally, Delpierre thought about making the film in live-action. \u201cThey had never worked with animation before,\u201d recalls the director. \u201cWhen they came to me, they were already working on a version of the script, but weren\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe 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 \u201cThe Treasure of Barracuda\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \n\tCommenting on what attracted him to the story, Garc\u00eda says he found the idea of how pirates interact with children in this world to be \u201cvery special.\u201d \u201cThese are not realistic pirates; they are not doing real pirate things,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\u201cThe Treasure of Barracuda\u201d courtesy of Inicia Films<\/span><\/p>\n \n\tWhen assembling his team, Garc\u00eda made a point of recruiting creatives from outside the world of animation. Art director Enrique Fern\u00e1ndez is a comic book designer whom the director started working with many years ago, for example.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cHe developed his career as a comic book artist, and I really liked what he was doing, even if we didn\u2019t have the chance to work on a project of this kind,\u201d he says. \u201cFor this, I approached him with some reserve because I wasn\u2019t convinced he would want to do animation, but he really made it his own thing\u2014this is what I wanted, people who bring their own thing to the project. I wanted to meet people whom I could learn from.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhen asked how much the world of animation \u2014 especially European animation \u2014 has changed in the almost two decades since \u201cNocturna,\u201d Garc\u00eda says it has \u201cbecome something completely new.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhen I started working in animation, there were only the big American studios like Disney,\u201d he says. \u201cNow, 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\u2019s really encouraging. Seeing all these projects, you can\u2019t help but be a bit humbled. There are people everywhere making things that look so interesting. It\u2019s a very rich environment for animation right now.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe filmmaker emphasizes that, while there are always crises and \u201cthere are not as many jobs and opportunities as we would like,\u201d there are still \u201ca great deal of interesting projects.\u201d \u201cAnd I don\u2019t mean just the one or two big French projects we used to have,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n \n\tWill it take another two decades for Garc\u00eda to release another animated feature? He hopes not, but for now, he is basking in the \u201chuge relief\u201d of being done with his latest.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI want to get some distance from the project and just see the reactions. I don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe Treasure of Barracuda\u201d is produced by Val\u00e9rie Delpierre at Inicia Films, with \u00c1lex Cervantes and \u00c1lvaro Garc\u00eda at Hampa Studio in co-production with Rapha\u00eble Ingberg from Belgium\u2019s Belvision. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost 18 years after his debut feature \u201cNocturna\u201d won the Goya Award for Best Animated Film, Adri\u00e0 Garcia is back to animation with \u201cThe Treasure of Barracuda.\u201d Sold by Filmax, the film, which has its world premiere at the San Sebasti\u00e1n Film Festival (Sept. 19-27), is adapted from the eponymous book by Llanos Campos and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[13949,13950,13951,6124,951,462],"class_list":{"0":"post-22758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-adria","9":"tag-animation","10":"tag-barracuda","11":"tag-garcia","12":"tag-returns","13":"tag-treasure"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}