Filmmaking can be a lonely process. Cut paper animation – the painstaking process of moving pieces of cardboard to create life – doubly so. And doing that in the isolation of the pandemic could only amplify the urge to get out into the wilderness. So a month before the premiere of his newest animated film, When You Get to the Forest, Austin storyteller Eric Power took his family on a gargantuan road trip to hike some of the nation’s most beautiful locations: the Great Smoky Mountains via the hot springs of Arkansas and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. However, he was also deeply aware that there can be peril in wild places. Three weeks before the trip, Power read that a family had been attacked by a black bear looking for food. “Wait, where did this happen? Oh, the camp site that I’m exactly staying in.”
There’s that melded sense of wonder and worry in When You Get to the Forest, a dreamy fantasy of a young woman, Dana (voiced by the filmmaker’s wife, Alicia Power), who gets lost in the woods, only to be befriended by a talking cat, Lakris (Marcella Campos), who becomes her guide to an enchanted realm across a year of change and growth. “A decade or so ago, I had a folder on my desktop called ‘The Forest Project,'” he recalled, describing the idea for “a multimedia thing with an art show all about the woods. But then I started to feel bigger about it, and I wanted to make a story about the afterlife, maybe taking place in this weird forest.”
“I wanted to make something hopeful, something for my daughter.” – Eric Power
At the beginning of the pandemic he started sharing those ideas with Andreas Petersen, writer of his last feature, 2016 Evil Dead-esque cardgore slaughterfest Attack of the Demons, and the pair started brainstorming the Forest Project as a way to stay busy and creative during lockdown. “It seemed like the most feasible thing to do with the lowest budget possible,” Power said, but more importantly “it seemed like the most meaningful things we could do with our time. … I wanted to make something hopeful, something for my daughter.” They were already in conversations with Fred Malmberg and Mark Wheeler of Pathfinder Media, who were fans of Attack of the Demons, and Power and Petersen actually pitched them on two projects: When You Get to the Forest, which he described as “very out experimental [and] out there and peaceful,” and a second project, The Wedding Over the Mountains, “which is about woodland creatures [and] half of it’s a musical, and that’s going to be very expensive to make.” The Pathfinder team saw Forest as the better project for lockdown production, and came aboard as executive producers. “They gave us the green light and let us do our things,” Power said, “so the second year of this crazy pandemic was spent thankfully employed, because freelance was getting very hard.”
Now Power’s pandemic creation premieres this month in person and online at the Maine International Film Festival (July 8-17), before making its international debut in August at the inaugural Hiroshima Animation Season. It’s not just a thematic change from his earlier bloodier films, but also an evolution in his style. With his first two films, Attack of the Demons and samurai epic Path of Blood, “it was strictly card stock and some colored pencils to do some lines on things, but adding in paint and crumpling the paper, just messing with it more makes it feel more crafty.”
But most of all, it’s the story that means most to him, and how personal the film is to his family. “I dedicate it to my daughter, and I think it’s rather awesome that her mom is playing the main character.”
When You Get to the Forest premieres at the Maine International Film Festival Wed., July 13, 3pm, and will be available to stream through July 17. Details at miff.org.
Into the Woods With New Austin Animation When You Get to the Forest
A version of this article appeared in print on Jul 8, 2022 with the headline: Into the Woods With New Austin Animation When You Get to the Forest
This article appears in July 8 • 2022.
