Alex Abreu Quotes

#1. Is as if the music is another character or as if it was a part of this great opera. I also through about this project as a structure or as a sculpture made out of colors, rhythm, characters, and brush strokes, but with every single one of these always supporting one another.

Alex Abreu

#2. The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.

Alex Abreu

#3. I tried to exploit such freedom to create those drawings like if I was a boy. I tried to draw with that freedom and that love that I remember from being a child and spending a day drawing without worrying about whether what I'm drawing is real or strange.

Alex Abreu

#4. Making a film from the point of view of a young boy's eyes opened the door to another universe with lots of freedom and to explore a new dimension. This was achieved as I started doing things that were close to what exists in a child's universe.

Alex Abreu

#5. The entire time I was following the feelings experienced by children, so the feeling of not understanding what adults say was very important to put the audience in this frequency to understand the world through his eyes.

Alex Abreu

#6. A little bit more than 50% of what you see on screen is handcrafted and the other 50% was about emulating these textures on the computer. However, for us, when we were making it, we had to believe it was all handcrafted.

Alex Abreu

#7. I feel that joy is the basic emotion of life and of human beings. It's what supports everything. We are here to be happy. We are to enjoy "alegria."

Alex Abreu

#8. On another level this film talks about that. We had tremendous freedom while making this film. We never thought about marketing. It wasn't a film made to sell merchandise or products or to reach millions of people around the world. It was a film made to say what I really felt.

Alex Abreu

#9. I always told my team, "You have to believe that you are not in front of a computer, but that your canvas is a piece of paper. You have to believe this even if you have a computer in front of you."

Alex Abreu

#10. I have the feeling that I didn't make it by myself, but that I was conducted by feelings that were completely different from those in my previous work. When I start making a film I don't know what I'm doing.

Alex Abreu

#11. I draw things on the paper very freely but believing there is meaning to them already. There is already meaning in the colors, I don't need to be guided by words. I draw them and the meaning comes after. Every time we would start a new sequence we would change everything.

Alex Abreu

#12. We were breaking away from anything that linked us to this world, but by doing that those ideas remained even stronger. Fables represent the basis for what I wanted to say about human beings.

Alex Abreu

#13. If I have a blank piece of paper and I draw a red figure, immediately this brings sounds and shapes to my mind. I tried to make a film in which every component supports the others while giving each other space and stimulating the creation of what's yet to come.

Alex Abreu

#14. The way a film is made tells you about its message. The processes are the same as the products. We made the film starting from processes that allowed us to find these complex ideas.

Alex Abreu

#15. Director and producers have to take all the risks they can. We developed this film with the possibility to create departing from a blank page and to discover things as the process went along and as we understood the things that at first we couldn't understand in words.

Alex Abreu

#16. It's a film made in a very radical creative manner. It was possible because we didn't have to pander to capitalism. I think the film is also a humanistic cry for help for animation. It's a film [Boy and the World] with sensitivities completely opposite to what the market wants to sell.

Alex Abreu

#17. We were in another planet and we were reaching for something closer to a fable. It was something fabulous. I started looking at the film as if it happened in another planet and that allowed me even more freedom.

Alex Abreu

#18. Looking through a child's eyes and knowing this was another planet, we decided to design the machines with eyes and bodies like animals, we also decided that this planet has two moons, and we decided that anything else we wanted to do was allowed. It was a new perspective to make the film.

Alex Abreu

#19. They didn't need to be specifically South American or Latin American. Instead we discovered we were talking about human beings in general. We realized that these are not issues only pertinent to Latin America: poverty, misery, consumerism, etc.

Alex Abreu