Illustrator and animator Marlies van der Wel’s Jonas And The Sea has been captivating festival audiences and clinching prizes worldwide over the past year, including best animated short at TIFF Kids last spring. Its festival run is set to continue into 2017 with its recent inclusion in the Sundance Film Festival’s short film selection. “I thought we were all done, but now it’s been programmed at Sundance there has been another wave of interest from festivals. It’s a gift,” says Van der Wel.

The 12-minute work – produced by Amsterdam-based Halal Productions and supported by the Netherlands Film Fund – revolves around the life-long quest of a man called Jonas to be at one with the sea, charting his experimentation with a series of increasingly elaborate contraptions constructed from the objects he finds washed up on the shore.

Intriguingly, van der Wel reveals she is not keen on swimming in the sea or going underwater. “I actually find going underwater water quite scary. I don’t even really like swimming,” she says. “Jonas’s quest to get underwater and get to a place he feels should be home is a metaphor.”

“My main goal when I started writing was to capture a whole life over the course of one film and a character who is trying to understand their purpose in life as well as connect with their inner nature,” she explains. “What I liked about the concept is that Jonas needs all the stuff that washes on the shore over the course of his life to reach his goal.”

In the background, the project also had a personal resonance. “I was trying to figure out where I wanted to be and how to get there and making this film was part of the process of working that out,” she says.

The work, made over a five-year period, consists of hand-drawn sketches combined with photographs and digital animation inspired by objects Van der Wel beach-combed on the Netherlands’ northern coastline. “It was a technique I developed myself. With a photographer friend, I went beach-combing. We collected objects we found washed up on the shore – old shoes, bits of wood – and photographed them,” she explains. “Back in the studio, I digitised the images in Photoshop, combined them and started drawing over them.”

Van der Wel studied at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht where she made the award-winning 2006 student film BWAP! about a girl who is ostracised because she makes a different sound from her peers. She cites her graphic designer grandfather and father as well as the Dutch animators Michael Dudok de Wit and Paul Driessen as sources of inspiration for her decision to work in animation. Driessen, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2000 for his short 3 Misses, was a mentor on the project while Van der Wel says she was heavily influenced by Dudok de Wit’s Academy Award winning Father And Daughter as a student.

Since completing Jonas And The Sea, Van der Wel has also made Sabuku, selected for Berlin Generation Kplus about a bird who is looking for a new best-friend after his long-time companion, the buffalo, passes away. “It’s a shorter work, something I did for fun after working on Jonas And The Sea for so long,” she explains.

Current projects include an illustrated Jonas And The Sea book which will be launched in March 2017. She is also developing a second longer animated short called Emily about a flower-seller, who cultivates and sells flowers for others her whole life but never has a loved-one who will send her flowers herself. The film will premiere at the 2017 Netherlands Film Festival.