_{Shuffle by Quita Felix}

You may recognise the very dramatic orchestral music used in Quita Felix’s short animated film Shuffle (Schoenmaten), which has been chosen for Graduation Films in Competition in Annecy. It’s Franz Liszt’s reverberant and atmospheric Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2.

“I actually found it quite late in the process of the film,” the young director says of the classic Liszt composition which lends such dramatic intensity to her animation. “It wasn’t actually my plan to use it in the beginning but it felt so right because it has lots of different chaotic elements to it, a certain repetitiveness to it….”

Shuffle is a tale of three apartment dwellers whose lives are plunged into confusion when one loses his tap dance shoe. Visually, it is highly stylised - full of brightly coloured geometric patterns. Felix acknowledges that she is heavily influenced by design as well as by traditional animation.

“Especially for this film I looked at mid-century design. I really liked the playfulness and the colourfulness,” the director says. She cites the work of artists like Saul Bass, famous for his credit sequences for Hitchcock movies like Vertigo and Psycho. “He was a designer himself. He wasn’t an animator. But he was a big inspiration for me. He used animation very playfully and in a really simple way.” Bass had a knack of “giving meaning” to colours, shapes and abstract spaces. “I also tried in my film to make a bunch of shapes into an apartment building.”

Felix grew up in Amsterdam. Her father teaches geography in high school but is a confirmed film lover who introduced her to Spielberg at an early age. Her mother is a textile designer who also teaches in art school, in the fashion department.

At high school, Felix took some film classes. “I really, really liked these film lessons but what I always disliked about making live action films is that it never became the film you wanted it to be,” she remembers. The young auteur was a perfectionist from the start. She realised that if she turned to animation, she would have total control over every aspect of her work.

Shuffle took around two years to complete - although the director points out she wasn’t working on it full-time. “I did most of it myself but I had one friend who helped me with the 2D animation,” she says, name-checking her friend and fellow student in Utrecht, Jing Yue Zwaan. “I always work a lot with her because we have the same vision.”

Another key collaborator, albeit an unlikely one, was the professional tap dancer Doortje Peters to whom Felix was introduced by her tutor. Peters provided the tap dancing sounds for the film.

Shuffle has screened at several other festival including Animakom FEST, the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht and Kaboom. It is now headed to Annecy. Felix admits she isn’t quite sure how it got there - whether it was submitted by her school or found its way to one of the world’s most prestigious animation festivals by another route. 

After the screening in Utrecht last September, Felix won a Wildcard from the Netherlands Film Fund which secured her €50,000 towards her next project. She already has an idea of what this might be - a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, done in a “cubo-futurist” style and featuring characters who are “a hybrid between animals and humans.” She looks for inspiration to the Bauhaus‘ Triadic Ballet, a radical avant-garde dance production from the early 1920s.

Rotterdam-based seriousFilm will produce the new project. Jasper Kuipers, who worked on the hit stop motion film Oink*, has agreed to be Felix’s animation coach.

The new film promises to be on a bigger scale than its predecessor which was made during the pandemic and on which Felix did almost everything herself. “I would really like to work with more people and be more of a director instead of doing everything on my own,” she says. “I know that your film looks better when you work with more people.”

Felix has a “love for happy accidents” in her animation. She doesn’t storyboard her work too carefully in advance.  “I put things together that don’t belong together…suddenly, I’ll see something which I couldn’t have imagined with my own fantasy,” she says of how inspiration sometimes comes in the most unlikely ways.

Shuffle is a graduation film from the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU).
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Production Incentive