HANNAH ANASTASI
Sweet Tooth
Upon being drawn to life, Crescent the Cat devours a large jar of multicoloured candy!
Sweet Tooth is an animated, hand-drawn Short Film with a runtime of just under 90 seconds. It features Crescent the Cat: a peculiar doodle that changes appearance and size depending on what he eats. I made the film independently as a filmmaking exercise, with some help from freesound.org and good ol' Kevin Macleod for sound and music.
Sweet Tooth was awarded a Special Mention from the Children's Jury at the Encounters Film Festival in 2018, and was then invited to screen at dozens of Children's Film Festivals across the world!
Concept and Inspiration
The initial idea for Sweet Tooth came from some doodles of a cat-like creature with a crescent shaped head that I had scribbled in one of my old notebooks. For some reason the image of the cat juggling coloured balls stuck with me, so I decided to use it as a starting point for a hand-drawn animated short. I had wanted to give myself a project that would involve animating an original character, with lots of short scenes and lively movement, so it seemed like a perfect fit.
But the main stipulation was that the film must be under 90 seconds long. For someone with little film-making experience at that time, I thought that these guidelines would keep the project manageable. It would force me to learn where my strengths and weaknesses lie as an Animator, as well as a Director.
Because the runtime was so important, I selected the music first. Taking inspiration from early Disney shorts that were led heavily by their scores, and Independent films like Micheal Ducok De Wit's 'The Monk and the Fish', I completed a storyboard that matched the tempo of the song I had chosen. Before long, I had a simple story of a doodle springing to life and undergoing a transformation to become a finished drawing after consuming a jar of multicoloured candy.
The scenes remained mostly unchanged from the original storyboards, so I started producing finished background art, using photographs of sweets thrown about on the floor of my garage for reference!
Unfortunately, about mid-way through production I began to suffer from mysterious musculoskeletal pains. I was misdiagnosed with elbow injuries and spent the year in and out of physiotherapy and Chiropractor offices, with little success, so I had to take a break from both animating and freelance contracts for a while.
Character Design
By mid-2017, I was on the road to a more accurate diagnosis for my pain flares: Fibromyalgia. Within a few months, the pain became easier to manage via Hydrotherapy and I was able to steadily return to drawing more frequently. Thankfully, it didn't take long to complete the shots of Crescent in his doodle-form and I was then able to comfortably complete the ending scene that featured Crescent sporting his final furry look!
Crescent's final design carries over some elements of the original "skeleton" look, particularly in the eyes and the shape of the head, but with a real mouth and big ol' chunky paws to match his new textures. The pattern on Crescent's fur is made up of randomly sized circles, hoops and sickle shapes, which I hoped would look as if a child had been asked to colour him.
In the end, this short was supposed to be nothing more than an animation exersise that I hoped would make people smile. But behind the scenes it ended up becoming a bizarre Pinocchio-esque story of a scrappy cat doodle finally becoming "a real character" once I had regained my ability to draw!
Official Selections
Sweet Tooth was officially selected to screen at multiple Film Festivals between 2018 and 2019, proving to be very popular with younger audiences:
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* Special Mention, Children's Jury: Encounters Film Festival, UK. 2018
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IPAF Seoul, South Korea. 2019
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Norwich Film Festival, UK. 2019
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Martha's Vineyard Film Festival, USA. 2019
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PLAY - Lisbon's International Kids Film Festival. Portugal. 2019
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Guro Kids International Film Festival, South Korea. 2019
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Chicago International Children's Film Festival. USA 2018
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Paris International Animation Film Festival, France. 2018
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CINANIMA, Portugal. 2018
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Imaginaria Kids, Italy. 2018
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Fest Anča, Slovakia. 2018
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Athens ANIMFEST, Greece. 2018
The warm reception from children made me really happy.
Keep an eye out for future developments involving Crescent the Cat in the future!
Animator | Director | Multimedia Artist
HANNAH ANASTASI