Synopsis
Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa, four dandelion achenes rescued from a succession of nuclear explosions destroying the Earth, find themselves hurled into the cosmos, stranded on an unknown planet, in search of a soil suitable for the survival of their species. But the elements, fauna, flora and climate are just some of the obstacles they must overcome.

---

---

Interview with Momoko Seto

Hideki Nagaishi (HN): Where and how did the initial idea for the film’s story come from? And why did you decide to have four dandelion achenes as the protagonists?

Momoko Seto: One day, in the park near my house, I noticed a dandelion lying on the grass. I began to observe its seed heads very closely and was amazed by its mathematical form. It looked futuristic. The ball resembled a spacecraft about to take off. So, I wanted to write a story from their point of view.

Seeds are the most mobile form of a plant. They have a whole strategy for establishing themselves. They must be eaten by an animal and then excreted further away. They must cling to the hair of a dog or sheep. They have to wait for the wind and flew off and parachuted elsewhere. In a sense, they’re all on an adventure. They’re also migrants. Like many animals and humans, they migrate. They’re looking for soil, for a home where they can put down roots. This also echoes my own personal story.

HN: All the characters in this film are very impressive, and I think they make us feel deeply connected to the film’s story. At the same time, we can sense that we are watching a story set on a planet other than Earth.

Could you please tell us how you decided which natural plants and moving creatures to film as the characters?

Momoko Seto: Raffaella Tringali, a botanical artist, joined us on this adventure. I knew her taste and her aesthetic, and I really wanted to have her to cast my plants-actors. We share a passion for small plants, mosses, and lichens. For the plants that appear in the film, she found most of them in nature; some she bought in a special market, and the rest she cultivated.

For the animals, the Idolomantis diabolica, which is native to Ethiopia, came from Stuttgart, the sea anemones were collected by divers at a research centre in Roscoff, and the frog was provided via a specialist.

HN: What do you hope the audience will take away from the film? Do you have a specific message or experience you want to deliver to them through this film?

Momoko Seto: Through this film, I tried to share the message that nature is not a backdrop to be trampled. All the little things around us live like actors in an action film. A growing plant is so beautiful that it can make you cry. We are all forces of nature, bound to one another. Together, we make up our ecosystem, our planet.

Showing nature in a different way, without it being a threat to humans, without it being eco-anxiety, without it being political and social, without it being documentaries about idyllic nature that no longer exists, is rare.

Being a plant, being an insect, and changing perspective are essential visions for re-establishing a link with the natural world around us.

HN: What was difficult or hard for you during the development of the whole film’s story?

Momoko Seto: It’s difficult to identify one aspect as the most challenging because the entire project demanded considerable effort and constant exploration. However, bringing life and emotion to characters without eyes, mouths, or limbs was a major challenge from the beginning.

HN: This film used several filming techniques such as time-lapse, hyper slow-motion, ultra-macro photography, StackShot, and fiber optic photography.

Could you please briefly explain these techniques, including the advantages of each for visual storytelling?

Momoko Seto: Time-lapse photography is the art of compressing time. It involves filming a slow, often imperceptible natural phenomenon over a period of time. By speeding up the footage, we can finally perceive the invisible.

On the other hand, hyper-slow motion is the art of unfolding time. Like time-lapse, the camera captures and decomposes rapid movements. The subjects filmed are transformed into “something else.” The technique is no longer simply a tool for enhancing what we see; it reveals what lies beyond the visible world. In an orangery at the Château de Rambuteau in Bourgogne (France), we set up a time-lapse studio with seventeen cameras shooting simultaneously over a nine-month period. The studio featured twenty models, each adorned with different staged plants. A single shot could take from 5 to 30 days.

HN: With some of these filming techniques, you can’t know what kind of movement or performance of the subject will be captured until the camera shooting is finished. For scenes using such techniques, did you arrange the story differently from the original storyboard, depending on the filming results?

Momoko Seto: For the time-lapse, I knew what I would get after 3 weeks of shooting (because I observed these subjects before during the preparation period). So, they weren’t too much of a surprise. But when we were filming living creatures, we often needed to adapt, even if we had prepared well in advance. We planned several solutions to maintain the story’s narrative.

We were rather lucky and managed to capture 95% of what we had planned, but here’s an example: In the sequence with the Idolomantis diabolica, we noticed on set that it loved climbing to the top of the plants. We incorporated this into the scenario, making it seem as if it were still chasing our characters. It was even better than we had planned!

HN: I think the animation of the four dandelion achenes is 3DCGI, is that right? I would like to hear what you took the most care in when animating the protagonists with 3DCGI.

Momoko Seto: It was complicated, if not impossible, to make dandelion achenes in live action, given the complexity of their movements. So, it was essential to make them in 3D animation. On the other hand, I wanted to use as little CGI as possible for the rest of the images. The aim was to blend the 3D characters naturally into this microscopic, natural world. We carried out several rendering and integration tests.

The animation was produced in Belgium, at a studio in Liège. Guionne Leroy, a renowned animator (Chicken Run, Toy Story), supervised the team of four creative animators.

We held a one-week residency with four actors from the worlds of circus, contemporary dance, and cinema. The goal was to personalize the characters, give them identifiable characteristics, and avoid anthropomorphizing them too much. This helped us understand their body mechanics and how they could interact with each other and the invisible elements surrounding them, such as the wind.

How can the bending of the stick-like body can express emotion? How to animate their ‘hair’ to make them sad or worried? Each character has its own way of flying, of walking, according to their personality. So, we built all their vocabularies together with Guionne before starting the animation.

HN: I would like to hear about the sounds and music in the film. How was the collaboration with Quentin Sirjacq and Nicolas Becker? And how did you convey the image of the music and sounds in your mind to them?

Momoko Seto: The sound design was crucial and complex because the film has no dialogue or voice-over. The sound, sound effects, silence, and music had to weave the narrative and emotion together.

In a sense, we had to create sound where none existed. Nicolas Becker and Quentin Sirjacq collaborated with us from the beginning on the sound and musical atmosphere.

The main stages involved:

– Defining sound and music scenes for each environment crossed by the achenes.

– Searching for eclectic and unusual sounds that reflect the uniqueness of the images and mixed techniques used.

– Working on the “little voices” or “breaths” of the achenes to express their emotions without using words.

– Ensure emotional richness in the musical composition to compensate for the absence of dialogue and convey the characters’ subjective destinies.

I had precise ideas about the need for a rich, nuanced soundtrack that would be in constant dialogue with the images, both archaic and futuristic. Collaborating with Nicolas Becker, an expert in micro-sound and sound experimentation, and Quentin Sirjacq, a composer with an orchestral palette, brought this vision to life.