Kensuke’s Kingdom Directors: Interview

Kensuke’s Kingdom, directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry, based on the novel by Micheal Morpurgo, is a hand-drawn animated feature that managed to snag both BAFTA and Annie Award nominations this year. The action-adventure centers around a young boy named Michael (Aaron McGregor), who is taken by his family (played by Cillian Murphy, Sally Hawkins and Raffey Cassidy) on a sailing trip. When a storm rolls in, he and his dog, Stella, are pushed overboard and end up on a remote island where they must learn to survive on their own. On the verge of losing all hope, Michael encounters a stern, elderly Japanese soldier (Ken Watanabe) who was stranded there after his military boat capsized during World War II. 

Here, Deadline talks to the filmmaking duo about bringing this tale to life.

DEADLINE: How did you both come to this project? 

KIRK HENDRY: Sarah Radclyffe, a  filmmaker and producer, she optioned the book off of Michael Morpurgo, I think probably 20 years ago. She had this dogged belief this would make a fantastic film. And for her, it was a real passion project because it took 20 years from the time she optioned it to seeing the final film screened last year. So she really just stuck with it and then bought in Camilla [Deakin] and Ruth [Fielding] from Lupus Films, the main studio in London where we made the film. I just made some things for the World Wildlife Fund around the time and she was looking for directors and got in touch. I was working with Neil at a brushing company in Soho. We were developing our own projects, and I said, “Can Neil come along on this trip as well?” And she said, “Sure.”

So we pitched our version of the film to her and she liked it. And from then, we were on board, and we began this 10-year journey for Neil and me with Michael Morpurgo and Sarah and Camilla and Barnaby Spurrier, another producer, and we became good friends over this time and really believed in the project. Then, eventually, it was COVID that really pushed the film into production. We thought COVID might end it during the first lockdown, but at the time the BFI couldn’t make any live action films because of lockdown. But with animation they said, “If you can prove you can make it remotely, then we’ll give you some of the money.” And we could make it remotely because the technology did just come along, with Zoom enabling you to share your screen and other softwares where you can share footage and go through frame by frame and draw on it. It was quite incredible. So that’s how we made it.

NEIL BOYLE:  The great thing about that time period — nothing was great about COVID — was that it took us eight and a half years before we got the money to make the film, and then we finally got the money. We went and spoke to the artists on board and said, “Look, channel this [feeling]. We’re all isolated at the moment. We’re isolated in our houses, bedrooms, in our studios, and this is a film about people who are isolated and try to make connections. So what you’re feeling now, put that into the film.”

DEADLINE: This cast is great. How did you end up getting everyone together? 

BOYLE: Well, the number one thing to say, is that they were all genuinely our first choice. So we were incredibly lucky to have our wishlist come true. The younger cast members had all read the book at school because in the U.K., it’s part of what they teach at school, so they all knew it, Some of the older cast members had read the book to their kids. We had this wish list of amazing actors and we went to them and they all just said yes. And it was all basically around the fact that they all loved Michael Morpurgo’s novel and he’s such a terrific writer, they wanted to be part of the film version.

DEADLINE: What were the non-negotiables that you had to have in this film? 

HENDRY: A key thing was that this was Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s, this screenplay writer’s idea. In the book, Kensuke can speak a little bit of English, so Michael and Kensuke can speak to each other. Now, Frank thought, let’s just get rid of that idea and have them not have any common language. When Neil and I read the screenplay, we saw, this could be a silent film. Neil and I really like silent film storytelling. It’s what’s called pure cinema, where you have to use just cinematic means to convey the ideas of the story and the characters to the audience. The audience has to become a little bit more involved and do a bit more detective work to figure out what’s going on rather than just having characters tell you what’s going on. So we really liked that kind of storytelling. Once Michael was washed overboard and he’s on his own, there’s almost no dialogue. So it does essentially become a silent film at that point. 

Another thing is that we definitely didn’t want any singing songs, talking animals, dancing animals, the anthropomorphic thing you often get in young people’s films. In a sense, we didn’t want to talk down to the audience. Young people understand a lot of stuff, we think. Because we remember being young people, we remember what it was like being seven, eight, going to the movies, and we really liked the films that didn’t talk down to us. So that was another non-negotiable, let’s deliver that for the current generation of kids going to see movies.

DEADLINE: Talk about the art style. How did you go about creating your vision with the animators? 

BOYLE: The most important thing for us in finding the style was to make sure the film was believable enough to feel that this hand-drawn animated character is in jeopardy. The thought that he could starve to death or dehydrate or injure himself or even possibly die. So there had to be a certain level of naturalism. The island’s like another character in the film. So we needed that rich visual detail in the animation so that you could really believe this place.

An example of this would be when Kensuke remembers what happened tragically to his family at Nagasaki, so he paints to remember his lost family in Japanese watercolor brush style, Then it felt to us that if you go inside his head that’s how he’s going to see his family, as a Japanese watercolor painting come to life. 

HENDRY: As Neil was saying, because the island is essentially like a character, we really wanted it to have enough detail so the audience felt like they were arriving in this new world like Michael was. You’ve got this urban kid who suddenly is coming from the gray concrete modernity into this whole other world. It’s a bit like Dorothy crossing over from black and white into the Technicolor of Oz. It’s like a rebirth. What happens to you after you’re symbolically reborn somewhere and find your new self and are totally changed by the process. That’s a dramatic motif that happens in a lot of stories, particularly in films,  because you can show it so much.

DEADLINE: Michael’s trajectory to me is very interesting. He has a knack for not listening to what other people tell him. But he does have tremendous growth by the end of the film. Can you talk about what went into depicting that? Were you worried that audiences might’ve found him a little too unlikable? 

BOYLE: Yeah, the thing is, the movie obviously had to have an arc. For Micheal to learn a lesson at the end, he has to start off very opposite. But you’re right that we didn’t want to make him truly obnoxious. There were early drafts of the script when we were working with Frank, where Michael would be a little bit of a wise-ass almost in the way that he spoke, and we were careful to try and get rid of that so that he didn’t become totally obnoxious and so the audience didn’t root for him. But he definitely needed to learn these lessons as he went along.

And what really helped, going back to the actors, was Aaron McGregor. We looked at 40 or 50 kids to play this role. We found Aaron and the wonderful thing about Aaron is that he’s actually Scottish, with this Scottish accent, but he could do an English accent really naturally, unbelievably. But when we auditioned him and when we finally met him and directed and worked with him, he really is a natural kid. He has no stage school theatricals about him, so he could be a regular kid. But there’s another part of his brain that could be very mature and he could listen to direction and he could understand technically things that he needed to do. So he really helped us to get Michael being a likable character.

HENDRY: He had a lovely vulnerable quality. Which is what the character really needed to be sympathetic when you are behaving badly. So when he delivered that in the test sequences, and then obviously when we were doing the film, that really helped to make the character more appealing even when he was being a little bit obnoxious or ignoring his parents.

BOYLE: Of course we’re very glad in a way that he does ignore his parents and not listen to them because if he did listen to them, we wouldn’t have a film. He wouldn’t be swept overboard and he wouldn’t go into this adventure. So in a weird way, maybe it’s something he needed to do. Maybe he needed to be just a little bit obnoxious [laugh]. 

DEADLINE: How did you go about making the island and its animals feel so lively? There’s great detail in these elements. 

HENDRY: The main theme of the film is about families. The film and the book are about a few things, but we decided that one of the main things was about families. There’s your blood family, then there’s the found families, whether it’s fostered or adopted or in Michael’s case, it’s a found family with Kensuke and the orangutans. Then, there’s Kensuke who lost his family, but now he’s found a new family of orangutans, so we just thought the wider family [should be] of all the creatures on Earth. So we just applied that to absolutely every animal and all things on the island. And because the poachers are going to come at some point and take some of these animals, that’s how we make it more emotionally effective, rather than just picking some random animals for the audience. We had to make it feel like it was families being broken apart. 

BOYLE: In terms of the animation, we were lucky. We had a fantastic animation director named Peter Dodd who worked directly with the animators on all the animation, and particularly Kensuke and Michael and so on. But we had another animator working with us named Ludivine Berthouloux, a French animator who just had a real sense of animals. She loves drawing animals. We put her on scenes with Stella, the dog. She was doing these beautiful drawings where just the angle of the ears and what the tail was doing and so on… She was doing it correctly by using the dog’s anatomy and not making it seem like there was a person in a dog costume. We got her to start working on a lot of the other animals, and she was one of our key players in the end making sure we were very detailed in our research. 

We did tons and tons of research with video footage that you can find on YouTube and BBC Wildlife documentaries and everything to make sure our animators gave really authentic movements to each of these animals that are specific to each animal. Then pushed it just enough so that you can get an emotional connection with them so that they feel very realistic. That was a little bit of a balancing act, but I think we pulled that off. We’re proud of that.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]