'Adults Like Cute Things, Too'

Thinking about 'Luce and the Rock.'

A still from Luce and the Rock (2022)

Hope you’re doing well! On Tuesday, Cartoon Brew reported a piece of great news. Luce and the Rock is out on YouTube after its multiyear festival run. To quote the site, “Every kid — young and old — will want to see it.”

We first saw Luce and the Rock in 2022, and it’s still one of our favorite festival films of recent times. Director Britt Raes aimed it at children — “but [it’s] not only for kids,” she’s said. Raes wanted to win over all ages, and Luce absolutely has that ability. This is charming, accomplished work with visual design a step above the competition’s.

We wrote in 2022:

Luce is all about crisp shape and warm, vibrant color — each shot is blocked out and arranged like an illustration rather than a film scene. Everything fits like toy blocks, or nesting dolls. It’s all design.

Luce is the story of a small girl in a small village. Here, people and objects break down into shape and color: Luce herself is a yellow triangle; her neighbors are red cubes. Things are fine until an animate blue boulder, the Rock, interrupts their routine and wrecks the village. Luce decides to solve the problem, setting out to take the Rock home.

Stills from Luce and the Rock (embedded in full a little lower down)

The style in Luce is minimalist: its “world is stripped of anything that does not serve the story,” in Raes’ words. What’s left behind has been fine-tuned. There’s a tactile, just-right feel to each gesture, curve and sound effect — which was a necessity. Going this minimal left the team with “nowhere to hide,” she noted.

Yet despite Luce’s achievements and its many awards, it faced a bit of a stigma, too.

On the podcast Under the Onion Skin, Raes admitted that children’s filmmakers get “treated differently” in the festival scene. Plenty of animated masterpieces have been made for kids but appeal to everyone (think Funny Birds). Even so, this can be isolating work. Animation for kids is sometimes siloed away, missed by peers and taken just a little less seriously. Raes said:

I mean, we put a lot of hard work and thinking into it as well. And we were very dedicated, just like all the other filmmakers. ... We can tell challenging and interesting stories and show interesting characters [too].¹