Seeing Music

How 'Peter and the Wolf' brought visuals to Prokofiev.

A still from Peter and the Wolf (2006)

Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter tackles the art of animating to music, as seen in Peter and the Wolf (2006).

It’s a famous film — Oscar-winning, screened around the world, used widely in classrooms. The British director Suzie Templeton adapted the music of Prokofiev into a dark, emotionally intense piece of stop motion. And it really works.

But getting it to work was the problem. There were no easy solutions during the five-year making of this film. As producer Alan Dewhurst said:

The real challenge for us as filmmakers has been to do something that rises to the drama of Prokofiev’s music, to make an engaging visual drama that plays successfully with the music and doesn’t merely illustrate it. That has taken us literally years.

How did they do it? That’s what we’re exploring today. Here we go!