The animated Irish co-production follows the life of Leonardo da Vinci, and recently had its world premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on 12th June.
Animated feature The Inventor, comes from writer and co-director Jim Capobianco, who shared an original screenplay Oscar nomination with Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava for Ratatouille. The film combines traditional 2D and stop-motion animation, with original music and lyrics by Alex Mandel.
“This is the biggest, most complex project I’ve done,” said Mandel. “I’d written some songs for Brave, I’ve scored films, I’ve scored streaming shows. This was artistically and technically, by far the most complicated and for a lot of reasons. We recorded strings in Budapest, but they recorded the woodwinds and the brass in New Zealand, and I did the guitar parts and I learned to play the lute. It wasn’t strictly Renaissance music. Leonardo was ahead of his time — he was designing flying machines in the year 1500. I would try stuff until it felt right for Jim because it’s his film, but it just meant I had to stay on my toes.”
Capobianco co-directed the film with Pierre-Luc Granjon, who has an established background in stop-motion animation. The Inventor is an Irish co-production presented by Curiosity Studio (Ireland) in partnership with Foliascope (France), Aerial Contrivance Studios (USA) and Robert Rippberger’s SIE Films (USA).
“I’m telling the story of [da Vinci] at the end of his life and years in France,” said Capobianco. “I knew he was going to die [at the end of the story] and I was asking what that means to a man like Leonardo da Vinci. Having researched him, I learned that he believed that he procrastinated a lot and he thought he didn’t finish a lot of the things he set out to do. So, I thought about what it would mean to this person, this character. I realized it’s about what you leave behind for others and how you affect other people with what you do, how you change other people’s lives while you’re here. I realized with Leonardo da Vinci, he’s the perfect kind of foil for that because here I am making a film about him 500 years after he lived, and we still talk about him. He has such an impact on us and the idea of invention and the idea of curiosity and everything he accomplished.”
The voice cast features Daisy Ridley, Marion Cotillard, Matt Berry and Stephen Fry, among others.
