The Danish Poet (2006)

Interesting facts

• Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film

The Danish Poet is a 2006 animated short film written, directed, and animated by Torill Kove and narrated by Liv Ullmann. A co-production of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Mikrofilm AS of Norway, it has won both the Academy Award and Genie Award for best animated short film.

Production

Kove first became involved with the National Film Board, an agency of the government of Canada, after her first year at Concordia University in Montreal. After working there as an assistant for some years, she wrote and pitched a script to the company, which led to her career as a director and animator. She first wrote the script for The Danish Poet some time ago, though she says that she "can't really remember when".

Production was split between Marcy Page, of the National Film Board, and Lise Fearnley, of Mikrofilm AS in Norway, and took roughly three years, although Kove took a year off for maternity leave.

The film was made using hand-drawn traditional animation, with pencil on paper, and then scanned and digitally coloured, with about half of the animation by Kove, and the rest divided between animators in Montreal and Norway. Kove's style is simplistic, which she says is less a specific style choice than "quite simply [...] the only one I know how to do." The backgrounds were painted by Montreal artist Anne Ashton.

Narrator Liv Ullmann was selected for the film because Kove liked her voice and "thought that her delivery would be right for the story"; she reaffirmed this after the film's release, stating that Ullmann was "just right". She thanked Ullmann in her Academy Award acceptance speech, saying that "it was really amazing of her to participate in this." Back in 1995, Ullman herself directed a film adaptation of Kristin Lavransdatter, the novel featured…

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