The Velle film — What Darwin Ordered — combines collage with stop-motion animation. The challenge was to build characters that are funny, sometimes outright ridiculous, and above all memorable.
It mattered to us that Darwin was not the only one you remember. The supporting cast — the fox and the squirrel — had to hold their own.
Small details in the illustration and unhurried, nuanced animation give each of them a life and a personality of its own.
The study is a display case of evolutionary mistakes. Everything on the shelves and on the walls works towards one joke: Darwin lives surrounded by the ones evolution already wrote off. The bottle of milk sits on the shelf between the sabre-toothed squirrel and the dinosaur — same row.
Every object was cut, cleaned and kept as its own transparent layer, so the set can be taken apart and put back together at will — the same way it was assembled in the first place.
