I married a Belgian, Hilde de Roover, in 2003 and began to spend time with her friends in Belgium. Each time we visited Ann Berckmoes in Tervuren, we would drink strong Belgian beer and Ann would give the latest update on her rooster Marcel, chain smoking and drinking and punctuating each section of the story with her throaty “cuculurucoo.” During May of 2011, Ann visited Hilde and me in St. Paul, Minnesota and I took the opportunity to record her telling Marcel’s story in English, Dutch and French, though I ended up abandoning the Dutch version. I licensed a piece of music composed by Phil Kline and recorded by the string quartet Ethel. After editing the different language versions of the story to the music, as I’ve done with my other “documentary” animation projects, I then analyzed the audio track frame by frame and drew to this structure. Technically, it’s the first film I drew digitally with a Cintiq, a computer screen upon which one can work with a stylus. And, somewhat ironically, the loose, painterly style of the film developed from working digitally rather than drawing on paper because I was experimenting naively with brushes in Photoshop.

As for the abstract transitional sections, these came about as a formal expression of the main theme of the film. When I initially heard Ann telling Marcel’s story, I thought “ah, Greek tragedy enacted by Belgian roosters,” but I also remembered a line from Camus’ essay on Sisyphus: “There is no fate that cannot be overcome by scorn.” I wanted to give Marcel a willful defiance, but I also wanted to find a visual equivalent to his dilemma. And so, as Marcel fights to stay alive, his representation in the film struggles to fight against the forms breaking into an abstraction of line and color. Form and abstraction, life and death, matter and energy. I’ve always felt that the most successful animated films demonstrate an awareness of the relationship between the technical aspects of the production and the narrative content.

Also read more about the making of "Marcel" here.

The creator, Tom Schroeder has done some fine work since Bike Ride, but perhaps none better than his latest, Marcel King of Tervuren. It's kind of a beautiful Bukowski/Sophocles tale with roosters. Best short animation of 2013 thus far. You should see it at many festivals. If not, those festivals should have their eyes shot out.

Chris Robinson, Artistic Director - Ottawa International Animation Festival