While some studios are looking to speed up animation with AI, fans of the traditional art form can rejoice that some people are still doing things the slow way, purposefully, laboriously, even if it takes a decade and a half. And the results speak for themselves.
The animator Michel Gagné has posted the first trailer for a hand-drawn movie that he began making in 2012. The Saga of Rex tells the story of a little fox who gets abducted by aliens and forms a bond with a mysterious being called Aven. And it looks extraordinary (see our guides to the best laptops for animation and the best animation software if you're inspired).
Michel Gagné's past credits include work at Sullivan Bluth Studios on iconic movies like An American Tail and at Warner Bros on the likes of Quest for Camelot and The Iron Giant. He's also worked at Disney and Pixar and designed special effects for Star Wars: the Clone Wars, and the video game Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
His short film Prelude to Eden was nominated for an Annie Award in 1996 and Sensology was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2010. The Saga of Rex is a much more ambitious project: a 60-minute feature film made almost entirely alone.
The Canadian animator raised much of the financing for the film through his freelance work on Hollywood productions. He designed and animated it using Toon Boom Harmony along with Adobe's Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop. The only other contributor to the visual side was longtime friend Seung Beom Kim, who helped with inbetweening. This assistance is allowed Michel to stick to his objective of making the film entirely hand drawn without modern digital shortcuts
The character Rex first appeared in Michel's 1998 self-published book A Search for Meaning: The Story of Rex. The artist later expanded it across six volumes of Kazu Kibuishi’s Flight anthology. Image Comics later collected the chapters into a complete graphic novel.
A 2012 Kickstarter campaign helped fund a short proof-of-concept clip for an animated movie. After that, Belgium-based GRID Animation optioned the film at one point, but Michel ultimately decided the movie had to be independent.
“I wanted to make the film that was in my soul, and to do that, I needed to completely remove the commercial and transactional aspects of the process,” he said in a recent interview with Animation Magazine.
While that meant no deadline, the director kept up a strict work ethic, committing a minimum of eight hours a day to the film, while also doing freelance work to earn a living. When he temporarily lost the use of his right hand at one point, he continued animating with his left for two months.
“I went a bit insane while making this movie," he says. "I would disconnect from reality and enter the worlds I was creating. It was intoxicating at times.”
Such an ambitious independent animation project is a once-in-a-lifetime piece of work. Michel describes it as a "journey of discovery, experimentation and revelation.”
“Would I do anything differently? Probably a thousand things along the way. But I think the film needed to take the journey it took to become what it is”.
Michel hopes to take The Saga of Rex to film festivals in 2027,
You can learn more about The Saga of Rex at sagaofrex.com.
