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The Tale of Little Puppetboy

Dir: Johannes Nyholm
Sweden, 2008, 18’
Prod: Johannes Nyholm

The Tale of Little Puppetboy

Puppetboy is sweating floods of clay, preparing for a lady´s visit. He gets even more nervous when she arrives.


Johannes Nyholm

Johannes Nyholm

Born in 1974, Johannes Nyholm is a film director, artist and animator living in Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds a MA in film, art and new media from the universities of Lund, Copenhagen and Gothenburg, and a degree in classical animation from Eksjö.
Since a few years, his work has centred on the neurotic figure Puppetboy, a dreamlike shadow play from the dark woods and two feature-length scripts.

Before that, he directed several music videos. His work is often very hands-on realistic, but with a dreamlike, contrasting dimension. He likes to play with different perspectives, different scales, micro and macro cosmos, challenging our common sense observations, giving our trivial life an air of mysticism and romanticism.

Director's statement

I started to work with this film after getting fed up with, and also fired from, a very nerdy computer research job. As a contrast I wanted to do something concrete, use my hands and tell simple stories – so I found a lump of clay and made a grotesque caricature of myself. An important principle behind the film was to work really quickly. To make a film that didn’t need special equipment, and at a very small cost. I used a pretty simple digital camera and the building material was mostly junk from my studio. I wanted to put all design aspects aside to focus entirely on the energy, the timing and the story. I wanted to create something raw and simple, yet sensitive and dramatic.

Another idea was to make an animation that was shot a bit like a documentary. Simple, natural lighting and long takes, focusing on the small minutiae of everyday life. The things that happen when nothing happens: vacuum cleaning the apartment, silence in conversations, exchanging glances. And on top of that some old traditional slapstick. A minimalist approach in some respect, and a very expressionistic in another – a mix between nothing and everything. The idea was to finish the film in a week. I ended up working on it for four years.

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