The short video featuring a studio visit with Tal Kantor is available to watch at the top of the page.
Tal Kantor is an animation art director, animator, and artist. She is an award-winning artist renowned for a technique she developed, combining drawing, photography, video, painting, and animation. Her work seamlessly integrates traditional and digital illustration into a sensitive and sophisticated visual language distinctly associated with her. The accompanying video, filmed during a visit to Kantor’s studio, offers insight into the thoughts and work process behind the short animation film Letter to a Pig. This film won the Grand Prix Anima 2023 for best international short film, achieving Oscar-qualified status, and has been nominated for an Oscar in 2024.
The 2022 short film Letter to a Pig is a mixed-media animation and an Israeli-French co-production. Kantor wrote and directed the film, produced by The Hive and Miyu Production. It is based on Kantor’s childhood memory of meeting a Holocaust survivor at school who read a letter he had written to a pig that saved his life, and a dream she had following the meeting. This encounter illustrates the fragility of the third generation of Holocaust survivors, annually exposed to survivors’ stories of the horrors they endured. The dream she had following the meeting addresses an often-overlooked issue: many Jewish children, exposed to Holocaust stories, films, and books, dream of themselves as children in the Holocaust. This identification with the stories and the intergenerational engraving of the Holocaust trauma is often experienced as a personal trauma, significantly impacting the personal and collective identity of the Jewish people.
Tal Kantor worked on Letter to a Pig for nearly five years with a team of about forty men and women. The production process had two stages: initially, the film was shot with actors and edited. In the second stage, Kantor added animation as an additional layer over the edited film. Her innovative combination of live action and animation, including painting on paper, gives the film a unique visual dimension and adds layers to the plot, enabling viewers to engage in an interplay between reality and imagination. Kantor’s meticulous attention to detail, from the subtle movements and expressions of the characters to the overall narrative structure, demonstrates a profound understanding of the medium’s power. She describes the film as a ‘developing collage of broken memories,’ reflecting the complex and fragmented nature of the subconscious.
Kantor’s unique technique evolved while studying for her bachelor’s degree at the Bezalel Academy of Arts. In her graduation film In Other Words (2016), which features a brief dialogue between two characters symbolizing retrospective memory and regret of a meeting between a father and his daughter, the mixed-media technique represented the connection between body and emotion.
In her role as an animation art director in films by other directors, Kantor employs her developed technique to create a unique visual language for each film. In the documentary Advocate (2019), directed by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche, Kantor used animation to obscure documentary material that required censorship; through animation, the characters were blurred, maintaining their presence in the film without cutting the sensitive material. In On This Happy Note (2021), directed by Tamar Tal-Anati, Kantor used animation to convey the emotional world of Anat Gov while she was writing plays.
Watching Letter to a Pig after the October 7th massacre adds another chilling layer of meaning to the film. The scale and brutality of the massacre and the sharp rise in antisemitism worldwide immediately resonated with the intergenerational trauma of Israelis and the international Jewish community. The thought-provoking film resonates with the traumatic recent events Israelis are experiencing and might reshape once again the sense of security and identity of future generations. Tal Kantor’s unique approach to animation, especially in her latest creation Letter to a Pig, contributes to the discourse on historical memory and trauma, demonstrating the power of animation as a medium to understand complex historical and emotional narratives.
You are invited to watch the first episode of the series, which presents the behind-the-scenes of the short film Letter to a Pig, at the top of the page. This series, produced by The Hive and Miyu Production, is part of the campaign to secure the film’s Oscar nomination.
