Out Philadelphia artist, director and animator Dani Aloi has launched a crowd-funding campaign for her ambitious film project “Body Seeking Soul.” The film is a story seen through the eyes of a genderless protagonist on a journey of self-discovery through a stop-motion world.
“I’ve always loved journey films,” Aloi said. “It’s what drew me to animation in the first place as a kid. I knew I wanted to do something that was important to me and my identity. Journey films are about figuring out yourself in a way and it all seemed to make sense and fall together.”
At the beginning of the story, the characters are largely in the dark, with some abstract light and color animation; they can hear the voice of another character trying to coax them out of the darkness. When they open their eyes, they see a forest full of creatures with whom they struggle to communicate as they search for the path forward.
“There’s a lot of symbolism in it,” Aloi explained. “The whole story is leading up to the characters finally ending up in an area with a crystal pond and they look into the pond and they finally see themselves for the first time.”
Aloi added the fact that the main character doesn’t have a defined gender adds to the sense of discovery throughout the story.
“The significance in that for me is really just being able to see a strong character that is not binary,” she said. “I don’t think the characters in the film needed gender for the most part. I thought it would make a more universal story because I don’t want people to see a masculine or feminine bias in the character.”
Aloi said the genderless nature of the main character also resonates on a personal level with her.
“I definitely personally connect to the character,” she said. “Being a bisexual woman, I have always felt that my self-expression has been very torn between masculine and feminine. But it’s not exactly for me because, whereas I feel a little bit of both, I think this character feels neither.”
The strange world that the genderless character ventures through is based on Aloi’s artwork, which is being brought live by her team of artists working on the film.
“It’s kind of weird with the concept art because the medium changes of course,” she said of making her two-dimensional ideas into a three-dimensional reality. “The puppets are going to closely resemble my drawing styles as much as I can. That is definitely what you can expect in the film. All the artwork so far in there is mine. At some point, you might see some other designs by artists on the team but all the original designs are mine. It’s going to be a bit abstract; most of the stuff I do has an experimental angle to it.”
Aloi said stop animation gives the film a more personal touch. She added she’s always been enamored with that style of filmmaking; she grew up watching films by director Henry Selick like “James and the Giant Peach” and “Coraline,” as well as older works by filmmakers Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers.
“It’s got this textual quality to it,” she said about the stop-animation technique. “You can see that someone’s hand actually moved the object around. You can see that physicality of the artist inside of it. A lot of people will say that it’s a dying art but I personally feel that there’s always going to be a small group of artists that will carry it on, especially great studios like LAIKA that take on feature films and do incredible things with the art.”
This being the digital age, there are far less time-consuming ways to create an animated film. But Aloi said the painstaking process of making a stop-motion film is worth the creative hurdles she and her team have to face.
“The most challenging thing is the fabrication stage,” she explained. “It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of dedicated artists to get through it, especially something as stylized and large-scale as this. Also during animation, there are so many things that can go wrong. The thing about stop motion is if you really mess up in the middle of a shot, you have to start all over again if you want to get it right.”
“Body Seeking Soul” is Aloi’s last film project for University of the Arts. But she said she would like to continue creating similar films after she has finished her studies.
“I would love to get to do more projects like this,” she said. “That’s my hope: that I can continue to make my own independent films and cover themes and topics that are important to me. I’m probably going to end up doing whatever pays the bills but my hope is that I can continue making works like this.”
“Body Seeking Soul” is currently in pre-production and is expected to be completed in May 2017. The crowd-funding campaign for the film ends Sept. 16. For more information or to contribute to the film’s funding, visit igg.me/at/BodySeekingSoul.