Oktapodi

Oktapodi is a fast-paced comedy created by six students from French school Gobelins about two octopuses in love who struggle to stay together. A classic among animated shorts, the film presents a clearly defined external conflict that turns into a long chase sequence.

Staged in a Greek town, Oktapodi employs three main characters. Two of them are an unlikely choice for such a short: octopuses. The artists made this choice due to the comedical situations they could help produce, as well as to the interesting challenges they posed technically as 3D characters. Oktapodi gives the theme of lovers being separated and fighting to reunite a very original treatment through the choice of characters, staging and conflict (one of the characters could end up being eaten).

The short uses a stylized aesthetic with saturated colors and special attention dedicated to lighting, reproducing the range of colors from a seaside Greek town. A brief change of aesthetic takes place during the subjective internal shot of the male octopus (at 0m25secs), turning colors flat, indicating that what we’re seeing is his imagination. A lot of work has been dedicated to environment design and modeling, done by François-Xavier Chanioux and Quentin Marmier. Character design has also received a lot of attention, making sure the audience would empathize with them. The great work done by Olivier Delabarre and Julien Bocabeille in this regard is worth highlighting. Color is used to help quickly differentiate the male and female octopuses. Plenty of medium and close-up shots are employed to transmit the expressions of the characters and augment conflict.

Moving cameras, crash zooms, fast cutting, parallel editing and action sequences are combined to create heightened visual rhythm, together with music and sound to accentuate the pace. The music of Oktapodi is the result of a collaboration with Kenny Wood, a graduate from the UCLA school of music who composed it especially for the short.

The production of the film took 7 months to complete, and had the restriction of making a short that lasted 2 minutes, in order to reach a high quality final result.

What makes Oktapodi work so well? Love serves as strong motivation for the octopus characters and is a widely appealing subject, narrative rhythm is tight allowing for effective storytelling, humor and creativity permeate the short, which also helps explain to a degree its great popularity.