Working for Disney was his dream from a very young age. And, like in the cartoon movies, the dream came true. Andreas Deja, who is Polish but studied in Germany, started painting at school. “One day I decided to send my drawings to Eric Larson, the great reference of the Disney factory, who saw them and hired me.”
This is how the young Deja landed in the mecca of cinema to “live with the great artists of the golden age and learn from them, those who had given life to Snow White and Cinderella, some had already retired, but still they lived and I immediately made friends with them”, he explains in an interview with La Vanguardia during his participation in the animation film festival Animayo, which is held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
“It was brutal. Intimidating and exciting at the same time. And soon I was drawing my own characters. I designed Roger Rabbit, which gave me a lot of freedom to express myself. I also created Scar, the evil brother of The Lion King, who was evil, but clever. I loved his voice and his performance and it gave me the opportunity to recreate a fabulous performance”, recalls Deja of his time at the animation factory par excellence.
He is also proud of Lilo, the Hawaiian girl who adopts an alien in the Lilo films
After so many years at Disney, Deja decided to break away from it when the hegemony of computers prevailed: “The studios agreed never to use paper again and I chose to leave and create my own projects. I continue to have a good relationship with Disney, I even keep my ID card and can log in whenever I want, but computers don’t match the way I work. The paper is safe. You can touch it, feel it, maneuver it, animate it…â€
Determined to fight so that the traditional way of making animation is not lost, Deja created his own society. It is a very small company in which only he works, who writes the script and draws the film, and his husband, Roger Vilonia, who is in charge of editing and coloring and who does use the computers. With a little outside help, some generous gifts and seven years of work, Andreas and Roger have created Muhska, a 29-minute medium that has the unmistakable stamp of classic films such as 101 Dalmatians and has already been applauded by the critics after his passage through the San Francisco Festival.
Muhska, which will be released this year, probably at Christmas, is set in the USSR of the seventies. Little Sarah has to leave Moscow, where she lives with her grandmother, to join her father in a remote corner of Siberia. The arrival is very hard for the girl, but she adapts immediately thanks to the help of her neighbor, Alex, and her new pet, an adorable Siberian tiger who, of course, grows a lot and faster than expected.
The Russia of the seventies was the ideal place to place the film because “it welcomed a movement to save the tigers”. For the rest of the production, the photographs of Moscow at the time or of the Siberian miners were of great help, which served as inspiration for the trio of villains.
Deja already had experience drawing tigers, but to perfect the work she had the help of the actress Tippi Hedren -star of Marnie (Alfred Hitckcock, 1964), mother of Melanie Griffith and grandmother of Dakota Johnson-, who to open the doors of her ranch, “where she takes care of about 40 tigers and many other animals”.
Hedren’s was one of the gifts that helped make Mushka a reality. The other, the most generous, was offered by Richard Sherman, the composer of Mary Poppins’ famous Supercalifragilisticoexpialidoso, who composed the central theme of Deja’s film.
A film made manually. Like the ones before: “24 drawings are made for one second of animation. But the result is worth it, because there is something very special about making things by hand, a human approach that is unique and unrepeatable. It is impossible for this to be replaced by computers or artificial intelligence, since inspiration, feeling and freshness are essential to making animationâ€.
More than 40 years after arriving in Hollywood, Andreas Deja has once again seen his dream come true, that of continuing to make animated films by hand: “If you want and have the courage, you can do it . It’s the message I want to send to young people who are starting now.”
