Interview: Chicken for Linda Directors on Color Coding & Working With Kids

comingsoon.net:

ComingSoon Senior Editor Spencer Legacy spoke with writers and directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach about the animated movie. The duo spoke about the color choices utilized throughout the film and what it was like to work with the children who provided many of the voices. Chicken for Linda! is now playing at Los Angeles’ Laemmle Royal and will have a wider theatrical release across the United States starting on April 15, 2024.

“Paulette feels guilty after unjustly punishing her daughter Linda and would do anything to make it up to her,” the movie‘s synopsis reads. “Linda immediately asks for a meal of chicken with peppers, which reminds her of the dish her father used to make. But with a general strike closing stores all across town and pushing people into the streets, this innocent request quickly leads to an outrageous series of events that spirals out of control, as Paulette does everything she can to keep her promise and find a chicken for Linda.”

Melancholy is even more powerful when it’s hiding behind laughter. A dish that brings up a memory … I think that’s something that happened to everybody — a whole sensory aspect to it. There’s the memory and the taste — that’s the most moving. It was interesting for us to choose the chicken, because there was a challenge for the children to understand you had to kill it in order to eat it. It’s a recipe that touches me because it’s a dish that my grandmother used to make for me when I was a child. I never had to kill the chicken to eat it, though. [Laughs].

We wrote the dialogue together. Maybe the sense of life comes from the fact that Chiara wanted to build up a real set and we start with the sound. So without any drawings, we set up a real cinema set with all the actors together and objects made of foam in order to not make any noise. It gave us a real truth and a first sense of life. It’s like real life. And starting from this sound, we were very free with the animation and the drawings. As the sound is