‘We liked the idea of her being a little bit baby bird-like when she’s in her baby form. That kind of vulnerable, slightly ugly, spiky haired thing. Baby Josefine was really nice to animate. I think animators like those circular shapes because you can squash them and do all sorts with them. Adult Josefine was more tricky to design. We went through a lot of iterations of her. We wanted her to feel more elegant, like she had matured into this different creature who suddenly had a sense of her own independence while looking similar enough that we know she’s the same character.’ - Sophie Bird, Lead Animator

‘In animation you can do things you can’t do in real life, on stage, or even in a live-action film. You can have that cartoon-like thing of strange movements and things changing form. In a way music and animation are very similar because it’s someone in a room making marks on a piece of paper that then in time come to life. The process is quite extraordinary. I orchestrated it, then we record and it all gets put together. All the time that’s going on, the animation is happening – the lip-syncing and tweaking down to the nearest millisecond.’ - Samuel Bordoli, composer / co-librettist

‘We wanted to do an animation because it’s not something you see very often with opera. It’s nice to have a story that actually has a singer at the heart of it. A story about a singer and her audience translates really well to opera. In the original story, she has this difficult relationship with these hardworking mouse folk. We worked very hard to get to this point where she’s this birdlike creature and the shoal sprites are little creatures that all work together, almost like they’re stuck together. We wanted to take it away from the Kafka and make it our own.’ - Antonia Bain, director / co-librettist

‘I hope young people will watch the film for the story and hear opera singers and an orchestra and things that they might never have been introduced to before. And I hope people stumble upon it as an animation and enjoy watching and hearing opera.’ - Gemma Dixon, producer