'Steven Spielberg said he loved it': Irish animator John Kelly on his Oscar-nominated Retirement Plan
John Kelly and a still from Retirement Plan, his Oscar-nominated short.
Filmmaker John Kelly was on zoom with the crew for his short film when he learned it had been nominated for an Oscar in the Animated Short Film category. Though it had been long listed for the biggest honour in cinema, the film hadn’t been predicted to make it to the final five from the 15 shorts selected - leading to a treasured online catch-up.
“I had assumed it would be a friendly chit chat and get together,” he says. “It took us totally off guard. There is a video of the zoom, a little clip of it online on our social accounts. Someone said it’s the most Irish celebration of an Oscar nomination - we all go: ‘Oh, brilliant, great! Let's stick the kettle on’.”
Since then, working life has become a little bit more surreal. As he prepares to attend his first Oscars, Kelly has been spending time in LA where, in the days before our interview, he rubbed shoulders with Hollywood royalty at the Oscars Nominees Luncheon.
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Among stars including Emma Stone, Timothée Chalamet and our own Jessie Buckley, Kelly got to meet fellow Irish Oscar nominee Richie Baneham. The Tallaght man, a graduate of Ballyfermot College, is up for his third Oscar win this year for Best Visual Effects for
having won for his work on the other two films in the series.
“He's so nice. He could clearly see I was green around the ears. He's an old hand in that situation, and his wife, so they were giving us pointers.” Kelly also met with fellow Irishmen Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element Pictures, whose film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, is up for four Oscars, including Best Picture.
It was, Kelly agrees, a “very surreal” experience. “Steven Spielberg told my producer that he had seen the film and loved it. I didn't get to meet him, unfortunately, but it's nice to know. Apparently he's very diligent about watching all the shorts every year.”
It marks the latest stage in a remarkable run for Kelly, whose seven-minute film has been beguiling audiences around the world. The nomination follows a festival run that began with its world premiere at the Galway Film Festival and includes other accolades as the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award in the Animated Short Competition at SXSW.
Kelly also co-wrote the film with Tara Lawall. It was produced by Andrew Freedman of Venom Films and Antidote Films, with the support of Screen Ireland and RTÉ.
The film centres on Ray, voiced by Domhnall Gleeson, who fantasises about all of the things he intends to do in retirement when he has the time. What emerges is a busy, funny and meditative mindset of intentions and possibilities as Ray moves through midlife.
The filmmakers approached Gleeson, who agreed to voice the central character after hearing of their vision for the film. They got in contact after hearing Gleeson on the podcast of a cinematography legend.
“I heard him speaking on Roger Deakins’ podcast, and he talked about how he’d done a lot of drama, and that he was interested in doing more comedy,” says Kelly. “I made a mental note. He was probably talking about feature films, rather than soliciting people to send them ideas for their five-minute animations,” he laughs.
“But I sent a video to his agent, basically outlining me speaking to camera, with some references, some sketches and storyboards, and a clear idea of what the beginning, middle and end of it was, even if the exact wording wasn’t fully confirmed. He brings such a vitality to everything he does. There’s so much intention in what he does that feels real. It doesn’t feel like acting when he’s saying it.”
Gleeson recorded the film’s voice performance in five or six complete takes from beginning to end, adds Kelly. “You could do it in chunks if you go scene by scene. But with this, it made sense to read it all the way through to try and get that arc and the thread working.”
Animation was the perfect format, Kelly says, to bring such a busy film brimming with ideas and intentions to shorts storytelling. “It’s funny, it’s very ambitious in some ways, but in other ways, it’s very deliberately stripped back. Putting the parameters on it visually, single line thickness, limited colour palette, not too many crazy camera moves. That sort of restraint allowed us to be a lot more ambitious with many other aspects, because it’s a nice foundation to work off.
“An extreme way to put it is if this was live action with actors, the idea of 100 shots and 60 locations and a character that’s ageing wouldn’t be possible. But because we're doing it with minimal line drawings, you can have him go to Bali and the Forty Foot and only have a one-second shot.”
Kelly’s background is more in stop-motion animation and puppetry and so working in 2D animation was a departure, as the other projects involve bigger teams and more planning. “This was a bit of a pendulum swing away from that. My drawings don't usually make it past storyboard — but they did in this case.”
Nevertheless, creating involved detailed and painstaking work. The project took nine months to complete, with animators averaging one or two shots per day.
“We were using a piece of software, Moho, which the animators hadn’t used before, but it was absolutely the right one for them to choose, and they learned very quickly as they were doing it. After you’ve got the animation, then you do sound design, which is really fun as well.”
This Oscar nominee’s path to animation has been unconventional, and saw him revisiting an early held passion. He drew comics as a teenager and studied graphic design at DIT, (now TUD) before moving to London with his now-wife Jenny.
“I followed her to London to the Royal College of Art, and she wrote my application, and I got in the next year. I worked and lived in London for 15 years, worked at a company called Nexus for a long time.”
The young family returned to Ireland in 2019. Now will compete at the highest stage in film, with Kelly and his team ready for their close-ups. Louis Copeland has offered his services on the suit front, while his wife is being dressed by the fashion designer Erdem, who she is friends with.
“I think when I was doing the CAO, I considered animation, but I didn't think of it as a viable career, I'm quite sensible. So that's why I got into graphic design and doing annual reports and logos and stuff like that for years. But the teenage comic drawing guy inside me just couldn't stop himself escaping!”
- The Oscars take place on March 15. You can watch on RTÉ Player and Disney+
