“This Magnificent Cake!” is a stop-motion puppet animation directed by Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roel and it’s the film I have analyzed throughout this term in my essay “This Stolen Cake!”. While researching for this film I came across an article in Animation Magazine entitled “The Many Layers of ‘This Magnificent Cake!’” and written by Ellen Wolff, which describes the details behind the duo’s studio productions and funding that I thought pertinent for this blog’s theme.

De Swaef and Roels’ first film is “Oh Willy” (2012), which was produced by Beast Animation and Vivement Lundi! in Rennes. De Swaef had previously interned at Beast for the film “A Town Called Panic” (2009) and said “They’re the biggest stop-motion studio in Belgium. After the internship, Marc and I asked them if they wanted to produce our short film Oh Willy… While we were financing that film, I received a scholarship from the Dutch Film Fund, which I used to develop the Willy puppet at Vivement Lundi! This naturally set up a co-production structure for that film that went well, so we decided to keep that structure for this film.”

Still from “Oh Willy” (2012)

Whereas Vivement Lundi!, in Rennes France, is where they craft their characters and sets, is at Beast Animation, in Gent Belgium, where they shoot their films, and for “This Magnificent Cake!” also in Pedri Productions, in The Netherlands, for post-production. Regarding funding, and after the success of “Oh Willy”, the film had the support of “the channel ARTE France, the short film fund at France’s National Center of Cinematography, the Flemish Audiovisual Fund, the private funds Procirep and Angoa, and the tax shelter program of the Belgian Federal Government”. This only highlights how important it is to find multiple sources of funding in independent animated films.

De Swaef also speaks of her experience working commercially “One of them, a commercial for a Belgian bus company, is probably our worst work technically, but it really took on a life of its own. It’s our most popular work in Belgium, so the press talks about us as ‘the directors who made the bus commercial.’ We’re not sure how we feel about that,” adds Emma, who teaches stop-motion classes as well. “It’s very important for us to stay film directors who do a commercial every now and then, and not the other way around.”

Wolff, E. (2018) “The Many Layers of “This Magnificent Cake!””, Animation Magazine, 19/10. Available at: https://www.animationmagazine.net/2018/10/the-many-layers-of-this-magnificent-cake/