Otherworld

What is the importance of music in animation?
The starting point with animation is the visuals and you start with a rough dialogue track which you work to in order to get your animated lip-synch, but really you're talking about mute visuals and that's a very difficult thing for an audience to respond to. So you need all the elements put in to carry the audience along be it sound design which comes from the sound editor or the music track which is absolutely invaluable in animation. Of course music is a crucial element of any big feature film, but you might have a feature film with as little as 20-30 minutes of music, in a 100 minute animated film like Otherworld we've got 70-75 minutes of music, because you just need to be carrying your audience along in the crucial places.

Tell us about the involvement of the National Orchestra of Wales
We chose the National Orchestra of Wales because they're a huge internationally renowned symphony orchestra and they just have the scale and the scope to provide that kind of sound and that kind of technical excellence. Basically they walked in in the morning and they got the score in front of them and it was nothing they were familiar with - it's not Tchaikovsky or Sibelius or Mozart or anything they'd laid eyes on before so they needed to have a play through and almost record straight away. So that demanded the highest possible musicianship, and the whole thing fitted together perfectly ... to use this famous Welsh orchestra and this famous Welsh composer on this Welsh production I just thought it fitted together like a glove.

What do you think the public reaction will be?
I certainly think there's a constituency out there for a film like this. What we need to understand is that it's not the normal approach to this material. These tales were first told orally around camp sites on dark winter nights on Welsh mountains. They were then written down centuries later perhaps in the 13th century so we're going back to the origins, to the earlier Celtic roots and it's hard-hitting stuff. This isn't for little children, this isn't cute animation, this tells it how it is. There's fighting, there's violence in it, we show society as it was, but then again we set that side-by-side with good looking animation techniques, a big soundtrack, accessible music, a beautiful cast of voices - people like Ioan Gruffudd who are young Welsh actors who are recognised by the public now and I think it'll be enjoyed very much by the general public.

Tell us about some of the actors and actresses that take part both in live action and as voices
Personally it was very important that we cast Welsh actors because there's nothing I hate more than hearing a cod Welsh accent, so they had to be young Welsh actors and we were looking really for characters that would be believable animated 6th century characters. So we cast Mathew Rhys as Lleu and he has the physique to play the young warrior. Then we cast Daniel Evans as Manawydan (Dan), the brother of the giant Bendigeidfran, he's the younger brother so he needed to start off the film in the younger brother mode, overshadowed by the big guy, and then grow in stature and in his vocal rendition as we went on. For the part of the giant (Bendigeidfran) we actually only cast the actor Ioan Gruffudd for the voice part. He has a wonderful presence in his voice, of course we know him from parts like Hornblower and The Forsyte Saga and he just has that presence in his voice to play something as big as a giant. Then we cast Jenny Livesey as Rhiannon, a sort of headstrong young woman that just really takes her life in her own. We've got other perhaps more established actors in other roles like Philip Madoc, who's famous as the Last of the Mohicans ... he has a wonderful Welsh voice to play the big part of Gwydion. Then we've got an Irish part, the part of King Matholwch and we cast Paul McGann in that role, Paul of course starred in 'Withnail and I', and he did a wonderful Irish voice with his Irish background.

This is all being produced in two languages, back-to-back in Welsh and English, tell us what you had to think about when doing that.
We make all of our films back-to-back in English and Welsh and that's directly a part of the S4C remit. You just have to be aware really that the lip-synch needs to work, not only in both English and Welsh, but really that's one of the central ideas of animation that it should travel and that it should work in other languages and you just have to be mindful of that.