by Helen Barlow
The Berlin Film Festival’s Generation section often unearths major talent. It’s where I first spoke to Taika Waititi for his debut feature Eagle vs. Shark and where the Berlin-loving director returned as a juror. It’s where Sophie Hyde presented her directing debut 52 Tuesdays and where Damon Gameau world premiered his feature 2040.
This year, one of the best movies in Berlin was a Generation selection, the quirky and partly animated dramedy Ninjababy, directed by Norway’s Yngvild Sve Flikke and co-written by Johan Fasting. The film, based on Ingae Saetre’s illustrated novel, Fallteknikk, will screen at the South By Southwest Film Festival next week.
It follows 23-year-old animator Rakel (stunning newcomer Kristine Kujath Thorp), who after a one-night stand suddenly realises she is six-months pregnant. But who is the father? She is keen on her fellow comicbook-loving guy from her one-night stand, but then there is another potential father, a guy with whom she has great sex. Rakel has to figure out who the father is and to decide whether to keep the baby or to adopt. Then Rakel’s animated character, Ninjababy, springs out of her notebook to state its case.
I spoke with Yngvild Sve Flikke over Zoom from Oslo.
This is such a fun film for young people that I thought you would be younger.
“No, I’m 46. My daughters say I’m from the Stone Age.”
Sexual permissiveness as depicted in the film was quite rampant in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“Yes, my parents, who are in their 70s, grew up in the 1970s and I’ve had such a good response from that age group. They really connect with the movie. My parents thought it was a fresh and fun movie. I asked my mum if she was embarrassed, and she was like, ‘No, no, no! Even though we look older, we’re always young at heart and we remember how it was’.”
In many ways younger people now are more conservative.
“They’re so proper, they’re so polite in a way; they’re kind of doing everything right. I see young people in Norway with the COVID situation and they say they have to stay to help their elders. One of the things we set out to do with this movie was to get away from all that polished niceness and to show a character who is not that nice and who doesn’t do what everyone expects her to do. We wanted to say that it’s okay to say what you feel and do what you want and to be touch with who you are and not just please people. A lot of the time, especially with women, we’re too busy thinking about pleasing people. We have to please ourselves as well.”
I love the argument Rakel has with Ninjababy, who sticks up for his survival. He’s like her conscience in a way, or her dealing with her thoughts. But she wants to be a liberated woman and doesn’t want to have a child. She doesn’t have any money and she wants to have a career.
“Ingae said how it’s not possible to be the best mother in the world and also to be the best animator or director or whatever. You need to find a way to work through those things and to not put too much pressure on yourself to be perfect in everything you do. We tried to make a liberated character who does what she wants. She has a sex drive like most women in their 20s. She goes out and if she wants to have sex, she has it. And if she doesn’t want to do something, she doesn’t do it. And if she gets pregnant, she’s like, I’ll have an abortion because we can in Norway.”
Yet since she is six months into her pregnancy, she can’t. So that is her dilemma. The actress, who personifies that dilemma, newcomer Kristine Kujath Thorp, is great.
“Yes, we wanted a new actress. We received hundreds of tapes, but Kristine had such a presence. I can’t really say what it was, but I knew I had to meet her. She understood the story and she understood the character. We particularly wanted a comic character who wasn’t the stereotype of a naive, clumsy woman. She had to be tough but also vulnerable. And Kristine really got that. She had that playfulness that I needed. And she’s also an illustrator, so when you see Rakel’s room it has some of Kristine’s work.”
Often animation feels tacked on in feature films, but here it’s so much part of the story. The Ninjababy character brings a lot of the comedy too.
“I wanted to try and mix in the animation. I really like a kind of roughness. I like the animation of Michel Gondry, who does that a lot. I hadn’t worked with Ingae before, I just knew about her book, which came out years earlier. When I got this idea of combining live action and animation, I wanted to make it about the craziness of being pregnant. Ingae’s book was perfect for this story. I didn’t know if she wanted to be part of the project but her drawings really spoke to me and I’d loved her previous cartoon series Grubby Girls. So, we met and found that we share the same sense of humour and views on the characters, on the story and on life and on motherhood as well as on all the gender issues.”
I love that your film says that women can be grubby too.
“We worked a lot on that, and we really wanted it to have that rough feel. We wanted to show a character who doesn’t shower every day and who when looking for something to wear would take the first thing she finds. She smells it and if it smells okay, she puts it on. I feel there are so many clean women in movies, and they should be dirtier. They should smell a bit more, be sweaty and all that stuff, because we can relate to that. Or I can relate to that! (laughs)”
The early sex scene, the one night stand in the bathroom, sets the tone.
“I don’t like seeing sex in films portrayed like it’s just something poetic and beautiful, because I find sex has a much more animalistic feel. It can also be clumsy, and I wanted to get that clumsiness on film because people can relate to that.”
I think Australians will love the film.
“It’s hard to make a comedy, you know. It’s not often you see good comedies. Hollywood comedies are often too polished. When I was younger, I loved Muriel’s Wedding about a young girl who wasn’t beautiful and who was in love with ABBA. It was so liberating to see that, to see real people how they really look and how they are. I really enjoyed that.”
It’s interesting that a man, Johan Fasting, has a screenwriting credit. But it was really you and Ingae who did it, and he came in and wrote the ending?
“It’s actually all three of us. It was fantastic for us because he really understood what we wanted to do with the film.”
He’s 30, so maybe that he is younger helped?
“We just didn’t know how we were going to solve that (ending), because we knew all the way what kind of character she was and the kinds of questions we wanted to raise. So, we were very happy in the way Johan solved it. He also came with the character, Ninjababy, which was like a present to us. We were like, why did we not think about that? Sometimes you get ideas from others that you are just mad that you didn’t think about yourself. I already knew Johan, because I’d worked with him on a TV series, Home Ground, and I knew that we were on the same path.”
