‘The Snail and the Whale’ follows the amazing journey of a tiny snail who longs to see the world and hitches a ride on the tail of a friendly humpback whale. A joyous, empowering story about the natural wonders of the world and discovering that no matter how small you are, you can make a difference.

Written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, it was originally published as a picture book in 2003. The film was made in 2019, directed by Max Lang and Daniel Snaddon, with music by Rene Aubry.

We caught up with Max and Dan for an exclusive interview.

Nether of them is a stranger to Julia Donaldson books or Rene Aubry’s music. We asked Max about his work on two of her books, both of which became Oscar nominated Animation shorts: ‘Gruffalo’ and ‘Room on the Broom’. Max countered, “Actually, for me, it’s number four and for Dan, it’s number two. We collaborated on a film, kind of overlapping with ‘The Snail and the Whale’. It’s called ‘Zog.’ That is also based on a Julia Donaldson book, and has Rene Aubry’s music. And, prior to that, Dan actually directed ‘Stick Man’. Yeah. It all started with the ‘Gruffalo’ ten years ago.”

Dan had read out the story of ‘The Snail and the Whale’ to his son Frank even before he was born. Frank is now two years old, and “was playing with his stuffed toys the other day, and I realised he was acting out the moment where the people dig the whale out of the ground. So, it’s really sunk in there. It’s deep in his subconscious now,” says Dan, laughing.

Technology changes fast, and so we wanted to know from Max what changes he sees in the way the films were made then and now. Max was forthcoming, saying, “‘Gruffalo’ was actually produced in Germany. Back then, we had stop motion sets, and CG characters that we integrated into that. At that time, that was really the only way to achieve that look. And the same with ‘Room on the Broom’, actually. After that, the production shifted to Triggerfish in South Africa and I was a little bit involved with the films, like I wrote the scripts for some of them, but to me, it was always like well, ‘The Snail and the Whale’, I don’t see how we could ever do that in that technology, its such a big film, like we have to go around the whole world, there’s all the water, how would we do that. In ‘Gruffalo’, I don’t know, we have a couple of water shots, it took us the whole production to get them. And, pretty much the same in all the other films. When I then, at some point, saw what Triggerfish was doing with ‘Stick Man’, ‘The Highway Rat’, ‘Revolting Rhymes’, and all these films, and how they had adapted the pipeline to CG and they could achieve that look, with all the advantages of a CG pipeline, ‘The Snail and the Whale’ became a bit more possible. Even then, ‘Zog’ was done on a slightly different pipeline, where we had not used Houdini before for the water effects, so we had to integrate Houdini in our pipeline, and it was a huge undertaking. The whole team had to be pretty much retrained, or we had to bring in new people who knew how to work with Houdini, and so yeah, every project has its own technological requirements, and we try to find the best software pipeline for that. And it’s usually dictated by the story.”

From the narrative point of view, one of the problems was how to create a connection between two characters that cannot really share a frame owing to their size (the smallest creature in the world and the largest creature in the world). Dan explained how they approached this problem. “Its only when the snail is reacting to something this way, and showing the whale is looking behind him, even though technically, they would not be able to, there’s no line of sight, do you get the sense that they are sharing experiences, and that they are communicating. The fact is we are not able to add dialogue. In the book, they don’t really have conversations,” he says, adding, “The second thing that’s tricky is from a technical point of view, when you look at those two different scales, and you look at the kind of details you want to get into the picture, you realise that when you are a snail, you see a micro world, and when you are a whale, you see a macro world.”

On the message they hope the world will take from the film, Dan says, “The message that I hope that audiences, both young and old, will take away is that what they do matters. That their actions count. That they can make a difference.” Max adds, “And what I love about it is that the film does it in such an optimistic and positive way, like it’s not like preaching to you like everything is bad and we have to fix it. It’s much more like, ‘Look at this, this is amazing! Try to preserve it.’”