How ‘The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse’ Creator Charlie Mackesy Brought His Book To Life Through Animation

09.01.2023 - 23:55 / deadline.com

For the animation of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, creator Charlie Mackesy was excited to bring his book to life and allow the story to affect people in a more “stimulating” way. The short follows a boy looking for a home. Along the way, he meets animals who are also looking for a place to belong. Though the film is based on his book, Mackesy says he didn’t even plan on making a book when he started. He was just concerned with making art to represent struggles within everyone.

DEADLINE: What was the inspiration for the original story?

CHARLIE MACKESY: It’s very hard to say, I guess it’s a combination of things, you know, friendships and conversations and thinking and the love of drawing. To be truthful, when I first started out, it wasn’t meant to be a book. It was a series of drawings that I would share with friends, and then on Instagram, just about existence and how we feel about life. Eventually, after maybe a year and a half of making the drawings, there were piles and piles in the studio, I got contacted by some publishers and they suggested we make a book. I was very dubious about it, I wasn’t sure if there was a book to be made and I didn’t wanna make one just for the sake of it. But when we reexamined them and looked at them, it did seem like it was worth it.

I would say the inspiration was probably the desire to make people, friends or whoever feel better about things. All of us were struggling at the time with things and it seemed good to be able to lay out those issues in a conversation between a boy, a mole, a fox and a horse, ultimately. Which sounds odd now, but it felt right at the time.

DEADLINE: So, it wasn’t even originally supposed to be a book and now it’s an animated short. What