Sit back, settle in and pour yourself a cuppa, assuming you're the cuppa sort. Author and newly minted Oscar nominee William Joyce and his cohorts at Shreveport's fledgling Moonbot Studios have a story to tell.
And given that storytelling is their stock in trade, it only feels fitting that it all starts with a "once upon a time," so here goes:
Once upon a time, celebrated children's author and illustrator Bill Joyce got an idea for a story. It was a simple story, but a heartfelt one, about the powers of the written word. One history-making hurricane later -- not to mention the founding of a shiny, new animation studio in Shreveport -- and the 15-minute animated charmer "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" was born, "inspired in equal measures by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, 'The Wizard of Oz,' and a love for books."
Last week, "Morris Lessmore" was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film. And just like that, it became apparent that Moonbot's moonshot had paid off. In describing his reaction to the nomination, "Morris Lessmore" co-director Joyce -- though a man of letters -- admitted to being at something of a loss for words. "The only quote that would work here is 'insert primal scream of joy,'" he said.
It was a mutual feeling at the 35-employee strong studio, as a raucous celebration erupted on nomination morning at Moonbot mission control in Shreveport. (See embedded video below.) There were shouts and shrieks. There were hugs and high-fives. There was champagne and Mason jars of moonshine. But before all that, there was that story.
The New Orleans influence in "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" is evident from the film's very first frames, as its title character -- a dead ringer for silent-film icon Keaton -- reads peacefully on a French Quarter balcony.
Over the next 15 dialog-free minutes of screen time, Morris learns that a good book can be a wonderful salve for aching wounds. The first germ of the story took root in the brain of Joyce -- creator of "Rolie Polie Olie," "George Shrinks" and other fixtures in the kid's-book universe -- when he was flying to visit an ailing publishing mentor of his, and a fellow book-lover, named Bill Morris, around 2003. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2006, it all started to take a slightly different shape. For starters, the storm chased former New Orleanian Lampton Enochs -- who would go on to co-produce the film with New Orleans resident Alissa Kantrow -- to Shreveport. And he was by no means alone.
"The main thing I guess," Joyce said, "was going into the shelters and seeing the displaced people and seeing the kids in these, usually a sports arena, with no privacy or any of the stuff they knew as home. But they had been given books -- there were different organizations to make sure kids had books to read while they were in the shelter. Seeing these kids reading these books and being able to shut out all the sadness and the uncertainty and lose themselves in a book ...
"And then Lampton ... is from New Orleans, and we got this whole perspective of how displacing all that was, and sad it was, and how the city looked like it was black and white for a long time after that.
"But once you get people telling their stories of what happened to them, it helped ground them a bit again, so it all started curling into the story of our own experiences and the experiences of Bill Morris. It's just that books matter. We were worried about that -- that they seem endangered."With all of those influences at work, Enochs said "Morris Lessmore" seemed like the perfect story to build the studio's inaugural film around.
"We founded the studio with the initial desire to create a short film first, to be able to use it as our calling card and express not only the quality of craftsmanship of everything we create," he said. "But it seemed like the right story to tell first as well. Since our company is rooted in storytelling, we should tell a story about the joy of story and the curative power of it."