Josefine: The making of Scottish Opera's award-winning animation

Obviously you can do a lot on stage, and also with a live-action film. But what a cartoon can do is just wild – and that’s not something that opera has done.”

Opera and animation might sound like unlikely bedfellows, but Scottish Opera has smashed them together in its latest collaboration between composer Samuel Bordoli – that was him reflecting on the project – and resident company filmmaker Antonia Bain. The result – Josefine – is a 14-minute animated opera conceived, written and created jointly by both Bain and Bordoli, with animation director Sophie Bird and executive producer Gemma Dixon of Maestro Broadcasting.

It’s already won best short film at 2024’s Messina Opera Film Festival, and it gets its Scottish premiere on 21 March at the Glasgow Short Film Festival, with two further screenings at the Scotsman Picturehouse Cinema in Edinburgh on 25 March.

A still from Scottish Opera's award-winning animation, Josefine | Scottish Opera

In fact, opera on film is becoming quite a Scottish Opera tradition. Menotti’s two-hander The Telephone was one of the company’s filmed opera projects during the dark pandemic months – it’s still online. More significantly, Bain and Bordoli have previously collaborated on the new opera The Narcissistic Fish, with a libretto by acclaimed writer Jenni Fagan, set in the kitchens of a high-end Leith fish restaurant. “I actually suggested an animated opera to Scottish Opera’s general director Alex Reedijk before we made The Narcissistic Fish, but then we later returned to the idea,” recalls Bordoli.

“And I almost said no to directing it when you said it would be an animation!” laughs Bain. “I felt I was a live-action director, not an animation director. But I think it was Steven Spielberg who said directing animation is such an interesting process for a live-action director, because you have to think through your ideas so much more carefully.”

Josefine director Antonia Bain | Gordon Ballantyne

Josefine is based on a short story by Franz Kafka, the final work he wrote. “I read it when I was a student,” says Bordoli. “I always had it at the back of my mind for an opera, but in many ways, it’s totally unsuitable. It’s almost more of a philosophical treatise than a story.”

And the original text’s plotline – of a starry singing mouse (who’s perhaps more of a human than a rodent: Kafka is never entirely clear) – has been transformed into the animated opera’s tale of a bird-like creature (voiced by soprano Zoe Drummond) and the sprites who seem devoted to nurturing her, but maybe want to control and possess her. “We had to interpret the story,” Bordoli explains, “and decide for ourselves what we thought it meant. But we also retained some of the story’s ambiguities, even for ourselves.”

“We were working on Josefine during the Covid pandemic,” continues Bain, “at the time when there were lots of questions about what was happening with the arts, and when performances would be able to start again. There are similar questions in Kafka’s story. Josefine doesn’t question her own singing abilities, but those around her seem to be constantly asking: what use is she?”

Bordoli brings up additional themes that seem embedded in the narrative: an individual versus a group (or a child versus their parents), and the trials of growing up, even a loss of innocence. If that sounds too weighty for a short animation, don’t be overly concerned – those ideas are there for anyone who wants to discover them, but Josefine also succeeds as a straightforward story of maturing and gaining independence.

Josefine composer Samuel Bordoli | James Glossop

But was it something that Bain and Bordoli specifically aimed at young people? “We probably had one eye on the fact that it could work for children,” Bordoli explains, “but we also wanted it to be something that anyone can get something out of on some level.”

“There was a lovely moment when it was screened in Messina,” Bain remembers, “when a woman who spoke a little English came up and said how amazing it was to get young people into opera. Even my own kids have watched me making Josefine, and they talk about her as if she’s a little person.”

Accordingly, Sophie Bird’s animation has plenty that’s cute, but quite a few hard edges too. And there’s a glorious Hollywood sweep to Bordoli’s music – “I love movie musicals from the 1940s and ‘50s,” he explains – but it also retains a steely inner core.

“It’s amazing to be able to come up with something new that’s been conceived for film,” Bain adds, “rather than filming something that’s already been staged.”

In that sense, with Josefine Bain and Bordoli have not only created a new opera, but also taken a few steps forward in developing a whole new art form.

Josefine will have its Scottish premiere screening at Grosvenor Picture Theatre in Glasgow on 21 March, as part of the Glasgow Short Film Festival, see www.glasgowshort.org. There will also be two screenings at the Scotsman Picturehouse Cinema in Edinburgh on 25 March, one at 4.30pm and one at 6.30pm, with a Q&A session featuring Antonia Bain, Samuel Bordoli and Susannah Wapshott, hosted by Scotsman classical music critic Ken Walton. For more information, and to book tickets, visit www.scottishopera.org.uk.