Aug 19, 2022

Director Hisko Hulsing describes an installment of the Netflix bonus animation "Sandman" - "A Dream of a Thousand Cats."

Neil Gaiman's Netflix series The Sandman, Warner Bros.Produced by Television and launched a 2-part bonus episode in the early hours of Friday morning, many in the US were still visiting the Kingdom of Morpheus.

Sandman currently tops Netflix's English-language TV rankings for 2 consecutive weeks, and the series has appeared in Netflix's 93 top 10 countries.

The first half of the surprise episode was an animated adaptation of Sandman's side story, The Dream of a Thousand Cats, directed and produced by Dutch film director Hisko Hulsing (Undone, Junkyard) The Submarine in Amsterdam and the Untold studios in London shared a mission to animate the episode .

For the launch of the episode, we caught up with Hulsing to discuss his role in Netflix's latest phenomenon.

Cartoon Brewing: How Did You Land a Gig-

Hisko Hulsing: I was actually the first person at Warner Bros. Even before they approached the live-action director, approached. They were watching Undone, a show I did production design and directed for Amazon, and they knew my short films Junkyard and Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck. I don't know exactly what they were attracted to, but I think it's because my style is very realistic in many ways, but not photorealistic, which is painterly and dreamy at the same time. It's based on reality, but it's wacky. I think that's what they were looking for in the dream of a thousand cats.

How much time did You Have to work on Your part of the episode-

Warner Bros. reached out to me first before I started on the second season of Undone. For the first season of that show, I was traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Amsterdam to direct the live-action I needed for the Rotoscope. The pandemic occurred before Season 2, so we had to put 4 screens in front of us at 5 a.m. and direct everything in Los Angeles from our chairs here in Amsterdam. I had so much on my plate already, so I had to end the second season of undo first. So, we started on May 4 [2021] but ended by May 1. So it took us about eight months to do our part of the episode.

How did the development proceed-

One of the things I learned when I worked as a storyboard artist was that if there was a very solid animatic, Psandman and Neil Gaiman's own producers were blown away by how thorough our work was.1 Usually I get two or three pages of notes, but the producers of Sandman had something like five notes for us.

And what was the process like after your board was approved-

I went to London in 2021/7 to shoot live-action scenes for Rotoscope. It's an interesting story because my second day on the set was my 50th birthday. I didn't tell them it was my birthday, but my assistant must have told them because I was directing 30 naked extras and suddenly everyone on the set started singing to me and it was the craziest birthday imaginable. But from there the technique was like we did with Undone, with a lotoscope of live-action footage I shot in Los Angeles.

But for cats it was more complicated in a way, especially because they were working between 2 studios - Submarine in Amsterdam and Untold in London. It gets even more complicated because we work in Blender and we work in Maya. So they would first do a 3d animation of a cat in full rendering. They worked on a remake of the Lion King, and the 3d cat fur they sent us was also photorealistic, because in that film the background is also photorealistic. But this episode had a painted style, so we took that 3d animation and stylized it. We had about 20 people who rotoscoped the cat to look more painterly. Our cats are very stylized and everything is hand-painted.

Animation is no stranger to anthropomorphic animals, but your cat doesn't feel anthropomorphic at all except for dialogue. It was a conscious decision on your side-

That's one of the things I was worried about. I decided not to lip-sync because that's how comics do it. Cats speak in a kind of telepathy. The whole point is that these are real cats. We have confirmed that cats are moving in sync with the dialogue, but they should not act. They should move so that the cat moves. Even in their history, when cats rule the world, they still behave like cats. They play with little people and torture them. Usually, animation has a character designer. So there was a story about having a character designer early on, but I was like, "No, we don't need it."I just searched online for the cats I wanted to see on the show, and I sent them to London to go to Untold Studio and model the cats based on those images," he says. That's how we dealt with character design.

How did you determine the aesthetics of this episode, and there were aspects of the live-action episode that you implemented in your contribution-

Exactly zero. I just got a link to some rough editing of the live-action part, but not much. Also, this episode was a bonus episode, and my part was pretty short, so showrunner Alan Heinberg told me that he completely trusted me and everything I did I worked in Amsterdam, not London or La. With the live-action team, it gave me so much freedom.

What about the original cartoon artwork - was there anything you wanted to implement in your work-

1. One of the great things about comics is that they have different people who are drawing different kinds of stories. Of course I read comics, but it's very different from my style. Also, in comics and graphic novels, there is a way of telling a story that is really different from animation. It's a different language than cinema. The film is more rigid and can confuse the audience, so there is less wiggle room for things like camera angles. So, I read comics, but when Alan sent me the script, I started doing what I'm used to. I put the script on the left side of my table and on the right side I started doing my thumbnails. The dream of a thousand cats is a beautiful cartoon, but I had to put it completely aside and work from my own imagination.

Was there anything concrete that influenced the aesthetics of the show -

You know, my favorite animated film is Bambi. It's still Bambi. So at one point I was like all the painted backgrounds, and even though the animals in that film are more anthropomorphic...It's hard to explain,