Nov 27, 2024

2025 Oscar Short Film Candidates: - Queen of Flowers Director Ciara Lacey

Cartoon Brew is putting the spotlight on an animated short film nominated for an Academy Award in 2025.

Today's film is the Queen Flower of Hawaiian filmmaker Ciara Lacey. The short film won the Made In Hawaii Short Film Award at the Hawaii International Film Festival and was eligible for an Academy Award.

As a magical take on a true story, Queen Flower is a vibrant animated short adventure aimed at a child audience following Emma, a native Hawaiian girl in Honolulu in 1915. Weaving a very special gift for Hawaii's last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, Emma reflects the will of Oscar-nominated animated director Daniel Sousa to tell a contemporary story that resonates with Hawaiian and international audiences as well as Ciara Lacey's. The film is produced by Ocean in A Drop Productions, co-produced with Qwaves and Strongman.

The Brewing of Comics: Beyond the story of the empowerment of indigenous girls, the short also brings the fate of Hawaii's independence at the hands of US settlers. How did you feel about moving this angle forward, especially through stories for children, and how it resonated with an international audience?-

Ciara Lacy: This film has been shown at festivals around the world and has also won jury and audience awards in Singapore and Wales. We were initially uncertain about its reception, but we have witnessed its impact on other people and cultures. Talking about the theft of governance in Hawaii, and later independence, is not only appropriate, but necessary. Children's stories approach all sorts of subjects, from carefree to gut-wrenching, to help guide their perspective into the world.

The loss of national independence fell into the hands of the Americans in 1898. So, in that case, the key term is "American" and "Hawaiian" as a country. I think this injustice from the American government in the midst of war (the Spanish-American War and the Inter-American War) is increasingly resonating in the present era, as the world is re-evaluating its understanding of the US position. In international affairs. We tend to focus on events almost exclusively as "destiny" – thus making the American bad guys a central character in the recount of the overthrow of the Hawaiian nation, but the narrative is increasingly used as a narrative of native Hawaiian resilience, determination, and presence on the landscape. The native Hawaiian has been here and is now achieving incredible things. And the fact that, despite the loss of our ethnicity, our ancestors continued to fight regardless of the situation inspires hope and gratitude to many native Hawaiians and others today.

What was forced me to connect with you and direct a film about this story and concept -

As a little girl in Hawaii, I had many cool mornings plucking jasmine and crown flowers among butterflies and bees. I then sat under the shade of mango, among my family, with needles and threads, stitched thick ropes of fragrant colors known as Lei that we sell to vendors at airports and Chinatown. Ray-making was a tradition I knew intimately and a business that supported our family as native Hawaiians, so it was when producer Concepcion Saucedo Trejo shared a true story about a little girl named Emma Pollock who had loved giving Ray to the last queen of Hawaii since 1915. It immediately felt like fate. I felt like I knew Emma.

When I started the process of collaborating with the animation director Daniel Sousa, I immediately learned that I wanted the film to be filled with visual "kaona" or layers of meaning. Every scene was painstakingly built from historical reference images, as well as hundreds of drawings and photographs from multiple archives. The opportunity to imbue the film with such cultural details and practices excited me to the end. Mixed with the main elements of fantasy, the goal was to make the work not only culturally specific, but also in some way widely accessible. In turn, my hope is that the first viewing of the film will offer a feast for the eyes, and in subsequent viewing there will be new details to discover and marvel at.

What did you learn through the experience of making this film, Production Wise, filmmaking Wise, creatively, or on the subject-

Making this film was a chance to connect with an incredible woman, the country's last reigning monarch of Hawaii, Queen Liliuokalani. We are dedicated to providing opportunities for Hawaiian children to realize their greatest potential and her love of the children who still show up in the thriving Lili'uokalani Trust We listened to many of the songs she brilliantly composed and chose as the movie's hero song "He Inoa N."Ka.Iulani"And we were surprised over how ahead of her time she was, just created an era-revolutionary bank for women, they dealt with their own financial affairs

It was not enough to dedicate the film to her; we wanted to bring her a fully realized version back to life for the viewer . We reviewed her meticulous gardening record and lived her yard with plants that she loved to grow. We researched her clothes, favorite jewelry and went through a lot of character designs to get her look just right. But perhaps the most pleasant in this process - we integrated 2 of her favorite things into the film: flowers and butterflies in the crown. The Queen loved the two of them dearly and had some precious pieces of butterfly jewelry that she regularly wore. As most small children in Hawaii know, 2 people have a special relationship.The caterpillar finds its home in the bush of the crown flower and munches and eats it until it disappears into the pupa and later appears as a butterfly. So there were a lot of reasons why these two exist together in the film, but in my mind they are present in diegesis only as a reference to her.

Can you explain how you developed a visual approach to cinema - why did you settle for this style/technique-

Animation Director Daniel Sousa: After reading the script and my first conversation with Ciara, it became clear that the visual style of the Queen's flower should represent a radical departure from my previous work. I often created a dark and gritty world, but now I'm talking to a much younger audience and I've created a very sweet and colorful world infused with the purple and lavender of the crown flowers used in traditional lei. At first it was difficult to get out of my comfort zone, but when I drove the environment and color palette with light, I immediately noticed that everything began to fall into place, the warm golden light could be contrasted with the purple and blue shadows, which felt natural and perfectly fit into the story.

We tried different character designs for Emma, some of which survived and with some of the other girls in her class, Emma's look had to be especially Hawaiian, but it also conveyed the universality that any child could have a relationship with. The Queen's design was based on actual photos of Queen Liliuokalani. The nun was the most pleasant because we were able to really push her features and proportions. The technology was a hybrid of traditional hand-drawn animation and 3d sets. The background was designed in 2d as a traditional painting, but then projected onto 3d geometry that allowed the camera movement and flexibility.