Calgary-based animators’ short film picked up by The New Yorker as it makes its way through the film festival circuit

Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis met at Vancouver’s Emily Carr art school in the early to mid-80s and after going their separate ways for about 10 years, they reconnected— and their creative partnership has blossomed ever since.

Now, the Calgary-based animators are celebrating their most recent animated short, The Flying Sailor, being licenced by The New Yorker, which is now streaming the seven-minute short. It’s also available for free through The National Film Board of Canada (NFB).

The film also received the Best Animated Short Award at September’s Calgary International Film Festival 2022 and was also featured in the recent GIRAF International Festival of Independent Animation in Calgary.

It was an idea that was two decades in the making and based on a true story about the deadly Halifax explosion 105 years ago on Dec. 6, 1917, Forbis explains.

The true story about the flying sailor

Rather than focusing on the explosion itself, the duo wanted to focus on a sailor who was sent hurtling through the air.

“Two cargo ships collided in the harbour and one of them was full of explosives so it blew up in the most catastrophic manner. The sailor was tossed the two kilometres and landed up a hill, naked, and very much alive,” Forbis says, adding the friends learned about the incident at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax.

“The question that came to mind was, ‘What was that trip like? What was it like to be that guy flying through the air that wouldn’t have had a clue what had just happened to him.’”

They thought the idea would be perfect for animation. There is, after all, a naked man flying through the air.

“You’ve got the bookends of him going up and coming down and then everything else in between, we could just make up. We loved that idea and held onto it for the better part of 20 years before we actually got around to making it,” Forbis says.

A near-death experience, in animation

Tilby says it was important to the duo not to simply tell a historical tale about a true story.

“We wanted it to be a very personal, subjective, surreal experience. We were thinking about it as a near-death experience, which is essentially what it was,” Tilby says, adding they did a lot of research on near-death experiences for the project.

“They’re super interesting because they’re all the same, essentially, where they seem to report the fragments of memory and the sense of time slowing down. Often, they say they saw the white light, the images of dead loved ones. And mainly it’s kind of a sense of bliss.”

The animators wanted to capture that near-death experience with the sailor.

“We wanted to take him with the arc of his flight. We wanted to take him through that experience where he starts off in kind of a panic and he’s flailing, but then he starts to enjoy the trip and he’s flying, losing the sense of his body as he goes into outer space,” Tilby says.

“Then it’s a sudden shift of gears as he plummets back to life. And it’s very harsh, and it’s wrenching for him to return to life because it’s not quite as pleasant as the bliss he was just in, yet it is life.”

Rave reviews, accolades, and success

The animated short has been earning many accolades and rave reviews, and was also named to a variety of different film festivals across Canada and even in France.

The New Yorker taking an interest was the icing on the cake for Forbis.

“It’s very, very special for us to be in the magazine. It’s not ever something that I imagined was in front of us,” she says.

“It means a lot because my dad got me a subscription to The New Yorker when I was about 22 and carried it on until he died, and then I’ve carried it on since then. So, The New Yorker has always been in my life.”

Forbis and Tilby say it’s very fulfilling to know that audiences are enjoying the short.

“As Wendy says, you just want to know that your intentions have been fulfilled so that if people are receiving it in the way that you wanted them to, that means a lot,” Forbis says.

You can watch The Flying Sailor here.