A: As a way to reach young audiences. And it is exactly for that reason that the Anne Frank Fonds Basel has approached me eight years ago and specifically asked for an animation movie. They were looking for a new dimension to tell the Holocaust story. Then came the idea to revive Kitty in the leading role and make her the protagonist of the movie - the narrator. Another two conditions where to connect past and present time and to follow the last 7 dreadful months of Anne Frank’s life.
A: As I said, our main innovation was to turn Kitty from the imaginary friend of Anne into an actual, living person. She – and not Anne Frank – is the protagonist of our movie. She is going on a quest for trying to find out what happened to Anne during the end of the war. How did she die, what happened to her? In doing so, she also discovers the current situation in Europe, flooded with refugees from all over the world, running away from war zones.
A: Anne Frank has left us many descriptions of Kitty: who she is, what she looks like, what kind of personality she is. And of course, there is her dialogue with Kitty. I then went a step further and made Kitty into an alter ego of Anne. In some respects, I ascribed an extrovert personality to her. She is a fighter, and she is not under the control of parents who set her limits, as Anne was. For Kitty, there are no fellow inhabitants in her hideout, criticising her. She is therefore free to do whatever Anne had wanted to do in her own imagination. That is just the way Kitty had to be – why else would Anne have invented her?
A: She is indeed a child of our times. The character of Kitty started out as Anne´s imaginary friend, basically. But in the movie she is building a bridge between the past and the present. As she ventures out into the world, she is meeting young people such as herself who are in danger for the first time – maybe because they have to flee from war zones. That reminds her of Anne and the fact that Anne did not have that option during her relatively short time in hiding. This experience turns Kitty into an activist. This in part happens almost inevitably because she falls in love with an activist. At the same time, she realises her powers to promote a movement for children´s rights. And these powers grow from her being a visitor in our world.
A: Realising the one scene where the Frank family arrives at the Auschwitz concentration camp was the hardest task in the whole movie. How can we show this specific moment in time to children aged ten or eleven years? Animation as a genre does provide us with quite a range of options for this. But we had to choose wisely among them. In the end I found numerous parallels between the killing sites of the Nazis in World War Two and the underworld in Greek mythology. Anne Frank was obsessed with Greek mythology. The Nazis had trains, transports, selections and death camps. In the Greek mythology beloved by Anne Frank there are no trains, but ferries; no land, but rivers. And we have selections there, conducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. There also are dogs there, just like the dogs the Nazis had on the platforms along the train tracks at the camps. I thought we would be able to create a montage to make everybody understand what the Frank family went through at the camp, by showing that experience in images derived from Greek mythology on the one hand and words telling the original story on the other hand. At the same time, we did not want this scene to become overly graphical and heavy handed.
A: For one, we did not want to show the end of Anne and Margot one-on-one in a realistic manner as quite a few Holocaust movies ventured to try. Whether we are working with animation or in a regular feature film format: there is no cinematic form that is appropriate to show what happened. Because I believe none of us really understands what happened. To truly imagine what happened is just beyond our reach. I grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors and have heard to most horrifying stories a child can ever hear. But our mind is incapable to create a visual connection to these stories and cannot fully grasp what happened. I would call this a task that is overwhelming to all of us. I therefore created an allegory to relate the story, using the tools animation and drawing provide us to create imaginary worlds.
A: Intellectually, I have what you might call an internal board of censors. Whenever I appear to lapse into clichés, I immediately correct myself and try to turn that into a part of the story. If we want to reach a really young audience as film makers and turn into teachers while doing so, nobody will sense that better than children. Therefore, a conclusive story that makes sense, the dialogue and the format we use to tell the story are key to our success as film makers.
A: I just turned to the powers of imagination. If one has to tell such a harsh story, one can work either with humour or a lot of emotions. Both methods present viable avenues. But if one exaggerates and forces the audience to delve into tired clichés of agony and woe, you risk losing your viewers. You must maintain an evenhandedness while showing human aspects of the characters and avoid overplaying emotions and turning to gimmicks.
A: By using the powers of imagination that animation provides as a format. In animation you control the colours, lines, how images are arranged. One also understands when to turn a harsh reality into a world that is more imaginary. Once you create such a zone for them, children are comfortable to deal with harsh contents.
A: We did keep much of the original material contained in the Diary. Scenes unfolding in the past are telling the story of the Diary and even the future beyond the Holocaust has been anticipated in the Diary to a certain extent. But the movie tells the story in an entirely different way, namely not as a monologue by Anne, but as a dialogue between the girls. For us, the imaginary friend has become real, and they are discussing among themselves what Anne has written down as her monologue. In the end we just use a different technique to tell the same story.
A: In the film Kitty has her own personality, that is separate from Anne. The character of Kitty is not meant to be an extension or a rebirth of Anne´s personality after her death. As Kitty leaves the house and ventures forth into the world, she has her own options. Although these have obviously been dictated by me, as the author of the script.
A: If you discuss their parents with children, one tends to hear bad things – no matter what the reality is. Teenagers generally like to assume a negative posture towards their surrounding environment and the world at large. They want to rebel. I assume this tendency gets aggravated if young people are forced to live in isolation for two years during their adolescence. Anne therefore might not have represented her surroundings in a wholly realistic way. Therefore, one should have empathy for her mother, who Anne seems to have despised almost throughout, as well as with her roommate. This despite the fact that Anne and he did get mad at each other frequently. For these reasons I have rounded out these characters.
A: I do. The Diary is profoundly human, it is very easy to read, comprehend and explain. And all the horrors that Anne and Margot went through after Anne had been forced to stop writing, are missing. We have no testimony from her to document those seven months that became the worst time of her life. That makes it easier to tell the story as a universal one about a girl in isolation during war time and under the constant threat of death – as a beautifully, intelligently and bravely written Diary. But this story is missing the horrific fates of those who starved in the ghettoes or who were deported in trains towards the East into the ˝Final Solution˝.
A: Kitty is following the path Anne took in Europe: At first, she went on a regular train also carrying regular passengers with her family to the Westerbork labour camp. Then the whole way to Auschwitz in Poland and from there to Bergen-Belsen. I followed the same itinerary for my research. Today, Westerbork has the feel of a park. The town has so much greenery that one hardly can imagine what happened there during the war. Meanwhile, I had been at Auschwitz numerous times because of my parents. Looking at the Bergen-Belsen camp, I found it devised with much thought as memorial site. There is not much left of the original structures, but as you enter, one receives an iPad containing the testimony of a survivor which triggers your own imagination. I integrated that journey, slightly expanded, into the story of Kitty. I show all the people she meets along her way and how the whole world sets out to pursue her because she had stolen the secret Diary.
A: This project took eight years to complete. One of the reasons for that was that we had to conduct deep, extensive research on every aspect before we were able to write the script. The screenplay is really based on a lot of knowledge. We worked with a team of researchers and visited many archives, but especially the archives of the Frank family maintained by the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel and Frankfurt.
A: I would say that the script evolved along real life. In the beginning, at the end of 2013, I was not concerned about refugees, but about young girls in war zones that experienced stories parallel to the story of Anne. But as immigration of refugees from war zones to Europe reached an apex in 2018 and 2019, I rewrote the script, although we already had used it as a basis for the first part of the animation. The second part originally dealt with girls in war zones. I then went over those sections and focussed on children fleeing from war zones to seek safety in Europe. This is one of the advantages of animation: Productions are so time consuming that one can still undertake changes in the middle of a project.
A: Ava is a refugee from Mali, and I researched how and along which routes African refugees reach Europe. Because the story takes place in Amsterdam, I found it appropriate to introduce an African girl. Furthermore, the story spans three generations from Anne, who invented Kitty and passed on the book to her; to Kitty, who finds Ava and then hands over the book to that girl. But we do not have the slightest intention to compare the Holocaust with the waves of refugees reaching Europe in the last five years. One cannot compare these events in any way, and we did not try to differentiate between ethnic groups or religions. We only try to point out that every fifth child on the planet today is in mortal danger because of exposure to warfare. And we want to help viewers realise what it means to be a child born into a war that it neither understands nor is engaged in. From the perspective of a child the stories of Anne and Ava do have parallels.
A: I have only one tool at my disposal: I can create connections between people in a script and via images. This effort produced the relationship between Anne and Kitty in the first part and the one between Kitty and Ava in part two. The themes here are friendship, becoming a teenager and also in some way the power girls and women possess to change the world. Anne had dreamt of that. Kitty did it. And Ava might carry the torch into the next generation. That is the underlying idea. But you cannot express that just in mere statements. You can only try to bring that idea across by telling a story.
A: In my homeland of Israel, I see that activists hail from all generations. However, it was the young who demonstrated every weekend in front of ex-Prime Minister Netanyahu’s house, in the heat of the summer and while it was raining heavily in the winter. And eventually they won; the corrupt government was replaced by a new one. The world is changing. It is becoming more racist, violent, anti-Semitic. And at some point, people reach a mindset that makes them recede and settle into their own comfort zones. Israel has been moving to the right in a significant way in recent years. Before Corona this provoked demonstrations mainly by young people in their Twenties. This activism was heart-warming and wonderful because it provided hope.
A: I am not overly concerned with Holocaust denial. That is mostly virulent among extremists beyond the fringes of society. We much more focus our efforts at the mainstream of society to fight against the slow descent of that history into oblivion and to present these stories as vitally important and anything but dusty relics of the past. That is much more crucial. In the same vein children should not be raised with clichés and didactic statements and fears. They are much too savvy for that as they grow up so fast with the technologies they are using today. It is astonishing how quickly they can absorb knowledge today even as three- or four-year olds, as they touch a screen for the first time and learn how to use it. In doing so, they should encounter and grasp good, correct and important knowledge. If we fail to tell stories fitting to their way of doing things, we will not be able to establish a relationship with them.
A: Yes, we did develop a fantastic educational program in cooperation with the Anne Frank Fonds Basel. There already exists the Graphic Diary that was published during the production of the movie in the fall of 2017 and has since been translated into 30 languages. Now, we also have the film and the story of Kitty as a Graphic book under the same title “Where is Anne Frank“. We also developed an educational package for schools, teachers and students that contains a wealth of knowledge and complements the artistic projects. This is a need we encounter today, as well as an opportunity to introduce history and current affairs to the classrooms.
A: Anne Frank is being perceived as a girl that had been locked up during the war. But the “final solution” is missing in her original Diary because she did not write about it. Therefore, the movies that had been previously made about Anne Frank do not mention that part of history either. But the Kitty book works as a continuation of the Graphic Diary and tells what happened to Anne after the family had been betrayed and deported. The book reports on the final seven months in Anne’s life. The Kitty book represents the complete picture of the story that Anne could not finish to write down and that Kitty then completed in her place.
A: While I was working on the book it became really important for me to create a connection between both sides and not just depict the relationship Anne had with Kitty as a one-way street. After Kitty had found out that Anne had died and then discovered the stone at Bergen-Belsen bearing her name, she writes her a letter and promises her to realise Anne´s dream to save every person that can be saved. And she promises to fulfil Anne´s dream to fall in love. That is a kind of oath of friendship among those two girls. That was the main idea behind it.
A: Sure, animation lets you reinvent the world. We had to start out by shaping Kitty and Anne. I believe we gave both very warm personalities. Lena is an exceptional artist and drew in a deeply beautiful way. But we decided at the outset to break with a certain pattern of the genre. Most war movies show the present in colour and the past as monochrome. We went the opposite way. Therefore, in our movie present-day Amsterdam is depicted in monochrome colours, the city is in wintertime and has been completely drained of colour. On the other hand, the past is seen through the eyes of Anne, it is very lively, colourful and rich in tones. That became the guideline of the movie. Moreover, we did not limit our palette in any way, as I had done in previous animation films. We just went wild with colours, especially when her imaginations and dreams come up.
A: I believe Lena is a genius. She creates the best figures for animation that I have ever seen. Her thinking is just made for getting pictures into motion. Because our job is not just to draw pictures. It is crucially important to get them into motion. Furthermore, Lena is an ideal partner in such a task. She is the opposite of an egocentric. She is modest, focussed on her work and her beautiful soul contains an incredible amount of talent.
A: This movie is the first to tell the story of Anne Frank entirely in drawings. We are talking about 159.000 individual drawings that have been created in 15 countries. This technique infused the film with a vibrant, lively feel and the story flows without demanding any effort from viewers. To accomplish this, we did develop a wholly new technique by combining static backgrounds with classic, animated figures in 2-D. Specifically, we recreated the “Hinterhaus” as a miniature model. This allowed us to create images of real scenery recorded by actual cameras. We then placed drawn figures into these backgrounds as animation. This is a true innovation. Nobody has ever done anything like this before in cinema.