THE SAUSAGE RUN

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Little Red Riding Hood going around and around

THE SAUSAGE RUN is a 10-minute animated film that reimagines the Grimm fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood as a darkly humorous satire on the use of animals as food, told through historic Zoetrope devices.

The roles are reversed: Little Red Riding Hood is a young lamb, Grandmother an old ram, the huntsman a sausage-loving dog, and the Big Bad Wolf a human butcher who has run out of meat. When the lamb sets off to deliver a warm sweater to its freezing grandfather, it catches the butcher’s attention. Although the huntsman rushes to the rescue, the outcome of his encounter with the butcher remains hidden at first, leading to a surprising and bitter twist.

The entire story unfolds through a series of rotating Zoetropes. Their short, endlessly repeating animated loops merge into an unusual cinematic language, transforming cyclical motion into a continuous narrative. The circular movement of the characters itself becomes a metaphor for an endlessly repeating cycle.

(for programmers)

Grand Prix – The Golden Kuker Award, Golden Kuker Sofia, International Animation Film Fest, 25th – 29th May 2022

THE SAUSAGE RUN absolutely deserves the award (and many more!). It was a very easy decision for all members of the jury, we love the film. It’s fresh, smart and connects with the soul of the origin of animation art.
– Juan Pablo Zaramella –

Best Film in the category 15-18 years, KINOdioseea 14th edition of the International Film Festival for the Young Audience, Bukarest, 14 – 18 September 2022, Romania

Best film between 4 and 20 minutes and Best European Film, 18 Cortoons Gandia Festival 20-23 October 2022, Spain

Honorable Mention Animated Short Film, CineEco’2022 – 28th International Festival of Environmental Cinema of Serra da Estrela, October 8^th to 15^th, Portugal

Winner of the VAF ANIMOK Youth Jury 2022 (6th grade), 10 Viborg Animation Festival (VAF) 26 September – 01 October 2022, Denmark

Comment of the festival director Ditte Lundsgaard Nielsen: The kids say that it is fantastically created with the use of a zoetrope, which none of them knew, but thought was deeply fascinating and that it made good sense to use the zoetrope in relation to the story in the film. The film is funny and entertaining, but still asks a good question about good and evil / right and wrong.

Animation Award, best storyteller, Mediawave Festival, 4th – 7th May 2022, Hungary

Certificate: “especially commendable”, German Film Quality Assessment Board (FBW), Germany

Second Prize, best animation, 17^th Athens Animfest, competition, 17-20 March 2022, Greece

First Prize, best humorous film, T-Short Animated Film Online Festival 2022, Humorous Shorts Competition, Karlsruhe, March 10 till March 27, 2022

Jury’s Choice Award, Thomas Edison Film Festival, USA, 11 February – 31 December 2022.

The film has received an Award and will take part at the 41st Annual Touring Season – 2022. The TEFF Jury’s Choice is a prestigious award for extraordinary films that have pushed boundaries, told important stories, and raised the bar for film as an art form.

How do you tell a ten-minute story using zoetropes that can only display about one second of repeating movement? That question marked the beginning of THE SAUSAGE RUN.

The idea was developed in late 2016 together with my former animation professor, Paul Driessen. Over the following years, the initial concept evolved into a German-Belgian co-production involving specialists in character design, animation, background art, 3D animation, music, and sound.

One of the greatest challenges was making the drawings look as if they had been created at the time the zoetrope was invented. Thousands of individual drawings were coloured, cross-hatched and enhanced with paper textures, stains, coffee marks and deliberately irregular outlines to give them the appearance of illustrations almost 200 years old.

Although the film was produced entirely digitally, it was designed to look as if the story unfolded inside historic zoetropes. For this purpose, a real zoetrope was built, digitised using photogrammetry and then animated as a 3D model. Even the seemingly authentic paper strips inside the zoetropes were created digitally, based on the texture of real paper strips.

The audience appears to be looking at historic zoetropes—yet every zoetrope, every paper strip and every movement is the result of an elaborate digital reconstruction.

See how the colouring was done.

THE SAUSAGE RUN is part of my Animated Film Show – an infotainment programme in which I present my award-winning animated films and share insights into their creation.

• Explore my other animated films
• See how I present my films in my Animated Film Show
• Discover my animation workshops