Xilam’s Buzzy ‘Lucy Lost’: ‘From Europe, We Can Explore a More Emotionally Driven Form of Family Storytelling’

Premiering in Cannes ahead of its competition slot in Annecy, “Lucy Lost” is something of a passion project for Xilam founder Marc du Pontavice.

Years ago, the French producer acquired the rights to Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel “Listen to the Moon,” which follows a young girl who washes ashore on the Isles of Scilly during the First World War. He spent considerable time developing it as a series but struggled to crack the adaptation, in large part due to its bifurcated structure, which unfolds across two parallel narrative threads.

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The breakthrough came when he handed the book to Olivier Clert.

“Olivier’s key idea was to braid the two narrative strands together,” du Pontavice says. The film now follows a young girl with no memories — and her bold new friend that only she can see.

“That made the characters more active and created a strong bond of friendship, allowing revelations to unfold progressively while building a powerful emotional relationship. It also gave more room for imagination,” he says.

A former head of story at Netflix and a veteran of Sergio Pablos’ “Klaus,” Clert initially joined as a storyboard artist before emerging as the film’s director, as Xilam reshaped the project around his take on the material.

“There was something very classical about it, something timeless,” Clert recalls. “I was motivated by the challenge of working in a more realistic register, but mostly I just wanted to tell a beautiful story.”

Variety spoke with Marc du Pontavice and Olivier Clert ahead of the film’s world premiere.

What originally drew you in?

MDP: What has interested me from the beginning is the power of children’s imagination and their ability to use it for resilience, as a way to overcome difficulty. Sometimes those difficulties are major traumas, as in our story, but even beyond that, children have this grace of imagination that helps them survive growing up in a world that can be very hostile.

What drew you to Olivier?

MDP: Given Olivier’s background, I immediately understood that his experience in major studios had given him a very sophisticated mastery of storytelling — a key quality for directing. And he proved that right away. Olivier storyboarded the entire film himself, which is extraordinary. He alone drew and staged the film’s 1,800 shots. Beyond the technical feat, it shows someone who knew exactly how to tell this story.

How would you describe that vision?

OC: I had spent a lot of time working on English-language productions where everything moves very fast. Here, we had space to introduce the characters slowly, to let the audience get to know them and grow attached to them. The film is an inner journey constantly expressed through the outside world, so we also wanted to bring poetry and imagination into the storytelling rather than simply stringing together dramatic events. That period of introduction was essential, as it gives the audience time to care. And once that attachment is there, everything that happens later becomes much more powerful.

Given its tone and focus, the film feels very much in conversation with Miyazaki.

OC: What appealed to me about this project was the possibility of moving toward something different from “Klaus” or the other films I’d worked on — something that didn’t reproduce the aesthetic of American studios. Miyazaki and Japanese animation are a huge influence. We were trying to stand at the crossroads between the efficiency of American storytelling and the visual poetry and boldness of Japanese animation.

MDP: You have to combine two things that seem contradictory but become very powerful when they nourish one another. On one side, there is delicacy of emotion, precision, fragility in the characters. On the other, you need the conditions for an epic story — a grand adventure driven by imagination. That is where we connect with Miyazaki.

How did you thread that into the film’s visuals?

MDP: We needed a design that conveyed fragility and delicacy. We didn’t want a Japanese anime style, nor an American or typical Franco-French aesthetic. The goal was to create a visual identity that expresses that delicacy through the characters themselves.

OC: From the moment I started storyboarding, I was already adding lighting indications, because light is a powerful narrative tool. Nature and the environment around the characters were essential. They are strongly present in the book and needed to be fully expressed on screen. We use them to support the storytelling. Wind appears in both poetic and dramatic moments, along with shifts in light, sunsets, and so on. Technically, it was a huge challenge because wind is extremely difficult to animate.

What kind of tools did you use?

OC: We used a lot of 2D animation and After Effects for wind. Water was a major element because the story is set on islands and the ocean grows in importance as it progresses. We animated some water in traditional 2D, but we also built a 3D ocean with a 2D rendering style and mapped FX animation onto its surface. We also used fire and other elements to support the storytelling. When I storyboarded the film, I did not fully anticipate how technically demanding it would become, but we pushed to meet those challenges.

How are you positioning the project internationally?

OC: The family animation market is extremely complicated when you’re European, and trying to imitate what Americans or Japanese studios do so well would be a mistake. The dominant genre today is family comedy. Our gamble is to move toward something more dramatic. Stories shouldn’t only be funny and easy — from Europe, we can also explore a more emotionally driven form of family storytelling. The challenge is balancing that ambition with the limited resources available.

MDP: Animation is 27% of the global box office — one out of every four cinema tickets worldwide. There’s no reason Europeans shouldn’t claim their share of that market, but we need to define our own space.

How so?

MDP: By offering more than entertainment. The real question is whether animation can do more than make people laugh — whether it can also make them cry. Children do respond to that.

One of the studio employees brought his seven-year-old daughter to an early screening, and she cried a lot afterward and kept talking about the film for weeks. We all grew up with stories about resilience, stories that dealt with difficult emotions. I still see kids today watching those kinds of films from the ’70s and ’80s, because children want to be emotionally moved – just like adults. Today, we may lean too heavily toward light, playful fare, but there is another path.