Two Bells Productions

Production Notes

This is another short film we have in development, as yet unscripted. It's a super-stylised part-animated part live-action tale of a girl with a wild imagination and a vendetta against most of the people in her life. It's heavily influenced by the awesome Miyazaki films and characters, along with classic Western superhero and vengeance stories.

If there's only one more short film I ever get the chance to make I'd like it to be this one. A cut above the others in both scale and design it would require a much more serious budget than Two Bells' usual restrictions.

About

The protagonist is an ordinary young Japanese woman working in a very ordinary office. She's an outsider, the rest of the women there being British and having very different interests. Sometimes they pick on our protagonist, asking her carry out the worst jobs and rarely including her in social evenings and so on.

She finds a way to escape by imagining herself as a kind of Warrior Princess. After one of the women has said or done something cruel to her the world turns into a Manga animation around her, she grows into a tough warrior and punishes her colleague. Even when she still sees the world unanimated the Manga-influence still seeps through - each of her co-workers taking on characteristics and animation-style sound effects.

This is her world as the film begins.

The story is about a new girl that starts work at the office, she's also an outsider - a quiet, shy, frumpy unpleasant looking girl that people in the office tend to avoid. She's quickly given the identity not of a villain but some sort of sweet but ugly innocent creature by her only kind colleage, our Warrior Princess. These two outsiders begin to befriend one another. But as the friendship develops our Japanese protagonist finds her imagination lacking; unnervingly devoid of her regular escapes into her Manga environment where she gets to be the winner all the time, the heroin.

Ultimately she feels she has to sabotage this new friendship, cutting it off and reigniting herself with the beautiful imaginary world where there's no such thing as ordinary.

Concept Images