Why do we feel compelled to ask women when they are having kids? A lot of people do it in innocent or wholesome ways–your grandmother just wants more tykes crawling around–but the questions come from every which direction. Our culture is designed to pressure women to have children and then berate them for not being good at being a mother. Why are babies the only option? In Ida Melum’s delightful and insightful animated short film, Ovary-Acting, one young woman is confronted by her own eager, excited ovaries. And that’s before the musical number kicks off.
Melum and I began our conversation talking about how strange we thought it was that strangers will ask people about plans of having kids. For some people, it’s a natual question, and they answer with no hesitation, but even the Vice President of the United States wants you to have more kids. Men don’t get asked this at anywhere near the same rate that women do. That constant question was swirling in Melum’s mind, and it inspired her film.
“When you get to your late twenties, people just start asking you when you’re going to have a family,” Melum says. “I met my husband when we were quite young, and I found that a lot of people were asking me similar questions by the time I got to [that age]. Everyone was settling down, and after many awkward, confronting conversations about me having kids, it made me really question if I wanted to have kids because I wanted to have them or if it’s expected of me. According to everyone else, I was behind schedule, and that was before the Norwegian Prime Minister went on television and say that more Norwegian women need to have babies. I realized that I had put an expectation on myself, and I had never really given myself the option to consider something else. What do I even want?
I brought it to my producers, Michelle Brandum and we’ve got Laura Tunbridge, a brilliant writer, who worked on Night of the Living Dread, my previous film. My incredible editor, Lesley Posso, also jumped on board. I had a core group of women spanning mid-20s to late-40s–some who had kids young, some who did not want kids, some who were trying or some whose road to kids looked different. We just poured so much of ourselves and our experiences into this story, and we hope that it resonates with so many different people.”
Ovary centers on Eva, a thirty-something woman who is at her sister’s baby shower when her belly suddenly expands and she gives birth to her own reproductive organs in the form of Ovy, a smiling, encouraging ovary. Can even an ovary learn something about motherhood and societal expectations? Since Ovy is a part of Eva, there is a recognizable connection to Eva, but Melum admits that there is a bit of her in there as well.
“I think all of my characters are a version of me until this point, but that’s why me and Laura collaborate so well since she feels the same,” she says. “Eva is me and I definitely have a side of me that likes to hone in on the logical stuff, but when I see something cute, my Ovy side emerges. I think we tried to tap into both extremes, but I had to admit that Ovy could’ve easily been annoying. In a bad way. I think Sofia Oxenham’s performance really sells it, and her voice is just so endearing. When she came in to record, she really had no filter–she left everything at the door.”
The color palette really draws you in, but the style of animation feels so inviting. We all feel welcome to venture down this road with Eva thanks to the visual storytelling that draws us in.
“When I made Night of the Living Dread, I spent a lot of time experimenting with stop-motion, and it’s a bit psychotic,” Melum says, jokingly. “You decide every single thing even down to what a character’s skin is made out of, and you look at all different types of textures and materials. For instance, Aardman uses clay–that’s their singature look–while Anna Mantzaris uses felt so her puppets are quite fuzzy. I found this t-shirt fabric that I thought was perfect for their skin. It’s soft but not too fuzzy, and we use felt for hair. Our production designer, Svein Erik Okstad, built all the puppets and the sets, so, in terms of color, that was very much him. We wanted it to be very vibrant, and we wanted Eva and Ovy to relate to each other a little bit with their pinkish hair and tone. They are a bit visually connected even though it wasn’t a perfect match.”
Melum blew my mind when she told me that Ovary switches animation styles for the toe-tapping musical number. That’s right! A musical number about a woman’s right to choose in the style of Jim Henson’s iconic creations.
“When we got to the musical number, though, we switched techniques to be live action puppeteering much like The Muppets,” she admits. “They are literally puppets on sticks, so Svein is literally under the table with his cousin, who was our dance choreographer. They were in the most awkward situations holding two sticks each, practicing choreography that they could not see the puppet doing above them as they watched a monitor. It was mad, but I don’t think anyone realized that we switched techniques on them.”
After Eva considers many things and makes her case with Ovy, she makes a decision that is very important to Ovary‘s plight: she goes back into the party. If the script had her leaving entirely, it would miss the point of Eva’s mission. It’s a small detail that makes a bigger impact than one might expect. Once she has the tools so she explain her choice, she can stand in her own confidence. And stand up to granny.
“She’s able to confront that stressful situation head-on, and I think that shows the growth of Eva through this journey,” she says. “Laura did such a brilliant job of balancing everything that we needed to say, but I’ve cpme to learn now that we can always have fun with our films. It only works, though, when we’ve landed the ending. We can be silly all the way through if we get our message across in the end.”
Might we see Ovy again? We could continue having these conversations with like-minded, cutesy organs–there is so much potential for an expansion of this world. We learn more about our relationships with our bodies every day. It could be Big Mouth meets Sesame Street.
“It’s a stage play,” Melum suggests, quickly. “I think there’s so much potential for either a short miniseries or you can have different topics every episode. Testee needs his own episode, and Granny needs to talk about menopause. Her ovary would be floating around with a cane and everything. We could do long form or episodic.”
