Toilet Life

I was first introduced to animation by Thomas Winding, a Danish legend in storytelling and the arts, who taught animation at the European Film College. There I made a two-minute black-and-white test of what would become Toilet Life. I couldn't let the idea go.

In 1997, I produced a seven-minute version. The film is about a toilet that falls in love with a mirror. The story is set in a bathroom where the objects come alive when no one is watching. The man who owns the toilet keeps hearing strange sounds and thinks he's getting ill. A small tribute to love and joie de vivre. I love anthropomorphism — imagining objects as alive — and often walk around grinning, picturing the secret lives of things around me.

The late Master Fatman voiced the toilet. Jacob Kromann-Andersen was director of photography, Bettina Tvede edited, Martin Peter Jensen did sound, and the music featured Count Basie alongside original compositions by Hans Christian Kock and Steffen Poulsen. The production received support from the Danish Film Workshop, Det Danske Videoværksted, and several other institutions.

The film aired on Danish national television and screened at more than 15 film festivals worldwide, including some where I went and presented the movie: the Children's Film Festival in Odense, the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, and a festival in Montevideo, Uruguay. It won a couple of awards along the way.

One of the joys of making this project was to sit and think through how many frames it takes a toilet to wink in a charming way, and to think about which kind of personality toilet paper can have - for some reason, it ended up being kind of French.