SITTING DOWN WITH… Maja Kjellstad Aanonsen
The first question I asked Maja was if it’s true that she made Watersprite 2023’s ‘Best Film’ alone in her basement. She told me absolutely not, it wasn’t her basement. This week I was very excited to be able to sit down with Maja Kjellstad Aanonsen, not only because her film Death at the Bus Stop is genuinely incredible (I’ve been nice enough to link it here for you to watch), but also because last year’s committee had only amazing things to say about her. And her warmth, humour, and relatability (minus the fact she’s way cooler than me) made her the perfect interviewee.
When I asked Maja how it felt to have won the highest award Watersprite had to offer she described it as her real-life Cinderella moment. ‘I allowed myself to be cocky enough to think that I might have a chance for some sort of animation award’, she laughs, ‘but I won the whole fucking thing!’ Having missed her initial train to Cambridge due to a horrific hangover, she said she was very thankful to have made it on time for her big moment. Other highlights of hers from the festival weekend include meeting one of the key creators of The Muppets, and the after-party ‘underneath the big whale skeleton’ (for context, the Watersprite closing gala takes place in the beautiful Museum of Zoology).
But I wanted to know a bit more about the making of Death at the Bus Stop, Maja’s final year project for her Stop Motion Animation bachelors, filmed in her school basement. Spending countless hours alone in a windowless room in what essentially sounds like a war bunker sounds pretty hellish to me personally, but she told me that’s the fun part. ‘Making the puppets was the worst stage of the process’ she insists. For those that haven’t seen her short film, there are four characters all hand-made by Maja and apparently held together only by copious amounts of hot glue. ‘They were not labours of love’ she tells me, and from hearing about the weeks-long process of creating skeletons from wire and hand sewing tiny clothes for them to wear, I can maybe see why. Luckily for her, setting the film in winter meant she didn’t need to worry about using latex to recreate skin as the characters are mainly bundled up in coats and scarves. The realism of the screenplay and the inescapable awkwardness of the film’s premise are all very human, so the abstract nature of the character’s figures themselves create a unique juxtaposition which clearly resonated with the Watersprite judges. There’s nothing more human than a refusal to interact with anyone on public transport, dead or alive.
So, what were the fun parts of the film-making process? ‘Definitely getting my friends to do the voice acting, those screams at the end of the film are real’. And surprisingly the post-production stage was also one of the most enjoyable. Maja’s love for film stems from her passion for storytelling, and she explains that a lot of the storytelling is curated through the clipping and placing in the final stages. And she’s right. Most of the film’s humour comes from the almost painfully long pauses, and she manages to locate that perfect sweet spot where a lot of the story is told through silence.
When I asked what Maja’s been up to since her impressive festival wins, she was refreshingly honest. She explains that recently she’s felt a bit ‘like a lost in your twenties cliché’ whilst I nod along a tad too enthusiastically. But it doesn’t seem like that from the outside, having only recently returned to her home in Norway after a year interning for a stop-motion studio in Bologna, Italy. Having visited there myself last summer we bonded for a while over our love of an Aperol spritz and a knowledge of the Italian language limited to swear words and, ordering more spritzes. Whilst playing it down as a throw-away gap year, she reveals that she also illustrated an entire children’s book for a Norwegian author while she was there. Having a look at the amazing Quentin Blake-esque illustrations she produced didn’t really help with my personal quarter-life-crisis.
But what now? Having moved into a horrifically expensive apartment in Oslo with some classmates from her film course and a friend’s friend’s brother’s friend’s girlfriend, she describes that directionless feeling initially as getting worse. ‘Getting a day job is awfully hard!’ she tells me, whilst lamenting the need to take a personality test for a job at a supermarket and then not getting a call for an interview (she’s trying not to take it personally). But things are definitely looking up for Maja, as very recently – literally the day of our interview - her and some animator friends were finalising a pitch to open their own stop-motion studio. ‘If the industry doesn’t want us, we want to make the
industry!’ And while I can’t agree that the industry wouldn’t want someone as talented as Maja, I wish her the absolute best of luck with these amazing plans. All of us at Watersprite can’t wait to see what you create.
Written by Lorelei Booth
