Ervin Han’s parents remember a Singapore that no longer exists. The country is only 61 years removed from independence, and in that single lifetime it has remade itself so thoroughly that whole generations talk about a place their children never saw. Han grew up hearing about that Singapore secondhand, and nearly eight years ago the distance between their country and his began turning into a screenplay.
That screenplay became “The Violinist,” an animated feature Han co-directed with Raúl García, which just had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It follows Fei and Kai, two young violinists who fall for each other while the ground moves beneath them. War comes. Politics upend everything. The relationship bends to both. But nobody in this film stops to explain Singapore. They’re too busy living in it.
Han was deliberate about that. He wanted the film to ask “who we are and where we come from,” but he was realistic about who would be watching. An audience in Toronto or Paris might not buy a ticket for Singaporean history. They might buy one for a love story. And music, unlike history, travels without subtitles. The violin gave him a way to carry viewers across decades and borders without turning the film into homework.
García, a veteran animator, read the script and thought of David Lean: “Doctor Zhivago,” “A Passage to India,” intimate lives dwarfed by events no one inside them can stop. It’s an unlikely touchstone for an animated feature, especially one whose look pulls toward Japan and continental Europe at once. Anime taught the directors economy, how much a face can say with very little. European 2D animation brought elegance and a hand-drawn individuality. García calls the result “Euro-Asian,” about as tidy a label as either of them wants, and a fitting one for a film made across several countries that still feels plainly, specifically Southeast Asian.
And then the violins. Hollywood has spent decades asking audiences to look past actors sawing away at instruments they obviously can’t play. Animation could have skipped the problem altogether, since nobody expects a drawing to know where its fingers go. Han and García decided the drawing should know anyway. A team in Singapore spent 18 months on the violin sequences alone, studying fingering, posture and the way a player’s face shifts mid-phrase, so that a working violinist could watch Fei and Kai perform without wincing. None of those animators played when they started. Han jokes that they still can’t, but they know an awful lot about it now.
All that rigor ends up serving something smaller than the historical canvas suggests. The film cares less about the sweep of an era than about the lives it interrupts, and audiences have felt it. When “The Violinist” premiered at Annecy this summer, it drew a standing ovation, and for the rest of the week García kept getting stopped on the street by strangers who wanted him to know how hard they’d cried. For Han, whose background is in series work, it was the first time an audience had ever applauded something he made. García puts the ambition plainly: “We don’t just make movies to be seen. We make movies to be felt.”
Awards Focus sat down with Han and García in Toronto ahead of the film’s North American premiere to talk about why animation was always the language they imagined this story in, how the medium’s artificiality can open viewers up to deeper emotion, the painstaking work behind every bowstroke, and why, underneath all that history, “The Violinist” is really about learning to let go of the life we planned so we can recognize the one that was meant for us.
Awards Focus: I watched the film and found it incredibly moving. What has it been like emotionally to bring “The Violinist” to TIFF?
Ervin Han: It premiered at Annecy just a couple of months ago, and oh my God, it was quite incredible. For me, it’s something really new because I come from series. We don’t get people applauding after seeing your work. This is our first film. It’s my first film, really. Raúl has a lot more experience in this. But that journey from Annecy, just these two months, feels like a lifetime. It’s been quite overwhelming and emotional, for sure.
Raúl García: When we premiered the film in Annecy, that was the first time we saw the complete, finished film with an audience on a big screen. We were not prepared for the reception. Everybody got really emotional. There was a standing ovation, and throughout the week we kept getting stopped in the streets by people telling us how much they cried and how much they loved the movie.
When these things happen, you feel that you’ve fulfilled your mission as a filmmaker because we don’t just make movies to be seen. We make movies to be felt. When I see a movie and it touches me, I completely forget the behind-the-scenes work. As a filmmaker, you tend to analyze a movie while you’re watching it. The moment a movie gets beyond that technical knowledge and you’re taken by the characters and their emotions, that’s something very special. It doesn’t happen every time.
Han: And I think we’re really looking forward to Thursday here at TIFF. Annecy was obviously an animation audience. Those are our people. But here at TIFF, it’s the first time we’ll see the film with this kind of festival audience. I’m really excited to see how audiences react to the film.
AF: Beyond the obvious budget advantages, why tell this story in animation? Did working in animation make you think about reaching younger viewers, and did that shape your approach?
Han: For sure. Maybe not so much the story itself, but certainly the tone, the overall presentation and how we executed the piece. Raúl and I never really saw animation as an alternative to live action because we’re animation filmmakers. It’s naturally the language in which we imagined the story.
I also think if this film had been made in live action, it would have been much darker and much bleaker, probably not so suitable for younger audiences. For me, there’s a beautiful paradox about animation. Everything you see isn’t real. It’s artificial. But because of that, in some ways you surrender yourself more openly to the emotions of the film.
With animation, you have a different contract with the audience. Particularly for this film, because of the role music plays, I think that role would be very different in live action. Sometimes live action has this burden of realism. I don’t think the music would fulfill the same function that it does in our film if it were made in live action.
García: When you watch animation, there’s a certain suspension of disbelief that doesn’t happen when you watch live action. That’s something we can play with because, in animation, we have to design every single thing you see on screen. That means we can direct the viewer’s attention exactly where we need it.
At the same time, we wanted to tell an intimate story against a sweeping historical background. In live action, we would have been bound by scale, economics and budget. In animation, we could create whatever assets we needed. We took advantage of the medium to tell a story of this scale in this way.
AF: There are three major elements working together: the love story, the violins and music, and the historical context. When you first conceived the film, which of those sparked the story?
Han: When I started writing the script nearly eight years ago, the desire began with wanting to tell a cross-generational story about Singapore. That was really the starting point for me. Singapore is a very young country. It’s only 61 years since independence, but it has changed so much over a single lifetime.
There are people in Singapore, my parents included, who have lived through moments in the nation’s history that are very different from today. It began with that desire to tell a story about who we are and where we come from.
Once that was established, though, it really became the backdrop. The focus is on the emotional story between two characters. Given that it’s a historical period and fairly heavy subject matter, that’s when we wanted music to come in. We knew the film had to be international. People aren’t necessarily interested in Singapore history from the get-go. We needed a universal language, and I think music is the one true international language. Those were the first two elements, and then we started building the story with these different languages.
García: For me, it was that sweeping, epic love story that I thought would be interesting to focus on. In my mind, I always had the cinema of David Lean, where he tells very intimate stories against huge historical events that the characters cannot control.
Having the history of Singapore as the background made the story more real and more interesting because you’re anchoring this story within real historical events. That brings believability to the story we wanted to tell. Obviously, music plays a big part in it as well.
AF: Once you introduce the violin, particularly at the level these characters are supposed to be playing, how did you approach animating those performances so that the finger movements and physicality would hold up even for someone who actually plays the violin?
García: We went to extreme lengths to make it as believable and real as we could. We’re talking about animation, and people have to believe these characters are real, so every detail enhances that idea.
Ervin is a real stickler for historical accuracy, and we felt we had to have that same accuracy with the music. Part of making you believe these characters are real is showing that they can actually play the violin. Personally, it always bothers me in movies when a character plays a musical instrument and they’re not actually hitting the right notes. In this case, we made sure that someone who knows how to play the violin could watch it and see that the fingering is correct.
Han: Animating the violin is very, very difficult because the performance of a violinist involves the entire body. It’s not just the hands and fingers. Even the facial expressions are part of the performance.
We had a team in Singapore that, for 18 months, animated nothing but the violin playing. Even though the production was spread across several countries, we wanted to keep that work very centralized, focused and consistent. None of them played the violin. They still don’t play the violin. [Laughs.] But technically, they know quite a lot about the instrument now. It’s a strange outcome for them, but we’re very happy with the results.
AF: How would you describe the animation style, and how much discussion did the two of you have beforehand about identifying the visual language of the film?
Han: We were looking for a very specific visual language. I don’t know if we can call it a Southeast Asian language. The style certainly has influences from anime, particularly in the emotional clarity and economy of the expressions. But Raúl and I were also very clear that we wanted to incorporate some of the elegance and individuality of traditional European 2D animation.
We weren’t trying to imitate either tradition. We wanted to find somewhere in between that belonged to this particular world. The characters are deliberately fairly simple and elegant, not highly detailed. The more important things are the specific posture and small movements. As long as they’re able to carry the emotion, that’s what matters.
García: We visualized it with a kind of anime style, but it’s not really anime. We tried to keep the intimacy of European animation within a kind of anime grammar in terms of how things are animated.
The more realistic a character design is, the more effort you have to put into animating it in a believable way. That’s why we surrounded the characters with beautiful backgrounds and paid attention to little details, including the violin playing, so everything would feel real and believable.
We arrived at this style that isn’t really anime, isn’t Disney and isn’t really European. It’s almost a Euro-Asian animation style that we stumbled across, and it fit the movie perfectly.
Han: The 2D animation was also a very early decision. We never really wavered from it. I think it lends the film a certain timeless quality, which was necessary given the subject matter and historical aspect.
Sometimes when I see the film, and of course we’ve seen it many times, it almost feels like it could have been made 10 or 20 years ago. I see that as a plus. It feels as though it has lived through a lifetime. It isn’t super modern or contemporary in terms of the animation technology, but I think that gives it its charm as well.
García: I don’t think animated films date as much as live-action films. We played with the stylization of the backgrounds and characters. Even choosing violinists fits the whole visual theme because there’s a certain grace to the way violinists play. There’s something beautiful and very aesthetic about it, and that works really nicely for the film.
AF: Without getting into spoilers, the ending leaves us with some questions about the paths Fei and Kai ultimately take. What did you want audiences to understand about where those characters end up?
Han: This is something I’d rather not impose on audiences. I’ve been asked that question quite a bit. A lot of people get it, but they also have questions.
For me, it comes down to something very simple. Sometimes we think we’re meant to do something or meant to be with someone, but life takes us on a very different path. Sometimes things change overnight. You can feel lost and keep searching for something you long for, but ultimately there are different paths to a life of meaning and happiness. Sometimes you have to learn to let go of something before you find something else that truly belongs to you.