In December 1917, two ships collided in Halifax Harbor, causing the largest non-nuclear explosion ever caused by humans. One of the ships was a French freighter, packed to the brim with explosives. The other was a Norwegian merchant steamer sailing empty to pick up World War I relief supplies in New York. When the ships collided with each other, the explosion triggered a tsunami and destroyed almost all structures within a two-mile radius. Some 9,000 people were injured and 1,782 died.
Amid the devastation, one sailor survived with an extraordinary story to tell. After being launched into the air and traveling 1.2 miles, Charles Mayers landed, naked and alive. The story so fascinated Canadian filmmakers Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby that they decided to make it the premise of their latest work, “The Flying Sailor,” which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. “It’s such an incredible story,” Forbis said. “And we thought: Well, what was that trip like for him? The dazzling array of potentials on that trip was what really got us excited.”
Forbis and Tilby’s eight-minute film opens with the sailor strutting down the docks, where he stops for a cigarette. Ships crash and explode, and suddenly he’s airborne, watching in slow motion random moments of his life: walking on the grass as a child, scrubbing the deck of a boat, punching a man in the face, looking at a woman dance “We wanted to get to the depth of life because the memory fragments that we see from the sailor, they’re not deep to us, they’re not really anything very important,” Tilby said. “They are just little fragments that we all have inside of us. And if we die, they’re gone. And that’s why he takes them with him and they are important. Life matters. But death also signals the idea that we are really just a particle. We really are insignificant. So when he lives, it’s a very bleak thing, but it’s alive. We are drawn to these contrasts in all our work: humor, sadness, life and death, the deep and the insignificant.”
Forbis and Tilby, whose previous two animated shorts, “When it dawns” and “Wildlife,” were also lively for the Oscars: She recently spoke to TheWrap via Zoom about returning to the Oscars race, the making of “The Flying Sailor” and the meaning of a lit cigarette.
Congratulations on your third Oscar nomination. You have quite an enviable track record. You make a movie, they nominate you.
Amanda Forbis: So! [Laughs]
Wendy Tilby: It’s easy, really. [Laughs]
How does it feel to be back in the Oscars fold?
Forbis: Well, it feels good. It’s hard to give a detailed description of how you feel because you feel good.
Tilby: We make a movie and we don’t really have any expectations while making it. And this one, we originally thought was going to be even shorter than it was. It just didn’t feel like it would be an Oscar-type movie at all. There’s full frontal male nudity, you never know! [Laughs] So it’s been a nice surprise. It is a very strong field this year of [animated shorts]. And it’s not like it’s an old hat to us because the whole media landscape is something quite different than it was 11 years ago, which was the last time. [we were nominated].
How did you find the story of the sailor who survived the Halifax harbor explosion?
Forbis: We were in Halifax a bunch of years ago, about 20 years ago, and we saw history in a museum. I can’t remember if we knew about the disaster or not, but it was a very moving exhibition that they had and there was a blurb about this sailor. Obviously, everyone is stunned by the story.
Tilby: And really all we knew was: he was there at the docks, although historians have said no, he was on his ship. The gist of what we had read was that he was thrown and found two kilometers away, naked except for one boot. We do not include the boot.
Forbis: That’s the thing. It’s such a terrible event, but there’s something inherently funny about someone landing naked in a rubber boot.
Yes, since he landed alive. I probably wouldn’t have laughed right now if he hadn’t survived.
Tilby: Good. And relatively unscathed. He returned to England and became a riverboat pilot.
He has explained before that the royal sailor was not a stout, middle-aged man, but a slender young man. What made you want to change his physique for your movie?
Forbis: I had a thought at some point, this guy must be middle-aged. In a way, the explosion reminded me of the ravages of middle age, when things come to you that you didn’t anticipate, that you don’t like. And it’s painful. [Laughs] So we liked that. And also, we have all seen ballets with beautiful young people doing beautiful things on stage. And it was much more interesting to have this body somewhat compromised, much more vulnerable, much more imperfect. And then to allow her to have some kind of beauty in this miserable time that she’s going through, to turn the fluttering into a dance. It felt better than having him young and beautiful.
tilby: Well, it was also more fun. That was the line we were trying to walk and we were really conscious of the fact that we didn’t want to seem irreverent or disrespectful of the explosion, or the severity of it. That’s partly why we were sure we wanted the debris, some artifacts from the explosion (a shoe, a pair of glasses, a chair) that’s up there with him. There’s a frying pan: these domestic things that represent lives below that are lost or affected. And we wanted to keep it real that way, but also have a little fun with the sailor.
In a short time, his film balances the specificity of this man on the dock at that moment with the universality of humans’ small, insignificant place in the cosmos. We are nothing but dust. How did you manage that balance?
Tilby: That is the essence of what we were trying to get at. It was related to a previous film we had done called “When the Day Breaks”, which is about those moments when everything changes: the car accident and the pig who witnesses the life of the chicken lying on the road, and changes it to she. That was a starting point for this. I don’t know what our fascination with death is because it seems to come up in our work, but it can tell us more about our lives. We define ourselves, or our lives, as before and after things change. Change our perspective. And in the case of the sailor, her nudity and her near-death experience, that vulnerability, that rebirth, all those kinds of things that in a few seconds, her life is totally different. People who report near-death experiences do report the slowing down of time and watching their life flash before their eyes, these fragments of memories and the transition to a feeling of weightlessness in midair. Bliss.
There is the extraordinary detail of how when the sailor disembarks, his cigarette is still in his mouth, lit. How did you come up with that idea?
Tilby: At the beginning, when he is on the pier, we have very little time to introduce the sailor. We wanted that prologue to be short because the movie really starts off with a bang for us. We wanted that sailor to swagger like he’s confident and a little unwavering. He is the owner of the docks, he is a somewhat weathered and salty sailor. So we thought it was funny that he didn’t panic or get excited. He’s just going to smoke a cigarette and watch the show. Also, the cigarette coincides with the ship’s fire and gives him a [sense of] slight guilt. And then keeping it in your mouth, that’s kind of a joke from, you know, smokers who hold on to that cigarette a lot. But the other thing is the fact that it’s still on and hasn’t burned out at the end is a bit like a clock to remind the viewer that this has only been a few seconds. This has not been a few minutes. That was just a flash.
Forbes: Some people have said, “Well, so you’re giving a mixed message? Because cigarettes kill and he lived!” [Laughs]
