This year’s eclectic Cannes Classics lineup brought 4K restorations of Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” and Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” documentaries about Bruce Dern and Vittorio de Sica, and historian/filmmaker Mark Cousins’ latest installment of “Story of Film.”
Tucked in the lineup alongside shorts from Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke and Iranian photographer Amirhossein Shojaei was a new 15-minute film from Brooklyn mixed media artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin — produced by Darren Aronofsky’s creative studio Primordial Soup, with cinematography from Oscar nominee Matthew Libatique, and starring Paul Rudd and the voice of Chris Rock.
The burstingly creative and joyous “Goodnight Lamby,” which stars Yellin’s daughter Zia as a version of herself who journeys inside one of her father’s sculptures in search of her missing stuffed animal, is produced by Aronofsky with his producing partner Justin A. Gonçalves (“Caught Stealing”).
Ricardo Villavicencio serves as head animator on a project that incorporates live action, photography, collage-like animation, and generative AI using Google Veo 3. Aronofsky has increasingly turned to the technology as a storytelling tool through his collaborations with Google DeepMind. Now, artist Yellin sees it as a natural extension of the “multimodal” storytelling of his own work, specifically the glass sculptural collage Politics of Eternity, which is here reimagined as a sprawling topography. Villavicencio Studio and 100 Zeros also produce the short.
The film even includes an acoustic end credits song by Maggie Rogers.
“I make these sculptures that are very narrative, allegorical, with multimodal story devices with many narratives happening simultaneously, and I’ve always wanted to bring them to life,” Yellin said. “I describe the sculptures as frozen cinema, and so it’s a natural progression. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for years.”
“My interest in that hypothetical scenario was doing a kaleidoscope of aesthetics, and in this case, we got to really dig deep into Dustin’s personal aesthetic for Politics of Eternity… it felt serendipitous from the jump because of that,” Gonçalves added.
Aronofsky has increasingly become one of the vanguard filmmakers most willing to experiment with Gen-AI — sometimes controversially, such as collaborating with Google’s DeepMind AI division on the ill-received “On This Day…1776” portrait of the Revolutionary War. But “Goodnight Lamby” offered a chance to wed these new tools to actual works of art.
That Cannes Classics programmed the film this year alongside repertory screenings of beloved movies as well as documentaries about filmmaking suggests this section (and the festival overall) is looking to embrace new technologies and modes of storytelling alongside the medium’s century-old methods.
Per the animation style, which expands on the worlds of Yellin’s sculptural work to create a vast undersea landscape, Villavicencio said that using Google Veo 3, “we prompt each of the elements to be animated, isolated with a green background, and then we rotoscope and compose everything digitally.”
“When I talked to Darren about bringing my art to life over the last few years, he would [say] story, story, story, story, and I’d be like, world, world, world, because I see visually and I think visually… so the whole time, from when I wrote the thing, he was there coaching me, as was Justin, because they come from the world of movies and I come from the world of making these images,” said Yellin, who called upon Paul Rudd to play a version of him in the film and Chris Rock to voice a talking octopus that guides Zia Yellin on her journey.
Yellin added, “These new tools helped me because I couldn’t really afford it because the imagery is very, very dense and very, very analog that I work from, and it would just take me 10 years to make… This is something I’ve wanted to do, and when I look at my sculptures, they’re frozen cinema, but in my mind’s eye, they’re moving, so I see it, and it’s like a little kid who’s like imagining things. I’m imagining the water moving, and the characters walking, and the clouds moving.”
Obviously, gen-AI films are under scrutiny by artists and audiences alike right now. What’s Yellin’s response to that in turning the technology to realize his vision?
“Generally, you walk into an art fair, you see mostly bad art, right? Good art might be made with stone or metal or acrylic or oil or whatever medium, but really it’s the idea and the vision that’s gonna make it good, and so I think that with these tools you’re gonna see so much garbage, but you also see so much garbage in the analog world, right? The world is made of a lot of bad art,” Yellin said. “It’s like when anyone asks me, ‘What kind of artist are you?’ And they’re like, ‘Do you paint?’ I’m medium agnostic. I’m working across so many different materials… it’s not the what you’re seeing but the how you’re seeing.”
The plan for now is to continue exhibiting “Goodnight Lamby” at festivals with the hope of eventually touring it through museums.
“I think the film allows us to introduce technology to a lot of different communities in the art world, not just film,” Gonçalves added. “I’ll be curious to see how the piece is received alongside the sculpture in those different spaces. I mean, the quality is undeniable, in my opinion… One of the things that I’m most grateful for about this experience is working with an artist like Dustin, who has such a refined eye, but in a lot of ways, it’s a first-time director, so there’s an active discovery alongside his experience that has made the process really unique.”
