«Flee» is a 2021 Danish adult animated documentary film directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen.
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- Flee is a 2021 Danish adult animated documentary film.
- It was directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen.
- It follows the story of a man under the alias Amin Nawabi, who shares his hidden past of fleeing his country for the first time.
- Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau serve as executive producers and narrators for the English-language dub version.
- The film had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 28, 2021.
- It was released in theaters in the United States on December 3, 2021, by Neon and Participant.
- Flee received unanimous acclaim from film festivals and critics, with critical praise for animation, story, thematic content, subject matter, and LGBT representation.
- The film also incorporates archival film footage of events in Afghanistan from the time Amin fled.
- Various critics found to be the most frequently ranked as one of the best films of the year, and garnered numerous awards, mainly for animated and documentary categories including Best Animated Feature – Independent at 49th Annie Awards.
- The film was selected as the Danish entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
- Actually it received a nomination, along with nominations in the Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature categories.
- It became the first film to be nominated in all three major categories simultaneously.
- In January 2021, it was announced Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau would serve as executive producers on the film, and narrate an English-language dub version of the film.
- The core animation team behind the film consisted of around ten animators and cleanup artists in Denmark, as well as a team of coloring artists in France.
- Each scene would go through a rough pass of animation where the team checked the acting of the characters and the intention.
- Once Poher Rasmussen approved it, the animators would tighten up the drawings in terms of the look of characters.
- The cleanup team would then check for the correct brushwork — meant to seem inky and sketchy as if from a graphic novel to give maturity to the line work — before finally shipping it off to the coloring team to embellish the characters. “It was a pretty big machinery,” noted Ladekjær.
- “Flee” is also the third film to be nominated for Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film after Honeyland (2019) and Collective (2019).
- Actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was blown away by the movie and was asked to join as an executive producer in the movie, but told that due to the limited budget he couldn’t get paid. Coster-Waldau responded they didn’t have to since it wasn’t the reason why he agreed to do it.
- Contrary to popular belief, the movie never uses rotoscoping for Amin, but rather actual hand drawn animation. The footage of his interviews was filmed and used as a reference, but it was never traced according to animation director Kenneth Ladekjær.
- Actors Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau were announced to join the project as executive producers in January 2021 after the movie premiered on Sundance Film Festival. They would also dub Amin (Ahmed) and director Jonas Poher Rassmussen (Coster-Waldau) in the English dub of the movie.
- Official submission of Denmark for the ‘Best International Feature Film’ category of the 94th Academy Awards in 2022.
- Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen initially conceived Flee as a radio production, then a short film, combining live-action and animation, before finally settling on creating it as an animated documentary.
- Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite, listed Flee as one of his favorite films of 2021 calling it “the most moving piece of cinema of the year”.
- It sold 11,709 admissions during its original theatrical run in Denmark.
