WeAnimate 2025-07-01 | wam#0063

This summer, the highly anticipated film version of the bestselling Lotte & Totte books hits the screen. This film adaptation was produced by Fridthjof Animation, and directed by Mia Fridthjof along with animation director Christian Kuntz. But the distinctive look of the film was created by art director Susanne Bækby Gerges, a key figure in Viborg’s animation community.

For over a decade, Susanne has been creating beautiful concept art and backgrounds, producing commissioned films, and teaching at The Animation Workshop, influencing a generation of students. We recently spoke with Susanne about her history, her philosophy, and the unique world of Lotte & Totte: Min første ven. 

WA: How did you get involved in animation?

SBG: Like everyone else in the industry, I was born with a pencil in my hand, and I’ve always been very fond of drawing. My mother was also a very creative person; she would always paint or draw or play music, and in that sense she was facilitating a very creative childhood for me, so I think that’s where it really started.

I’m from a small town south of Viborg. When I was a teenager in gymnasium, one of my classmates and I shared a passion for animation, particularly Disney animation. I still had the Tarzan bed linen, and a giant poster of the Antz movie on my ceiling, even though we were 16-17 years old. So my friend took me under the arm one day and we went to visit The Animation Workshop. I was ready to skip school and start right away. I think I actually had a phone call with Morten Thorning and he said that I should finish school first.

So I finished gymnasium and I actually started on another bachelor program, for graphic design. And then I realized that I was not going to depict washing detergent or mobile phones for my whole career. I noticed that in the meantime The Animation Workshop actually had become a bachelor program, so I made a huge portfolio and applied and ended up being accepted.

By the time I was finished with my bachelor, I believed that I was going to become a 3D animator who would travel the world and work at the biggest studios in Europe and the USA, but that isn’t what happened.

During my internship in Bangkok, I worked on the short film Escape of the Gingerbread Man, directed by Tod Polson, a former teacher of mine. That is where I first got involved in small-scale film production, where you get to do all the phases from writing to storyboarding to designing… I felt that I had so much influence, and I was so welcomed in the whole production, that I felt like the short film genre really infused into my blood, and I ended up working as a short film director in the following years

 

– Susanne Bækby Gerges

WA: Your company, Drawesome Films, is really focused on animation with a social benefit. Where did that come from?

SBG: My desire to use animation to make the world a better place started with an experience I had in a holiday resort in Denmark. This is a place with swimming pools and rollercoasters; it’s a place for families. I was sitting in the bar one evening, myself and my adult cousins, because the bar isn’t really a place for kids. Then at one of the tables near us, suddenly a father stood up and started hitting his wife, and she fell on the floor. Afterwards he just reached out his hand for a child’s jacket, and took his son, who was maybe 6, by the hand, and walked out.

It’s such a strong moment in my head. In the beginning, I just wanted to put that moment into my showreel or in my portfolio. I wanted to show something that was not entertainment for children, because animation is always perceived and expected to be that way. Originally I just wanted to make that one scene, but I soon realized that I needed to tell the whole story. I started writing a script where I tried to mix imagination and reality from a child’s perspective. Then I got in touch with The Family Center to ask if someone would read my story and tell me whether it was real and authentic, and I got a lot of good feedback. It took me years to finish Skål Viola, but it won the Animation Talent Award in 2013 at the Odense Film Festival.

So that kickstarted my focus. It is in those types of stories that you can really get in touch with strong feelings, not just humor and love and friendship. I thought it was important to tell these types of stories in animation, as well as the other types. There can also be neglect and sorrow and needs that have been forgotten, and I found that really motivating and inspiring.

 

– Susanne Bækby Gerges

WA: How do you manage to balance art direction and educating along with your own commissioned films?

SBG: It’s nice to have these three “products on my shelf”, so that I have different things to offer. I have definitely become a better art director because of my teaching. When I started teaching, I returned to the theory and the foundations of the craft, because I had to explain it to students. Before then I had been working more on an intuitive level, just working for hours until I had the right feel. But once I returned to the books, I realized that there were actually methods. I remembered things that a teacher had once told me, and now I repeat it to my students, and that has really had a positive effect on my own work.

When I teach bachelor students, it’s about passing on the craft and inspiring my students, but it’s also about boosting confidence and helping young people grow. It’s about helping them understand what it means to be a professional: not just earning money for your work, but also how to talk about prices and not to shy away from negotiation. Many young people who enter the industry really carry their heart on their sleeves. It’s inspiring for me, and it’s always a positive feeling to see young hopeful artists growing, but it’s also a tough industry, and artists really have to be robust. My best advice is to find a community, like we have in Viborg. We have a nice ecosystem here with a lot of creators and animators and freelancers and producers, so their work goes around and we can involve each other. I have super collaborations with other creatives here in Arsenalet. We drink a lot of coffee and we look after each other; these people are also my colleagues, even though we are independent companies.

When I work in freelance and entertainment, I work as a background artist and an art director. I have worked as a background painter on the Disney TV series Big Hero 6, and as a lead background painter on LEGO Elves. I have always enjoyed that type of work, and try to deliver as high a quality as possible.

I need to feel proud of my work, I need to achieve quality. I’m actually very competitive; in all my work I try to do the best thing the world has ever seen, within the scope of the budget and timeframe.

 

– Susanne Bækby Gerges

WA: On that note, you are just now wrapping up work as the art director for Lotte & Totte: Min første ven. How did you get involved in that film?

SBG: Ronnie Fridthjof is a film producer in Copenhagen, and his wife Mia Fridthjof is the director of the film and wrote the script. They were really ambitious because they got the rights to produce this IP as a feature film, based on the books, so they looked all over the country for people to work on the project, and finally Christian Kuntz joined them.

I have a handful of people that I really really enjoy working with, and I have a super awesome work energy with Christian Kuntz. He is in Copenhagen, and he does lots of other things, and I do my own things, but when we work together, it is really fruitful. We share the same work ethic and values; our work overlaps well and we give each other constructive feedback, so it always gets better.

So when he needed an art director for Lotte & Totte, I said yes. Together we created a couple of minutes for a 6 minute trailer, and I was surprised at how fast the film was financed – it was just like a year later that we started producing. I think it was last year in early spring, in March, I started doing the first location designs and color keys for the story.

WA: How did you approach creating the aesthetic of the film?

SBG: Mia and Ronnie had been looking for visual inspiration in animated films, and Disney was their reference point, while Christian and I were originally looking more to the books. One of the things they sent was Bambi, which has backgrounds that are very painterly and soft, but every time there is a character who is close to the camera those same character outlines are carried into the background, so you can see outlines on the blades of grass and so on. This technique integrates the flat foreground character animation with a more painted, dimensional background, bringing them together. So that was something that I sought to apply within the painted universe of the film, and it also goes well with this kind of story.

The backgrounds in Lotte & Totte are drawn from methods I have really admired. I tried to make it look like an analogue film, painted with gouache or watercolor or something, but then executed with a digital process. The look really complements the film because it suits the slower development of the story. You could stop the film and just dwell on the background art, seeing all the little details and the light and shadows and colors; you will discover all these little brushstrokes and how the colors blend so well.

WA: Were you influenced by how much people loved the stories as kids?

SBG: I don’t really fuel my energy with worries like that, but I do know that this story is really important to a lot of people.

What I focused on is Mia’s ambition to re-tell and reinvent the Lotte & Totte universe, and explore this slow childhood with these unique special moments that children have. These moments can be emotional or they can be playful or they can be funny or sad… I am so happy that a film like this is going to hit the canvas, because I think there is so much entertainment for young children, but it’s often so fast that they don’t even really get the story or the humor.

 

– Susanne Bækby Gerges

I think in this case we will manage to entertain everyone from 4 to 35; I think everyone will appreciate it.

WA: What have been some of your favorite projects over the years?

SBG: I really enjoyed working on the TV series for Big Hero 6. It really felt like the right place at the right time. I learned so much about creating the correct perspective in an image so you can enhance it to make it more dramatic, and shoot an up or a down-shot, placing boxes and buildings and cities in the distance. I really enjoyed that. And the style was a mix between 101 Dalmations and Tekkonkinkreet, so it was so much fun from an art perspective.

With Lotte & Totte, the producer and director had really high ambitions for the look of the film, and their ambitions were perfect for what I have to offer. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed myself as hard as I did on this film. I loved being able to work this hard on something this scale, and maintain the quality throughout the whole production. I like the responsibility; I like directing and mentoring, giving and getting feedback, working with the theories of animation.

Being an art director allows me to put my own fingerprint on a film. All the introductory steps, from the earliest preproduction: reading Mia’s script and imagining the scenes in my head, experiencing the story and the atmosphere, and then imagining the surroundings where the characters come alive, so the storyboarders have a universe in which to put the cameras. I loved being involved so very early in the development of Lotte & Totte, so I got to produce the color keys as well. The colors are such an important part of setting the mood and the quality of the film, and I really love how they work to support the story of the film.

WA: What inspires you?

SBG: Colors. Colors and great compositions. I just love it when I have a nice shot and I can make the elements fit, and I can create depth and I can create atmosphere, and it all supports this one moment in the story with a specific emotion or action. It is something completely new, a place where no one has ever been before, at a specific time of year… that gets me going.

What I also really enjoy is when I am challenged with a very difficult piece of communication. Sometimes I feel that I’m in too deep, and I can’t figure it out, I’m not smart enough. But it’s only me who can fix it – I’m the only one who can crack the nut, and once I push through to the other side, I can create a concept that is waterproof and the client likes it, whether it be about district heating or collaborating with a doctor to talk about about end-of-life decisions. Those kinds of things can be difficult to talk about, and then how do you visualize it? It makes it interesting.

It feels very natural to me, to make complex information simple, because as a child, when I was trying to explain something to my parents or someone else, I would always tell people ‘You don’t get it? Okay, let me just make a drawing for you’. And that is what I’m really doing now. I think I’ve always been like that, and I’ve always been able to see things in my head before others.

 

– Susanne Bækby Gerges

My focus is always to make complex information accessible to anyone, to normal people. And I’m very normal. I try to see myself as a housewife, and ask myself what I know about district heating and pipes and alternative energy… but I learn in the process. And that’s one of the things that really keeps me going in my company: I always meet the most dedicated people, the most competent people, and they tell me about their challenges and share their knowledge, and I try to take it all on and shape it into a film. That is so satisfying.

WA: What’s in the future?

SBG: I often think about that myself. I have no idea. For many years I have been a bit frustrated, feeling a bit lonely in my business, and feeling like I haven’t found the right situation yet. I’ve seen so many people in the middle of or a bit later in their career, and they were workaholics, and they love animation so much, and they are so dedicated, and they have become their work. But I did not envy their life. It felt lonely too, and very unhealthy.

I have tried to find people to team up with and become partners, but it’s very difficult; it’s like finding the person you want to marry. It takes a lot of consideration, and so far I have not found it, and I have stopped looking. I am married, to my amazing husband, and having one partner in my life is enough. I also had a child really early, so my oldest child and my company were born in the same year. They are twins, and I have given them both my attention, and they have been molded into a life with each other.

It feels very natural to me, to make complex information simple, because as a child, when I was trying to explain something to my parents or someone else, I would always tell people ‘You don’t get it? Okay, let me just make a drawing for you’. And that is what I’m really doing now. I think I’ve always been like that, and I’ve always been able to see things in my head before others.

 

– Susanne Bækby Gerges

I once had to do a visualization of my future at a business course: what is my future in 10 years? And I closed my eyes and pictured the perfect morning. I’m sitting in my house, the sun is bright and overwhelming, coming through the windows. I am walking through my house, and I go to the kitchen, and all my children are sitting there. They are 10 years older than they are now, so they are big teenagers, and my husband is there. And we all have a nice conversation, and I just appreciate listening to them and learning about their opinions and the new lives they are starting. So my visualization about 10 years in the future was about wanting to have a happy and strong family, so I should not be prioritizing my career any more than I am already. In order to make that image come true, I have to give my family all my attention and all my love and all my support while my children are still young.

So I have come to the conclusion that actually this is the perfect setup for me, and I’m not going to change it. I don’t have a lot of influence over the demand, but as long as the demand is there, I’m going to keep saying Yes to teaching. And I’m going to say Yes to art directing  and doing concept art. I’m going to say Yes to directing. And I’m going to say Yes to complicated stories.

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