Maya, Give Me a Title

Filmmaker Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004), who commutes between Los Angeles and Paris, is often away from home. Between her third and eighth birthdays, he asked his daughter Maya to suggest titles for cut-out animated shorts he would subsequently create, using only coloured paper, scissors and tape, with Maya always their heroic lead. It doesn’t get much more handmade then this – you can often literally see Michel’s hands on screen, cutting and moving his simple yet lively characters.

With Maya’s permission, her dad has now compiled some of the more than fifty shorts he made for her into his very first feature-length animation, the charming compilation film Maya, Give Me a Title. And following its success (it won the Berlinale youth competition for under-14s), he quickly compiled a second: Maya, Give Me Another Title has since been released in French cinemas.

Maya’s youthful imagination fits perfectly with Michel’s fantastical absurdism. So that, when Maya goes underground to investigate the source of an earthquake, she discovers Michel there – drumming much too loudly. Another time, she goes to ask the King of Belgium to please provide enough fries to soak up the ketchup she spilled, turning all the world’s oceans red. Narrated by actor Pierre Niney, with an adventurous score by Jean-Michel Bernard, and fuelled by the joyful love between parent and child.