We were breaking away from anything that linked us to this world, but by doing that those ideas remained even stronger. Fables represent the basis for what I wanted to say about human beings.

I feel that joy is the basic emotion of life and of human beings. It's what supports everything. We are here to be happy. We are to enjoy "alegria."

The entire time I was following the feelings experienced by children, so the feeling of not understanding what adults say was very important to put the audience in this frequency to understand the world through his eyes.

We discovered this halfway through the process. When we started making the film there were some lines of dialogue in Portuguese, but we then changed our minds. The film started from very specific issues in the world, in particular Latin America, but halfway through the journey we felt the necessity to have more universal ideas that were not so specific.

That was a very natural process because as I was creating the animatic I added music clips as reference of the kind of music I wanted in the film. These were from musicians like Naná Vasconcelos and Barbatuques, the body percussion group.

A little bit more than 50% of what you see on screen is handcrafted and the other 50% was about emulating these textures on the computer. However, for us, when we were making it, we had to believe it was all handcrafted.

I always told my team, "You have to believe that you are not in front of a computer, but that your canvas is a piece of paper. You have to believe this even if you have a computer in front of you."