On another level this film talks about that. We had tremendous freedom while making this film. We never thought about marketing. It wasn't a film made to sell merchandise or products or to reach millions of people around the world. It was a film made to say what I really felt.

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.

Films are born from screenplays and they are guided by words. They are born very limited and there is no space for real creation: graphic creation, pictorial creation, or audiovisual creation. If we really want to use the art of animation with all its strength, we have to rethink the processes by which it's made because the medium is the message.

The film [Boy and the World]gave me the possibility to create a new language. Animation is a very rich medium but hasn't fully been exploited by artists. Often artists are trapped by words.

I tried to exploit such freedom to create those drawings like if I was a boy. I tried to draw with that freedom and that love that I remember from being a child and spending a day drawing without worrying about whether what I'm drawing is real or strange.

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."

"Airgela" is "Alegria" backwards and "Alegria" means "Joy" or "Happiness." This is a fundamental word in this film. It's very important. Symbolically "Alegria" is crucial word in the creation of this project. Although it wasn't present from the beginning, as we were working on the music it became symbolic.