If I have a blank piece of paper and I draw a red figure, immediately this brings sounds and shapes to my mind. I tried to make a film in which every component supports the others while giving each other space and stimulating the creation of what's yet to come.

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."

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.

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.

It's a film made in a very radical creative manner. It was possible because we didn't have to pander to capitalism. I think the film is also a humanistic cry for help for animation. It's a film [Boy and the World] with sensitivities completely opposite to what the market wants to sell.

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.

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.