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.

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.

We were in another planet and we were reaching for something closer to a fable. It was something fabulous. I started looking at the film as if it happened in another planet and that allowed me even more freedom.

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.

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."

Making a film from the point of view of a young boy's eyes opened the door to another universe with lots of freedom and to explore a new dimension. This was achieved as I started doing things that were close to what exists in a child's universe.

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.