They’ve just recently concluded a U.S. tour in support of their newly released, self-titled debut album. Now One EskimO founder and frontman Kristian Leontiou sits down with Uinterview to discuss details of their groundbreaking animation series The Adventures of One EskimO.

For the benefit of our readers what exactly are the Adventures of One EskimO?

One EskimO is the band, first and foremost. This is something we’ve been working on for a few years. We created and album and we wanted to try to create a kind of ambient, filmic, magical sounding album, so to go along with that we wanted something that mirrored that visually. We spent a long time writing these songs, a long time on the music and we wanted to spend an equal amount of time on the visuals. A couple of years ago we went off and did an animation independent from Warner Bros and we won a British Animation Award and that opened up some doors. Warner Bros got involved and they liked where we were headed so they gave us funding to animate our whole album. So we’ve got an animated story to go over our album and that animation is called The Adventures of One EskimO.

You began work on it with a finished album, a written body of songs, but it was always in your head?

Yeah the songs were written first. My background has been music for most of my life and I’ve always been heavily influence by anime, animation and movies in general and I think it was just a case of trying to tie the two together. We were working on such a filmic sounding album that it just made sense to work on the visuals [ourselves] rather than leaving it to some marketing company or just having our faces on a CD. We felt like we were trying to design more than that really, so it’s an album that’s fully animated now.

Did it influence the songwriting into more of a narrative vein?

It’s really weird because usually you write a movie and then you soundtrack it. Or you write a story and then you work out what kind of sounds you want to put to it, but these songs are not written lyrically for the animation. It’s really just what you’re feeling on the day you’re writing the song. Throughout the whole album there are a lot of happy and sad parts, and a lot of light and shade and that’s reflective of just what kind of a day you’re having. The style of music we were aiming for was definitely very specific. We recorded the album as a four-piece band acoustically and added all these filmic and ambient sounds. It’s very delicate, as if its all been chipped away by a little Eskimo, the character that we designed – an album that’s been chipped away in a little igloo. I think the sound of the album and the visuals grew together and influenced each other, but lyrically it was a case of the music first.

The animation was done by Passion Pictures who established themselves doing music videos for the band Gorillaz. How did you end up collaborating with them?

Well the first one was done independently out of our own pocket that we worked on for six or seven months; and this was a friend of mine [Nathan Erasmus] who knew some animators, and I knew some animators, and his company was called Gravy Media. We just kind of battled through it really and it was a case of more and more people just really wanting to get involved in that side of it. That animation world, those people do give a lot, it’s a lot of time. I think it [The Adventures of One EskimO] is twenty-six frames per second. There has been a lot of dedication to it and everyone just feels like they’re in it for the right reasons.

What influences did you draw on from the world of animation? My own background is in film theory and it reminded me very much of the work done by director Hayao Miazaki Studio Ghibli, a little in terms of the look but more in terms of the anthropomorphizing of the environment and the blending of the real world with almost a netherworld of spirits. Was he an influence for you at all?

Yeah, definitely, you’ve hit it totally on the head. That’s most definitely my background. We played the [San Diego] Comic Con Festival recently and that’s where my background is; anime, you said, Spirited Away, and even my age now these are films I watch and stuff I write to as background images. I’m from London and I didn’t just want to do a Japanese animation, I wanted a slight twist on that. So it was kind of anime meets Snoopy was where I was aiming for.

So the story shows us One EskimO’s girlfriend, Little Feather, being kidnapped by The Man in the Top Hat who is like a puppet master. The Top Hat Man visually looks like a captain of industry from the turn of the century, almost like the monopoly man. What does he represent?

Well [the rescue of] Little Feather is just one part of One EskimO’s journey. We tried to write the story so it crosses over…we haven’t tried to write the songs or the animation for any particular audience. Literally it was a case of ‘this is the song I want to write and this is what I want it to look like. But I think there is a lighter side to it that can cross over to any audience and the characters of the animation reflect people in my life. I tried to write them so they could fit into anyone’s life. The Man in the Top Hat is a puppeteer character. For me it was just people in authority pulling strings and One EskimO trying to avoid that and be on his own route. That was where the story came from and it was, like I said, trying to put the story to songs that already existed so w were limited by where the story could go. But I feel that with our animation there are lots of little hidden parts that people can just kind of put themselves to.

In terms of the imagery, the series features a cityscape surrounded by black smoke, there is lava eroding One EskimO’s glacier, and at one point what looks like an atomic bomb goes off. Are you being political?

Well that song ‘Home Time’ [with the bomb going off] was the first animation that we did and at that point we didn’t know how many songs we were going to get animated as this was out of our own pocket again at the time. So it was the case at the time that that song stood independently, and I think lyrically it’s not so much political as saying what we want to say. People ask us [about the album] ‘Is this environmental?’ ‘Is this political?’ and I feel that there are love songs in there and I think whatever kind of lyrics come out of me at the time. At the time I was writing Home Time that came out and became part of that song. The album’s not trying to be environmental, each song just has its own message.

Is this how the album is meant to be experienced in its definitive form?

To be honest, I feel the main way, for me, is for people to see it live. It was nice to have such a strong animation team developing that side of it, but equally we feel that we’ve got a strong band and are developing the live side of it. When the two come together at live shows where we can use our projection, I feel that is definitely where it should be experienced. But secondary, we’re very happy with the sound of the album. We had a chance to rerecord a lot of it over in the States after the tour, so it was nice to get the animation finished and then go back and rerecord the album so now we’ve got two different mixes; one with the animation and one with more of a live feel since we’ve just been out touring.

You recently toured with Tori Amos and she is know as an artist that creates characters out of her music – Scarlet’s Walk, American Doll Posse – was that a connection you found you shared?

My respect for Tori Amos is massive and from the first gig we saw she’s got an amazing band, an amazing crew, and we were lucky to get that. We were lucky that someone picked us and it just really worked well because I think there is a similar style there. We’ve opened for quite a few bands that have been great, but I think that one really worked because the audience was just totally right for us.

What was it like taking the stage at Radio City Music Hall with all the history that venue has?

Well it’s weird you say that. People have asked me ‘What was your favorite moment?’ and for me the oddest one was Radio City. We’d played so many of these amazing venues where people had told us of who had kind of shared these stages with us, and Radio City was the first one where you actually look out at the auditorium and you can really feel it. It was the first one I was stood there thinking that The Beatles have played here, Bob Dyland has played here, and Hendrix had played here. There have been some amazing venues that have been kind of fun to play at, but that one I really felt like I have achieved something here. It was definitely one of my favorite shows on the tour.

So what’s next for you guys?

Well the album just came out [last week] so we’ve just been sat in the van touring. We go back to England in a week or so to tour with Paolo Nutini for a couple of weeks, and then the idea is to come back over here [to the U.S.]. For me, we spent a long time writing the animation and working on it, and then a long time out gigging, and when I’m not gigging I’m itching to get back into a studio and do some writing. I suppose we just carry on doing what we’ve been doing, writing and touring.

Well we really enjoyed the album.

You said you’ve got a background in film, how did you enjoy the animation?

It seemed very dreamy and surreal to me. Like I say, there was all this stuff there that I felt could be political, could be ecological…you’ve got a love story in there. But it didn’t hit you over the head with any of it. It was all there if you wanted to find it. I thought it was very subtle in a lot of ways.

Well that’s what we wanted. Lyrically as well I don’t want people to struggle listening to the album. People have said to me it’s kind of a fun album, and I think well you’re not listening to it is that’s the case. But still it works for people, like you said, that can kind of take what they want from it. It’s nice that people are looking into it because that’s what it’s meant to be. But, also like you said, it’s not just hitting people over the head with it. It’s nice to hear that, you know, because that’s definitely what we worked on and with it being our first animation it’s given me a lot of ideas to move forward with for the next one.

One EskimO’s self-titled debut album is available in stores now. The animated series The Adventures of One EskimO is available through iTunes. Visit www.findlittlefeather.com for further information.

This interview was conducted on behalf of Uinterview.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.