[INTERVIEW] ‘Bunnyhood’ Director, Mansi Maheshwari (Sundance Animator Spotlight Series #1)

In just a few days the Sundance Film Festival will begin in Park City, Utah and one of the most exciting aspects of this festival is the animated shorts category. This year, we have the opportunity to talk to as many of the minds behind these shorts as possible in a series of interviews that begins today. These creative minds are dynamic and exciting and can’t help but make us enthusiastic for the future of the medium.

First up we have animator Mansi Maheshwari. Her short Bunnyhood is part of the Midnight Short Film Program at Sundance and was also won the La Cinef at Cannes in 2024. We asked Mansi how she got started in animation:

“I wanted to have a fashion brand, and if you scan a QR code, you can then go and watch an animated film that I also directed. So I decided that I need to learn how to direct an animated movie, and that’s where I went to NFTS in the UK. And now I’m just making films and I’ve forgotten everything fashion.”

Bunnyhood is a unique short and Mansi talked with us about her inspiration:

“I’ve always struggled with why people lie so much in the world because it spreads so much misinformation. And with news, the state of news right now where you can’t believe anything there’s some information at you and then there’s new information and you really can’t trust anything….”

The film has a special visual style and use of color:

“A lot of times it was just in my head how it looked. Sometimes I just could not see the color in that frame, so I decided not to color it. And a lot of times it was also if we could even have paint in the background because the backgrounds is just one layer. So if we paint the whole thing, maybe the color is gonna come on top of the character because we don’t have too much color on the character. So if they’re running across, then they’re gonna have different parts of the background on them. So sometimes we just decided not to color it all together, so we were just being cheeky with it. Sometimes we put it, sometimes we don’t.”

Once the animation is finished it became time to put together the music and other aspects of the short:

“The music, it was quite hard actually, because sometimes you don’t really know what’s sound and what’s music because it’s going so hand in hand…you don’t really realize where sound is ending and where music is beginning. So it was so hard to direct them separately.”

After finishing Bunnyhood, Mansi shares her exciting moment of the film getting accepted into Sundance:

“I was so happy. It was my birthday and everyone was singing Happy Birthday to me at the same moment as they were telling me that I’ve gotten accepted. I was like, who is calling me? Like, thank you for accepting the film, but who are you? Who is this? They were like, over from Sundance…”

For more of our conversation with Mansi check out the full interview below. If you get a chance to see ‘Bunnyhood’ at the Sundance Film Festival, let us know what you think.