Imagine, if you can, an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse directed by John Waters. The manic energy of the gray-suited man-child’s retro-kitsch house-slash-living-toybox would still rule – talking furniture and beehived visitors feel very on-brand for the Pope of Trash – but it would arrive with a more lacerating, NSFW edge. Miss Yvone might be closer to Waters Dreamlander Divine than heteronormative neighborhood sexpot. The King of Cartoons might bring his wares in brown paper wrappers. And instead of the latest installment in the domestic lives of a mouse-sized dinosaur family that lives inside the Playhouse walls, we’d probably get something like Under Covers.
The seven-and-half-minute stop-motion animated short, directed by Michaela Olsen, is framed around a voyeuristic moon peeping into half a dozen bedrooms. We enter each room from an overhead, God’s eye view and find someone asleep, the covers pulled up high and tight. When the blankets are pulled back, our expectations are upturned: a blond head turns out to belong to a dozing dog, a dreaming nun receives oral favors from a fellow sister, a sleeping girl is actually a sack with sewn-on pigtails because the real kid was murdered by one of her siblings. And then the beds themselves are flipped, exposing another layer of boudoir mystery: a mermaid cat asleep next to a feline in a banana peel, a dragon-worm living under the floorboards, two crickets chirping in a matchbox.
Under Covers, which Olsen describes as being about the “sweet, spooky, and salacious secrets of a small town,” began as Sleepcrets, a small pop-up book Olsen made as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. (It also feels like an outgrowth of her thesis film, Fuzzy Insides, which similarly peeks in on the various goings on happening behind closed doors.) It took her about six years to complete Under Covers, and it would feel right at home playing before Waters’ A Dirty Shame or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, two films similarly interested in irreverently peeling back the veneer of sleepy suburbia. It’s fitting, then, that it premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in January as part of the Midnight Shorts program. In the months since that high-profile debut, the film has screened at international festivals, been highlighted as a Vimeo Staff Pick, and been given installation space at the Radical Film Fair, an event held at Kickstarter’s Greenpoint headquarters in September.
Not a bad nine months for Olsen and her film – and, likewise, her partners at Mighty Oak, an animation and design studio based in Carroll Gardens where Olsen is Creative Director. In fact, the success of Under Covers is a kind of microcosm of Mighty Oak’s meteoric growth from a scrappy startup created by two friends four years ago to what is now an in-demand, award-winning firm with a high-octane client list.
Located on the second floor of the former Scotto’s Funeral Home complex on 1st Place and Court Street, above a dentist office and Johnny Karate dojo, you could walk by the building every day and be oblivious to the creativity at work. A table is strewn with a graveyard and barnyard made from cookies and frosting for a Lactaid commercial; a nearby life-size pink teddy bear eyes them hungrily. Cardboard is being fashioned into pieces for a series of Unilever spots. Totes of supplies sit alongside walls of tools, racks of materials, and tchotchkes and elements from previous work, like a set from Under Covers sitting atop a file cabinet. And even after 5 p.m. on a Monday, the space hums: two animators work on a shoot behind a black curtain, while another artist is outside spraypainting a set and CEO Jess Peterson wraps up a client call.
Mighty Oak moved into the space in January from its previous studio in Red Hook, near IKEA. But the business began in Carroll Gardens in 2015, in the unused top floor of Peterson’s building. She started the company with Emily Collins, Mighty Oak’s Head of Production, whom she met and collaborated with while managing communications for the Children’s Museum of the Arts in SoHo. (Collins ran the CMA’s stop-motion department, teaching kids and adults how to animate.) Peterson was doing a lot of brand and design work at the time and Collins had animation experience, but as Peterson tells it, Mighty Oak began “with no portfolio or financing.”
“We asked a lot of questions” when starting out, Peterson says. “Curiosity is something that runs through all of us, and that’s a big part of how you grow. And then community has been really helpful, so that also came into play.”
Community helped lead them to creating an Adult Swim promo for last year’s Aquaman film, a Coke spot advertising the Netflix series Stranger Things, a stop-motion segment for HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, and work for Samsung, Planned Parenthood, General Electric, Etsy, and Airbnb. Mighty Oak’s rapid success and unique visual sensibility – hand-made animations with a “creepy-cute” aesthetic, as Peterson puts it – led them to making Fast Company’s 2019 list of Most Creative People in Business, with Collins, Olsen, and Peterson clocking in at numbers 39-41 (two spots below Michelle Pfeiffer).
But it was curiosity that brought Under Covers into Mighty Oak’s orbit. Olsen joined the company six months in, and soon after she was evicted from her Gowanus studio. (It was in the way of a high-rise development.) Peterson found a corner in that first Carroll Gardens space for Olsen to store some materials, which she brought in trash bags. “I peeked in and it was the Under Covers sets,” Peterson remembers. “And I went, ‘What the hell is this?’ She said it was this short she was working on. I said, ‘Finish it here. We’ll help you produce it. We’re going to take it somewhere.’ It looked so wild.”
Over the next few years, stealing time here and there and ultimately devoting a chunk of money to the project, the film was finally completed. “Client projects were the priority, but Michaela was going to do this either way,” Peterson says.
Mighty Oak eventually partnered with Cartuna, a more film-savvy Brooklyn-based animation studio, to produce Under Covers and get it into festivals. Sundance was the first that accepted it. Ahead of its premiere, the film had some heat, making IndieWire’s list of 10 must-see shorts at the festival. When it screened, Peterson remembers it serving as a kind of “palette cleanser” for what was an otherwise pretty dark Midnight Shorts program. It generated laughs and gasps, even in places that surprised Peterson and Olsen, which helped stoke their enthusiasm for a project they’d devoted so many years working on and watching.
“There are endless possibilities in these illustrative forms of storytelling, [like pop-up books and animation],” Olsen told Vimeo, “and the fact that they’re pigeonholed as ‘for kids only’ makes no sense. Adults should be able to experience play and exploration too.”
Peterson agrees, adding that that sensibility is at the core of how Mighty Oak creates. “We like to ride the line of taking something weird and making it feel accessible,” she says. “We want it to be approachable and accessible to people who don’t usually watch animation. It’s really trying to introduce this level of play and fun to adults in a way that feels it’s for adults.”
Under Covers might have begun as a wild short film project in a Gowanus art studio, but it has taken on a greater life for Olsen and her Mighty Oak partners. The film, which has nearly 100,000 Vimeo views, earned her a spot one Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2019 list, and it has given Mighty Oak a unique calling card. “Clients want to see cool stuff,” Peterson says. “Even if what they want to make is very traditional, they want to see that you’ve been out there creating work and have a point of view. So it was actually pretty important do this piece.”
“The minute this came out, the calls started coming in about optioning this, are you making it a series, what are we doing with this,” she continues. “We tried pushing that for a minute, but we were kind of forcing the issue. We’re partnering with other filmmakers, so there’s a lot of that going on. But in terms of making [another film] from the ground up, I think when it feels right we’re going to get there. I don’t think this will be the last thing we do.”
Under Covers can be viewed online at vimeo.com/350853814. Other clips created by Mighty Oak can be viewed online at www.mightyoakgrows.com/projects.
Credit for all photos: Mighty Oak
