Spike Jonze Finds Inspiration in a Handbag

Cannes Film FestivalA scene from ““Mourir Auprès de Toi.”

CANNES, France –- The directors here are serious of purpose, creating films that take on love, death, social ills, political turmoil, and, in the case of Terrence Malick in his “Tree of Life,” even the origin of the universe itself.

Spike Jonze, meanwhile, made a movie for a handbag.

“Mourir Auprès de Toi,” the short he co-directed that was screened as part of Semaine de la Critique here, involves stop-motion animation with felt characters. They’re the work of Olympia Le-Tan, a Paris handbag designer whose whimsical felt-covered creations are based on the covers of first-edition books.

“I just loved them and loved the world she was making,” Mr. Jonze said in an interview at the Hotel Martinez here the other day. “So I asked if I could have one. And she said yeah, if you want to make a film for it.”

Way to work it, Ms. Le-Tan! Mr. Jonze was game; he enlisted their friend Simon Cahn to co-direct, and the three wrote the story casually, over dinners in Los Angeles and Paris. Ms. Le-Tan and an assistant spent three months painstakingly cutting out some 3,000 felt parts and handed them over to a team of recent art school graduates to do the animation. “Felt is not the easiest thing to animate,” Mr. Jonze noted. “It’s very flimsy.”

The film, set in a bookshop, follows the adventures of a skeleton (off the cover of “Macbeth”) and a damsel (from “Dracula”) who meet cute, across a shelf, and get involved in some high jinks. (It’s French, so there’s sex and death, naturellement.) There are only a few lines of dialogue; Mr. Jonze voices the skeleton.

“We shot a video of ourselves acting it out and then edited that together into a five-minute film just in her office and then gave it to” the animators, he said. (Watch the making-of piece.) Though Ms. Le-Tan said she hoped that the short would increase interest in her handbags, it wasn’t really a marketing tool, nor was it meant for the festival circuit, though, thanks to a zealous producer, it will be screened across Europe in the coming months. Mr. Jonze said, “It was really just for fun because we thought it would look cool.” He came away with an original “Catcher in the Rye” purse and the Dracula bag.

Looking at the heroine on her purse, Ms. Le-Tan added, “I kind of want to rip her hand off and shake it.”