When Loving Vincent premiered in 2017, it felt like a groundbreaking achievement: a meticulously crafted film animated with oil painting that showed nothing can replace human artistry. Now, married writer-director duo DK and Hugh Welchman are back with a film even bigger in scope, story and game-changing hand-painted animation. The Peasants (Chłop), Poland’s entry for the 96th Academy Awards, is based on Władysław Reymont’s 1904-1909 Nobel Prize-winning novel of the same name. Tracing a year in the life of the peasants in a Polish village over the four seasons, the film adaptation centers on Jagna, a young artist forced into marrying an old farmer, which leads to unrest in the village.

Letterboxd member Mzkk keeps their review simple: “Proud to be Polish,” they write, alongside five stars, while OwHiMark has something to say about how The Peasants might be shaking up cinema genres themselves: “This is not cottagecore anymore. This is full-time Chłopmania.” Where Loving Vincent mostly dealt with still portraits talking, The Peasants is more ambitious: fights, dances, huge set pieces, lavish costumes, and gorgeous visuals. Unsurprisingly, this huge endeavor proved to be a daunting task. Trevzzzz, who’s been waiting six years for this, sums it up best in their five-star Letterboxd review: “The paintings and animation were incredible and the acting was on point. [Shout out] to all the Ukrainian artists who risked their lives [getting] this film made.”

The Welchmans’ studio, Breakthru Films, has several headquarters in Europe, the most recent of which was in Kyiv. On top of Covid shutdowns for the studio, the Russian invasion came to its door; Hugh and DK immediately moved to help many of their Ukrainian animators and families evacuate and rebuild their lives in neighboring Poland.

After the film’s world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, the Welchmans told us about the fight to get The Peasants made and how what comes next will be even bigger.

Tell us how The Peasants came about after Loving Vincent.
Hugh Welchman: Most people outside of Poland have never heard of this novel. I read it and thought it was a masterpiece; probably the greatest novel ever written about peasants. Peasants are very underrepresented in film and in books. It’s always about either the working classes or the aristocracy or the emerging industrial workers. DK didn’t actually tell me when she gave me the novel that she was interested in adapting it. But as I read it, I felt as if it was a painting. When you read the descriptions, you don’t see real life, you see 19th-century paintings of rural life.

It felt like the perfect challenge after Loving Vincent. Maybe a bit too big a challenge, because we went straight into it and adapting a thousand-page novel is quite complicated. But it was an opportunity to make people aware of the novel, and we actually did a new English translation with Penguin.

HW: We weren’t moving the camera for the hell of it. With the dance sequences, you want to have that dynamic motion and it gives you the energy and romance of it. For the battle we wanted those quick cuts, and that was helped by having many cameras. When it came to painting, we had to rip part of the production line for Loving Vincent and come up with an entirely new one.

In that movie, we were painting twelve frames per second, and each frame took an average of two and a half hours. For The Peasants, it was an average of five hours per frame because of the increased complexity of the style. We had a system that was reminiscent of the classic Disney studio system where the oil painters were doing the key frames every eight frames, so three frames per second. Then we had an intermediate digital painting animation unit doing the in-between frames.

The editing process sets limitations because you realize it takes so long and it costs so much to animate. I’d shoot something I thought was important but then I’d see how long it would take to animate and rethink the whole scene. It made the movie shorter and the narrative tighter. If we had done this purely in live-action, it would have been longer because there would not have been a reason to cut scenes.

DKW: And because of Covid, we actually had to shut down the production twice, first for a couple of weeks then a year. We shot about three quarters of the film, then we started editing and animating. We shot the other quarter of the film the following year, then did more editing and more animation. What it should be is that we shoot the live-action, and we put it all together with the CG animation, the 2D animation, and the visual effects, and then we start painting it.

How did you arrive at the film’s visual style?
DKW: It was organic because the style of the book is realism, it’s a little impressionist, a little romantic, even. I thought it would be interesting to animate the film in the style of the Young Poland painting movement, which was the style of the time the author wrote the novel in. It fits quite nicely.

Was there a particularly challenging sequence to shoot and then translate to the paintings?
HW: The bride dance before the wedding. It was all sorts of levels of difficulty starting with music that had to be composed beforehand. We had the actors singing on set, with the music playing on set, in order to create this whole choreography. That was quite challenging. You also have very detailed costumes in movement. It was tough. Some of our frames took eight hours, so a whole day of people painting one frame of a film.

DKW: But we were also excited because we could see that it looked so beautiful. You never get the same light if you’re doing live-action or digital painting. That’s why people love oil painting, because of the way it subjectively plays with light.

What lessons are you taking into your next project?
HW: We just want to go to bigger canvases each time. Our aim is to do a trilogy, and then I think we’re done.

The next one, also painted animation, is called The Blaze, which is going to be set in Africa 140,000 years ago, at a point where there were only under 10,000 humans on the planet. We were almost extinct. We wanted to tell the story of how humanity almost disappeared and how we survived through that and took over the planet. It’s an epic story. There’s so much you can do with oil painting, because it’s a technology that’s been refined over 500 years. We want to go bigger and wider.