During one of the many confrontations at the heart of this visually rich and vibrant organic world, a white blood cell takes a virus prisoner. As the virus sets off to return him to his base, these two opposites embark on an adventure reminiscent of a certain romantic duet written by Shakespeare.
Will these two mortal enemies manage to choose between their budding love and their sense of duty?
Directed by Claire Alberny, Tess Benedetti, Simon Brejoux, Lucie Gonzalez, Carla Kaddam, Jonah Montier, Justin Phillips, Nolwenn Queval and Gibril Siline, with music by Adèle Chavy and voices by Nesrine Tkitek and Jonah Montier, Inner follows in the footsteps of series such as Once Upon a Time in Life , transforming the inside of the human body into the stage for the greatest stories.
To find out more about the secrets behind the making of this project, we invite you to go behind the scenes with the team.
Opening up to others
Through this story of a confrontation between viruses and white blood cells, the Inner team wanted to convey a message of tolerance and openness. “We chose to make this film to encourage viewers to learn to accept others, despite our differences in culture and appearance. By plunging into the human body, we were able to distance ourselves from our subject, but also to treat it as a whole through an original and metaphorical universe.”
It’s a metaphor that builds throughout the film, right up to its happy, hope-filled conclusion.
Writing the images
Even so, constructing such a fable requires a great deal of writing, to get to the heart of the matter without skimping on the elements needed to understand the plot.
In a film with no dialogue, everything must be conveyed through images, and the construction of this visual narrative was a long process, rich in exchanges between the team and the teachers.
The students also used detailed character profiles to define the profiles of the two protagonists and to fine-tune the development of their relationship. It’s a story that unfolds little by little, through the eyes and adventures of our two contrasting heroes.
Diving into the infinitely small
To bring their world to life, the Inner team drew on many elements of science fiction. A world whose inspirations can also be found in video games, with influences from both No Man’s Sky and Starcraft, both in the environments and in the design of the various elements of the project.
The slender, sharp shapes of viruses are matched by the gentle curves of globules. The greenish and violet colours of the viruses are matched by the white and pink hues of the globules, reinforcing the opposition between the two camps.
But the link between the two worlds is subtly woven through the two protagonists, who at first glance are complete opposites, but whose appearance and big, expressive eyes already herald their ability to share common emotions.
“Building this universe from A to Z was one of the biggest challenges of the film,” the team recalls.
Of course, we’d done a lot of work on pre-production and concept art, but it was a different story when we had to turn that into 3D environments. That said, having this solid base is also what enabled us to achieve such a result.”
Eternal history
“Our film was primarily aimed at young people,” concludes the team, “but through the richness of our sets, the work we put into our designs, and this poetic story inhabited by a pair of touching characters that we thought would be universal, we hope to reach a much wider audience.
Our film is based on a simple moral, but it is also through this simplicity that we have been able to emphasise the transmission of emotions”.
Check out Inner , ESMA’s 2024 graduation film, now available in full: