Born and raised in Brooklyn to Italo-American parents of Sicilian origin, veteran animator Lino DiSalvo recounts how his family’s expectation was that one day he would take over the family pizzeria business.

“Who am I to tell my parents no or that I’m going to move to L.A. and be an animator,” he explains. “I spent my adolescent years obeying and doing what any good Italian kid does, which is follow their family legacy, until I turned 18 and then I had a hard talk with my family and said, ‘I don’t want to do this’. That was when I started living my adult life.”

This experience was the spark for DiSalvo’s upcoming film Twisted about Angelina, an 18-year-old girl living in a small town in the Alpine Camonica Valley in Northern Italy, who becomes entangled in her own web of lies and turns to the local folkloric truth-telling figure of the Badalisc for help.

The storyline takes its cue form a Camonica Valley tradition in which a townsperson dresses up as the folkloric horned Badalisc for the Epiphany in early January. He is hunted down and paraded through the streets, before delivering a light-hearted speech digging into gossip and secrets that have kept the community talking across the year.

“In our movie, our take is that town has gotten so sick of everybody’s business being aired, that they banished the Badalisc and he’s living in the woods, doing the best he can in this really crappy caravan,” says DiSalvo.

“Then this 18-year-old girl, who has been telling everybody lies, turns up. She needs his help to fix what she broke. They’re like water and oil. She’s always lying and he can only tell the truth. He wants no part of it, humans ruin his life, but she needs him.”

Beyond the exploration of the greylines around when a lie may be a better course of action than the truth, DiSalvo says the central message is that lying to oneself is never the answer.

“It’s the glue of the whole movie. It’s the thing that we debate in every sequence. Should you always tell the truth? Should you always lie? Obviously, it’s somewhere in the middle, but what is not debatable, and what I want young people to understand, is that sometimes you have to disappoint people, but be true to yourself.”

Longtime Disney animator DiSalvo touched down at the Annecy International Film Festival on Tuesday for a behind the scenes deep dive into the upcoming 3D animated feature and screening of an early scene showing the moment when the young protagonist seeks out the Badalisc in the wood.

DiSalvo spent 17 years at Disney working as an animator on films such as Chicken Little, and then rising to become animation supervisor on Tangled and Head of Animation on the 2013 mega-hit Frozen, which remains the sixth most successful animated movie of all time with a $1.3B worldwide gross.  

He has now set himself the mission of creating an animated movie outside of the U.S. studio system. Lead produced by Emmanuel Jacomet for Mediawan Kids & Family Cinéma, in coproduction with Italian Mediawan subsidiary Palomar, the $15M budget has been pieced together with soft money and theatrical distributor pre-buys, with Sola Media handling international sales.

Dwarf Animation Studio in the French city of Montpellier is leading production with support from Palomar Animation Studios in Bologna. Up to 150 people will be involved in the entire process of making the movie.

DiSalvo has dealt with the challenge of working with a smaller budget by doing deep development to lock the screenplay, animatic and character design before triggering full-scale production, and then streamlining production processes.

“Big studios need to feed the machine: everyone’s getting paid, dollars are going out the window, and it’s ‘Hurry up, hurry up, we need to get it into production’,” says DiSalvo.

“We didn’t trigger anybody until we felt the animatic was in decent shape. Our story team was teensy weensy. We just worked on the animatic and the minute the animatic told us this is a real movie, that’s when we started bringing in the departments.”

“When we triggered somebody, it was real work, not busy work. The studios have this problem now that the overhead is $120 million a year and they need people to be doing something. Our overhead was six people in the beginning.”

“In my experience, the coolest productions were always the ones where the character design and concept art was synched up and looked great right from the beginning. In production you have to do less fixing… the designs work, so you can focus on the acting and subtext and bringing it home.”

The Montreal-based animator also streamlined production, stopping animators from “over-animating” to let the gesture and pose speak for themselves, and reducing the number of “looks” he and the head of animation get on a given shot to three, against the five to six he would habitually have gotten on a Disney production.

“I can’t be nitpicking…  I approach everything from the emotional crescendo of the sequence with the bird’s eye view of these are my three takes on the shot and that if I can get the rest to the standard I need, they will be supported by these three.”

Most the animation is being produced by Dwarf Animation studio in Montpellier, which is overseeing the 3D modelling from asset to final image, while Palomar Animation in Bologna is also working on a 20-minute segment of the film.

Lead producer Jacomet, who previously worked as a production manager on Mark Osborne’s The Little Prince and then took EP credits on Ladybird & Cat Noir Awakening and Playmobil: The Movie, suggests they have taken a guerilla-style filmmaking approach both in the financing and production of the project.

“We travelled for a year to sell this movie. Le Pacte, our French distributor, was the first one to come on board, to trust us at Cartoon Movie,” says Jacomet. “It was the spark, with France Télévisions and Sola Media coming on board shortly after. It was March 2024 and within six months we were doing our first drawings.”

DiSalvo admits to feeling doubts when he pitched up the Cartoon Movie animation co-financing meeting in Bordeaux.

“We were like is this the right place to pitch an all-audience movie with heart? Then everybody lined up after the screening. The Le Pacte deal made the movie real,” he says.

The pair say the production taps into pent-up independent distributor demand for animated features suitable for theatrical release.

“As producers Mediawan Kids & Family, we’ve been nurturing relationships with independent buyers for 10, 12 years, ever since The Little Prince… we service and provide high quality content animation to buyers and distributors that are not able to snatch Illumination’s Minions, or Disney, Pixar type movies,” says Jacomet.

Beyond, France and Italy, where the theatrical release will be handled by Vision Distribution, the film has sold into a slew of territories across Europe and the Middle East, and is now looking to seal Asian territories and North America.

“The beauty of this industry and this type of movie is that in any given year, anywhere in the world, whether it’s in France, in Europe or anywhere, there are few slots during the year where distributors outside of Universal, Disney, Pixar, or Fox can release an animation movie.”