Natasha Lyonne is executive producing All Heart, an animated short that marks the latest project from Michael Govier and Will McCormack, the filmmaking duo behind the Oscar-winning short If Anything Happens I Love You.
Asteria, the AI production studio co-founded by Lyonne, is helping back the short and was involved in its production.
The nine-minute animated shorttells the deeply emotional story of a father’s journey to visit a young man with an extraordinary connection to his late daughter.
Combining hand-drawn artistry by illustrator Jimmy Thompson and groundbreaking AI-animation techniques, All Heart is described as an exploration of grief, memory, and the transcendent power of love. The short has already qualified for Academy Award consideration and will begin its official Oscar campaign this season.
The filmmakers said the short integrated custom generative pipelines with traditional hand-drawn designs and storyboards to bring the animation to life. Starting with Thompson’s original art, Asteria trained a custom AI model to help its team of artists create additional production assets in his style. This same technology was then integrated into a traditional animation process for the keyframing and in-betweening part of the production. Traditional editorial, compositing, scoring, and sound mixing followed, enlisting Los-Angeles-based creative talent at each phase of the process.
“After If Anything Happens I Love You, we had a clear vision of wanting to continue telling intimate human stories through animation, and All Heart is the next iteration of this journey,” said Govier and McCormack in a joint statement. “By integrating AI into these films, we’ve not only unlocked more freedom to art direct the animation, but we’ve also been able to bring more of our artistic visions from an idea to a completed short with the amount of time saved.”
The project was produced by Govier and McCormack, along with Kimberly Dennison (Stillwater), Justin Lacob (the Academy Award nominated Ninety-Five Senses), as well as producer Carly Burgess (Sesame Workshop’s Helpsters).
On top of Lyonne, executive producers included Asteria co-founder Bryn Mooser as well as Matthew Cherchio, Benjamin Michel and Nick Confalone.
All Heart is the latest short film produced by Asteria and follows the recently completed ChikaBoom!, directed by C. Craig Patterson and that features the voices of Yara Shahidi, Daveed Diggs, Roy Wood Jr., Tika Sumpter and Lyonne.
If Anything Happens I Love You was a 2D short that told of a mother and father who are grieving the death of their daughter, killed in a school shooting. It was released on Netflix in 2020 and subsequently won an Oscar the following April at the 93rd Academy Awards.
