Camille calls; Johane doesn’t pick up: “Hey, it’s me, I need to talk to you, but I don’t know how to start.” But Johane also calls; Camille doesn’t pick up: “When you look at me, I remember that I exist.” Thus goes the central situationship (if we may) of Géraldine Charpentier’s greyscale short film Messages personnels (2024), which is currently playing in the Belgian Competition of the 2025 edition of Anima, the Brussels International Animation Film Festival. Over the film’s 12 minutes, we discover the nature of their relationship primarily through the titular voicemails, accompanied by expressive sequences of the two characters in their own habitats. Can they each give the other what they want?
At Anima, we sat down with the Brussels-based nonbinary animator to talk about the film’s inspirations as drawn from the work of acclaimed US cartoonist Alison Bechdel (whose work makes an illustrated appearance in the short), finding compromises in the artistic process, and ending a queer relationship story on a hopeful note.
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Purple Hour: I’d love to start by asking about the inspirations behind your film, whether stories from yourself or other people, or from other sources.
Géraldine Charpentier: It’s a melting [together] of all the love stories I was happy to live. I was also inspired by Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. I wanted to write a little dyke story in my own city. The last inspiration was a song [“Message personnel”, 1973] by Françoise Hardy, a French singer, and the song says, “If you believe you still love me, don’t think your memories will bother me; run to me.” This song was very inspirational.
The animation style starts with these very strong, bold lines, and then you briefly move into a more painterly style partway through the film. What led to this distinction in styles?
I love to do traditional animation through painting on glass, but it’s a really, really long process, so I wasn’t able to do it in the whole film. I thought maybe I could use this medium for special moments in the film. In the end, I chose only one moment, which is Johane crossing Brussels. And actually, she is asleep [during this sequence], so it’s more of a dreamy moment.
Is the first animation style you don’t work with usually? Do you prefer to work by painting on glass?
The first style is 2D on the computer, on a tablet. This is the easiest way to work because if we make an error in the movement, we can go backward and forward. It’s really nice, and I was used to this process during school. It was faster than doing the entire film with paint. I try to compromise between something that is [more cartoonish], in graphic novels like Bechdel’s, with a slightly bigger line on the silhouette, which is something I like.
I noticed there’s a halftone dot texture to some parts of the animation style, which emulates the physicality of drawing on paper.
I don’t know if you know the printing process of gravure [a type of intaglio printing made by engraving a design onto a metal cylinder, on which ink is then placed]—it’s kind of old, but not that old. In Brussels, there are a lot of people that use this technique for illustrations in comics. I was very inspired by this.
You said you wanted to set the story in your city. Were you thinking about what parts of Brussels to portray—or how to portray it? We see, for instance, one of the train stations.
Most of the film is inside Camille’s flat. It’s almost a huis clos [chamber piece]. It’s an empty Brussels—it’s not the real Brussels because the city has a lot of people here. But we cross Brussels because Johanne lives in the south, Camille lives in the north in Schaerbeek. And Joanne decides to join her in the north, so she crosses Brussels. Actually, the most important thing about the city was the [rainy] weather, and then I focused on the characters and on their emotions.
I think a lot of these moments of both love and frustration between Camille and Johane undoubtedly resonate in a lot of queer relationships, particularly sapphic ones, for instance. Can you talk about the film’s ending, which is inevitably quite calm and hopeful despite the disconnect between the two?
It’s a bit open. If the audience wants to think they become friends, for me, it’s good. If the audience is more enthusiastic to see them be lovers, it’s cool too. The point was to make a story not just about breaking up but the construction of something else, too. I wanted to make something gentle about queer people, to have the diverse representation today of romantic stories and also the diverse representation of queer stories. I wanted something with hope and gentleness because we deserve it.
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