Mushka is an animated short film that follows a young Ukrainian girl, Sarah, who finds and raises a tiger cub, whom she names Mushka, in the 1970s. However, as her Mushka grows, Sarah discovers that it isn't safe anymore, with people planning to kill and sell his body. To protect him, Sarah must take Mushka back deep into the forest where she found him in the hopes that he will learn to live as a wild animal away from people.

Mushka is an original story by legendary animator Andreas Deja, who utilizes hand-drawn 2D animation for the short film. Mushka also features an original theme and song written by Academy Award winner Richard Sherman, another Disney legend. Fabrizio Mancinelli composed music for Mushka based on Sherman's original theme. Mushka stars Helena Aviv Perez, Tanner Beard, Ariel Goldberg, Josh Allen Goldman, and Kelly Hoover.

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Screen Rant spoke with Andreas Deja and Fabrizio Mancinelli at San Diego Comic-Con about their short film Mushka. Deja revealed what inspired the idea of the short, including The Lion King, and how long he has been working on it. Mancinelli discussed their collaboration process and what it is like working with his idols.

Andreas Deja & Fabrizio Mancinelli Interview: Mushka

Screen Rant: I am with Andreas, animation legend, and Fabrizio, who did the score for this beautiful short called Mushka. I absolutely love is the 2D animation. I feel like it's almost a lost art because most of the things we get in animation now are 3D generated. Can you talk to me about preserving the 2D animation and why you wanted this film to be in 2D?

Andreas Deja: Well, I never really left 2D animation. I spent 30 years at Disney as a supervising animator there. And then, being on my own, it being in my DNA, I had to continue doing this kind of art form. There's still room for change and expressing myself differently but I still wanted to draw my own project so-

Fabrizio, talk to me about the music that we hear in this. Where'd you draw the inspiration from?

Fabrizio Mancinelli: So first of all, I wanted to say one thing because we all say short, but it was long. When we started talking, it was 7 minutes. It became 28, so what I [call] it all the time is featurette. Which is not a feature, not a short, it's in the middle. And what I drew my inspiration from, first of all, we have an amazing original song and theme by Richard Sherman of the Sherman Brothers. So those ones, those themes that Richard pulls are instant earworms, something that stays with you. So he dictated already a color together with Andreas's beautiful hand-drawn animation which looks like a beautifully illustrated book from the 1970s where they were drawn by artists in a great way with pastel colors. So I'm like, "How do I top that?"

I have to take that into consideration. So I'm a very instinctual composer and when I saw the images, whatever he communicated, I responded. It was a dialogue between his art, Richard's song, and my music so that it could fit because I'm a tailor, I'm fitting the suit or the dress to this movie. And I feel like there was sometimes the right music, "We need to find the right music."

Richard had found the right theme material. So I had to go in that direction and be a good actor in being myself but replicating a certain kind of style which was not an edgy modern style but it was something that could make it a classic. So that was the goal and I pulled from all my knowledge of orchestral European music. I'm a classically trained European composer and conductor. And so, I pulled from that and trying to speak in the best way and put in the best suit I could onto this film.

Where did the idea for Mushka come from?

Andreas Deja: I guess I started it so I'm to blame for getting it started. So after 30 years at Disney as a supervising animator, it was just time to maybe find my own voice and do my own project and I knew I needed something that I could really get my teeth into. I didn't want to do a 5-minute funny short that was pointless. I wanted to be a storyteller or become a storyteller.

So the whole idea started with me loving animals. And I thought, "What would be an animal that would be fun to animate that you haven't animated yet?" You got some experience with big cats, Lion King and all that research we had done there. Maybe you can bring that to a new level for a tiger which are beautiful animals with all their design and stripes and all that.

Then I thought, "Maybe I can pair this tiger with a girl who raises this tiger cub?" And of course, they bond, become friends, and when the tiger is larger, the girl finds out that there are some bad people around them who want to kill her Mushka, her tiger and sell the dead body because a dead tiger's worth a ton of money.

And then, the only thing she can think of is take him back deep into the forest where she found him as a cub and hopefully, he will stay there and become a wild tiger but maybe things don't go according to plan. But that's all I had, that's not a script or a story, that's just an idea. So what you do then as an animator, you reach out to friends who have more experience with the writing and storytelling.

So my friend Micah is one of those freewheeling all round artists. He does architecture and he paints murals and he writes novels and all of that. And I said, "Maybe you can help me flesh this out," and he did and when I read this screenplay, it was like a novel and I really liked the tone in it. I said, "Okay. It's not necessarily a comedy but I liked the melancholy tone in it." He added characters, he added the grandmother, he added Sarah's father who she never knew, and so... But it became a real world and I wanted to stick to that tone and when we... Kept it.

Did you have already character design in doodles and animation of things that you already wanted to do and the story just followed after the idea in the collaboration?

Andreas Deja: It was wind of simultaneously. As Micah was writing the screenplay, I was doodling and I thought, "What would a tiger look like that I could animate but also a tiger that doesn't talk?" He's a wild animal. When you have an anthropomorphic animal that has a human voice, that's a whole other story because you can give really human expressions. But that's not to say that a wild animal, a wild tiger, doesn't have expressions. They really do.

When they get angry, there's certain things happening in their face and when they are bored, there's also things that happen. So there's a range that I needed to explore. And I remember doing a couple of sheets of drawings, of doodles where I was trying to find out how far can I go with a tiger's expression before it becomes human looking. So you explore that and then you say, "That goes too far. This I can do. This I can't do." Walk that fine line.

Talk to me about your collaboration process and putting this all together, Fabrizio.

Fabrizio Mancinelli: I mean, it was Christmas party at your place in 2012 when he showed the teaser after we had shown a documentary I had scored and said, "And Fabrizio is going to write the score," and I was almost fainting. We keep telling this thing. And for me, it was like I'm getting to work with my idol that has become a friend but still is my idol. I used to watch him in making of, behind the scene content on DVDs in Italy, even with my neighbors and admiring.

So when I met him the first time in 2008 at an event, at the Disney event at El Capitan, and I had just moved here, I met my idol. And that same week, I met Richard Sherman at another event. And I uncovered those pictures some days ago, I'm like, goes, "It starts there." It starts there looking at these people I admire and then getting to know them better. They get to know me not as a fan and he listened to my music so we started working together.

He took a leap of faith, which is very, very rare unless you... What did I have to offer beside my music? Nothing. I know that I was a professional. But in terms of marketing, publicity, I'm a big name? No. I'm not John Williams, I'm not... But he trusted me and Richard trusted me with his theme. They trusted me to write music around Richard Sherman's music. So I think the collaborative process started there. And then, he showed me his reels, mini reels of the film, and I sent him music and we discussed. And then, I even went back to stuff I've written in the beginning at the end because I was like, "Okay. Time has passed."

Andreas Deja: Years had passed.

Fabrizio Mancinelli: And I want to make it better. He said, "Yeah, but it sounds good." I said, "We have this already. Trust me, I can make it better," and usually, I succeeded like the first cue of the opening, there was something that I added that I feel works much better now because you want to build a storytelling arc like he did in his film.

Andreas Deja: I knew that he was the right guy for the job. Well, even early on. And it was confirmed to me personally when you did one of your first pieces, maybe it was the first piece-

Fabrizio Mancinelli: The first montage.

Andreas Deja: We have a montage sequence in the film where we see the girl bonding with a tiger cub and by the end of the montage sequence, he's a real tiger and there's some entertaining bits in there. And so, I animated this first but it had a rhythm to it but no music. And so, usually when you do a piece like that, it is pre-scored.

Fabrizio Mancinelli: Right.

Andreas Deja: You do even a piano track, a beat track first, and then the animator gets it. So then, you can animate your falls or your lifts or your movements based on that rough music and we didn't have that. He got all of the animation first and then he had to imagine or he had to come up with a score that would emphasize all the beats that I had put in and it came back perfect. Like, "How did this even happen?" He wrote this beautiful music but then the tiger falls and the music does this. And then, the tiger jumps and the music does that. And it all works so it couldn't have been anybody else but him doing the score.

Fabrizio Mancinelli: I was very happy in using different musical colors coming from... In that, helped the classical training and background because you know the palette you have at your service. They ask me, "What's your favorite instrument?" I always say, "The orchestra or every instrument." Because like if I say one, why? Why I'm picking up... I'm like, "Every color is different." I like to experiment on this. It was a different kind of experimentation. It was an experimentation on feelings. On other scores, it is an experiment on sound. But on the montage sequence, that was a challenge because I wanted it to sound natural and not made after the fact. So that was the challenge.

Right. Succeeded. Andreas, how long has this story been in your head?

Andreas Deja: Well, I think I started about thinking about it about 11 years ago. There were some breaks throughout the production where I had to put Mushka aside. I had the opportunity to write a book on the old Disney animators who I had met personally and had become friends with. Some of the nine old men. Actually, one of them hired me to the studio. It was Eric Larsson who the film is dedicated to.

He hired me actually into the Disney training program in 1980 and Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnson, Mark Davis, all these magic names. And so, I wrote a book on these people, on these artists about their work, and that took about 10 months. And then, another two breaks where I do some work for the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. So I curated a large exhibition on Mickey Mouse and one on the Jungle Book which just closed earlier this year.