Dorine Leenders

Growing up with an inner imagination that was too wild for the people around her, Dorine Leenders would often flee to Japanese Anime and other fairy tales to help still her hunger for fantasy. Needless to say, she was extremely excited about this year’s Brief and decided to honour her husband’s battle with cancer by using visuals from his first short film, that he cooked up while in recovery.

Divided into 43 frames, “Kitsune”, Japanese for “fox”, tells the story of a mythical fox guided on a journey of self-discovery by a magical star in the sky. He follows the star on an adventure through fields and magical woods filled with levitating fish, ending in front of ruins, where the star reveals itself to be the fox’s higher purpose, finally reconnected to him.

Using the wonderful art of colour, Dorine emphasises the fox’s transformation by having the frames gradually lose a little colour and adding more gold work with every frame. To match the nostalgic part of the Brief, she chose to design an old-Hollywood-style dress, revamped as a two-piece. Inspired by Gisele Bundchen’s 2004 Esquire Polaroid dress, she attached the frames as polaroids into film strips that together show the storyboard of the short film.