Welcome to the whimsical 3D, character-filled world of animator Harry Bhalerao

It’s funny how the gifts we receive as kids can go onto inform hobbies, or even career choices. For Harry Bhalerao his love of animation began this way, first when he received a zoetrope as a present at around nine or ten. After trying out some frame-by-frame animation on the computer at the tender age, he realised stop motion wasn’t for him – “I still don’t have the patience to painstakingly draw every frame,” he jokes today.

Family members have seen a hidden animator in the young Harry (possibly through his love of cartoons as you’ll soon hear), and he was gifted an iPod touch for Christmas when he was 11. Playing around with an app soon after, he then began to “make loads of crappy stop-motion films using Lego people as my armatures,” he recalls. “I really enjoyed the immediacy of animation in straight ahead stop-mo.” This led Harry to realise 3D animation was the route for him, both in artistic expression and the fact it appeased his lack of patience as a young’un. “You can put your ideas down into motion in quick fashion (quick in animation terms is usually glacial to most normal people!)”

Harry went on to study illustration where he honed his character-filled animation style we’ve grown to love, teaching himself Blender during his free time at Arts University Bournemouth. “I was making something new daily, and then semi-daily for about a year,” he explains. “My style just sort of spawned out of that avalanche of trial and error.”

This style is one Harry describes as having a “strong emphasis on tactility, nostalgia and whimsy”. Each of these traits are then brought to life through personality of his characters; often round and squidgy in their 3D form with tiny eyes and wide smiles to evoke a heartwarming sense of cuteness for audiences tuning in (his graduate film brilliantly creates a narrative from the act of picking your nose, for example). It’s a style also driven by Harry’s passion for the illustration and animation community, who have now welcomed the creative with open arms. His graduate film has even been cherry picked by the revered festival Pictoplasma – an accolade the younger Harry, creating those Lego starring early animations on his iPod touch, can certainly be proud of.

INT: Why did you decide to study at Bournemouth and how did you find your time there?

HB: Coming out of school I had really no idea what kind of art I wanted to do, or if it could even be a viable career (the whole starving artist stereotype was deeply ingrained). I chose Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) because I’d heard good things about it as a place to study, and I did a foundation year there which was a big help as I hadn’t even considered (or really heard of) illustration as an option. I enjoyed my time there, and I’m thankful to the great tutors for giving me the freedom to do my own thing – with some nudging in the right direction when I needed it.

INT: If you had to pick a favourite project, which one are you most proud of and why?

HB: It would have to be my final film, Love Nose No Bounds. It was incredibly gratifying to work on from start to finish, and has turned out better than I could have hoped for, in no small part due to the help and support from others in putting it together. Sometimes I look back on old work and cringe a little, but I think this is something I’ll be looking back on fondly in the future.

INT: We’d love to hear more about it! What is the idea behind the narrative of this film? It has a perfect ending!

HB: Thank you! Love Nose No Bounds is a short story of love and loss from the perspective of a tiny spider living in a mysterious cave.

I came up with the idea after fruitlessly wrestling with more complicated narratives for a long time; I just wrote in my notebook that I needed an idea that was simple and silly, and that’s what I came up with in an afternoon with some basic sketches outlining the whole story.

There’s a lot of childish humour with nose picking and bogies, but I think that connects with everyone, no matter their age. It’s a pretty tragic ending now that I think about it, but I like to imagine that our little friend finds a new companion very soon.