The Biggest Little Farm  

In 2010, John and Molly Chester, and their dog, left Los Angeles for two hundred acres of exhausted soil an hour north, and spent the next seven years trying to farm it the way nature would. The film has the farm on camera for all of it. What it doesn't have is the version that was in their heads before they started.

So we drew it: the two of them riding a pig through the orchard, every animal they’d ever wanted crowded in around them, and abundance of food, all working in perfect harmony with nature. It's meant to be too good to be true — the storybook farm, the dream before the first failed crop — because the film is about what happens when fantasy and reality don’t match.

Before getting started I spent time on the farm with John, getting to know the place and people. You can't draw someone's fantasy of a place until you understand what actually makes it work.

92 min · 4 min of animation · 2019