Arrested by Marianne Handoko

04 Feb 2016

In Term 4 of 2015, our student Marianne Handoko wrote, animated and voiced the main character of her short film Arrested. What makes this even more remarkable for a girl who turned seven during the term is that Marianne is working through autism. She finds it difficult to control her speech and her body, and writes by pointing out letters one at a time on a letter board.

To make her illustrations she had to first write herself instructions, or else her “rebellious” body would simply draw something other than what she wanted. We were also planning on voicing the characters without her, until two weeks before we began recording we discovered that if Marianne is reading from paper, she can sometimes control her voice. This was revelatory, and resulted in her voicing her own main character, the world-saving Pretty.