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Montreal Gazette

Actor Jay Baruchel only too happy to provide all of the voices for Bread Will Walk

Movies And TV By Jay Baruchel didn't need any arm-twisting to agree to lend his voice to the brand-new National Film Board animated short Bread Will Walk. In fact, he was so into this extraordinary 11-minute film that he agreed to do all 10 voices in the short film! 'Number one, it's just gorgeous and wholly unique,' said the former Montrealer in a recent phone interview from his home in Toronto, explaining why he agreed to jump on board the film created by Montreal director Alex Boya. 'I can't explain its look or tone to anybody, which is a rare thing,' said Baruchel, who has appeared in the films Goon, Knocked Up, BlackBerry and Million Dollar Baby. 'It's like nothing meets nothing. I don't know how I would possibly describe what Bread Will Walk is and in 2025 that's a rare special thing to be treasured. There is not one piece of phoney inside of Alex Boya. There isn't a phoney bone in his body. He's as authentic an artist as I've ever worked with and I felt it watching it. When I saw this f---ed up Grimm's Fairy Tale, it reminded me of the scariest stories my mother would read to me as a kid. Then on top of that I really liked what he had to say about the food industrial complex and the inherent predatory nature of free-market capitalism.' Bread Will Walk is kind of a reverse zombie-apocalypse movie. The zombies are peaceful beings made of bread and it's the hungry living who're trying to eat the zombies! It's not The Walking Dead. It's The Walking Bread! Like in any zombie flick worth its salt, the setting is a world on the verge of collapse with a little social critique thrown in for good measure. It's about hunger, nasty food multinationals and a media world gone mad. The basic story is simple: An older sister is on the run with her younger brother who is indeed made of bread. Bread Will Walk is set to have its world premiere on Thursday in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. 'It started off with a dream,' said Boya, on the phone from Cannes. 'I had a dream many many years ago about a man who was faceless, who had a jet turbine on his head instead of a face. In that world you also had a scene where someone pulled my hand, I was trying to get away from this industrial wasteland, and someone held on to my arm and then my whole arm was ripped off. But it wasn't an arm. It was a baguette and there were crumbs everywhere.' It took Boya four years to make the film using paper and 2D animation mixed with digital collages. It's built around 4,000 ink-on-paper hand drawings. Baruchel does 10 different voices in the film, using styles of voice that range from a guy who sounds like an older Louisiana man to someone who sounds like a BBC announcer. He also sings the jazz standard All of Me. 'It appealed to my hubris,' said Baruchel. 'He said: 'Do you want to do the work of 10 people?' And I'm like: 'Yeah! Absolutely I can'.' Doing voice work is old hat for Baruchel. One of his highest-profile roles on the big screen was voicing the character Hiccup Haddock in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, but even that was far from his first experience doing voices in animation. 'I have spent years at a microphone figuring out a way to make my voice suit an animated story,' said Baruchel. 'When I started my career, when I was 12 or 13, I worked at Astral Tech a lot on Ste-Catherine St. near Fort (St.). I would dub French TV shows into English, live action and animated. That was like boot camp for voice recording. So that put me in a good place to do How to Train Your Dragon, which turned into three movies and eight-plus years of a TV series. It is now a place in the world that I am as at home in as anywhere else. 'I'm plus à l'aise in doing a voice because nobody's looking at me and it's devoid of vanity. I'm not worried about my complexion or my hairline or my posture or any of these things. All I'm doing, in a pretty pure way, is just creating with no ego, no sense of personal aesthetics. When you take away a camera, you take away a microscope and any superficiality, which is a necessary evil of being a person who gets makeup put on their face and stands in front of a camera and lights. So it becomes this really pure almost childlike channeling of your imagination.'