For her novel, Procházková, a writer, humanitarian worker, and award-winning Czech journalist, used her experience as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Chechnya to write a powerful, accessible story about an Afghan family, with multidimensional characters and strong women figures.

“Welcome to Kabul. One family — countless secrets,” reads the opening of the official production notes. It continues: “When Herra, a Czech woman, falls in love with Nazir, an Afghan, she has no inkling of the life that awaits her in post-Taliban Afghanistan, or of the family she is about to join.”

Pavlátová herself adds: “I’ve always been interested in strong women characters and relationships, mostly relationships between men and women. That’s how I’m approaching this film, and that’s how I hope people will see it as well — not as a war story, or a political story, or an exotic story about Afghanistan, but a story about one big family, where people love each other but that doesn’t stop them from making things hard and complicated sometimes.”

Procházková’s book is perfect for this approach, especially since Procházková isn’t reluctant to use dark, wry humor in bizarre daily situations. Still, Pavlátová wants to be careful not to overuse certain animated tricks, like exaggeration or shortcuts, in the story’s funnier moments. “My main goal is to translate the strong emotions from the book to the screen. I want the audience to be so immersed in the beauty of the story that they might even forget they’re watching an animated film. And to do that, you have to be careful about how you use animation in the funny bits. They might work perfectly in a short animated film, but a feature animation is a totally different creature.”

Pavlátová knows what she’s talking about, since not only does she have a history of success with animated shorts — an Oscar nomination in 1993 for words, words, words; a Berlinale Golden Bear in 1995 for Repete; and the Annecy Grand Prix in 2012 for Tram — but she also has experience with live-action feature directing.

Both of her live-action films, Faithless Games (2003) and Night Owls (2008), were critically acclaimed, too, so it seems like an obvious question to ask why she didn’t choose to make My Sunny Maad as a live-action film as well. “People often ask me, ‘why does it have to be animated?’ well, it doesn’t. That’s just the way I decided. Animation is my favorite medium, the world where I feel most comfortable, most my true self. I want to show people you can experience all the same strong emotions you get with a great live-action film in a great animation, too.”

This March, Pavlátová presented her new project at the Cartoon Movie pitching forum in Bordeaux, France, and was pleasantly surprised to find she wasn’t alone: a full one third of the pitched projects were animated features aimed at an adult audience. “It was a big motivator, and it confirmed for me that My Sunny Maad has a place in the contemporary animation world. It’s hard to say how successful our pitch was since you don’t see that until later when the contracts are finally signed, but personally, I feel very positive about the experience. We were approached and contacted by a lot of distribution representatives and potential co-producers who appreciated the emotional power of the project and the personal point of view.”

My Sunny Maad is currently in the financing phase and final phase of preparations. Production should get underway in early 2018, with a finishing date sometime in spring 2020. The film will be a Czech-French co-production between Negativ (Petr Oukropec, Kateřina Černá) and Sacrebleu Productions (Ron Dyens).