What started as a spur-of-the-moment bedtime story for animator John Weldon’s young daughter has been transformed into the Genie-nominated Frank The Wrabbit, a nine-minute National Film Board animated short featuring a philosophizing wrabbit.

Not your average long-eared, puffy-tailed bunny, Frank sees himself as a highly intelligent rabbit with a lima-bean sized brain (rabbit brains are pea-sized) and many deep and philosophical world views.

He lives in a rabbit hole in the center of a carrot patch. All of his worldly needs are satisfied and life is good, which leads him to believe that in a previous life he must have done many heroic deeds.

His sunny outlook is challenged when he awakens one day to find a truck carting away all of what he believed were his carrots. He chases them to the market yelling at the driver, but unfortunately, rabbits don’t make any noise when they yell.

Arriving at the market, Frank jumps onto the pile of carrots and starts chomping until a farmer chases him away. During the pursuit, he comes across the meat section, fully stocked with hanging dead rabbits.

To hide from the farmer, Frank joins his unfortunate friends and plays dead, then a mother and daughter come in and purchase him for dinner.

Lying in a brown paper wrapper on their kitchen counter, a horrified Frank decides to continue playing dead until his lima-bean brain comes up with an escape. The little girl, who believes in magic, wishes on the lucky rabbit’s foot that her mother will allow her to have as a ‘pet,’ at which point Frank leaps up into her arms.

Believing the little girl’s wish brought the dead rabbit back to life, people come from near and far to see the miraculous Frank.

‘I just launched into the story and to my surprise it had a beginning, middle, end and a plot that made sense,’ says Weldon of the film’s genesis. ‘Several years later, with a little, spit and polish, it turned into an actual meaningful tale full of interesting philosophical meaning.’

Produced at the nfb’s Montreal studio by Marcy Page, the $250,000 short was completed around six months ago. It was drawn with thick pencil lines and scanned in a computer. All coloring and painting were done in Photoshop while the sequences and layering were completed in Adobe After Effects.

The backgrounds are made of ‘natural stuff,’ namely bushes and trees, which Weldon photographed and ran through various filters for a more artistic collage look.

Frank The Wrabbit is slightly different from most of Weldon’s other projects in that the computer played a larger role than usual. But like his previous work, it focuses on a consistent theme.

‘The theme in this one is about methods of thought,’ says Weldon. ‘Frank is a pre-scientific thinker, a bit like Plato, and the universe thrusts itself upon him in a way that he has to become a little more scientific in his thinking.’

Weldon has worked on 50 productions at the nfb and directed over a dozen. His 1978 film Special Delivery, codirected by Eunice Macaulay, earned him an Oscar for best animated short.