Kid Koala’s Nufonia Must Fall is a multimedia love story for the age of AI
Part puppet show, part film screening, and part concert, the show lets attendees in on its creation
Nufonia Must Fall. Photo by Pierre Borasci
As part of the Performing Arts & Technology Festival, Massey Theatre presents Kid Koala’s Nufonia Must Fall on November 15 at 7:30 pm and November 16 at 4 pm and 7:30 pm
NUFONIA MUST FALL is a live musical performance, but it’s not a concert.
Nufonia Must Fall is a movie, sort of.
Nufonia Must Fall is a puppet show, but it’s much more than that.
Based on Canadian DJ Kid Koala’s 2003 graphic novel of the same title, which came with an accompanying soundtrack CD, Nufonia Must Fall is all of the above. The show tells the story of a robot who falls in love with a human woman while coming to terms with his imminent replacement by a newer model.
Artists have been fascinated by the potential for intimate connections between humans and sentient machines for about as long as people have been able to conceive of things like robots and artificial intelligence. It’s a topic that has been explored by filmmakers from Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) to Spike Jonze (Her, 2013).
With AI becoming a part of our everyday lives, Nufonia’s look at these themes seems even more timely than it did in ’03.
Reached in Montreal, where he’s working on a film score in his studio, Kid Koala tells Stir that his intention has never been to foretell the future. He just thinks robots are really neat.
“They make fun characters to draw and animate and what-have-you,” he says. “But I think story-wise, Nufonia is genuinely an old-fashioned love story, but the character of the robot is dealing with his own obsolescence just because of how fast technology eats itself. You know, the updates and the upgrades and the new model or whatever. So, really, it also addresses the anxiety around that, or even aging or running through your usefulness in a system that keeps getting technologically faster, for a robot. So I was trying to empathize with what that’s like. But I think humans actually feel that type of pressure too, where all of a sudden the world seems to be moving a little too quickly.”
Kid Koala created the stage-and-screen version of Nufonia Must Fall with K.K. Barrett, a Hollywood production designer known for his work with Jonze; Barrett was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Production Design for the aforementioned Her.
Barrett and Kid Koala were fans of each other’s work, and when they met at one of the latter’s shows, they began trying to conceive of a way they could collaborate. The DJ sent Barrett a copy of the Nufonia Must Fall graphic novel, and the wheels started turning.
“In his mind, originally it was two-storey scaffolded sets and live actors, one who was in a full-sized robot suit, and all this stuff,” Kid Koala recalls. “And I was like, ‘This sounds amazing! I would totally pay money to see that.’ But when we were starting to talk about the logistics of doing something on that scale, I realized, like, ‘Oh, he’s speaking in movie-budget terms, and I have indie-music budget.’”
The show took on a more modest, but no less artistically ambitious, form: while puppeteers enact the story in real time, it is filmed and projected onto a screen, with live musical accompaniment by Kid Koala himself on piano and turntables, along with the Afaria String Quartet.
While it may have been the result of logistical necessity, scaling things down certainly worked in the show’s favour, if the rave reviews are any indication. Broadway World called Nufonia Must Fall “amazingly captivating”, while visionary filmmaker Darren Aronofsky described it as “moving, original, and deeply inspiring”.
And it’s never the same performance twice.
“It changes every show,” Kid Koala says with a laugh. “Quite literally. I think our last run, in San Francisco, over the course of five shows we’d added new set pieces and adjusted some of the music to be more punchy in places. We’re constantly sculpting it.”
It takes a cast and crew of 15 to pull off a performance of Nufonia Must Fall. Given its multifaceted form—part puppet show, part film screening, and part concert—this is an artistic endeavour with a lot to keep track of. This, says Kid Koala, took some getting used to.
“When we first started, you might get that ‘Mayday!’ he says. “Or AJ [Korkidakis], who’s our cinematographer, might look over, making big gestures, like ‘The puppets aren’t ready!’ But nowadays, I think we’ve played together as a group for so long that we can look out for those shorthand signs. I can tell by how the robot might be moving on the screen—which is their live performance—how long we might need to give them musically, and I can just kind of slow the piano-playing down, so that we all land at the end of the shot in the right moment. So there’s definitely that live element, that urgency, that makes it fun to perform.”
That also makes it a lot of fun for the audience. Aimed at anyone aged seven or older, Nufonia Must Fall lets attendees watch not just the show itself, but also observe how all the parts come together.
“Technically, there’s a lot happening from a performance standpoint, but from an audience standpoint, hopefully it’s just an enjoyable story,” Kid Koala says. “You have access to how it’s being made, and the end product at the same time. So, if you’re interested, you can look down and see how the puppeteers and musicians are working together to create that moment, but some people enjoy just watching what’s happening on the screen.” 
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