BENDAZZI, Giannalberto. Animation - A World History. Volume 3,.Contemporary times

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ANIMATION: A WORLD HISTORY, VOLUME III A continuation of 1994’s groundbreaking Cartoons, Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Animation: A World History is the largest, deepest, most comprehensive text of its kind, based on the idea that animation is an art form that deserves its own place in scholarship. Bendazzi delves beyond just Disney, offering readers glimpses into the animation of Russia, Africa, Latin America, and other often-neglected areas and introducing over fifty previously undiscovered artists. Full of firsthand, never-before-investigated, and elsewhere-unavailable information, Animation: A World History encompasses the history of animation production on every continent over the span of three centuries. Features include: • • • •

Over 200 high-quality head shots and film stills to add visual reference to your research Detailed information on hundreds of never-before-researched animators and films Coverage of animation from more than ninety countries and every major region of the world Chronological and geographical organization for quick access to the information you’re looking for

Volume III catches you up to speed on the state of animation from 1991 to the present. Although characterized by such trends as economic globalization, the expansion of television series, emerging markets in countries like China and India, and the consolidation of elitist auteur animation, the story of contemporary animation is still open to interpretation. With an abundance of firsthand research and topics ranging from Nickelodeon and Pixar to modern Estonian animation, this book is the most complete record of modern animation on the market and is essential reading for all serious students of animation history. A former professor at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore and the Università degli Studi of Milan, Italian-born Giannalberto Bendazzi has been thoroughly investigating the history of animation for more than forty years. A founding member of the Society for Animation Studies, he authored or edited various classics in a number of languages, and has lectured extensively on every continent.

‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is a highly gifted historian, scholar, observer, teacher, and most of all, lover of animation in all of its many forms. His painstaking and detailed research, as well as his social and cultural observations about the various times during which many animated pieces were produced, give his writing an authenticity rarely seen in other books on the subject. I cannot think of anything better than to curl up with one of his books and have him tell me the world history of the animation medium I love.’ Eric Goldberg, Animator and Director, Walt Disney Animation Studios ‘Giannalberto Bendazzi’s book gives us the complete overview of how the art of animation developed around the world in the last one hundred years. It is a book global in scope for an art form now global in appeal and being created around the world. This work is an essential addition to the library of any serious scholar of cinema.’ Tom Sito, Chair of Animation, University of Southern California ‘A staple of any animation library, this encyclopedic book covers the far reaches of production worldwide, throughout history. It is an incredible resource from one of the animation world’s leading scholars.’ Maureen Furniss, Director of the Program in Experimental Animation at CalArts ‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is one of the world’s finest historians and scholars of the art of animation. We are indeed fortunate that his thorough research, cogent perceptions, and eloquent writing is now in this ... acclaimed masterly tome on world animation.’ John Canemaker, Oscar winning independent Animator, Animation Historian, Author, and Professor ‘I feel that one looks into Giannalberto Bendazzi’s exhaustive book as one does into a mirror – it is the whole history of the animated film and all its creators... In taking up such a grand endeavor, Bendazzi has shown a determination, a predisposition, and above all, a talent comparable to that of the finest filmmakers... With this talent Giannalberto Bendazzi gives meaning to our work. To our creativity and volition, to both the ability to withstand hard work and the temperamental nature of a creative spirit, to study, to our artistic caprices, to accuracy, and to our eccentricities, creative perfection and human imperfection, expectations and improvisations, passions and doubts, successes and failures... This is a book that has long been anticipated by professionals and enthusiasts of animation from all over the world.’ Jerzy Kucia, Director, Poland ‘Giannalberto Bendazzi is the greatest animation historian I have ever met.’ Priit Pärn, Director, Estonia ‘I am extremely proud that Giannalberto Bendazzi, at the beginning of my career, was my first official biographer. And I like to believe that I was the flame that led him to become one of the world's top experts in the field of animation.’ Bruno Bozzetto, Director, Italy ‘I don’t know any historian of animation more reliable than Giannalberto Bendazzi.’ Yamamura Koji, Director, Japan ‘I have been anxiously waiting for this sum total on animation... Giannalberto Bendazzi monitored, saw, and noted everything and met everyone in the world of my beloved profession – and for so long, way before it was fashionable. Wherever I went – to both festivals and meetings throughout continents – he was there. Welcome to the monumental book that takes into account a great art and the whole planet.’ Michel Ocelot, Director, France

ANIMATION: A WORLD HISTORY Volume III: Contemporary Times

Giannalberto Bendazzi

First published in paperback 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 First published in 2016 CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300 Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742 CRC Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016, 2017 Giannalberto Bendazzi This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material reproduced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to publish in this form has not been obtained. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged please write and let us know so we may rectify in any future reprint. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, please access www.copyright.com (http://www.copyright.com/) or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users. For organizations that have been granted a photocopy license by the CCC, a separate system of payment has been arranged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A calalog record for this title has been requested. ISBN: 978-1-138-85482-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-03533-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72074-6 (ebk) ISBN: 978-1-138-94307-0 (hbk pack) ISBN: 978-1-138-03534-8 (pbk pack) Typeset in Baskerville and Optima by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

The Sixth Period

1

The Sixth Period, since 1991, features economic globalization, the expansion of television series, developments in such countries as Japan, Korea, China, and India, and the consolidation of elitist auteur animation. But it is impossible to write history while it is in the making. So we’ll leave this period, its contributions, and its legacy open to interpretation as we explore these ‘Contemporary Times (1991–2015)’.  1 Contemporary Times The Last Days of the Wall An Animation Notebook  2 North America

3 3 4 5

Is TV an Art Too? 5 Animation Followed 5 Sub-Period 1: The Beginning, 1989–19986 Mike Judge7 Nickelodeon’s Double Humour 7 A Matter of Style 8 The Extremist 9 Sub-Period 2: 1999–2009 9 Authors’ Work10 Animated Channels 10 Limited Disney 10 Renaissance in Disney Features 11 The Mantle of Walt 12 Working on Dreams 13 Pixar: Character Animation in the Digital Era14 Before Pixar14 From Toy Story to Disney 15 The Pixar Touch 16

Computer Animation 17 What It Looked Like 17 Storytelling18 18 CGI and Feature Films Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Mike Johnson 25 Tim Burton 26 27 Henry Selick Mike Johnson 30 The Independents 30 Outside Animation 31 31 Duration: Long Form Duration: Time and Space 34 Performance Catharsis 35 Documentary36 37 New Yorkers Out There39 Digital Pulp41 42 Women in the Limelight Vibeke Sorensen 42 Deanna Morse46 Joanna Priestley 46 Maureen Selwood 48 The Soloists 48 Bill Plympton 48 Igor Kovalyov 51 Canada54 Steven Woloshen 60 Normand Roger60 Wendy, Amanda, and the Others 62 Jacques Drouin 63 The Evolution of Pierre Hébert 64  3 Europe Great Britain: The Wonderful Years Channel 4 Animation

68 68 69

vi  Contents

Animation Meets Video Art 80 Londoners87 In Manchester 90 In Cardiff 90 Scotland90 Ireland90 Studios91 Independents94 France97 The Feature Film 97 Animation and Comic Strips 98 3D and Infography 100 TV Series 102 102 The Short Film That Famous Touch 105 Michel Ocelot 105 Florence Miailhe 106 Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli108 Borislav Šajtinac 108 Belgium109 Luxemburg111 The Netherlands 111 Rosto114 Michael Dudok de Wit 114 Germany after Reunification 116 The German Colleges: Where the Art of Animated Film Began 117 The Renewal of the Abstract Animated Film117 Underground, Subversion, and Animation117 Reduction118 Reflection and Narrative 119 The Art of Puppet Animation 120 Winning Students 121 Humourous Germany? Animated Movie Theatre Productions 121 New Form of 3D-Rendered Computer Animations 122 Bärbel Neubauer 122 Austria125 Switzerland126 Georges Schwizgebel 126 A Case of Form 127 Other Animators 127

Denmark129 Sweden131 Magnus Carlsson 131 Norway132 Finland135 Iceland136 The Invasion of the Elves 137 Estonia137 Priit Pärn140 Latvia144 Lithuania147 Belarus148 Poland150 Piotr Dumała 152 Jerzy Kucia154 Czech Republic 156 Michaela Pavlátová 156 Jirˇí Barta158 Jan Balej158 Pavel Koutský 159 Vlasta Pospišílová 160 Aurel Klimt160 160 Other Czech Artists Slovakia161 Hungary162 Slovenia165 Croatia166 167 Joško Marušic Serbia168 168 Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria169 Romania170 Cyprus171 Ukraine172 Georgia173 Armenia174 Robert Sahakyants 175 Azerbaijan176 Greece177 Yiorgos Sifianos 178 Albania178 Italy179 The Neo-Pictorial Current 180 Spain185 The New Era 186 The Turning Point 186

Contents  vii

TV Series 188 Shorts188 Portugal188 Russia191 History of the 1990s 191 History of the 2000s 192 Economy193 A Look Back, in Anger 194 Tatarsky and Pilot, the Greatest Adventure194 Producers: The New Class 197 Prokhorov, from Science to Children’s Films199 Directors200 More About It 1 210 More About It 2 213  4 Asia

214

Japan, Asiatic Giant 214 214 A Lost Decade? Studio Ghibli 215 Takahata Isao216 Miyazaki Hayao219 More Animation Studios 222 Kawaii227 Dezaki228 Rintarô229 Oshii Mamoru 229 Kon Satoshi 230 231 Otomo Katsuhiro Kawamori Shoji231 Kawajiri Yoshiaki 232 Morimoto Koji232 A New Kind of Serial 233 Satellite Channels 234 The Main Directors of New Serial Animation 235 237 Internet and CG Anime Visual Art, Anime, and Manga 238 Murakami Takashi 238 Tabaimo238 Ishida Takashi 238 The Superflat World 239 Independent Animation 239 More Independent Animators 243 Conclusions247

Challenges248 Israel248 Israeli – American Tatia Rosenthal 253 Turkey253 Arabian Middle East 255 Palestine255 Jordan255 Syria256 Lebanon258 Iraq258 Kuwait259 Saudi Arabia 259 Bahrain260 Qatar260 Emirates – Dubai 260 Oman261 Yemen261 Iran261 Kazakhstan262 Zhaken Danenov, the Master 263 Younger Kazakhs 263 Uzbekistan263 Kyrgyzstan264 New Period, New Horizons 265 Tajikistan265 Bakhtier Kakharov 266 Turkmenistan266 Mongolia266 South Korea268 China270 Short Chinese Animation1990–2000 271 Investment and a New Mainstream 271 Animation Studios 273 Taiwan274 Taiwan Independent 274 Hong Kong276 India278 Nepal281 Southeast Asia281 Vietnam282 Thailand282 Malaysia283 Singapore284 Indonesia286 The Philippines 287 More About It 3 288

viii  Contents

 5 Africa

291

Morocco291 Algeria291 Tunisia291 Libya292 Egypt292 Mali293 Niger293 Sudan294 Ethiopia295 Senegal296 Ivory Coast296 Ghana296 Benin297 Burkina Faso297 Nigeria298 Cameroon300 Kenya300 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 302 Mozambique302 Madagascar302 Zimbabwe303 The JAAG Group 305 South African Republic 305 Frame-by-Frame Animation Studios305 Klaybow Films306 Lindsay van Blerk and XYZoo 307 Triggerfish Studios 307 Commercial Studios 309 William Kentridge 309  6 Latin America

311

Mexico311 Feature Films312 Cuba313 English-Speaking Caribbean Area 313

Jamaica313 Saint Lucia314 Barbados314 Trinidad and Tobago 314 Guatemala315 Honduras315 El Salvador 315 Costa Rica315 Panama316 Colombia317 Venezuela318 Ecuador319 Peru319 Brazil320 Bolivia323 Paraguay324 Chile325 Argentina326 Features326 Short Films328 Appearance of Schools 328 Uruguay329  7 Oceania

331

Australia331 Volumetric Leunig 332 Death Becomes Him 332 Adam Elliot 333 Anthony Lucas334 And Many More 335 336 New Zealand  8 Issues

339

Music Videos 339 Stereoscopy343 The Audience’s Literacy 344 Optical Perception and Film Language344 Machinima, Real-Time Animation 346

Contributors and Collaborators

Supervising Collaborators Cinzia Bottini and Paolo Parmiggiani

Contributors Fabia Abati, Midhat Ajanovic, Ricardo Arce, Rolf Bächler, Laura Buono, Stefania Carini, Alessandro Cavaleri, Joe Chang, Camilo Cogua, Olivier Cotte, Rolando José Rodríguez De León, Janeann Dill, David Ehrlich, Raúl Rivera Escobar, Dizseri Eszter, Shoyista Ganikhanova, Mohamed Ghazala, Silvano Ghiringhelli, George Griffin, Francesca Guatteri, Mikhail Gurevich, Orosz Anna Ida, Marcel Jean, Corinne Jenart, Heikki Jokinen, Mariam Kandelaki, Annemette Karpen, Antonina Karpilova, Elena Kasavina, John Lent, Marcos Magalhães, Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato, Philippe Moins, Hassan Muthalib, Ebele Okoye, Tsvika Oren, Irena Paulus, Marco Pellitteri, Valentina Pezzi, Francesca Pirotta, Igor Prassel, Liliana de la Quintana, Maddalena

Ramolini, Thomas Renoldner, Alberto Rigoni, Emilio de la Rosa, Federico Rossin, Giovanni Russo, Jaan Ruus, Shanaz Shapurjee Hampson, Elena Shupik, Charles Solomon, Vibeke Sorensen, Gunnar Strøm, Enis Tahsin Özgür, Ieva Viese, Hans Walther, Ulrich Wegenast, Jumana Al-Yasiri, and Ran Zhang.

Columnists Gianluca Aicardi, Anna Antonini, Marianna Aslanyan, Marianna Busacca, Adam De Beer, Nobuaki Doi, Sara Fumagalli, Maureen Furniss, Dina Goder, Tommaso Iannini, George Khoury, Clare Kitson, Jónas Knútsson, Mihai Mitrica˘, Michela Morselli, Tsvetomira Nikolova, C. Jay Shih, Georges Sifianos, Gulbara Tolomushova, and Paul Wells.

Editors Ray Kosarin and Andrew Osmond

THE SIXTH PERIOD

The Sixth Period, since 1991, features economic globalization, the expansion of television series, developments in such countries as Japan, Korea, China, and India, and the consolidation of elitist auteur animation. But it is impossible to write history while it is in the making. So we’ll leave this period, its contributions, and its legacy open to interpretation as we explore these ‘Contemporary Times (1991–2015)’.

1

CONTEMPORARY TIMES

The Last Days of the Wall ‘This Government has decided to grant its citizens the permanent right to travel abroad,’ said Günter Schabowski, spokesman of the new government of the German Democratic Republic. ‘And how?’ asked Riccardo Ehrmann, an Italian journalist. ‘Permanent expatriation can be done via any frontier station between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany.’ ‘Is this decree in force for West Berlin, too?’ ‘. . . Yes, yes.’ ‘Since when?’ ‘Uh . . . as far as I know, it comes into force, well . . . ab sofort.’ It was the beginning of the end. Ab sofort means ‘straightaway’ in German. The live broadcast press conference ended with these words at 7:01 p.m. Straightaway, tens of thousands of East Berliners rushed to the crossings to go west and massed there until the East border guards, who had watched TV in their turn and hadn’t received any official instruction, opened the gates wide and restricted themselves to directing traffic. It was 9 November  1989. The border was actually supposed to open the next day, but nobody had briefed Schabowski. A  blunder by the over-efficient Communist Party triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between 1989 and 1991, the Eastern European satellite countries abandoned Communist rule and the Soviet protectorate. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania broke from the Soviet Union itself, which had included them since the Second World War. On 24 August 1991 the Ukraine left the Soviet Union and declared its independence. Moldova, Tajikistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Byelorussia (later Belarus), Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan followed. By

the end of the year the Cold War was definitely over. Only the division between North and South Korea remained. Western leaders experienced various feelings during those years. Bliss was not among them. The status quo had pleased everyone, and after 1980, when the Soviets became bogged down in Afghanistan and the Poles openly and steadily started opposing the regime, the chancelleries of the entire Northern hemisphere embarked more or less secretly – and more and more frantically, after the rise to power of reformist Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 – in a piloted strategy to let the Soviet Union lose the Cold War without losing face. The West Germans were exhilarated by the reunion with their Eastern brothers, but the French had a joke: ‘We love Germany that much that we are happy to have two of them’. Russians, Poles, the British, Czechs, and Americans all agreed. After more than forty years of Communist rule, Eastern European countries had to face, all at once, an embarrassingly difficult commodity: the free market. Poverty arose and many people migrated to the US, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, causing serious social problems that those countries had wished to avoid. The map of Europe was redrawn for the third time in little more than seventy years. Germany was unified, the Czech Republic and Slovakia split amicably, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan left the USSR. Yugoslavia became a battlefield. Twenty years of fratricidal atrocities and ambiguous international military interventions followed. By 2010, the former Yugoslav territory was occupied by the independent states of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (officially called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), and Kosovo (partially recognized).

4  Chapter 1: An Animation Notebook

An Animation Notebook 1.

What implications did all of this have for animation? The fall of the Soviet Empire brought with it the end of the State-based economy. As far as cinema was concerned, it was the end of the State-funded film industry. Films continued to be made sporadically and states continued to be the films’ patrons, but only in a disorderly and casual way. In effect, what was known as ‘animation from the Eastern countries’ ceased to exist. 2. Around 1990, in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and other countries, there was a sudden, unexpected demand from the public and from new television stations for cartoons. In the European Union between 1989 and 1992, the consumption and production of TV animation increased by 15 to 30 percent each year. France, the largest European producer of cartoons, went from creating 61 hours a year in 1988 to 237 hours a year in 1994. Between 1985 and 1996, the US market increased from 810 million to 4,000 million dollars. In 1995 in Japan, 80 weekly animated TV series lit up the domestic screens. In Taiwan, Wang Film Productions had more than a thousand people on the payroll, and most of the time worked for Warner Brothers. There were many booms in what had been traditionally a field of subsistence. 3. The global spread of personal computers, the Internet, and easy-to-use software for animation (such as Flash) opened the way for an entirely new network – animation on the Web. Production was cheap. Creating an Internet site presented no obstacles, so the filters of production, distribution, theatrical exhibition (the last ring of the goods chain, from production to consumption), and broadcast were wholly eliminated. Making an animated film became an accessible art, like writing poetry. (After the initial enthusiasm, spurred by a sense of freedom of expression without limits, the disappointments came. Despite the many new artists using the medium, works worth remembering on the Web were rare).

4. From the late 1980s onwards, there was a marked growth in animation schools, both in the number of institutions and in their quality. First in the United States, and then gradually throughout the rest of the world, universities, academies of art, and film schools offered courses for aspiring animators. At international festivals, graduation films often were presented as a separate category, with separate awards; frequently these débuts were of high quality. All this coexisted with fads, some filmmakers were adopted as models for imitation (the most exploited of these in the decade from 1990 to 2000 was Jan Švankmajer), and the unfortunate belief persisted that computer software would perform the creative tasks of animation. 5. In 1995, the great success of the feature Toy Story, directed by John Lasseter, put an end to the experimental era of computer-generated and animated images. Algorithms and pixels were no longer called ‘new technology’; they became everyday ‘digital technology’. It was here to stay, and cels and ink and paint departments became outmoded. 6. Hybridization became the rule in film production – at least in blockbusters. Techniques and technologies that had been experimented with in animation, or that already belonged to animation, were absorbed by Hollywood film producers. Live-action shooting combined with postproduction computer special effects became standard. Many people thought live-action was becoming artificial-action. Cinema was going back to its origins, when animation and live-action worked together. 7. The road forked, and forked, and forked again. Animation entered the new markets of the Web, special effects proliferated, and then mobile phones arrived, and music videos, video games, and so on. What happened after the early 1990s in animation is still too recent for us to have a historically clear perspective on the events and movements. The following pages document, as far as is possible at the present time, and in no way exhaustively, the films and movements that seem to have significance for the larger history of animation.

2

NORTH AMERICA

Is TV an Art Too?1 In the 1980s, American TV changed definitively. The monopoly of the three major channels (ABC, NBC, and CBS) was broken by a new network, Fox, and by the growth and spread of cable TV. From then on, there was a differentiation of supply and demand, with programmes oriented to different audiences. TV series had to cater to these new and diverse audiences in order to catch their attention. The late 1980s, called the beginning of the Second Golden Age2 of TV, represented the turning point. It marked the birth of Quality TV, a new style of American fiction. Quality TV consisted of an open serial format, multiple plots, controversial subjects, and a large ensemble cast. It created a new genre by mixing old ones, using quotations and self-referential elements. The visual element became a fundamental aspect of these series.3 The most important examples of Quality TV in the 1980s included Hill Street Blues, St.  Elsewhere, Moonlighting, Miami Vice, China Beach, L.A. Law, and Thirtysomething. During the 1990s, differentiation was of paramount importance, as was seen in Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, ER, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, The West Wing, and so on. By the turn of the century, Quality TV was a stylistic trend. The first phase of Quality TV referred to the network era, but cable and satellite TV were developing too. For instance, HBO made its own Quality TV series, without the previous restrictions on content, including: Sex and the

City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. Networks made 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, CSI, Ugly Betty, and House M.D. New cable TV channels presented Dexter, Weeds, and Mad Men.4

Animation Followed The new trend also involved animation. In 1989 The Simpsons broke with TV tradition, opening a new ‘TV Animation Golden Age’.5 Thanks to The Simpsons, aired in prime time, animated series gained visibility and prestige in networks. Meanwhile, cartoons were also promoted by cable channels in their programme schedules, and their production increased. Animated series were no longer just for children. They were programmed on prime time and aimed at people aged between 18 and 49, the most valuable target audience. Cable channels differentiated programmes according to various targets: preteens, tweens (between middle childhood and adolescence), teenagers, and young adults. Programmes for the youngest age groups represented mainly pedagogic experiments. The middle category aimed at creating a narrative and stylistic mix, hoping to attract a more adult audience as well. The last category took a visually and verbally irreverent approach. The Simpsons and King of the Hill were two of Fox’s highest-rated programmes; South Park was cable TV station Comedy Central’s highest-rated programme.6 Cartoons

By Stefania Carini. The first Golden Age was the period between the late 1940s and the 1950s. 3 See J. T. Caldwell, Televisuality. Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994. 4 See also Stefania Carini, Il testo espanso, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2009. 5 See Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, eds, Prime Time Animation. Television Animation and American Culture, Routledge, New York, 2003. 6 D. Leonard, ‘ “South Park” creators haven’t lost their edge’, last modified 2010, http://money.cnn.com/. 1 2

6  Chapter 2: Sub-Period 1: The Beginning, 1989–1998

became valuable commodities. Animation represented the core business for media conglomerates, which worked across different connected fields. Cartoons soon became a multiplatform service (TV, DVD, Internet, video games, etc.), and their characters turned out to be great icons, generating huge levels of merchandising. Animated series became the way to differentiate, both for cable TV and the networks. Furthermore, thanks to their international circulation, they also became an important part of global pop culture. As for their narratives, the most important difference from the past was the better quality of the screenplays. The new animated series used different comic forms, from satire to the grotesque, and parody with quotations, self-referentiality, and postmodern irony. The multifaceted comedies often had surreal elements and fast, frenetic timing. Thanks to animated series, the comic genre was renewed: The Simpson transformed the live sitcom. Limited animation became a conscious stylistic choice. Moreover, cartoons showed graphic research: the style was characterized by grotesque deformity or by personal approaches that echoed UPA. Stylized geometric shapes and strong colours were among these cartoons’ main features.

Sub-Period 1: The Beginning, 1989–19987 The Simpsons by Matt Groening represented the first successful cartoon example of Quality TV. It marked a big change, both in the history of animation and in the history of the sitcom. The decade witnessed other important changes, such as the increased role of cable channels and new brands, including the Cartoon Network. The Simpsons8 was created in 1989 by Matt Groening (b. Portland, Oregon, 15 February 1954). Groening was a comic artist and writer whose first success was Life in Hell,9 published in the innovative Wet Magazine. It attracted the attention of James L. Brooks (b. North Bergen, New Jersey, 9 May  1940), creator of the TV series Mary Tyler Moore (1970–1977) and Lou Grant (1977–1982), who was at that time working at Fox. The new network needed something to break the oligopoly of CBS, ABC, and NBC – something new and

unexpected. Brooks was working on the sitcom The Tracey Ullman Show and asked Groening to adapt Life in Hell for that programme. Groening created a short film series with a dysfunctional family; these were the first Simpsons cartoons. Brooks loved them and convinced the network to create a complete series for prime time, which hadn’t happened since The Flintstones. The sitcom scriptwriter Sam Simon (b. California, 6 June  1955, who had worked on Taxi, Cin Cin, and The Tracey Ullman Show) joined the crew. The Simpsons soon became one of the most watched shows in America, quickly spreading round the world and becoming a classic. The target audience was young adults; for this reason, taboo subjects were allowed. The visual style was complex, using a language close to live-action cinema. The Simpsons are yellow characters with big eyes. The family is composed of the stupid father Homer, the careful mother Marge, the smart daughter Lisa, the little-boy brat Bart, and the baby girl Maggie. Homer works at a nuclear power plant, Marge is a housewife, and Bart and Lisa attend school. They live in Springfield, a small town full of strange characters. The drawing style was generally grotesque, though it changed over the years. Groening defined his work as ‘the hallucination of a sitcom’. Each episode focused on a seemingly meaningless subject and developed it into a complex story. Characters were often involved in catastrophic adventures, but in the end everything went back to ordinary life. It was not a traditional happy ending or a return to status quo but the characters experienced a kind of ‘end of hallucination’. The Simpsons was a subversive satire of American middle class and culture. It created a dense text, partly by quoting from TV, cinema, literature, and pop culture. Parodies and tributes were common. The world in the show was surrounded by the media, evoking the ideas of representation, reproduction, quotation, and distortion. The Simpsons poked fun at pop culture but at the same time, being part of it, paid tribute to it. In 1981, aged 20, Bruce Timm (b. Oklahoma, 8 February  1961) started to work for Filmation, a production company that specialized in animated series inspired by comics. For instance, he worked on the studio’s He-Man

By Stefania Carini. The production companies behind The Simpsons were 20th Century Fox Television and Gracie Films (created by James L. Brooks). 9 The strip features the anthropomorphic rabbit Binky, who is bitter, depressed, and thus ‘normal’. Groening used these characters to explore a wide range of topics with an alienated, angsty style. 7 8

Chapter 2: Sub-Period 1: The Beginning, 1989–1998  7

and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power. At Warner Brothers Animation he worked on Tiny Toon Adventures before creating and producing Batman10 (1992–1995) for Fox with Eric Rodomski. The animated series of Batman pleased both audience and critics. Its design was simple and angular, inspired by 1950s- and 1960s-era comics as well as art deco. Graphic combinations of black and white created an elegant noir and dark effect, well adapted to adult-oriented narration. Later, Timm produced Superman (1996–2000, on The WB), The New Batman Adventures (1997–1999, The WB), Batman Beyond (1999–2001, The WB and Cartoon Network), and Justice League (2001–2006, Cartoon Network). His fans called Timm’s work ‘The Timmverse’, as he enriched the comic book world of DC. His creations represented a new standard for animated series based on comics. In the 1990s MTV, a youth-oriented cable TV channel dedicated to music (owned by Viacom), began producing and airing animation through its show Liquid Television. It was composed of various shorts (Cartoon Sushi, The Maxx, The Head ). Æon Flux11 was an avant-garde animated series (1991, a six-part series of short films, followed in 1995 by ten half-hour episodes as a stand-alone series). Created by Peter Chung (b. Seoul, South Korea, 19 April 1961), Æon Flux is set in a dystopian future. The main character is a secret agent from an anarchistic nation whose mission is to infiltrate a centralized government of another country, led by her nemesis and lover. The plot was obscure, characterized by philosophical subjects and violent and sexual elements. The style was influenced by Egon Schiele, Moebius, and anime. Daria (1997–2001; created by Glenn Eichler) was a spin-off of Beavis and Butt-Head (see below), about the life of a sarcastic teenage girl. Ironic and intelligent, Daria is an outcast in her high school. Ironic violence was the hallmark of Celebrity Deathmatch (1998–2007, created by Eric Fogel, b. 1969), a Plasticine animation in which caricatured celebrities fight each other.

Mike Judge MTV’s most famous animated series was Beavis and Butt-Head (1993–1997, revived 2011).12 It described the life of two unsociable teenage boys who love heavy metal, hate school, and usually spend their time watching MTV and commenting on its music videos. They speak their plain thoughts, emphasizing the stupidity of the world around them, and criticize the mass media they depend on.13 The animation is as rough as the world portrayed in the show. Mike Judge (b. Ecuador, 17 October  1962) directed the cinema film spin-off, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996). In 1997, Judge created King of the Hill (1997–2010)14 for Fox, teaming up with Greg Daniels (b. USA, 13 June 1963), a scriptwriter for The Simpsons. The series focused on the Hills, a small-town Methodist family in Arlen, Texas. There is Hank, the father, Peggy, his wife, and Bobby, their son; living with them is Peggy’s adult niece, Luanne Platter. If Springfield is a place that subverts values, Arlen is the realm of traditional ones. Hank can neither reject them nor respect them perfectly, but he tries to do his best in every episode. The show depicts the American middle class with a realistic approach but is no less meaningful for that.

Nickelodeon’s Double Humour Nickelodeon is a cable TV channel owned by Viacom and aimed at children and teenagers. It opened its in-house animation studio in 1990, and a year later it aired its first original series. Its products followed different approaches: simple comedy (Doug, Rugrats), more complex approaches (Rocko’s Modern Life), and sometimes grotesque work, following the lessons learned in Warner’s Golden Age (The Ren and Stimpy Show). Rugrats (1991–2004)15 was created by Arlene Klasky, Gabor Csupo, and Paul Germain. In 1981, Klasky

Batman was produced by DC Comics, Sunrise, Warner Brothers Animation, and Warner Brothers Television. Æon Flux was produced by Colossal Pictures, MTV Animation, and MTV Networks. 12 Beavis and Butt-Head was produced by MTV Animation., J. J. Sedelmaier Productions Inc. (season 1), Paramount Television (1–7), Judgemental Films, Inc. (2–8), Tenth Annual Industries (2–7), Ternion Pictures (8), and Film Roma Productions (8). 13 See Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, ‘Prime Time Animation’, in Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison (eds.), Prime Time Animation. Television Animation and American Culture, Routledge, New York, 2003. 14 King of the Hill was produced by Deedle-Dee Productions, 3 Art Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Television, Film Roman Productions, Judgmental Films, and Judgemental Films, Inc. 15 Rugrats was coproduced by Klasky-Csupo and Nickelodeon Network. 10 11

8  Chapter 2: Sub-Period 1: The Beginning, 1989–1998

(b. Omaha, Nebraska, 26 May  1949) founded, with her then-husband Gabor Csupo (b. Budapest, Hungary, 29 September  1952), the remarkable production company Klasky-Csupo, Inc. The third member of the group, Germain (b. Los Angeles, California, 6 June  1959), was an American animation screenwriter and producer. Rugrats told the adventures of a group of babies whose ordinary life becomes imaginary adventures, underlining the different points of view between adults and children. The style was linear; the cartoon was one of the most popular children’s animated series and attracted adults as well. In 1998, The Rugrats Movie was released, followed by Rugrats in Paris (2000), and Rugrats Go Wild (2003); the latter film also featured characters from another Klasky-Csupo series, The Wild Thornberrys (1998–2002). The Ren and Stimpy Show (1991–1996)16 was created by John Kricfalusi (b. Chicoutimi, Québec, Canada, 9 September 1955). He worked on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures (1987–1988), a zany, irreverent version of the venerable cartoon character produced by Fritz the Cat director Ralph Bakshi. Kricfalusi then established Spümcø International Animation Studio and created The Ren and Stimpy Show for Nickelodeon. The series chronicled the nonsensical adventures of Ren Höek, a psychotic Chihuahua, and Stimpson J. Cat, a good-hearted but stupid cat. The style echoed the Golden Age of American animation, but taken to extremes. Grotesquerie prevailed and visual gags were linked to strange and disgusting deformations. Because of that, The Ren and Stimpy Show had a reputation for indecent humour and violence. In 1992, Kricfalusi was fired by the network,17 and when the series was turned over to Games Animation it lost its peculiarity. Rocko’s Modern Life (1993–1996)18 was created by Joe Murray (b. San Jose, California, 3 May  1961), who had joined CalArts and worked for MTV, making some shorts and films. The show featured an anthropomorphic wallaby

named Rocko and his life in the city of O-Town. The series was a surreal interpretation of life, with a deformed and caricatured style, aimed at both children and adults. Unlike The Ren and Stimpy Show, Rocko’s Modern Life never became grotesque.

A Matter of Style Cartoon Network (CN) was created by Turner Broadcasting in 1992. Its initial programming consisted of reruns of classic cinema and television cartoons. Its first original shows (Space Ghost Coast to Coast and The Moxy Show) were created in 1994 by Hanna-Barbera Productions.19 In the same year, production started on What-a-Cartoon! (also known as World Premiere Toons and The Cartoon Cartoon Show). The programme showed shorts created by the studio’s animators that were later turned into series. These series included Johnny Bravo (1997–2004), I  Am Weasel (1997–2000), Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy (1999–present), Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999–2002), and Mike, Lu & Og (1999–2001). Cow and Chicken (1995–2004) was created by David Feiss (b. Sacramento, California, 16 April  1959). The series showed the adventures of a cow, named Cow, and her chicken brother, named Chicken. They were often tormented by the Red Guy, a usually pants-less devil. The series was characterized by surreal and sarcastic humour. The best-known CN series were Dexter’s Laboratory (1996–2003)20 by Genndy Tartakovsky and The Powerpuff Girls (1998–2004)21 by Craig McCracken. These creators helped define the style of the network. Tartakovsky (b. Moscow, Russia, 17 January  1970) moved to the United States at age seven; in 1993 he worked for 2 Stupid Dogs, a Hanna-Barbera animated series. Then he created Dexter’s Laboratory, based on a university project. The show

The Ren and Stimpy Show was produced by Games Animation, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon Network, Paramount Television, and Spümco. 17 In 1995, Kricfalusi directed and animated a music video for Björk’s song ‘I Miss You’. He also made Flash animation for the Web. In 2003–2004, he relaunched The Ren & Stimpy Show as Adult Party Cartoon; it was aired during a late-night programming block on Spike TV, a cable channel for young adult males (it was a branch of MTV Networks, owned by Viacom). The series explored more adult themes but was soon cancelled. 18 Rocko’s Modern Life was produced by Games Animation, Joe Murray Productions, Inc., and Nickelodeon Network. 19 In 1991 Turner purchased the studio and the Cartoon Network Studios division was created to produce new animated shows for Cartoon Network. In 1996 Turner merged with Time Warner. In 2001, coinciding with the death of William Hanna, the studio folded into Warner Brothers. 20 Dexter’s Laboratory was produced by Cartoon Network, Hanna-Barbera Productions, and Rough Draft Studios. 21 The Powerpuff Girls was produced by CCTV, Cartoon Network, Hanna-Barbera Productions, and Media Asia Films. 16

Chapter 2: Sub-Period 2: 1999–2009  9

featured a little scientist, Dexter, whose work is mostly subverted by his older sister Dee Dee, a naive hurricane.22 Craig McCracken (b. Charleroi, Pennsylvania, 31 March 1971) created The Powerpuff Girls, based on one of the shorts he made while at university. Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles, three sisters with superpowers, were created by Professor Utonium. The heroines have big heads and eyes and little bodies and defend their town from monsters and villains. The styles of McCracken and Tartakovsky underlined their graphic aspect through limited movement. Linked to the new Flash fad, their shows were graphic work, in which lines and colour are predominant. Their characters were openly inspired by UPA, Mr.  Magoo, and Gerald McBoing-Boing, as well as by Japan’s Tetsuwan Atom by Osamu Tezuka and Rocky and Bullwinkle by Jay Ward. McCracken and Tartakovsky’s shows were visually and verbally innovative, with comic nonsense narration. Their characters were hybrids of design, animation, comics, advertisements, and art, representing pop art’s new frontier. They were analogous to the creations of Takashi Murakami, or to street art.

The Extremist South Park23 was created in 1997 by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The series was written for the cable channel Comedy Central, owned by Viacom, which was oriented towards comedy-based programming for mature viewers. Trey Parker (b. 19 October  1969 in Denver, Colorado) and Matt Stone (b. Houston, Texas, 26 May 1971) met at Colorado University. They started their film career with the shorts Jesus vs. Frosty (1992) and Jesus vs. Santa (1995), also known as The Spirit of Christmas 1 and 2. These were the basis for South Park, which also spawned a 1999 cinema feature, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. South Park is a small town in Colorado. Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny are four boys who experience

indescribable adventures together. Cynical and innocent, bad and commonsensical (as children can be), they live in a hypocritical world surrounded by irresponsible adults and influenced by mass media. Beauty, depth, and nuance do not exist in their chaotic, strange, and grotesque world. Characters are shapes that move jerkily in settings that are just as poor. Everything is two-dimensional in South Park, portrayed through explicit visual and verbal language: religion, sex, death, war, violence. The series aims to show how to deal with cultural relativism and political correctness, two obsessions of American culture (among others). With South Park, the animated series for adults reached a peak of stylistic and narrative provocation.

Sub-Period 2: 1999–200924 In 1999, Fox launched a new sitcom, Family Guy.25 It was created by Seth MacFarlane (b. Kent, Connecticut, 26 October  1973), an animator, producer, actor, and voice-actor. The animated sitcom revolves around a lunatic family, the Griffins. Peter, the father, lives in his own world (he’s often portrayed as an infantile imbecile, though the show’s characterizations can shift without warning). Stewie, a malevolent baby with an adult voice, wants to conquer the world and kill his mother. Brian is a talking dog who reads newspapers and is highly cultured. Lois, the wife/mother, seems wise but often follows Peter’s craziness. The other children, Meg and Chris, are maladjusted in their own ways. MacFarlane focuses on the accumulation of images, parodies, and gags, rather than on plot consistency. His comic style is based on fragments and cutaway gags, inspired by television and mass media, which symbolize the simple imagination and aspirations of America’s middle class. In 2009 Family Guy spun off The Cleveland Show, featuring Peter’s titular friend and his own family. MacFarlane also cocreated American Dad! (2005) with Matt Weitzman and Mike Barker. The ‘odd family’ this time includes

22 Rita Street profiled the 25-year-old Tartakovsky. ‘After the debut of Dexter’s Laboratory [. . .] Tartakovsky became the youngest member of an animation movement that might be called “Retro Absurdists”. The movement is helmed by the likes of Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi and pays deference to the art of the “funny drawing” vs. the art of the animated actor. “The appeal of animation is the drawings. I love looking at even bad animation because it’s like eye candy,” Tartakovsky said. “But when you get into live-action animation like Pocahontas, for me it loses its appeal.” A Cal Arts graduate, some of Tartakovsky’s other credits include animation on Steven Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures, Two Stupid Dogs and The Critic.’ (Daily Variety, 20 September 1995, p. 38). 23 South Park was a coproduction by Comedy Central, Braniff, and Comedy Partners. 24 By Stefania Carini. 25 Family Guy was produced by 20th Century Fox Television, Film Roman Productions, Fuzzy Doors Productions, and Hands Down Entertainment.

10  Chapter 2: Sub-Period 2: 1999–2009

a fanatical CIA employee, his wife and children, an obnoxious alien, and a goldfish with the brain of an East German Olympic skier.

Authors’ Work Ten years after The Simpsons first aired, Matt Groening created Futurama (1999)26 for Fox. Fry, a pizza delivery boy, is accidentally frozen in 1999 and wakes up 1,000 years later. In the new world, he meets Bender, a cynical, heavy-drinking criminal robot, and Leela, a female one-eyed alien heroine. Fox cancelled the series in 2003, but DVD features were released in 2007 and aired on Comedy Central. In 2010, the same network renewed the series. In 2001, Genndy Tartakovsky presented Samurai Jack (2001–2004; Cartoon Network). The evil Aku sends the only person who could challenge him, a samurai called Jack, to a future where Aku rules everything, so Jack tries to go back to the past to defeat his enemy. The drawings are influenced by anime and UPA. Samurai Jack is a real graphic work: all of its elements, from characters to movements, are a play of geometric lines. The screen is divided into vertical and horizontal sections, sometimes reminiscent of Japanese painting. Later Tartakovsky was commissioned by George Lucas to produce and direct Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003–2005; Cartoon Network), a successful animated series in the Star Wars universe. Tartakovsky’s style gave new verve to the franchise. In 2004, Craig McCracken produced Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (2004–2009) for Cartoon Network. It was set in a home for ‘imaginary friends’, who were abandoned when their childhood companions grew up. McCracken created a surreal and poetic visual world. In April 2008, he became executive producer of a Cartoon Network showcase project called Cartoonstitute. After King of the Hill was cancelled, Mike Judge created The Goode Family (2009)27 for ABC, about a family obsessed with being environmentally responsible, liberal, and politically correct. The series had no success and was cancelled after the first season. Judge returned to Beavis and Butt-Head, made for MTV.

Animated Channels Fox was the animated network par excellence. Among cable channels, Cartoon Network continued broadcasting successful series (Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends), some imported from the Canadian channel TeleToon. After the success of South Park and the renewal of Futurama, Comedy Central sought a new success with Drawn Together (2004–2008),28 created by Dave Jeser and Matthew Silverstein. Nickelodeon continued searching for comedy. SpongeBob SquarePants (1999) was created by Stephen Hillenburg (b. Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 21 August 1961), a marine biologist. He completed a master’s degree program in experimental animation at CalArts and started working on Rocko’s Modern Life for Nickelodeon in 1993. In 1999 Hillenburg created SpongeBob, a naive and optimistic sea sponge (drawn as a kitchen sponge). The series followed his and his friends’ adventures under the sea. Made in a childish style, SpongeBob SquarePants29 stood out for its surreal elements and became a transmedia franchise. Nickelodeon’s second biggest series was the AmericanCanadian The Fairly Odd Parents (2000),30 created by Butch Hartman (b. Highland Park, Michigan, 10 January 1965). The main character is Timmy, a ten-year-old boy. One day Cosmo and Wanda, two strange parents, come to help him. Thanks to them, Timmy can satisfy his desires – but with comically catastrophic consequences.

Limited Disney Disney launched its own cable TV channel in 1983.31 At the beginning, it aired the company’s animated classics, live-action series, musicals, and sitcoms. Meanwhile, from 1985, The Walt Disney Company began to produce some animated TV series with both old and new characters, including DuckTales (1987–1990) and Gargoyles (1994–1997). By the end of the 1990s, the Disney Channel was increasing its products. It concentrated on tweens, releasing sitcoms and films with strong musical elements: Hannah Montana, High School Musical, Camp Rock, and Sonny with a

Futurama was produced by 20th Century Fox Television and The Curiosity Company. The Goode Family was produced by Blue Water Productions, Film Roman Productions, Judgemental Films, Inc., 3 Art Entertainment, Media Rights Capitol, and Ternion Pictures. 28 Drawn Together was produced by Comedy Central. 29 Produced by United Plankton Pictures, Nicktoons Productions. 30 The Fairly Odd Parents was produced by Billionfold, Frederator Incorporated, Nickelodeon Network, and Nicktoons Productions. 31 Disney Channel was managed by Disney-ABC Cable Networks Group, a Walt Disney Company division. 26 27

Chapter 2: Sub-Period 2: 1999–2009  11

Chance. Thanks to its Original Series, Disney Channel was one of the most watched cable channels in the US and also one of the most famous in the world. Kim Possible (2002–2007)32 was created by Mark McCorkle (b. Bristol, Pennsylvania, August 1961) and Robert Schooley (b. Boston, Massachusetts, September 1961). The teenage Kim (a girl) is a special agent helped by her best friend, Ron Stoppable. The series parodied teen sitcoms and spy stories and made its limited animation a style choice. Kim, with her red hair, black t-shirt, and green trousers, was a mostly graphic heroine. Phineas and Ferb (2007–present)33 was created by Dan Povenmire (b. San Diego, California, 18 September 1963) and Jeff Marsh (b. Santa Monica, California, 9 December  1960). The series features two stepbrothers, Phineas and Ferb, during their summer holiday. They invent games to relieve the boredom while their sister, Candace, is obsessed with ‘busting’ their plans and their pet platypus acts as a secret agent. The series has much in common with Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network productions, and also with Family Guy and The Simpsons, with its humour and pop culture

quotations. It is made with limited animation, bright colours, and stylized design, but it is also in line with the Disney Channel’s philosophy, which is founded on a positive vision of extended families and on a strong belief in the abilities of children.

Renaissance in Disney Features In the arena of feature animation, Ron Clements (b. Sioux City, Iowa, 25 April 1953) and John Musker (b. Chicago, Illinois, 8 November  1953) completed their second joint venture in 1989, following 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective. The new film was The Little Mermaid. To everyone’s surprise, it grossed 183 million dollars worldwide and started a much hoped for, but little expected, comeback for Disney cinema animated features. The Little Mermaid was a fairy tale with a young female protagonist, a prince’s heart for her to conquer, and a wicked witch to defeat. Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora (the Sleeping Beauty) had a new colleague. But

Figure 2.1  Walt Disney, The Little Mermaid, 1989. © 1989 Disney.

32 33

Kim Possible was produced by Walt Disney Television Animation, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Disney Channel. Phineas and Ferb was produced by Walt Disney Television Animation.

12  Chapter 2: Sub-Period 2: 1999–2009

for filmgoers the mermaid Ariel was not a role model, an idealized alter ego, or a star in heaven. Like live-action characters of the 1970s and 1980s, Ariel was one of the girls. For instance, she had her room with her secret collections, from which her widowed father was banished. She was classic yet contemporary. In the years before The Little Mermaid, an empty space had haunted the market. John Huston’s disastrous Annie (1982) had demonstrated that live-action musicals were too expensive for the time and too out of tune with fashion to sell tickets. Yet world audiences still loved musicals the way they used to be. The Little Mermaid, a cartoon musical, filled that void.34 Its songs were by lyricist Howard Ashman (b. Baltimore, Maryland, 17 May 1950; d. New York, 14 March 1991) and musician Alan Menken (b. New York, 22 July  1949); the pair had previously created the stage musical Little Shop of Horrors (1982). A retrospective Disney documentary, Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009), shows Ashman stressing the affinity between cartoon drawings and the painted scenery of stage musicals. ‘We watch in a different way,’ he argued of these media, ‘therefore it may be easier to sing.’ Beauty and the Beast (1991)35 was directed by Gary Trousdale (b. La Crescenta, California, 8 June 1960) and Kirk Wise (b. San Francisco, 24 August  1963; according to another source, 9 November 1958). It was another musical, again based on Ashman and Menken’s songs. Beauty and the Beast was a better film than The Little Mermaid because it deeply depicted the psychology of the characters and openly challenged the equation ‘ugly = bad’. The initially fearsome Beast shows his kind heart slowly and believably, both to the audience and to Belle, the female protagonist. Gaston (Belle’s suitor) is even subtler, beginning as a muscular, jovial young man and gradually revealing himself to be a murderous villain. The songs and choreography add magic to the whole. Clements and Musker returned in 1992 with Aladdin. Visually and narratively it was far from original, and even further from captivating, but it had a star: the Genie, animated by Eric Goldberg and superbly voiced by Robin Williams, who threw out almost sixty celebrity impressions. The Genie made Aladdin the third hit in a row for Disney’s renewed animation.

A year later, Roger Allers (b. Rye, New York, 1949) and Rob Minkoff (b. Palo Alto, California, 11 August  1962) presented The Lion King (1993), with music by the Oscar-winning Hans Zimmer and songs by Tim Rice and Elton John. Fifty-one years after Bambi, a parent (the lion king) dies in a Disney film – this time before the audience’s eyes. Nobody was shocked, but there were complaints that the second part of the film didn’t match the tenderness of the father-son relationship in the first. Interestingly enough, the company’s menagerie became richer. The barnyard mice, pigs, and ducks of the 1930s had given way to parlour cocker spaniels and aristocats, or cutely drawn foxes and hounds. The Lion King, though, offered a mandrill, a hornbill, a meerkat, a warthog, and hyenas – a perfect team for children educated by National Geographic TV documentaries. After The Lion King, the quality of Disney’s feature animation went downhill – first slowly (Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and then at an accelerated pace with Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan. The Disney Renaissance was over. The 2000s were saved by Pixar’s productions, which Disney distributed. Mention should be made of Fantasia/2000 (premiere December 1999, distribution January 2000). Roy Edward Disney had not forgotten that his uncle’s original idea was to treat Fantasia as a concert, adding and changing pieces now and then. Fantasia/2000 had segments illustrating Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (the original Fantasia segment starring Mickey Mouse), Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, and Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Apart from Rhapsody in Blue, a masterful homage by Eric Goldberg to the New York cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, it was a generous but failed venture.

The Mantle of Walt [Michael] Eisner had clung to power with a King Lear-like intensity, convinced that he and he alone had

34 A rebirth of live-action film musical comedy arrived in the twenty-first century with Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002), Phantom of the Opera (Joel Schumacher, 2005), Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008), and Nine (Rob Marshall, 2009). 35 This tale has dozens of European, Asiatic, and African versions. It’s the story of an ugly person with a beautiful heart, and of a woman sensitive enough to recognize that.

Chapter 2: Sub-Period 2: 1999–2009  13

the creative instincts and managerial skills to shepherd Disney into a twenty-first-century world of giant media and entertainment conglomerates. Indeed, Eisner claimed the mantle of Walt himself.36 Walt Disney was a tough man, but he looked like a benevolent uncle. Eisner had cold blue eyes, and his smile was not reassuring. Walt was both an emperor and an empire-builder. Eisner was a corporate executive, inclined to maintain power by laying plots. Walt was a farsighted strategist. Eisner was a short-term tactician, interested in quick revenues. In 1994, the company’s president, Frank Wells, died in a helicopter accident. A few months later, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chair of film production, clashed with Eisner and left. After ten extraordinary years, Eisner’s downward path began. He continued to enormously expand the company, but the business-driven shadow that ‘New Disney’ cast at the turn of the century wasn’t popular. The Disney name should have been synonymous with childhood, trust, kindness, and quality. On 20 November  2003, Eisner notified Roy Edward Disney, the last obstacle to his unchallenged power, that Roy Edward had passed the mandatory retirement age of 72 and would no longer be on the Disney board. Two decades after their battle over the studio in 1984, Roy Edward and his counselor Stanley Gold fought a second ‘Save Disney’ campaign. On 3 March 2004, at Disney’s annual shareholders’ meeting, 43% of the assembly voted against Eisner’s reelection to the corporate board of directors. On 30 September, Eisner resigned. Robert Iger37 replaced him, and on 24 January  2006 he announced the acquisition of the extremely creative Pixar for 7.4 billion dollars. Roy Edward Disney died on 16 December 2009 in Newport Beach, California. In the Los Angeles Times of 17 December, animation critic and historian Charles Solomon wrote: Roy was a warm, approachable man whom the animators could talk to and caricature, knowing their comments would be received with respect and affection. But Roy was more than a boss: he was also a link to Walt, whose spirit hovered over his studio long after his death

in 1966. [. . .] For animators and animation lovers, that was the Golden Age, and talking to Roy about Walt was like getting stories about Achilles from a veteran of the Trojan War.38

Working on Dreams In 1982, Jeffrey Katzenberg (b. New York, 21 December 1950) was President of Production at Paramount and reported directly to Chief Operating Officer Michael Eisner. In 1984, Katzenberg followed Eisner to Disney and became chairman of its motion picture (live-action and animation) divisions. While viewing some scenes from The Black Cauldron, Katzenberg asked to see the outtakes, thinking that the footage could be reedited. He did not know that, in animation, there are very seldom outtakes – at least of finished work. On the ground that animated TV series were much cheaper than theatrical animated features, Eisner and Katzenberg thought the films’ production costs and times should be halved. The dismayed animators could only rely on Roy E. Disney. But then Katzenberg decided to hire Ashman and Menken to write the music for The Little Mermaid. It was a brainwave. The music was worth half of the film, winning Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Song. Meanwhile, Katzenberg discovered that he’d fallen in love with animation. He took a lot of care with Beauty and the Beast (again entrusting the music to Ashman and Menken, who would be awarded a second time39), then with Aladdin and The Lion King. In 1991, he brokered the deal with Pixar to produce three pictures for Disney, including the Academy Award-winning Toy Story. When president Frank Wells died in 1994 and Eisner assumed his duties, he rejected Katzenberg’s candidature for the position and pushed him to resign. On 12 October  1994, two weeks after leaving Disney, Katzenberg announced he was joining forces with director Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, the former head of Asylum and Geffen Records. The three contributed from their own personal wealth to launch a new company. (Katzenberg

James B. Stewart, Disney War, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2005. In 2011 Robert Iger (b. Long Island, New York, 10 February 1951) had his contract as CEO extended to 2016. 38 C. Solomon, ‘Roy Edward Disney, more than a famous name’, latimes.com, last modified 17 December 2009, latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-roydisney-appreciation-2009dec17,0,5433946.story. 39 Howard Ashman, who died in 1991, was awarded posthumously. 36 37

14  Chapter 2: Pixar: Character Animation in the Digital Era

mortgaged nearly his entire net worth to contribute his 33 million dollars.) Thus DreamWorks SKG was born, an all-purpose production company whose objective was to release films, television content, albums, and video games at a lower price than most major studios. Its animation section had ups and downs. The Prince of Egypt (directed by Brenda Chapman, Simon Wells, and Steve Hickner, 1998) was a good adult-oriented animated film but didn’t make money from merchandising.40 While Andrew Adamson’s41 and Vicky Jenson’s CGI Shrek (2001) was a hit (see below), The Road to El Dorado (2000) and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) – both hybrids of traditional drawing and CGI (computer-generated images) – were uninspired clichés. The studio gave a private little office to every animator and promised that DreamWorks would produce the auteur shorts of the animators who wanted to express themselves. However, there were never any auteur shorts, production schedules became as frantic as they were in any other Hollywood studio, and there was no consistent guiding production style or philosophy. In 2006, DreamWorks SKG was sold to Paramount, though Katzenberg retained DreamWorks Animation. Flamboyant, talkative, and dynamic, Katzenberg was a media favourite but his later films have not left a lasting mark.

Pixar: Character Animation in the Digital Era42,43 Founded in 1986, Pixar Animation Studios represented a new model in animation cinema for the digital epoch. It balanced innovation and tradition; it united animation and digital technologies. Pixar resulted from the work of three pioneers: John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and Steve Jobs.

Before Pixar John Lasseter was born in Hollywood on 12 January 1957. He had a passion for cartoons from childhood and went to CalArts, where the lecturers included animators working for The Walt Disney Company. While there, Lasseter learned classic Disney animation.

After graduation in 1979, Lasseter obtained a job as an animator at The Walt Disney Company. The studio was declining, but Lasseter was amazed by Tron (1982) by Steven Lisberger, which contained passages created with computer graphics. The Disney management didn’t agree with him, and Lasseter was fired (see below). In 1984, he moved to the computer division of Lucasfilm, a young company that, together with its subsidiary Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), would become a leader in special effects. ILM was founded in 1975 by George Lucas to create the effects for Star Wars (1977). From 1979 on, ILM specialized more and more in new technologies as engineers and programmers from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) Computer Graphics Lab joined the company. This led to ILM’s own Computer Graphics Division, which had about forty members. Ed Catmull (b. Parkersburg, Virginia, 31 March 1945), who had been the director of the NYIT graphics lab, became the leader of the ILM division. He was a computer scientist with a passion for animation who recognized the new technology’s implications for the film industry. One of the division’s first achievements was the ‘Genesis Effect’ sequence, created for the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Lasseter cooperated with Catmull’s division on a small project, The Adventures of André  & Wally B (1984). Lasseter created two characters for this short – an android and a bee. He adopted the basic Disney rules to make them come alive, using movement and acting. André and Wally B could be seen as two actors performing a little sketch (the puppet André mocks Wally B, who chases him). They communicate their feelings through body movements and facial expressions. Lasseter also tried exploiting the possibilities of cinematographic language in digital form. The film was a narrative short, which distinguished it from previous works of computer animation (which were tied to video art). The Adventures of André  & Wally B was shown to acclaim at SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics exhibition that had begun in 1974. Catmull, Lasseter, and some members of ILM’s Computer Graphics Division decided to create their own animation studio. Steve Jobs (San Francisco, 24 February 1955–5 October 2011), one of the pioneers of the new informatics industry, would be the third musketeer. He had

Nonetheless, the film grossed 101 million dollars in the US and an additional125 million dollars internationally. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 1 December 1966. 42 By Stefania Carini. 43 For further information about Pixar, see Karen Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2007. 40 41

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cofounded Apple, one of the leading companies in the personal computer market, with his friend Steve Wozniak. In 1986, Pixar was officially born. It employed 44 people, and its first registered office was in San Rafael. The company then moved to Point Richmond and from 2000 on would be in Emeryville. In 1986, Pixar made a new short, Luxo Jr. (1986), which represented another leap in creativity. A large desk lamp, Luxo (the parent) reacts to the antics of a small desk lamp, Luxo Jr. (the child), as it plays with a small ball, chases it, and tries to balance on it. The ball deflates under Luxo Jr.’s jumping. However, after this disappointment, Jr. starts playing with a bigger ball. Luxo can only shake its head. We talk about Luxo’s ‘head’ even though the two lamps were not anthropomorphic. They were simply two desk lamps reproduced by computer technology. The characters come alive through Lasseter’s animation, mixing character acting and cinematographic language. After Luxo Jr.’s success at SIGGRAPH, the title character became the studio’s mascot and symbol, the letter ‘I’ of Pixar’s company logo.

From Toy Story to Disney The new company focused on the development of hardware and software technology. For example, it cocreated

CAPS (Computer Animation Production System), with Disney, for the digital management of traditional animation. Pixar’s rendering system44 was initially called REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw) and was then renamed RenderMan. It was improved and updated through the production of various short films and was always the foundation of the studio’s works.45 Pixar’s Marionette was created as an internal software tool (not sold outside Pixar) to be applied in the animation process. Pixar went on making shorts – Red’s Dream (1987), Tin Toy (1988, which won the Oscar for Best Short Film [Animated] in 1989), and KnickKnack (1989) – but its aim was to create a feature. In the late 1980s, digital technology became mandatory at all levels of the entertainment industry. The Walt Disney Company, thanks to its cooperation with Pixar, benefited from CAPS in features such as The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Beauty and the Beast. In 1991, the two companies signed the Feature Film Agreement to develop, produce, and distribute three feature films. The agreement would be more profitable for Disney,46 but it also benefited the young Pixar studio, which would not have had the stability to make a feature without a powerful partner. The result was Toy Story (1995), the first fully computer-animated film, directed by Lasseter. (For more on Toy Story and its successors, see below.)

Figure 2.2  Pixar, Toy Story, 1995. © Disney·Pixar. Slinky®Dog is a registered trademark of Poof-Slinky, Inc. Mr. Potato Head® and Mrs. Potato Head® are registered trademarks of Hasbro, Inc. Used with permission © Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved.

Rendering is the step by which the features of a scene file (colour, light, shape, movement, etc.) are converted by the computer, through a series of calculations, into a colourful high-definition image. 45 RenderMan was given in license to other production companies and became the leading software in the cinematographic industry. It was used in The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and Avatar. 46 See D. A. Price, The Pixar Touch, Vintage Books, New York, 2008. 44

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Toy Story was a commercial hit and helped to diffuse computer animation aesthetics. Lasseter and his team now had a new aim: to build a world-class animation studio. Constant training was essential in such a rapidly evolving sector, which was one reason why the production of short films continued.47 They were useful exercises for new employees, an effective way to test new technologies, and a rewarding creative experience for the directors. In 1997, Pixar signed a coproduction agreement with Disney to make five feature films over ten years. Production costs were to be shared 50–50 and profits derived from film releases and merchandising would also be shared. Both Disney’s and Pixar’s brands had to be put on the films and related merchandise.48 The first film produced under this agreement was A Bug’s Life (1998), directed by John Lasseter and codirected by Andrew Stanton. During the making of Toy Story, Lasseter had realized how difficult it was for a single director to manage a computer animation film alone. Codirection had been very common in the traditional American animated cinema; for Pixar, it was also a way to find new talent. On 29 January 2004, Pixar announced a halt in negotiations to renew its agreement with Disney. This was due to a conflict between Steve Jobs and Disney’s Chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner. Jobs was determined to free Pixar from Disney’s control.49 However, when Eisner left Disney in 2005, negotiations between Pixar and Disney recommenced. In 2006, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s new CEO, announced that the studio would acquire Pixar in an all-stock transaction. Actually, the agreement was much more complex, and it resulted in principal positions for Lasseter, Catmull, and Jobs in The Walt Disney Company. Catmull retained his position as President of Pixar but also became President of

Walt Disney Animation Studios. Lasseter became Chief Creative Officer of both studios and Principal Creative Advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering. Jobs was appointed to Disney’s Board of Directors. The two studios continued to be separate, and Pixar maintained its registered office in Emeryville, but John Lasseter and Ed Catmull jointly supervised Walt Disney Animation and both continued to be actively involved at Pixar. The two felt strongly that Disney could reclaim its past greatness. Under their supervision, Disney released the traditionally drawn The Princess and the Frog (2009),50 directed by Musker and Clements. Meanwhile, Pixar films continued to enjoy commercial and critical success with Ratatouille (2007), directed by Brad Bird, WALL-E (2008), directed by Andrew Stanton, and Up (2009), directed by Pete Docter.

The Pixar Touch In the 1996 Annual Report,51 Jobs pointed out the need to transform the name Pixar into a clearly and positively recognizable brand. Pixar was tightly connected to the technique of computer animation, as its name reflected. Pixar comes from ‘pixel’, the smallest unit of a digital picture. But technology is nothing without artists. As Lasseter put it: ‘We’ve reduced the way we work at Pixar to this phrase: The art challenges technology and the technology inspires the art [. . .] It’s this wonderful yin and yang.’52 Pixar artists defined themselves as well-rounded filmmakers. As Lasseter explained: In Pixar we believe in the filmmakers. It’s a filmmaker-led studio. I believe very strongly in that vision. When we

These shorts included: Geri’s Game (1997), directed by Jan Pinkava; For the Birds (2000), directed by Ralph Eggleston; Mike’s New Car (2002), directed by Pete Docter and Roger Gould; Boundin’ (2003), directed by Bud Luckey; Jack Jack Attack (2005; DVD release), directed by Brad Bird; One Man Band (2005), directed by Andrew Jimenez and Mark Andrews; Mater and the Ghostlight (2006; DVD release), directed by John Lasseter and Dan Scanlon; Lifted (2006), directed by Gary Rydstrom; Your Friend the Rat (2007 – Pixar’s first short in traditional animation, also including CG and puppet animation; DVD release), directed by Jim Capobianco; Presto (2008), directed by Doug Sweetland; BURN-E (2008; DVD release), directed by Angus MacLane; Partly Cloudy (2009), directed by Peter Sohn; Dug’s Special Mission (2009; DVD release), directed by Ronnie del Carmen, and many others. 48 See D. A. Price, The Pixar Touch, Vintage Books, New York, 2008. 49 See D. A. Price, The Pixar Touch, Vintage Books, New York, 2008. 50 Dazzled by Pixar’s enormous success, Hollywood animation studios assumed that traditional drawn animation was dead and that only computer animation would please audiences. Pixar’s top executives openly declared their dismay. As soon as he could, John Lasseter hired back traditional animators to make The Princess and the Frog. 51 See Excerpts from the 1996 Annual Report, at www.pixar.com, last modified 1997, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1002114/ 000119312506018565/dex991.htm. 52 M. Cotta Vaz, The Art of Finding Nemo, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2003, p.11. 47

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choose an idea of the movie to make, the first thing I look for is ‘where is the emotion going to come from?’ It’s typically in the emotional growth of the main character. I also think about the setting and the genre. The last thing in the world I  worry about is if it fits with some other persons, with models of what a popular film could be. We believe in making great stories and movies . . . quality is the best business plan.53

Computer Animation The animation of CGI (computer-generated images) shares elements with both cel and puppet animation. It shares the three-dimensional form of objects, sets, and characters with puppet animation (albeit in virtual form). This allowed for more realism, compared to cel animation. However, the potential for fluid movements and the malleability of 3D computer animation also make it close to animated drawing. Pixar applied the principles of character animation to CGI, always following Disney´s example. In particular, Pixar followed the concept of the plausible impossible, or the creation of a world in caricature that obeyed coherent laws. In order to seem believable, drawn characters had to act convincingly, but in a way that suited the caricatured world where they were. Lasseter was the first to prove that Disney’s Twelve Rules could be applied to computer animation. The animator worked with a rough model of the character, which was far from its final look. Working with these models allowed for purity and fluidity of movement because the artist focused on a few, simple elements. Animators focused on both facial expressions and body movements, determined not only by the character’s personality but also by the ‘material’ of which it was made (for example, wood or fur). Every animator had his/her own method and style. Some had a traditional background, having learned their craft working with puppets or cel animation. They adapted their methods to the new medium, a transition made easier by user-friendly software.

One profound difference between computer and traditional animation is in the area of interpolation. In computer animation, interpolation was the equivalent of inbetweening. The computer calculated the middle passages and positions of a movement, based on the key poses, and generated the missing frames. Interpolation saved time, with the animator deciding the key poses and modifying the automatically generated movements to get the best, most natural acting out of a character. Sometimes interpolation was combined with other techniques, letting the computer generate the movement while taking mathematical parameters into account. For instance, the computer could simulate an object’s weight, mass, and inertia so that its physical properties and natural laws of movement could be simulated. Additionally, the computer could consider the movement of a group of objects as a living organism, which needed to be managed as a whole, but in which each of the smaller organisms had its own features.

What It Looked Like Disney had always looked for ways for animation to conform to the resemblance codes of live-action. As noted by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin,54 computer animation remediated, absorbed, and reshaped Disney’s approach to animation and live-action cinema. To remediate, computer animation assimilated both the representation that pertained to Disney animation and the representation of live-action cinema. Animation could ‘finally compete with the realism of the Hollywood style’.55 Realism (good realism) did not mean photorealism. Rather, it was the mastery of a representational model, and a variety of language, that belonged to live-action cinema – through a technology that simulated them.56 Depth of field had already been experimented with in traditional animation, through the multiplane camera. But 3D computer animation was intrinsically based on a deep-field environment. As Bolter and Grusin stressed, it was now possible for animation to obtain a moveable and shifting perspective.

Interview recorded by Stefania Carini during the 66th Venice Film Festival, September 2009. J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media, MIT Press, London, 1999. 55 J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media, MIT Press, London, 1999. 56 See also A. Darley, ‘Second-order Realism and Post-modern Aesthetics in Computer Animation’, in A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling, John Libbey, Sydney, 1997. 53 54

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Perhaps the computer’s most important contribution to animation was the expansion of its language. It made it possible to simulate the work of a real camera in a virtual space, with the possibility of reproducing every lens and every camera move. Pixar tended to stay halfway between the photorealistic imitation of reality and a ‘cartoony’ style, choosing a photorealism in caricature that followed Disney’s ideals. For Finding Nemo, some underwater shots were filmed. Those images were successfully simulated by the computer, reaching a stunning photorealistic quality. Afterwards, though, the digital images were turned into a caricature of themselves, thanks to a (hyper-realist) intensification of colours and forms. Pixar’s style owed its charm to this difficult balance between the photorealism of live-action cinema and the stylized nature of animation.57

Storytelling Pixar movies were addressed mainly to a family audience; however, this didn’t affect their artistic value. Their brand of family adventure films is most comparable to that of Lucas, Spielberg, and Disney and was at least partially, if not highly, influenced by the works of Christopher Vogler,58 who reprocessed Joseph Campbell’s ideas.59 Pixar movies were part of the adventure genre, because they set the main character on a real and objective journey. They featured strong action but focused on the inner changes the characters undergo as a result of the journey. In Pixar’s films, adventure was mixed with comedy, as in the live-action films of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Visual or verbal comedy had always been at the basis of American animated movies, and Pixar took part in this tradition by building up multilayered visual and verbal humour suitable for many different audiences. The films used quotations and knowing irony in the vein of, for example, Who Framed Roger Rabbit or The Simpsons. While Disney made animated musicals in the 1990s, Pixar decided to go another way with Toy Story. The movie used the ‘song-over-action’ technique, in which a

song commented on a sequence to underline its emotion. This solution was abandoned in Pixar’s next film, A Bug’s Life, and reappeared in just one sequence in Toy Story 2. The next films mostly did not use the song-over-action technique.

CGI and Feature Films60 During the 1980s, American audiences were bombarded with computer-generated network logos, election graphics, and TV commercials. CGI was the ideal medium for creating shiny chrome letters, flying objects through space, and simulating complex camera moves. But the technique was widely perceived as too cold and unresponsive for the animation of characters. In a 1987 interview, animator Chris Bailey summed up popular opinion when he said: ‘For character animation, the only easy thing to do with a computer is turn the character into a block of cement and fly it around the room. Everything else is much harder.’61 Both the perception and the reality changed during the 1990s. The Disney Renaissance that started with The Great Mouse Detective in 1986 began to falter after The Lion King in 1994. The release of Toy Story the following year launched a revolution that would transform the art and industry of animation in America more profoundly than the introduction of sound or colour. Animators had to rethink, and often reinvent, their approach to character animation. Many CGI artists had been trained in drawn animation, using the principles that had been pioneered by Winsor McCay, Otto Messmer, and the Disney artists in the 1930s. The three-dimensional look of the new characters and the use of the computer instead of pencil and paper required new ways of creating expressions and styles of movement that conveyed a unique personality. Some principles could be adapted from traditional animation, some could be taken from puppet animation and live-action film, and some had to be invented. Similarly, the medium dictated new approaches to the use of colour,

57 See also K. Sarafian, ‘Flashing Digital Animations’, in A. Everett and J. Caldwell, eds, New Media. Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, Routledge, New York, 2003, p. 216. 58 Chris Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, 1992. Vogler’s book appeared at the end of the 1970s. It was a 7-page company memo titled A Practical Guide to the Hero with a Thousand Faces and it became influential in Hollywood. Vogler himself worked on Disney movies, such as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, and his book was mandatory for Disney executives. 59 J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1968. (Original edition, Pantheon Books, 1949). 60 By Charles Solomon. 61 Charles Solomon, ‘Sees Limits to Computer Graphics: Animator Returns to Drawing Board’, The Los Angeles Times, 28 August 1987.

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lighting, texture, layout, editing, cinematography, and storytelling. As the new medium replaced drawn animation in American features, the ‘second age of Disney’ became the ‘age of CGI and Pixar’. The initial inspiration for that revolution was Disney’s innovative but unsuccessful Tron, the first feature to use computer graphics extensively. Early footage from Tron excited John Lasseter, a young artist at the Disney studio. He and fellow animator Glen Keane contrasted the flashy, three-dimensional movements of the Light Cycle race with the flat, uninspired cinematography of the recent Disney features. The Fox and the Hound (1981), for example, had included a single multiplane shot. In 1982, Lasseter and Keane created a 30-second test based on Maurice Sendak’s popular children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are. Max, a mischievous little boy, chases his dog out of the bedroom, through a hallway, and down the stairs. The setting and predetermined path of action were created at the computer studio MAGI-West. The animators’ drawings were scanned and coloured by the computer, with highlights and shadows added. The resulting footage was exciting and distinctive, adding a three-dimensional look and complicated camera moves to the vibrant animation. Lasseter hoped to develop the first CGI feature at Disney based on Thomas Disch’s The Brave Little Toaster. The appliance characters would have lent themselves to the mechanical bias of early CGI, but the project was halted and Lasseter was fired in 1983. Ed Catmull invited him to come to the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, where he began using CGI to create character animation in The Adventures of André & Wally B. In 1986, Steve Jobs bought the graphics division of Lucasfilm and established it as an independent company, Pixar. Over the next few years, Lasseter directed a series of prize-winning shorts and commercials. He used these shorts the way Walt Disney had used the Silly Symphonies during the 1930s – as a way of exploring a new medium. Many computer companies were producing shorts, but most of them were showcases for new software or hardware and lacked appeal as films. Lasseter used his knowledge of traditional animation techniques and the Disney classics to produce films that were entertaining. Luxo Jr. (1986), which depicts a patient father desk lamp and his rambunctious son, was the first CGI film that made audiences laugh. Lasseter’s experiments culminated in Tin Toy (1988), which became the first CGI film to win the Oscar for Animated Short Film. The success of the Pixar shorts led to an agreement with Disney to develop, produce, and distribute three features.

For Pixar’s initial feature, Lasseter planned to build on Tin Toy. An avid toy collector, he knew that a cast of plastic, metal, and fabric characters was well suited to CGI. Humans remained a problem, but the toys felt alive, and Toy Story played to a fantasy all children share: their toys come to life when people aren’t around. Woody, an old-fashioned cowboy doll who has been Andy’s favourite toy for years, is consumed with jealousy when the high-tech action figure Buzz Lightyear threatens to replace him. Toy Story, which was conceived as a classic ‘Buddy Picture’ along the lines of The Defiant Ones, Midnight Run, and The Odd Couple, provided comedy, adventure, winning secondary characters, and a happy reconciliation at the end. Although the animation was less nuanced than the best drawn work, Toy Story proved that CGI could be used to create characters to which audiences would respond. The three-dimensional settings, coupled with the realistic lighting, shadows, and highlights, gave the toy characters an added believability. The Pixar artists cleverly evoked such common childhood memories as making the army men walk with their feet fixed to their bases. Although considerable media attention was focused on the novelty of using CGI in a feature, audiences flocked to the film because it offered a solid, well-told story. The highest grossing film of 1995, Toy Story earned 192  million dollars at the domestic box office, with a world-wide total of 362  million dollars. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Musical or Comedy Score, Best Song (‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’), and Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. Buzz and Woody appeared on the 1996 Oscar telecast, when John Lasseter received an Award for Special Achievement. Pixar followed Toy Story with an unprecedented string of critical, technical, and financial triumphs. Between 1995 and 2010, the studio released 11 features, and each one advanced the medium and scored a hit at the box office. It was a record even Walt Disney had never achieved. For A Bug’s Life (1998), Lasseter and his crew chose characters with hard exoskeletons, well-suited to CGI. But the artists encountered a problem that Ward Kimball had faced when he designed Jiminy Cricket for Pinocchio decades earlier – people perceive insects as ugly. Kimball recalled: ‘I ended up with a little man, really, wearing spats and a tail coat that suggested folded wings; he looked like Mr. Pickwick, but with no ears, no nose and no hair.’ The Pixar artists turned the ants, which make up the bulk of their cast, into creatures resembling Muppets, with bright pastel bodies and ping-pong ball eyes. The ants in Princess Atta’s colony are little better than slaves. All year

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they gather food that thuggish grasshoppers confiscate. Flik, a misfit ant, recruits a troupe of unsuccessful circus bugs to help the colony break the grim cycle of labour and exploitation. Toy Story 2 (1999) was initially planned as a low-budget, direct-to-video sequel. But the story showed so much potential that the film was shifted to a theatrical release, extensively reworked, and completed in less than a year. Pixar president Ed Catmull said the push to make the second Toy Story movie as good as, or better than, the first was a defining moment in the studio’s history. ‘That was where our notions of quality were challenged, what lengths we would go to hit quality, how we get there, how we think about things, and the role of people in doing that. Everything shifted.’ Toy Story had centred on Woody’s jealousy of Buzz, a jealousy that suggested sibling rivalry. In Toy Story 2, Woody confronts a toy’s notion of mortality. Andy doesn’t take him to Cowboy Camp because his arm is torn. Woody is left to wonder what will become of him as he ages. Will he gather dust on a shelf ? Or be consigned to a yard sale – or the trash can? The Pixar crew invented a backstory that Woody had been the star of a children’s TV series in the 1950s. Al McWhiggin, an odious toy collector, steals Woody to complete a set of ‘Woody’s Roundup’ toys to sell to a museum in Japan. Woody can remain perfect behind glass forever – and never be loved. Alternatively, he can remain Andy’s favourite toy and be loved but risk being destroyed or abandoned. The tragedy he risks is made poignantly clear by Jessie, the cowgirl from ‘Woody’s Roundup’. In Randy Newman’s touching ballad ‘When She Loved Me’, Jessie recalls how she had been the beloved doll of a girl, Emily, and how Emily had grown up and given Jessie away. Luxo Jr. was the first CGI film that made audiences laugh. Toy Story 2 was the first CGI film that made audiences cry. The old Disney animators had been amazed when their drawing of the Seven Dwarfs weeping at Snow White’s bier reduced audiences to tears. A new generation of filmgoers wept over the fate of a lonely cowgirl doll that was just an arrangement of pixels. Toy Story 2 was an even bigger hit than Toy Story or A Bug’s Life. Monsters, Inc. (2001) was the first Pixar feature not directed by John Lasseter. For the film, Pete Docter (b. Bloomington, Minnesota, 9 October  1968) drew on another childhood belief – that monsters hide in closets at night. Although children’s screams provide the energy needed to power Monstropolis, the Monsters are terrified of being contaminated by contact with humans. A  little girl named Boo mistakes top ‘scarer’ James P. ‘Sulley’ Sullivan for an enormous kitty and follows him into the

monster-world. Sulley and his sidekick Mike Wazowski learn that kids are really harmless – and that their laughter is far more powerful than their fears. The bond established between Sulley and Boo triumphs over prejudice, adversity, and the homicidal lizard-like villain, Randall. The ending feels warm, without becoming saccharine or manipulative. Monsters, Inc. (2001) centred on supposedly irrational childhood fears. In contrast, Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo (2003) depicted a parent’s real fear – losing a child. Nemo, a young clownfish with a withered fin, is captured by a diver collecting specimens for the aquarium trade. His overprotective father Marlin sets out to find him and is joined by Dory, a dotty regal tang fish (in a wonderfully zany vocal performance by comedienne Ellen DeGeneris). Finding Nemo became the first Pixar feature to win the newly established Oscar for Best Animated Feature. In 2004, it set a record for DVD sales, selling over 24 million copies. The Incredibles (2004) was the first Pixar feature directed by Brad Bird (b. Kalispell, Montana, 1963), a former CalArts classmate of Lasseter’s who had made the critically acclaimed The Iron Giant (1999). Mr. Incredible (a.k.a. Bob Parr) and his family (Mrs. Incredible/Elastigirl, Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack) struggle to keep their superpowers hidden and lead everyday lives. But the arrival of the super-villain Syndrome forces them to abandon their pretended normalcy and save the world. One of the highlights is Bird’s performance as the voice of the maniacal Edna Mode, diminutive designer of superhero costumes. Every Pixar film included technical breakthroughs. A Bug’s Life had crowd scenes, sunlight shining through leaves, and a credible evocation of the world from an insect’s point of view. In Toy Story, every hair on the dog Scud was applied to his body individually; Sulley in Monsters, Inc. was covered with realistic blue and purple fur. Finding Nemo required believable water, undersea effects, and swimming movements. In The Incredibles, Bird pushed the animation of the human characters in a broader, cartoonier direction. In each film, the animated acting grew more nuanced and polished. Lasseter’s love of automobiles and his recollections of family trips through the American Southwest on Route 66 provided the inspiration for Cars (2006). Hotshot racecar Lightning McQueen learns what’s truly important in life when he’s stranded in the largely forgotten town of Radiator Springs. Mater, a rusty, none-too-bright tow truck, and Sally, a plucky Porsche, present the lessons. The car characters delighted little boys, and the toys flew off the shelves. Despite its extraordinary success, the relationship between Disney and Pixar soured over questions involving

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sequels and disagreements between executives Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs. Shortly after Eisner’s departure Disney bought Pixar, in early 2006, for 7.4 billion dollars. Catmull became President, Walt Disney Animation Studios/Pixar Animation Studios, and Lasseter was the Chief Creative Officer of both companies. The task of reviving Disney’s moribund feature animation division was added to their duties at Pixar. After completing The Incredibles, Bird was asked to take over as director of the troubled Ratatouille. Remy, the film’s unlikely hero, is a rat with the desire and the talent to become a great chef. He gets his chance when he discovers he can manipulate Linguini, a hapless human dishwasher in a once-great restaurant that’s fallen on hard times, by pulling clumps of his hair. With Remy as puppeteer, Linguini attracts the attention of diners and food critics and wins the love of fellow chef Colette. Bird insisted that Remy had to be believable as a rat and able to run on four legs. The artists threw out models they had worked on for nearly two years and reconfigured them on a breakneck schedule. Bird told the crew: ‘I’ve jumped out of an airplane, I’m knitting a parachute on the way down – and I need you to jump with me.’ The crew jumped, and the results justified the effort. The scenes of Linguini jerking around the kitchen, as Remy commandeers his body, suggest Buster Keaton, and the mime sequences of Remy set a new standard for subtlety. Ratatouille was the best-reviewed film of 2007, earning more than 623  million dollars worldwide and winning Bird a second Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Stanton’s Wall-E (2008) is set on a ruined Earth that is little more than a gargantuan rubbish heap. The title character (an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), spends lonely days compacting blocks of trash and stacking them into towers. His metal body can’t be squashed or stretched, and his minimal facial features preclude using the expressions that usually bring a pantomime character to life. The Pixar artists employ slight tilts of the binoculars that form his eyes to suggest expressions and use the character’s blunt but sensitively animated hands to indicate his emotional state. Wall-E proves that animated characters are often most eloquent when they say nothing but reveal their emotions purely through movement. The film garnered six Oscar nominations, won Best Animated Feature, and was voted Best Film of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association – a first for an animated feature. Pete Docter’s Up (2009) defied Hollywood’s conventional wisdom about animated films. Prior to the film’s opening, entertainment industry observers predicted that

audiences, especially the vital juvenile audience, wouldn’t watch a movie about an old man. Up proved the naysayers wrong. Lonely, disgruntled widower Carl Fredricksen embarks on a long-dreamed-of adventure to South America, accompanied by the enthusiastic boy Russell, a Junior Wilderness Explorer. A  montage of Carl’s long and loving marriage to the irrepressible Ellie moved viewers of all ages to tears and balanced the action sequences and the comedy provided by Russell and Dug, an endearingly dim golden retriever fitted with a voice box. Up became the second animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture (the first was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast). It won Best Animated Feature and composer Michael Giacchino won for Best Original Score. In 2009, Lasseter, Docter, Stanton, Bird, and Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich were honoured with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival. Lasseter had often thought about a third Toy Story film, and after Disney acquired Pixar he asked longtime collaborator Lee Unkrich to direct it. The key Pixar artists came up with the outline of the story, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Arndt wrote the script. Once again, the toy characters are forced to confront their mortality. Andy is now 18 and preparing to go to college. What will he do with his old toys? Woody believes that Andy still loves them and they have to be there for him; Jessie argues that their time with Andy is over and they have to move on; Buzz insists all the toys must stay together as a family. Toy Story 3 brought the cycle to a moving close. Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the rest of the gang find a new life with Bonnie, an imaginative little girl who will love them and play with them. Andy can move on to college and adulthood knowing his toys will be well cared for. Toy Story 3 was the best-reviewed and most successful film of 2010, earning more than a billion dollars worldwide – a record for an animated film. Producer Darla Anderson summed up the movie’s themes and how they paralleled the experiences of the Pixar artists, including the death of beloved story artist Joe Ranft. ‘This movie can be as deep as you want it to be,’ Anderson concluded. ‘It reflects what’s happened with our company. People have died. Joe’s gone. It reflects people moving on. It reflects the human experience. All the Toy Story movies have always been about mortality. You can keep peeling that onion and going as deeply spiritual as you want into it. Or enjoy it for what it is.’ Disney initially used CGI to enhance the cinematography in drawn animated features, creating camera movements in three dimensions and simulating the illusion of depth produced by the multiplane camera. Lasseter and

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Keane had sought to achieve such effects in the Wild Things test in 1983. The soaring flight of the eagle Marahute in The Rescuers Down Under (1990), the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast (1991), and the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King (1994) demonstrated the potential of CGI to enrich drawn animation. Like the classic Disney films of the 1930s and 1940s, these features were at the cutting edge of filmmaking as well as animation. But the increasingly elaborate CGI effects blended less effectively with the drawn characters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). Although Disney released the Pixar blockbusters, the studio entered the CGI field belatedly and unimpressively. Dinosaur (2000) combined computer animated characters with live-action background plates. While some of the visuals were interesting, the film was burdened with a weak, rambling story and effortful humour from a lemur-like character who described himself as ‘your love monkey’. In The New Yorker, critic David Denby complained, ‘I found myself missing the violent freedom of Tarzan surfing the upper branches of the forest and the exuberant airborne absurdities of Aladdin.’ After the exciting battles in Steven Spielberg’s first two Jurassic Park films, Dinosaur felt pallid. Disney, the studio that had led American animation artistically and technically for decades, was clearly playing catch-up. The studio’s first purely CGI film, Chicken Little (2005), proved even less memorable. The title character (a boy, despite the name) begins as a nerdy kid who can’t, to his father’s dismay, play baseball. But this storyline gets lost as the feature progresses and mutates into a heavy-handed imitation of some live-action science fiction films. Chicken Little lacks the hip edginess of DreamWorks’ Shrek series, while the awkward character designs and uninspired animation look like student work next to the innovations of The Incredibles. Chicken Little grossed 135 million dollars domestically – better than Disney’s unsatisfying drawn films Brother Bear (2003) and Home on the Range (2004) but less than Toy Story had made a decade earlier. Changes in management, a lack of vision, and a proliferation of vice presidents, creative executives, and other ‘suits’ left the artists feeling demoralized and adrift. When Disney bought Pixar, the new leadership faced the daunting challenges of rebuilding the once-great studio. The Pixar team arrived too late to do much to help Meet the Robinsons (2007), an unimpressive film that performed indifferently at the box office. American Dog had been initiated by Chris Sanders, the co-writer/codirector of the

charming and quirky traditional Disney feature Lilo and Stitch (2002). Sanders created a story about a dog who’s the star of a popular TV series but doesn’t realize this world is a fantasy. When Sanders departed over creative differences, Byron Howard and Chris Williams took over and the title was changed to Bolt. The new crew kept the premise but focused on the bond between Bolt and Penny, the girl-actress who plays his owner. Although more satisfying than Chicken Little or Meet the Robinsons, the film often feels derivative. Bolt’s stubborn belief in his own superpowers recalls Buzz Lightyear’s insistence that he really is a space ranger in Toy Story; and the backstory for Mittens, a cat abandoned by her owner, echoes Jessie’s story in Toy Story 2. On the plus side, the film has a handsome visual style that distinguishes it from the work of Pixar and DreamWorks. Bolt was not a great film, but it suggested that Disney Feature Animation was on the road to recovery. Disney’s next CGI feature, Tangled (2010), spent nearly a decade in production and preproduction. It began as a retelling of the fairy tale ‘Rapunzel’, under Glen Keane’s direction. Keane left the movie due to health reasons in 2008 and Nathan Greno and Byron Howard restarted and completed the project. When the drawn feature The Princess and the Frog (2009) failed to perform as well as studio management hoped, the new film’s title was changed to Tangled in an effort to attract more boys – who, it was believed, would not come to a movie about a princess. Tangled is still the story of Rapunzel, the girl imprisoned in a tower. But she’s now a princess who was kidnapped as a child for the magical properties of her hair, which keep the manipulative Mother Gothel perpetually young. The role of Flynn, a dashing rogue who helps her escape, was enlarged in hopes of attracting male viewers. Unlike the passive original heroine, this version of Rapunzel is feistier and displays a teenager’s seesawing emotions. Tangled is a good film, but it’s still not a great one. It offers some excellent animation of the main characters, especially Flynn. The often lyrical visual style once again sets it apart from the work of other studios – especially the scenes of hundreds of candlelit lanterns floating through the evening sky. But the story feels like a mixture of Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and DreamWorks’ The Road to El Dorado. Tangled opened on Thanksgiving weekend 2010 to generally favourable reviews and earned 68.7 million dollars – the biggest opening for any non-Pixar animated film released by Disney. Its success boded well for the future of Disney Feature Animation. Pixar’s most serious rival in CGI features was DreamWorks SKG, the studio Jeffrey Katzenberg founded with

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Steven Spielberg and David Geffen after leaving Disney in 1994. Although he had come to Disney knowing virtually nothing about animation, Katzenberg quickly grew to love the medium and focused his attention on the new studio’s feature animation division. The studio’s first feature was The Prince of Egypt (1998), a retelling of the story of the Ten Commandments in drawn animation. Two years later, DreamWorks released The Road to El Dorado and its first CGI film, Antz, made in association with Pacific Data Images (PDI). Z, a young ant in a colony in New York’s Central Park, chaffs at the restrictions of its conformist society. His efforts to advance individuality within the colony win the heart of Bala, the Queen’s daughter. While Pixar’s ants in A Bug’s Life look like puppets with two arms and two legs, the DreamWorks ants suggest aliens with large triangular heads, human eyes, and small noses. They walk on four legs, like insect centaurs. Antz boasts an all-star vocal cast that includes Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Dan Aykroyd, Jennifer Lopez, and Sylvester Stallone. But the story lacks emotional punch – despite Woody Allen’s humorous commentary as Z – and the overwhelmingly brown palette failed to charm audiences. DreamWorks’ decision to make a film about ant characters angered the Pixar artists, as did the plan to release Antz two months earlier than A Bug’s Life (2 October 1998 vs. 20 November 1998). A Bug’s Life outdrew Antz at the box office (163 million dollars vs. 91 million dollars, domestically) but the face-off left bad feelings between the studios. DreamWorks acquired a majority interest in PDI in 2000, and the combined entity went public as DreamWorks Animation. In 2001, DreamWorks scored its first major hit with Shrek. Loosely based on a children’s book by New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, Shrek is a hero-in-spite-of-himself story. The title character, a grumpy green ogre, is drafted into rescuing Princess Fiona from a tower guarded by a fire-breathing dragon. Initially, Shrek’s motives are selfish: the villain Lord Farquaad has banished all fairy tale characters from his realm, and they’ve taken refuge in Shrek’s swamp. If Shrek rescues the princess for him, Farquaad will move the squatters out. During his quest, Shrek acquires a sidekick, Donkey, and discovers that Fiona is under a curse that causes her to turn into an ogress at sunset. All ends happily, with Farquaad eaten by the dragon and the ogres married. Shrek was a spoof of fairy tales in general and of Disney fairy tale films in particular. A fussy Pinocchio, a trio of Germanic Little Pigs, and a Gingerbread Boy were among the supporting characters, and Farquaad’s realm was a pointed send-up of Disneyland. The animation,

particularly of the stiff human characters, was less polished than that of the Pixar features. But Shrek was a huge hit, grossing 268 million dollars domestically and winning the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The film also set the pattern for most future DreamWorks films: characters with A-list star voices delivering sitcom-style one-liners. The humour was edgier than that of the Disney and Pixar films, aimed at the teenage and young adult audiences who see movies on their opening weekend. This approach proved more effective in some films than in others, but the DreamWorks approach to animated comedy was very successful and influenced features from other studios. DreamWorks scored an even bigger hit in 2004 with Shrek 2, which is generally considered the most entertaining of the four Shrek films. After their honeymoon, Shrek and Princess Fiona are invited to visit her parents, the King and Queen of the Kingdom of Far, Far Away. The royal couple isn’t expecting an ogre son-in-law or an ogress daughter. His plans for his daughter foiled, the King seeks the help of a nasty Fairy Godmother and a handsome Prince Charming. Of course, Shrek triumphs in the end. The animation is much more polished than in the first film, and the gags more outrageous. The Kingdom of Far, Far Away is a caricature of Beverly Hills, complete with the fairy tale equivalent of Rodeo Drive. However, the lively animation of Puss in Boots (complemented by an over-the-top vocal performance from Antonio Banderas) nearly steals the film. In just a few frames, the cat shifts from threatening Shrek and Donkey with his sword to pleading for mercy with the outsized eyes of a dime-store painting. Shrek 2 earned more than 441  million dollars domestically, setting a new record for an animated feature. DreamWorks offered a change of pace in 2008 with the warmer Kung Fu Panda. Po, the panda, begins as a slacker who daydreams about martial arts while working in his father’s noodle shop. (Po is clearly adopted; his father is a goose.) A series of mishaps causes Po to be proclaimed the hero of an ancient prophecy, and he begins Kung Fu training with the Furious Five. Under the guidance of Master Shifu, a diminutive red panda, Po learns to exploit his strengths (especially his love of eating) until he can defeat the terrible snow leopard Tai Lung. Like Shrek, Po is an unlikely hero who comes from behind to win the day, but he is more appealing – clumsy yet endearing. Kung Fu Panda also earned widespread praise for the strikingly stylized two-dimensional dream sequence that evoked both Chinese painting and contemporary graphics. The film showed that the DreamWorks artists could

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move beyond the sardonic tone of most of their features and tell a story with more heart. How to Train Your Dragon (2010) reunited writer-directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who made Disney’s Lilo and Stitch. The other Vikings dismiss teenage Hiccup as the village loser. Skinny and inquisitive, he tries out unsuccessful contraptions instead of fighting the dragons that attack his village. When one of his inventions actually works, Hiccup can’t bring himself to kill the young dragon he’s brought down. He names it Toothless and befriends it, although he’s been taught to fear all dragons. The bond they form enables them to defeat the monster that truly threatens the Vikings. How to Train Your Dragon ran into trouble during its development: Sanders and DeBlois came in at the last minute, rewrote the story, and finished the film on a breakneck schedule. The resulting film was a delight, and many observers noted that its uplifting tone felt more like Pixar than DreamWorks. The flying sequences of Toothless carrying Hiccup above rocky coasts and into the clouds rival the 3D effects in James Cameron’s Avatar. The charming mime sequences of Hiccup befriending Toothless showcase the extremely subtle animation. When Toothless chases a spot of sunlight reflected off Hiccup’s hammer, like a giant kitten attacking the beam of a laser pointer, the humour comes from the characters’ personalities instead of one-liners. It makes the film feel less timely and more timeless. Although it failed to duplicate the financial success of Shrek 2, How to Train Your Dragon ranks as DreamWorks’ most satisfying feature. Blue Sky, a small studio specializing in commercials and effects that was acquired by Fox in 1997, made an impressive feature debut in 2002 with Ice Age. Manny the mammoth, Sid the sloth, and Diego the saber-toothed tiger form an uneasy alliance as they seek to return a lost human baby to its tribe. Scrat, a small squirrel-like mammal who struggles to keep a single acorn, provides slapstick humour. The diminutive character’s antics are clearly modeled on Wile E. Coyote’s unsuccessful bids to capture the Road Runner in the Warner Brothers cartoons, but the new animation feels like an affectionate homage rather than a pallid copy. The most successful animated feature of the year, Ice Age offered a cartoonier, less realistic approach to CGI. Director Chris Wedge (b. Binghamton, New York, 20 March  1957) and his artists were obviously working with a smaller budget than their Pixar and DreamWorks counterparts, but what they lacked in money they made up for in imagination. The designs were simple, angular, and appealing. Sid looked like a frayed theme park

walk-around figure. Instead of rendering every individual hair of Manny’s pelt, the filmmakers gave it the texture of an old chenille bathrobe. The human characters were the least successful members of the cast, and the artists wisely kept their presence to a minimum. The success of Ice Age led to sequels: Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), and Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012). The films did well at the box office but failed to recapture the scrappy charm of the original. The sequels were obviously made on larger budgets, which enabled the artists to create more detailed backgrounds and characters. But more elaborate didn’t necessarily equal more imaginative. The runaway success of the Pixar and DreamWorks films led other studios to begin making CGI features, just as the success of the Disney features in the early 1990s motivated studios to produce drawn animation. Once again, the results were decidedly mixed. Too often, directors used simulated three-dimensional camera moves to take the audience on protracted roller-coaster rides through caverns, machinery, ice, and so on. These sequences quickly degenerated into clichés that halted, instead of advancing, the story. Many CGI films suffered from a problem that a depressing number of drawn films also exhibited – a tendency to talk the audience to death. Viewers weren’t subjected to endless chatter because the characters had something to say but because filmmakers and studio executives were afraid to let them be quiet. When the eager young metal hero arrives in Robot City in Blue Sky’s Robots, the audience should share the excitement he feels as he enters the metropolis of his dreams. But any feelings of wonder are crushed under the nonstop verbiage of the robot Fender, voiced by Robin Williams. Sony made an unimpressive debut in CGI films with Open Season (2006), a film that suffered from a plethora of bodily function jokes. Surf ’s Up (2007), directed by veteran artists Ash Brannon and Chris Buck, was more appealing. But the mockumentary about surfing with a cast of penguins felt like the filmmakers were trying to juggle one concept too many. The other CGI penguin movie, Happy Feet (2006), was produced at the Sydney-based visual effects and animation studio Animal Logic. Mumble is a misfit penguin who retains much of his juvenile down as he grows up. Unlike other penguins his age, he dances rather than sings. It would have been more entertaining to see tap dance wizard Savion Glover perform the steps that were used for the motion capture than it was to watch an animated penguin with distorted legs dance without seeming to touch the ice.

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However, the film scored an upset win in the Animated Feature Oscar category, beating out Cars. Animal Logic followed Happy Feet with Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010), a portentous, overblown saga that borrowed heavily from The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy adventures. The Hong Kong-based studio Imagi’s Astro Boy (2009) attempted to update Osamu Tezuka’s 1963 adaptation of his long-running manga Tetsuwan Atom (literally ‘Iron-arm Atom’). The original Astro Boy was the first Japanese animated series to air in the US. It was an iconic work, beloved on both sides of the Pacific, and the series launched the postwar Japanese animation industry. The Imagi Astro Boy centres on a redesigned title character who looks more like a teenager than the innocent child that Tezuka had envisioned. The naïve charm of the original black-and-white visuals is replaced with elaborate but undistinguished special effects that echo countless other science fiction films. Astro Boy pleased neither fans of the original nor devotees of American CGI, and the film died at the box office. Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (1999), which Bird made prior to his Pixar films, was the most successful attempt to combine three-dimensional CGI and traditional drawn animation. Bird adapted poet Ted Hughes’ story The Iron Man by moving the story of a robot who crashes to Earth to a setting in Maine in the late 1950s. Hogarth Hughes, the adolescent son of a widowed mother, befriends the Giant, who suffers from amnesia after his fall. The Giant’s bond with Hogarth transcends his programming as an instrument of destruction. The robot sacrifices himself to save Hogarth and his family in the film’s moving finale. The contrast between the CGI Giant and the drawn characters emphasizes the differences in their natures. Bird and his artists imbued the Giant and the very likable Hogarth with good humour and genuine pathos. Made on a modest budget, The Iron Giant excited many animators who felt its powerful story, honest emotions, nonmusical format, and lack of wisecracking sidekicks embodied the kind of film they wanted to make. Unfortunately, Warner Brothers mishandled the release and the film fared poorly at the box office despite ecstatic reviews. The Iron Giant enjoys a loyal following and remains popular on DVD. Disney had less success blending diverse media in Treasure Planet (2002), a sci-fi retelling of Kipling’s Treasure Island. Long John Silver is a cyborg whose robotic limbs were

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created in CGI. Although the computer imagery was well matched to Glen Keane’s drawings of the character, the elaborately detailed, constantly moving appendages call too much attention to themselves. The results proved less satisfactory than the drawn animation of Edward Elric, a character with similar prostheses in the popular Japanese series Fullmetal Alchemist. Michael Eisner’s dismissal of Treasure Planet as a failure within a few days of its opening sealed the film’s fate. Flushed Away (2006), a cocreation of DreamWorks and Aardman Animations, attempted to infuse CGI with the charm of Aardman’s celebrated clay films. But the story of Roddy, the spoiled pet rat of an upper-crust British family, and his adventures in the London sewers with Rita, a scavenger-entrepreneur, proved less than enchanting. The artists failed to capture the illogical, handmade appeal, wonderful silliness, and engaging personalities of Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. As computer speed and power increased almost exponentially over the years, it became possible to make a CGI feature on a smaller budget and with a smaller crew than the Pixar or DreamWorks films utilized. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001) served as a lead-in to the Nickelodeon series (The Adventures of Jimmy Neuton: Boy Genius) that debuted the following year. The animation never approached the subtlety and polish of Pixar, but the filmmakers made good use of their limited resources. Instead of rendering individual hairs, they gave the title character a solid coif that looked like soft-serve cream. While not a great film, Jimmy Neutron showed that reasonable quality CGI could be produced on a restricted budget.

Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Mike Johnson62 There are few directors who take their first steps into animation and then choose live-action. This is probably because, as Alfred Hitchcock once said, some directors want to be animators, but most animators are happy to sit at their desks and take advantage of all the possibilities animation offers. The directors who side with live-action seldom have the strength, the skills, or the opportunity to conceive their films as if they were cartoons or puppet films while also winning favour with audiences and critics.

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Tim Burton Born on 25 August  1958 in Burbank, California – also home to The Walt Disney Studios – Timothy Walter Burton was not in tune with the typical 1950s suburban way of life. He found an escape in painting, drawing, and watching movies. He especially liked Hammer’s horror films, the works of Ray Harryhausen, and Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla. Not surprisingly, he tried to give life to his imaginary world using animation. After attending CalArts, he began work in the concept art department at Disney Studios, where he befriended Henry Selick and Rick Heinrichs. Together, they made Vincent (1982), Burton’s first black-and-white puppet animation short film. The short, based on a poem written by Burton himself, depicts Vincent Malloy, a seven-year-old boy who wants to be Vincent Price. He plays the role so seriously that he scares himself to death (or at least he dreams that he does).63 Vincent’s little world is a theatre of horrors, described in an expressionistic style. There are never-ending stairs, light and shade effects, curved lines, leaning walls, and other visual effects to paint the child’s anguish and dread. The voice of Vincent Price himself emphasizes the drama and provides the audience with shivers and (bittersweet) smiles. From the beginning, Burton showed a rare ability to show horrible things with grace and frankness, being artistic and popular at the same time. However, his dark humour and his love of horror films didn’t help him at Disney, where he submitted several projects only to see them rejected. However, he was able to write and direct Frankenweenie (1984), a live-action short about a boy (called Victor Frankenstein) who resurrects his bull terrier Sparky. Actor Paul Reubens64 liked the film and asked Burton to direct a feature film based on the comic character of Pee-Wee Herman, played by Reubens himself. With Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Burton started his career in live-action and didn’t direct an animated feature film until Corpse Bride (2005). However, he produced several animated series for television, including Beetlejuice (1989–1991) and Family Dog (1993), and he also made series for the Web, including The World of Stainboy (2000). The Beetlejuice series only superficially resembles the live-action film directed by Burton in 1988 and is less biting and

gloomy. It can be viewed on one level by small children and on a deeper, more sophisticated level by adults. However, the animation is unimaginative and the show relies on verbal more than visual gags. Family Dog made its debut as an Amazing Stories special in 1993. It was written and directed by Brad Bird and produced by Steven Spielberg65 and Tim Burton (who was also the character design consultant). The special was beautifully made by television standards, but when it was turned into a CBS series things changed. Bird had to leave, Dennis Klein took his place, and the scripts became crude and the animation poor. The six episodes of The World of Stainboy (2000), a Flash animation series for the Web, were completely under Burton’s control. The main characters came from Burton’s book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories (1997), in which poems are illustrated by drawings of freaky kids. Stainboy is a young sleuth working for the Burbank police department and investigating cases involving characters such as Roy the Toxic Boy and the Girl with Many Eyes. Stainboy wears a superhero suit but has no superpowers except that he leaves nasty stains. Like Burton’s other creatures he is a proud social outcast. Burton’s set design, costumes, and makeup are strongly influenced by comics, cartoons, and Burton’s own drawings. The vivid, primary colours of Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks! (1996), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) alternate with the black and white of Ed Wood (1994), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and Planet of the Apes (2001). Sometimes this bright world lives together with the gloomy world, but not for long. In Edward Scissorhands, a crumbling building is surrounded by a ruffled park and everything is black, white, blue, or gray. On the other side of the gates there are new terraced houses, flowery meadows, groomed poodles, and smiling housewives. Edward and his home are like a black spot on a tidy apron. Frankenweenie (2012), Tim Burton’s feature-length puppet animation remake of his 1984 short, has the same plot as the original though it is developed further. The meaning is the same: how far can we go to preserve friendship and/ or love from death, and how hard is it for the freaks to live with common people? Burton, like young Victor, cannot leave the faithful Sparky and so he keeps redesigning, rewriting, and reanimating him. Calling back Sparky from

In Vincent there is a clear homage to Bobe Cannon’s Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951). The verses of the poem sound similar to the ones written for the earlier film by Dr. Seuss. 64 Real name Paul Rubenfeld (b. New York, 27 August 1952). 65 It was Spielberg’s first animated project, a year before the creation of DreamWorks SKG. 63

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Figure 2.3  Tim Burton, Frankenweenie, 2012. © 2012 Disney. death and from live-action, Burton claims the grown-up’s right to keep alive the child’s dreams and nightmares through animated films. Little, meaningful details reveal how deep is the link between puppet and live-action films. In Frankenweenie, the human puppets have human hair, while in live-action films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Planet of the Apes (2001), and Alice in Wonderland (2010), heavy prosthetic makeup, wigs, and unrealistically designed clothes cover the faces and bodies of the live actors. From Vincent to Beetlejuice, from Edward Scissorhands to Batman, from Ed Wood to Sweeney Todd, there is always a continuity between Burton’s animated characters and his flesh-and-bones actors (for example, between the Johnny Depp-like puppet in Corpse Bride and the actor in Edward Scissorhands). As in Big Fish, the point is not whether to lie but rather to turn reality into something more interesting. Burton’s animated features are on the same wavelength as his live-action features, though Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1996) was directed by Henry Selick and Corpse Bride (2005) was codirected with Mike Johnson.

Henry Selick Henry Selick (b. Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 30 November 1952) did little but draw in his early years. After seeing Lotte Reiniger’s silhouettes and the puppet ‘creatures’ by Ray Harryhausen, he decided to follow his fascination

with animation. He studied experimental animation under Jules Engel at CalArts. After his studies, he worked at Disney as an inbetweener and animator. He was on the team working on the alien creature in the live-action The Watcher in the Woods (1980); he animated the main titles of the feature cartoon The Fox and the Hound (1981); and he storyboarded the clay animation sequence in Return to Oz (1985). At Disney he met and worked with Tim Burton, Rick Heinrichs, Brad Bird, and John Musker – and also the veteran Eric Larson, from whom Selick learned how to improve his drawing, animating, and storytelling. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Selick made Seepage (1981). It was a combination of expressionism, Picasso collages, abstractionism, and Rodchenko’s works. Over several years, Selick worked as a freelance artist. He made Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, which used puppet animation, cutouts, and live-action, for MTV. Selick showed a talent for combining visual innovation with accessible narration. His first feature was Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1991),66 based on an idea that had inspired Burton to write a poem in the early 1980s. The film told the story of Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king, who is tired of Halloween and fascinated by Christmas. It was conceived as a short film, but in 1990 Disney and Burton made a development deal for a puppet animation feature film. In rewriting the project, Burton decided to turn it into a musical.

The film was promoted under the title ‘Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas’, giving the misleading impression that Burton, rather than Selick, directed the film.

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Figure 2.4  Tim Burton and Henry Selick, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1991. © 1993 Touchstone Pictures.

Together with his longtime collaborator Danny Elfman, Burton created a rough storyline and then Selick and his team wrote and rewrote the screenplay and storyboard. For the sets, Selick referred to expressionism for Halloweentown and Dr. Seuss’ illustrations for Christmas Town. The palette is washed out blacks, oranges, and green, with some neon colours. The puppet animation gives the film a restless look. On the making of the film, Selick said, ‘[Burton] laid the egg, and I sat on it and hatched it.’67 Predictably, the film seemed risky to Disney officials – too scary for kids, too childish for adults. However, it earned 50  million dollars in the US on its first theatrical run. In a short time Tim Burton’s The Nightmare

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Before Christmas became a cult classic, and Disney has reissued it every year since 2006. James and the Giant Peach (1996), Selick’s second feature after Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, used puppet animation, cutouts, 3D graphics, and live-action. It was based on a classic children’s story by Roald Dahl. James is an orphan who lives with two sadistic aunts. A peach in their garden magically grows to an enormous size and is inhabited by friendly talking insects. They help James escape from his aunts and cross the ocean to New York. Richard Corliss wrote in Time magazine that Selick’s film was better than Dahl’s story because the filmmaker had ‘reconciled the tale’s realistic and surreal elements’.68

Leslie Felperin, ‘Animated Dreams’, Sight and Sound 4, no. 12 (1994): 26–29. Richard Corliss, ‘Taking Out the Bugs’, Time, 15 April 1996. This article can be found at www.time.com.

Chapter 2: Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Mike Johnson  29

Monkeybone (2001), based on the comic Dark Town by Kaja Blackley and Vanessa Chong, used both animation and live-action. The complexity of the plot and the numerous visual and mythological references didn’t appeal to audiences or critics. In 2004, Selick joined Laika Studio as the director for feature film development and the next year he made his first computer-generated short, Moongirl. It had a lot in common with his subsequent Coraline (2009) – a friendship between a boy, a girl, and their pet friends; a journey into a parallel, mysterious world; a key that passes from hand to hand; and malicious creatures trying to do harm. Coraline, Selick’s fourth and possibly best feature, was shot with a double digital camera. This meant the 3D effect was obtained not through splitting bidimensional images but rather by shooting stroboscopic images; it used three-dimensional depth without resorting to cheap tricks. Coraline Jones lives with her very busy parents in an old house. She finds a little door that leads through a womb-like

tunnel to a parallel world. Here, the Other Mother awaits her – a benign-seeming double of her real mother who has buttons for eyes and a terrible secret purpose.69 Selick’s films are faithful to the books and drawings that inspired them, but in a creative, nonliteral way. There are marked differences between the character designs for Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Coraline. (For example, the characters designed by Selick are ‘pointier’ and have bigger heads than those designed by Burton.) However, Selick can always find a balance between his own creative world and the worlds of the authors he adapts.

Mike Johnson While working on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – a live-action film so unreal that it gently slides into animation – Burton returned to puppet animation with

Figure 2.5  Henry Selick with Coraline puppet.

69

Following is an excerpt from a review of the film by Justin Chang (Variety, 1 February 2009): Eerily inhabiting the netherworld where a young girl’s wildest dreams become her cruellest nightmares, Coraline is a dark delight. Although it coarsens some of the details in Neil Gaiman’s popular 2002 children’s horror novel, this eccentric and deliriously inventive fantasy finds puppet auteur Henry Selick scaling new heights of ghoulish whimsy, buoyed by a haunting score that works its own macabre magic. [. . .] Like the novel, the film functions as a crafty cautionary tale on the perils of getting what you want, whether it’s a pair of gloves or a new family. Yet the dazzling colors and unhinged imagination of Selick’s visual palette also have the effect of rendering Coraline’s fantasy world that much more eye-ticklingly and dangerously seductive.

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Corpse Bride.70 He was the credited codirector, but the ‘on the ground’ work was done by the film’s other director, Mike Johnson (b. Austin, Texas). Johnson had left Austin for San Francisco to become an assistant on Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. In 1996 he set up his own animation company, Fat Cactus Films, and produced several shorts, including the excellent The Devil Went Down to Georgia (1996). This energetic, colourful, and humorous music video tells the story of a boy, Johnny, who is challenged by the devil to a battle of fiddle-playing. The song, originally by the Charlie Daniels Band, is played by Primus, who wrote and played the theme of the animated series South Park. In 1998 Johnson directed three episodes of Eddie Murphy’s animated sitcom The PJ’s. After that, he taught puppet animation at CalArts and eventually directed Corpse Bride, his first feature, with Burton. Based on a Russian folk tale, Corpse Bride features a man, Victor (the puppet is voiced by Johnny Depp and obviously resembles him). Nervous about his upcoming wedding rehearsal, he goes to practise in the woods and puts the wedding ring on a twig. This ‘twig’ turns out to be the finger of the Corpse Bride, who was murdered by her

sweetheart on the day of the wedding. With her killer still unpunished, she can’t find peace. Johnson described his collaboration with Burton: I felt like I was there to help [Burton] realise the film that he would want to make if he could sit there for three years and do it himself. I think we had a sort of mutual respect. I was grateful that he treated me that way. Basically, we would meet and he would have ideas of where he wanted it to go and then he would give me the space and the time to develop those options and come up with those ideas. I would meet with him again and he would dial it in from there. It was a good collaboration that way.71

The Independents72 There is really no definition for ‘independent’ or ‘experimental’ animation, except that it is self-published, often made by one artist, and stretches formal conventions. These umbrellas cover a broad spectrum of practice – from entrepreneurs in the popular comic idiom to makers of visual music and conceptual installations

Here we’ll take the opportunity to pay tribute to an outstanding contributor to current animation, the Catalonian layout artist Carles [‘Carlos’ in Castillian] Grangel (b. Barcelona, 1963). Charles Solomon writes:

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Casual viewers may find little to connect the egotistical lion and hip-hop zebra of the DreamWorks computer-animated Madagascar with the macabre puppets of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride [. . .] But animation aficionados will see in both the fine hand of Carlos Grangel, a Spanish artist whose designs are coming to define the cutting edge of big-studio animation. [. . .] Mr. Burton first saw Mr. Grangel’s work at the model-making studio Mackinnon & Saunders Ltd. in Manchester, England. He [. . .] noticed drawings Mr. Grangel had done for the puppets in Steffen Schäffler’s short The Periwig-Maker, which would be nominated for an Oscar in 2001. [. . .] ‘So I felt quite connected with Carlos before I met him’. [On collaborating on Corpse Bride:] Once the designs were approved by Mr. Burton and his codirector, Mike Johnson, Mr. Grangel worked with crews at Mackinnon & Saunders, who built the puppets. The main characters are about 18 inches [45.72 cm.] tall, half again the size of a Barbie doll. Puppets are more than interesting-looking sculptures: they need armatures, jointed steel skeletons that enable the animators to adjust their positions in minute increments. The Corpse Bride puppets’ heads contained mechanical devices that the artists adjusted through the ears to change the models’ expressions. ‘The puppets for The Periwig-Maker were very simple’, Mr. Grangel said. ‘The ones for Corpse Bride represent a new generation of puppet that is so expressive, they may change people’s thinking about the possibilities of animation’. [. . .] The living characters look as bizarre as the spectres. Victor, the reluctant groom, has the long, skinny legs of Jack Skellington in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. But his expressive eyes and prominent chin resemble those of Johnny Depp, who supplies his voice. [. . .] ‘The eyebrows and eyes, and the very shy mouth make the character sympathetic’, Mr. Grangel said. ‘You care about him because he looks vulnerable’. (Charles Solomon, ‘How a Puppet Master Brings Life to the Comically Dead’, The New York Times, 14 August 2005.) 71 72

Mark Osborne, ‘Interview: Mike Johnson’, FramesperSecond, last modified 26 October 2006, fpsmagazine.com/feature/061026johnson.php. By George Griffin.

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to obsessive creators of hermetic alternative universes. Rarely self-sustaining, independent animation is less a discipline or profession than it is a calling.

Outside Animation ‘Experimental animation’ may refer to cartooning, abstraction, or virtually any innovative approach to the formal elements of film. Some who do it identify themselves as avant-garde filmmakers rather than animators. Lewis Klahr’s73 collage films, for example, rip images from a dazzling array of found media (advertising, comics, pornography), recomposing them into compelling, spiky narratives with underlying sexual undertones. The animation is abrupt and indelicate compared, for example, to Larry Jordan’s.74 There is little effort to create articulated characters, but subjective personae abound, and the jolting reinventions are riveting. Klahr’s 1993 Pharaoh’s Belt grapples with the dream of American consumer culture. Janie Geiser’s75 work is more multilayered, using puppets, silhouettes, and antique graphics with her signature drawings of lonely women searching through deep, enigmatic dream spaces. The animation is often glimpsed peripherally through superimpositions and soft-focus fabrics, as in Ghost Algebra (2009). Stan Brakhage76 spent his last years returning to his early direct strategies, painting and scratching on film. Stephanie Maxwell and Jennifer Reeves continue this practice while adding sophisticated variations with digital compositing. Phil Solomon appropriates and recomposes existing footage such as computer-animated games. He creates a meditative counternarrative, a moody dreamscape of meta-animation (Last Days in a Lonely Place, 2008).

Duration: Long Form Given its compression and intensity, is there an optimum length for an animated film? The ideal standard of seven minutes arose in the days of studio hegemony and still has a hold on our expectations. As with any long performance, pacing is everything. Independent animators may look to historical precedents for feature-length productions, including Lotte Reiniger, Jan Lenica and, more recently, Bill Plympton. Another precursor is R. O. Blechman’s77 1984 The Soldier’s Tale, the one-hour PBS special based on the Stravinsky opera. Blechman’s signature Everyman comes to life amid the hopes and delusions of post-World War I modernity, including forays into medieval castles, advertising, and conspicuous consumption. The wiggly-lined Blechman character introduces a spirit of introspective modesty, tinged with modern angst, whether he is acting as a worried stomach in a TV commercial or as a perplexed American voter in a Web cartoon. Through his legendary studio, Inktank, Blechman carried on an avant-garde New York tradition that had been established by John and Faith Hubley, discussed in Volume II. He advanced animation by perfecting a minimal

Figure 2.6  R. O. Blechman, The Soldier’s Tale, 1984.

Born New York, New York, 1956. Born Denver, Colorado, 1934. 75 Born Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1957. 76 Stan Brakhage (Kansas City, 14 January 1933–Victoria, BC, Canada, 9 March 2003) was the most important American vanguard film artist of the twentieth century. He began his career during a period of artistic ferment which included Maya Deren and John Cage. Brakhage created an unsurpassed body of work, including Window Water Baby Moving (1959), the Pittsburgh Trilogy (1971), Text of Light (1974), and theoretical writing (e.g. Metaphors on Vision, 1963), all based on the poetics of personal vision. Of interest to animators is Brakhage’s artistic approach to the material support of film through burning, scratching (Chinese Series, 2003), painting (Chartres Series, 1994), and appliqué (Mothlight, 1963). 77 R. O. Blechman (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1 October 1930), illustrator, writer, and director, applied a personal, idiosyncratic touch to The Soldier’s Tale. He collaborated with the character animators Tissa David (1921–2012) and Ed Smith and with Pop iconoclast Fred Mogubgub (1928–1989), with his unique sensibility. The film was line-produced by Blechman. 73 74

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approach to design, which always looked like a casual sketch brought to life. His work deals with serious themes and classics of high culture with a sly wit and subtle touch. It is a sophisticated antidote to what passes today for ‘adult’ animation. Nina Paley78 is a natural cartoonist. She can make a flurry of effortless rough gestures snap into a character. Paley burst out of her syndicated comic strip world by drawing directly on film. She then progressed to drawing directly in Flash, which seems custom-ordered to her agile talent. A string of shorts, one of the highlights of which is Fetch (2001) – a bouncy riff on Escher’s spatial conundrums – led to her ambitious feature Sita Sings the Blues (2008). The film melds the personal (Paley depicts how she got dumped), the mythic (the Indian national epic poem, the Ramayana, told from the viewpoint of the jilted wife and mother), and the political (gender politics on a historic scale). The film also has a witty reflexivity (a babble of contemporary Indian voices provides ironic interpretations). Sita (all bosom and hips with Betty Boop mannerisms) sings her bluesy tales of woe, sashaying through extravagant Bollywood settings. Cutout, hinged animation with florid air-brush gradients and Art Deco detail set a high standard for what used to be called stylized, or limited, character animation.

Meanwhile, the first-person story of ‘Nina’ is told as a generic, unfinished sketch. Various retellings of the legend resemble clumsy paintings, as if to suggest the primitive burden of national myths. Key musical passages are garnished with astonishing psychedelic effects based on a rotoscoped dancer and pulsating images of popular Hindu iconography, projecting Sita’s flaming rage. Paley is the pioneer in the ‘one-person, one-feature film’ field. In her spare time, she continues championing the concept of the Creative Commons.79 In 2009, Paul (b. Ashiya, Japan, 15 March  1936) and Sandra (b. Westport, Connecticut, 16 November  1953) Fierlinger released their feature My Dog Tulip, based on J. R. Ackerley’s eponymous memoir. As mentioned previously (see Vol.  2), Paul Fierlinger made the Oscar-nominated It’s So Nice to Have a Wolf around the House (1979). From his roots in Czechoslovakia to his work on Sesame Street and his sophisticated engagement with inner narrative, Paul’s work is characterized by a refinement of his loose drawing style. This is coupled with a canny sense of timing, which fills his baggy characters with subtle grace. Sandra’s role extends well beyond colour and production to include cowriting and codirecting in this ‘paperless studio’ of two. Early adopters of the digital workflow, the Fierlingers made their first autobiographical feature, Drawn from

Figure 2.7  Nina Paley, Sita Sings the Blues, 2008.

Born Urbana, Ilinios, 3 May 1968. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Their free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use the creative work – on conditions of the author’s choice. CC licenses let authors easily change their copyright terms from the default of ‘all rights reserved’ to ‘some rights reserved’. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable authors to modify their copyright terms to best suit their needs.

78 79

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Figure 2.8  Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, My Dog Tulip, 2009.

Memory, in 1995, followed by Animated Still Life with Dogs (2001) and A Room Nearby (2003). All delved into deeply felt personal stories with sensitivity. The Fierlinger touch is evident in the spare linearity and muted tones of the characters, who are ordinary folk in the drama of quotidian lives. Focused throughout on a German Shepherd dog’s excretory and reproductive functions, My Dog Tulip would seem an unlikely story for a feature film. Its underlying theme, though, is the stultifying effect of class and family in a Pinteresque England and the transformation of a crabby old bachelor into a more liberated, humane man. It makes other animated pet stories seem childish by comparison. Faith Hubley80 said she and husband John Hubley vowed to make at least one of their own films every year between commercial jobs. After John’s death in 1977,

80 81

Faith kept that promise until her own death in 2001. Her work has a consistent, innocent design. Watercolours reference mythology and ritual, organized into cyclic rhythms. Considered together, they work as an extended tone poem celebrating universal spiritual and aesthetic values. Emily Hubley81 often helped produce her mother’s last films. At the same time, her own shorts diverged into a more narrative, intimate, and confessional mode, peppered with wordplay, using collage and abstracted cartooning, as in Pigeon Within (2000). Her writing and directing gifts came to the fore with her 2008 feature The Toe Tactic. This is a live-action drama about a confused young woman whose chattering inner voices are effectively illustrated by quirky cartoon characters layered into the frame.

Born Faith Chestman, New York, 16 September 1924–New Haven, 7 December 2001. Born New York, 24 March 1958.

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Duration: Time and Space Animation installation, playing continuously or initiated by a viewer, redefines the viewing experience from a passive, sedentary reception to an active, environmentally immersive experience of grazing in real space and unreal time. The father of this practice is Robert Breer,82 whose mutoscopes, flipbooks, wall-mounted cards, and randomly creeping ‘floats’ are physical complements to his kinetic films. Throughout Breer’s creative life, he retained a deep fascination with the still image and its potential for animation. This was most evident in the barrage of single frames in his 1955 Recreation. Its radical use of rotoscoping breaks down and compresses the ephemeral flow of movies into discrete sketches. Breer’s later work, such as Bang! (1985), uses his uniquely witty, discontinuous sense of time to mash up abstracted doodling and collage. What Goes Up? (2003) shows a more introspective artist, poignantly juxtaposing autumnal glimpses of nature, eros, bouncing kites, soaring jets, and a view of life tapering off. Breer’s influence on both aesthetics and kinetic art practice has been enormous. When Paul Glabicki83 moved from film to animate his densely layered collages digitally in 1991, he expanded his complex vocabulary of tilting, orbiting, and rotating planes. He exhibited the animation directly on computer monitors together with paintings and drawings; and yet, he often discovered that his multidimensional designs pushed digital animation past its current limits. (Getting animation out of the computer and onto an affordable, high-resolution medium is a relatively recent option for independents.) In Full Moon (2001), Glabicki constructs a Newtonian universe of spherical wonders, slyly deploying Acoma pottery, rotating parasols, and a silhouetted hand. His last animation installation, Red Fence, involves multiple screens in and out of sync over its 61-minute duration. It was last mounted in Hiroshima (2002), accompanied by a traditional tea ceremony.84 A classic of onsite ‘concrete animation’ is Bill Brand’s85 Masstransiscope, installed in 1980 and restored in 2008.

It is a linear sequence of brightly-lit panels of abstract/ cartoony images mounted in an abandoned Brooklyn subway station, hidden by a black wall with cutout slits. As commuters travel past the station, their continuous view is intermittently obstructed; the images become brief, playful transformations. In a more technological mode, Eric Dyer86 made large zoetropes based on video footage. Then he reanimated them with a video camera aimed through the viewing slots, simultaneously displaying a live feed. His Copenhagen Cycles, installed in art spaces such as the 2007 Platform Festival in Portland, was also released as a short film with music by John Adams. Bellows (2010) updates the continuous spin-cycle. Laser-sculpted figures are animated intermittently with LCD shutter goggles worn by the bedazzled viewer. Gregory Barsamian’s87 extraordinary work consists of carefully sculpted objects positioned within a rotating matrix and lit by a synchronized strobe light. The content is typically a surreal transformation, minutely crafted in a wide variety of materials. Green hands scoop text out of a book to form a lizard; a tiny brass man runs on the teeth of a spinning saw blade. Artifact (2010) is a recumbent steel head, 12 feet in diameter, with windows cut all round to view the interior of sinewy, synaptic tangles of random tracery, coalescing into transmutations. Barsamian’s main subject is the process unfolding before our eyes. Actual objects, not just images, hurtle through space, arrested momentarily for our delight. Rose Bond’s88 early direct animations deal with mythic themes from Celtic and African cultures with sensitivity to texture and rhythm. Now she transforms windows in urban spaces (a synagogue, an office building, a historic hotel) into rear-projection screens. Her simple comic-stripstyle animation, effectively silhouetted, often covers ethnic history related to the specific architecture. Intra Muros (2007), also at Platform, is an introspective glimpse into the creative process. The work is a mesmerizing nocturnal spectacle (with samples of McLaren and Lye) and a hilarious misadventure involving obsessive, diversionary vacuuming and a squawking chicken.

Born Detroit, 30 September 1926–Tucson, Arizona, 12 August 2011. Born 17 January 1951. 84 Glabicki has since exhibited only drawings of his work. 85 Born Rochester, New York, 1949. 86 Born Baltimore, Maryland, 11 November 1971. 87 Born Evanston, Illinois, 18 April 1953. 88 Born Victoria, BC, Canada, 1948. 82 83

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Figure 2.9  Gregory Barsamian, Artifact, 2010. MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.

Performance Catharsis Are there regional influences in animation? Or is it mere coincidence that Appalachian Pennsylvania nurtured three animators who share a kind of outsider sensibility – roughly improvised techniques performing dark, operatic, personal tales, a kind of Rust Belt Gothic? Working in a barn in rural Pennsylvania, Brent Green89 created wild concoctions of cartoon, object, and puppet animation. They playfully disregard professional slickness, featuring dirty cels and flickery, uneven lighting. His films are intricate stories, narrated and sung in Green’s dirge-like, quavering voice. Some are presented as live performances. Others, including Hadacol Christmas and Paulina Hollers (both 2006), are installed in gallery spaces, projected on and within his sculptures. Green’s most ambitious work was Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010). This short feature was shot in his backyard, reenacting the life and architecture of an eccentric hardware store clerk. Green’s work bears some resemblance to that of Chris Sullivan,90 whose meandering, wobbly, dark characters (line drawings and cutouts) enact mysterious personal and social traumas, both real and imagined.

From Master of Ceremonies (1987) to his 2011 feature Consuming Spirits, Sullivan has demonstrated an intuitive knack for rendering nightmare narratives of dysfunctional families; they are also laced with moments of mordant wit. Fifteen years in the making, Consuming Spirits focuses on the interconnected, small-town lives of quietly drunken desperation, as chronicled by the local paper and an all-night advice-radio host. Martha Colburn’s91 films burst with improvised, kinetic energy. Her rock-inflected rhythms drive swarms of marauding figures, animals, soldiers, and natives. Examples are Triumph of the Wild (2008), a stinging indictment of American militarism, and Myth Labs (2008), juxtaposing the Puritan ethos with the menace of drugs. Colburn embodies an avant-garde insouciance toward craft as she wrangles her cutouts spontaneously under a Bolex camera. The full-frontal effect (her films have been displayed on a huge Times Square screen), with or without live music, is electrifying. These artists work in the outsider tradition of weirdness – the animation equivalent of Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic.92 After Kathy Rose93 made a cartoon self-portrait, Pencil Booklings (1978), she ‘went live’ into dance performance,

Born Baltimore, Maryland, 1978. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1960. Master of Ceremonies (1987), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1992). 91 Born Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1971. 92 New York, Holt Paperbacks, 1998. An insightful analysis of Bob Dylan’s seminal ‘Basement Tapes’, filtered through the musicology of legendary animator Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. 93 Born New York, New York, 1951. 89 90

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Figure 2.10  Kathy Rose, She, 2009. With credit to Kathy Rose. using projections of animations on and around her body in motion. Adding elements of Butoh-inflected puppetry with video and digital compositing, she has expanded her practice both as installation and multilayered theatre. She (2009) is a hypnotically rhythmic arrangement of subtle head and arm gestures into an exotic, ritualistic vision. The music is by C. P. Roth. Saying that something is ‘bad’ animation, like ‘bad’ drawing, painting, or taste, is another way of saying, ‘Wait, this is only a phase.’ Don Hertzfeldt94 elevates the stick figure to the heights of existential despair in caustic satires that brilliantly skewer our culture of emotional myopia and miscommunication. From Billy’s Balloon (1998), a sadistic parody of the classic Red Balloon, to Rejected (2000), a series of darkly anarchic proposals to the entertainment industry, the humour is both self-conscious and adolescent. It trades on the curious innocence of American optimism and sight gags arising from the extreme minimalism of the design (including brilliant cartooning on crinkled paper). With Everything Will Be OK (2006) and I am So Proud of You (2008), Hertzfeldt adds a confessional voice of depressed self-deprecation to rival Woody Allen. JJ Villard’s Son of Satan (2003) contains scenes of pimply-faced, adolescent cruelty rendered in an assortment of grunge styles on pulpy brown wrapping paper. Random notes are appended, awkwardly arranged to

Born Fremont, California, 1 August 1976. Born Cambridge, England, 28 December 1941. 96 Born New York, 8 October 1962. 94 95

illustrate a harrowing tale (based on a story by Charles Bukowski). These disorienting aesthetic strategies parallel the psychological torture at the film’s heart.

Documentary Collisions of truth and artifice can occur in the same frame/space. Alternatively, they can be an eclectic montage strategy through time. Paul Vester95 creates disturbing juxtapositions of documentary footage with a mélange of graphics to deal with subjective and political states of consciousness. In Abductees (1995), people’s retellings (often under clinical hypnosis) of their experiences with extraterrestrials are illustrated, often with their collaboration, through animation. The result resembles the nonsensical grammar of dreams, suggesting the ongoing traumas of survivors of sexual abuse. In the Woods (2008) mixes sound-bites from US President George W. Bush (‘War on Terror’, tax cuts) with a spirited cowboy yodel, then brutally leads from that into the vernacular cartooning of stark political realities, continuing the satiric spirit of Stan VanDerBeek. Sheila Sofian96 uses audio interviews with victims of domestic violence in Survivors (1997). The film is graphically illustrated with minimal line animation, evoking

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Figure 2.11  Sheila Sofian, Survivors, 1997. experiences that are harrowing. By including voices of clinical therapists, the film acts as a mental health public service yet also rises to the level of art. Ten years in the making, Truth Has Fallen is a one-hour live-action/ animated documentary that examines the work of James McCloskey, the founder of an organization to free prisoners wrongly convicted of murder. The first-person confidential voice-over also works for Andy and Carolyn London97 in Back Brace (2004), a comic memoir of a child’s orthopedic ordeal, told with collaged cutout figures. Letter to Colleen (2007) is a starkly rotoscoped descent into a teenage sexual twilight zone. In The Lost Tribes of New York (2010), Andy and Carolyn London synchronize Harlem street voices with characters digitally invented from found objects, such as suitcases and manhole covers. It is a clever send-up of the man-in-the-street interview.

New Yorkers New York City has long been supersaturated with animators of all stripes, mostly born elsewhere, who hustle back

and forth from freelance advertising work, or practically any paying job, to their own independent, personal work. The prolific and entertaining Bill Plympton comes to mind first. Among the many others is Candy Kugel98 who, with creative partner Vincent Cafarelli,99 has made many films, including The Ballad of Archie Foley (1995) and Command Z (2005). They feature witty lyrics and a range of bright, toony styles often resembling neon signage. Kugel made her first film, InBetweening America (1977), based on a New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg, while working at her first job inbetweening TV commercials.100 Michael Sporn’s101 Champagne (1996) and Mona Mon Amour (2001) are anchored by the voices of real people telling their own stories and demonstrate the filmmaker’s subtle and versatile narrative skills. The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2005) is based on the original book by Mordicai Gerstein telling the story of Frenchman Philippe Petit walking a tightrope between the still-unfinished Twin Towers in New York in 1974. Sporn’s numerous sensitive adaptations of classic children’s books are themselves classics of animation.

Andy (b. New York, 18 January 1968), and Carolyn (b. Chicago, 1 November 1972). Born New York City, 13 April 1951. 99 Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, 29 July 1930–Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, 1 December 2011. 100 It was not finally completed until 2001, when the Saul Steinberg Foundation gave its permission for release. 101 Born New York, New York, 1946. 97 98

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Figure 2.12  Candy Kugel, Command Z, 2005. Command Z, © 2005 Buzzco Associates, designed by Lee Lorenz, directed by Candy Kugel and Vincent Cafarelli, song by Lanny Meyers and Candy Kugel.

The objects animator PES (Adam Pesapane)102 has developed his trademark style by wrangling unlikely objects into short, spirited struggles of perfectly pulsating timing and candy-coated colour. Roof Sex (2001) stars two lusty, overstuffed chairs (in broad daylight). Game Over (2006) is a cheesy video game, and Spaghetti Western (2008) demonstrates a cooking lesson with a cornucopia of delicious inedibles. John Dilworth,103 known for his hit series Courage the Cowardly Dog, has created several absurdist shorts: The Dirdy Bird (1994), Mousochist (2001), and Life in Transition (2005). The last is self-rendered in a style reminiscent of Salvador Dalí crossed with Basil Wolverton.104 Further inspired nonsense comes from Alex Budovsky (a.k.a. Aleksey Budovskiy).105 His music video Bathtime in Clerkenwell (2002) transcends the form. An antic silhouette world of teakettles, assembly lines, militaristic cuckoos, and a

bather becomes a mad clockwork construction, all bopping and strutting to a relentless beat. Pat Smith106 brings professional animation chops to his tales of innocent suburban teens undone by comic contrivance. A handshake becomes an anatomical disaster; a sock puppet (Puppet, 2006, updating The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) drives his maker into masochistic self-destruction; an innocent drink unleashes a ziggurat of multiple personalities. Smith’s silent gags spill out as effortlessly as Chaplin’s. He is also a graffiti-style painter noted for writhing piles of nude cartoon figures that, for all their suggestive posing, retain a clinical innocence. By contrast, Signe Baumane107 has earned a reputation as the dirtiest animator in town with her outrageous films Five Fucking Fables (2002) and Teat Beat of Sex (2007). The ribald humour derives from her no-nonsense, cartoon simplicity, matched to the nonchalant feminism of her

Born New Jersey, 26 May 1973. Born New York, 14 February 1963. 104 In Giannalberto Bendazzi’s opinion, John Dilworth’s relevance in recent animation also lies in his originality in drawn animation and unique visual language. The movements of his creatures have little to do with canonical Disney rules and exhibit maddening, screwball behaviour in a screwball, maddening world. 105 Born St. Petersburg, Russia, 21 January 1975. 106 Born San Juan, Puerto Rico, 18 February 1972. 107 Born Auce, Latvia, 7 August 1964. 102 103

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voice-over confessions and instructions. Baumane also has a more serious, mysterious side, with films about veterinarians, dentists, and the need for sex education for teens (Birth, 2009). Debra Solomon108 uses her wobbly-lined, nebbish characters to transform life’s awful emotional storms into hilarious musicals of self-preservation. They depict a wife’s jealousy of her painter-husband’s young models (Mrs.  Matisse, 1994), a couple’s obsessive quest (Everyone’s Pregnant, 1997), and a divorced woman’s search for love and happiness after divorce (Getting over Him in 8 Songs or Less, 2010). Solomon writes irony-spiced lyrics, belted out as sarcastic bubblegum pop: Connie Francis with a sneer. John Schnall’s109 world possesses a uniquely macabre view of life, which thankfully has not mellowed over the years. A  tasty Thanksgiving turkey witnesses its own demise, an arguing middle-aged couple dismember themselves into skeletons, a terrible comedian ‘dies’ before his nonexistent audience (Dead Comic, 2007). His characters are ghoulish amalgams of German Expressionism and Alfred E. Newman. They are luridly rendered in a variety of graphic textures, pulling the viewer into their own private hell – like comedic takes on Poe or Lovecraft. Jeffrey Scher110 experiments with perception by melding rotoscoped home movies and found footage. His films are interwoven and densely collaged; they flicker discontinuously in the manner of Breer, and they are consistently astonishing. His prodigious output includes All the Wrong Reasons (2008), with roughly sketched glimpses of aggression, courtship, sports, and a multitude of gestures, random bits of type, and abstracted pastel smears. Together they create subliminal impressions that somehow coalesce into a single, indelible vision. They often masquerade as animated home movies or lyrical paeans to nature, engaging the eye and mind without straining for an overtly polemical point. The prolific illustrator Gary Leib makes hilarious comments on the quirky nuttiness of urban life that appear as if they’re sketched doodles in a ruled notebook. Both Scher and Leib have developed a new distribution paradigm.

Born Boston, Massachusetts, 1956. Born Rahway, New Jersey, 1961. 110 Born Greenwich, Connecticut, 1954. 111 Born Massachusetts, 1953. 112 Born Sydney, Australia, 23 July 1954. 113 Born Buffalo, New York, 14 August 1948. 114 Born Kansas City, Missouri, 1943. 115 Born Denver, Colorado, 1954. 108 109

Their short films regularly appear on the New York Times website as visual op-ed pieces. Lisa Crafts111 makes hypnotic collages by compositing digitally captured puppets, drawings, and objects. Flooded Playground (2005) is an eerie narrative of tormented childhood in which even the wallpaper comes alive to harass a lonely Victorian doll. Ruth Peyser112 uses an expressionist palette to depict a grotesque underbelly of dark emotions where women and children are frequently under attack – a kind of animated Sue Coe. Her work uses hand-painted photos, cutout drawings, and a range of digital animation and compositing techniques, mashing up fantasy with documentary realism. There Was a Little Girl (2010) is a harrowing memoir of childhood abuse that extends Crafts’ personal journey to wider social issues and even has a happy ending.

Out There The American landscape is studded with pockets of animation activity, often centreed in college towns. Skip Battaglia113 is interested in transforming simple actions through his flurry of splintery sequenced drawings. Second Nature (2000) transforms a carnival peepshow into an Edenic misfire, while the patterns of water ripples in Crossing the Stream (2006) expand into an ecstatic vision of nature. Suzan Pitt’s114 Joy Street (1995) illustrates a woman’s growing depression, suicidal fantasies, and exotic redemption in a rain forest. Even more enigmatic is El Doctor (2006), set in a Mexican town brimming with cartoonish hospital horror, mutilation, mutant birth, alcoholism, and rainy death. Pitt’s most recent film, Visitation (2011), a nightmare in the mode of Goya’s Los Caprichos, introduces a black-hatted father figure amidst others in her cabinet of horror. Pitt retains a mainline access to extravagant, subconscious material and the painterly chutzpah to render it into a garish, quixotic vision. In a similar vein is the monochrome collage film Phantom Canyon (2006) by Stacey Steers.115 It deploys Muybridge

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figures mingling with engravings of beds, bats, beetles, fish, and quivering abstract textures. They suggest the risky and lovely aspects of an erotic life. David Ehrlich,116 isolated in rural Vermont yet truly international through his ASIFA collaborations, continues to produce exciting work on his own terms. It is characterized by hard-edged, systematic, and linear abstractions radiating limpid chromatic textures and following cyclic, natural rhythms. The handmade design, at times resembling Klee in colour and form, can be read as a defiant rebuke of digital animation. Ehrlich’s design world suggests an astringent dichotomy: right angles, perfectly straight lines, and folding spaces compete with undulating arcs and curves. A new spirit of improvisation emerges in Etude (1994), a flamboyant spectacle of smeared clay, swirling and pulsating between flat and sculpted forms, perfectly complemented by Tom Farrell’s eclectic music. Ehrlich returned to his roots in live performance art by accompanying the swirling abstractions of Posnanie (2009), playing his compositions on a toy piano. Karen Aqua’s117 films blend abstract forms with stylized figures caught up in the spunky rhythms of dance and gesture. The design often weaves primitive symbolism with an angular, contemporary inflection. They evoke specific places and cultures – for example, Spain, in Andaluz (2004), codirected with Joanna Priestly, and the American Southwest, in Ground Zero/Sacred Ground (1997). She has created a body of lively, exquisitely chromatic animation over 35 years. Her later films imbue a more complex graphic mix with a profound depth of personal feeling. Twist of Fate (2009) uses clinical x-rays, self-images, swarms of pharmaceuticals, and biomorphic shapes to evoke an inner landscape, an artist staring directly at her own mortality. But this meditation on disease manages to emerge as a buoyant, hopeful testament to life. Lorelei Pepi118 followed her eerily mystical debut film, Grace (1998), with dual pursuits: animation history and physical, concrete animation (e.g. performing phenakistoscope motion with strobe lights). In Dem Bones Wiggle (2005), a skeleton dance is replicated as a primitive,

pixilated trickfilm. Her latest project, Happy and Gay, ambitiously pays homage to the rollicking spirit and style of the 1930s Fleischer Talkartoons. Fun-loving party animals strut their sexual preferences in a brash send-up of the strict moral codes of past conservative cartoons. Amy Kravitz119 learned animation as a child in Yvonne Anderson’s legendary Yellow Ball Workshop in suburban Boston. This style emphasizes direct processes, neo-primitive/intuitive design, and deep emotional content. The essential Anderson principles continue through Kravitz’s own work, her curriculum at RISD, and even, at a stretch, to the work of her husband, Steve Subotnick.120 Both animators set up short, dense, turbulent enigmas with a suggestive quote or title and follow through with an intense parable-like experience. Kravitz’s Roost (1998) creates a mad scramble of charcoal gestures to suggest birds’ manic behaviour. Subotnick cooks up a stew of bristling calligraphy in Devil’s Book (1992); he also shows a wicked wit with Hairyman (1994), a delightful fairy tale cartoon puzzle featuring a tea-sipping, pipe-smoking grandma. Glass Crow (2004) employs collaged materials (photos, leaves) with scattershot glimpses of maps, men, and arms to suggest the turmoil of warfare. The Hubleys’ seminal work in the 1960s had initiated the use of a conversational, non-professional voice-over, for both spontaneous documentary and contrived fantasy. By the 1970s, this approach was an important way of juxtaposing the flow of familiar, narrative sound with oblique, abstract visuals. In Frank and Caroline Mouris’s121 1973 masterpiece, Frank Film, Frank’s voice (correctly) predicts winning an Oscar but then sarcastically wonders about his next film. In Frankly Caroline (1998), Caroline repeatedly attempts to tell her story, punctuated by Frank’s punning intrusions. A kind of contrapuntal couples’ therapy emerges, driving the buoyant collage invention. The graphic constructions have become leaner, cleaner, more clever. They juggle constructivist typography, symmetrical crosswords, architectural facades, and cute cats in a wink of the mind’s eye. The intimate, confessional voice of Laura Heit underlies the poignant love story Look for Me (2005). Wondering what she would do were she invisible, the wistfully uninflected character, designed (one might

Born Elizabeth, New Jersey, 14 October 1941. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 2 February 1954–Boston, Massachusetts, 30 May 2011. 118 Born Lowell, Massachusetts, 1964. 119 Born Wilmington, Delaware, 6 March 1956. 120 Born San Francisco, California, 21 October 1956. 121 Frank (b. Key West, Florida, 1944) and Caroline (b. Zurich, Switzerland, 19 November 1945). 116 117

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Figure 2.13  Frank and Caroline Mouris, Frankly Caroline, 1998.

say disguised) in cutout flatness against a bland cityscape, slips from one mischievous encounter to another, oblivious to her desperately searching boyfriend. Newcomer Jodie Mack122 combines two virtuosic talents: musical wit and a playful approach to the possibilities of unlikely materials in free-form, torn-edge, spontaneous collage. She makes simple, handmade experiments using optically-printed images and woven patterns. Her work hovers between conceptual performance art and fun-loving, rough and tumble, 16mm filmmaking. Much of her output has been silent studies of fabric patterns, often accompanied by her singing in performance. Yard Work Is Hard Work (2008), at 28 minutes, is a delirious collage jumble (which looks a little bit like Frank Film). It is both a musical (with tunes she writes and sings) and a stinging satire on American media and materialism.

Digital Pulp Over the past two decades the computer has become embedded in the animation workflow. The gains (speed,

Born London, 1983. Born Stamford, Connecticut, 16 October 1954. 124 1953–1998. 125 Born Cincinnati, Ohio, 1958. 122 123

ease, exponential expansion of design and movement complexity) and the losses (fetishized technology, alienation from real material and handcraft) continue to affect many animators. Flip Johnson’s123 magnificent Pulp (1990) is a deep plunge into the physical sensuality of the printed page and the rich medium of paper, including its bristling arboreal origin, with brilliant music by Caleb Sampson.124 Johnson’s prescient window on the waning of the age of print also seems an elegy for animation composed of marks and smears on paper. But it is foolish to call drawing by hand, whether it is shot on film by a camera or scanned into a digital environment, a ‘traditional’ practice. CGI methodology, now pervasive in commercial entertainment, is also used effectively by many independents who have mastered Maya and other tools. James Duesing125 was an early adopter. His over-the-top, chattering characters might be the next generation of Sally Cruikshank’s surreal party animals. His dysfunctional band of pals ooze with catty put-downs, but the writing is infused with clever satirical jabs at our cultural values and self-delusions, particularly in End of Code (2010).

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David Lobser126 creates dazzling worlds of creepy beauty that seduce the viewer with cuteness before revealing, as in Elephant Girl, Part One (2008), the horrid slimy truth. The candy-coloured creation myth of Mother’s Day (2007) follows the life cycle of cute little worms who, after navigating the cruel yet gorgeous world of predators, end up back with their smothering, voracious mom. One floats through Lobser’s world with a chuckling sense of dread. The Hunger Artist (2001) is Tom Gibbons’ 3D version of the Kafka classic. It uses both puppets and CGI to visualize a haunting, claustrophobic cityscape. A  society of mocking tormentors (monstrous clowns and harlequins) orbits round the stoic, saint-like artist. The desolate performance is enhanced by the use of graphic 2D puppets and subtle character movements. Joshua Mosley’s127 work contains CGI animation but retains a puppet-like quality and even a scratchy, handdrawn, graphic look. It is quiet and sober and moves with subtle, enigmatic understatement. Often composited with live-action and placed in sculptural installations, it is an eclectic hybrid bristling with complex narratives involving imaginary conversations and unlikely philosophical relationships. Commute (2003), for example, involves Descartes, a businessman on a cell phone, and a young man climbing a ladder through a small hole. There is tension, but the relationships in the film are illusory. Mosley isn’t bound by animation’s history, conventions, or techniques. Rather, he seeks a new context for dreamlike moving images forged with a computer as he grapples with language and keeps one foot planted in the real space of the sculptural object. Michael Scroggins (b. Louisville, Kentucky, 4 June 1946) specialized in real-time performances, from liquid light projection to videographic animation to immersive virtual reality. Shape, colour, texture, and rhythm were architectured as in music, updating the colour organs of the nineteenth century. Scroggins’ virtual reality work Topological Slide premiered in 1994 at The Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace. Ina Conradi (b. Belgrade, Serbia, 12 June  1961) made poignant installations combining stereoscopic animation, digital painting, and sound, both abstract (Le phénomène atmosphérique, ‘The Atmospheric Phenomenon’, 2011) and figurative (Elysian Fields, 2013). Mark Chavez (b. El Paso, Texas, 28 January  1958) debuted in 1984 with a thesis work in laser light. It was projected onto the Federal Building in Westwood,

Born Cleveland, Ohio, 1977. Born Dallas, Texas, 1974. 128 By Cinzia Bottini. 126 127

California, during the Olympic Games. After many academic and industrial experiences, in 2008 he directed Vengeance+Vengeance, created in a game engine and designed for interaction. (The visual design of the characters and sets changes dynamically to manipulate the viewer’s experience.) The result is baked out into a rendered format and plays like any film. Finally, there is the enormous world of anonymous animation embedded throughout the Web: animated experiments shot on cell phones, anarchic personal home movies filled with clichés and mistakes – a tsunami spread by and across the social network, garnering millions of hits. All of this would be inconceivable without the computer’s innate compulsion to compress, duplicate, simulate, and distribute. When uploading a movie file to a vast server like YouTube makes a short animated film available to many millions of viewers, it is clear that certain rules and terms of the art have changed. Animation is now ubiquitous (on hand-held devices) and anonymous, chaotically blending into both mass marketing and private, homemade journalism. In this digital milieu we are likely to see more self-taught, artless animators using simple Flash-like tools having a growing impact on society, particularly in politics and social action. Clearly the independent animation scene is staggeringly broad, whether viewed in the gallery or in the communal context of the movie house. It is made with myriad techniques and new tricks and accents pop up daily, even as the laborious slog of drawing upon drawing still yields startling ideas and visions. Animators cannot afford to be hobbled by limited categories – digital, traditional, cartoon, or experimental. The possibilities for cross-pollination are simply too vast.

Women in the Limelight128 Vibeke Sorensen Vibeke Sorensen (b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 February 1954) chose computer graphics – and later digital multimedia installation – as the most suitable tool and the best way to question the human representation and perception of reality. She tried to reconnect art and science and to create a spatial cinema made of new sensory and intellectual experiences. Her works aimed at making people feel part of a complex and beautiful ecosystem.

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Figure 2.14  Vibeke Sorensen, 2011. After spending part of her youth in Buffalo, New York, Sorensen returned to her native Denmark to study at the Royal Academy of Art and Architecture in Copenhagen. In 1974 she came back to the US, where she became a video/computer animation/artist-researcher and professor at several universities. In 2009 she left the US to lead the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Sorensen’s artworks are experimental multimedia, ranging from drawing, painting, photography, film, and video to analog and digital computer animation. Starting as a musician/composer and architecture student, she wanted to create ‘liquid architecture’,129 a synthetic new dimension composed of all media together. In the mid-1970s she started her exploration with some works at the WNET TV Laboratory in New York City, including Temple, TV Tubes, Fresh Fruit, and Monocules, in which she created analog computer animation and electronic music as well as stereoscopic experiments. Temple (1976) exhibits the features that will characterize her later works. The title suggests a place where it is possible to meditate and, eventually, to find ourselves. Technology is used to convey both physical and emotional expressions, while the synesthetic combination of images and music130 describes an awakening, an explosion, and a metamorphosis. Finally, the spectator hears the meditation chant ‘Om’ and has the sensation of being in a temple. Aquarelles (1980), Voyage (1981), Tempest (1981), Calypso Cameo (1983), and Rejuvenation (1983)131 deal with synesthesia as well. The viewer sees colourful shapes dancing in a musical flow and evoking imaginary landscapes. In 1989 Sorensen made NLoops, in which abstract painted cycles are looped in space and in time to polyrhythmic music. The film also refers to the history of animation – including, for example, a zoetrope and homage to Oskar Fischinger. NLoops was originally created in 1987–1988 as a computer animation for video installation.132 Sorensen had produced

She recalled that one of her professors used to say that ‘architecture is frozen music’, so by ‘unfreezing’ music you obtain liquid architecture. Sorensen says: ‘A way to look at architecture is to think of the musical connections to it’ – such as composition, form, structure, counterpoint, rhythm, polyrhythm, and so on. ‘For me, liquid architecture was a kind of freeing it from gravity.’ She came to create a space that transforms itself through metamorphosis (animation) by ‘repositioning the image into space rather than space into the image’. Vibeke Sorensen, interview by Cinzia Bottini and Javad Mohammad Khajavi, 12 September 2013. 130 Sorensen says of synesthesia : 129

My approach to music composition for video art is twofold: to create sounds which to me are the sounds I  imagine in my head when I see the images, and to set up an electronic music patch which is technically analogous to the video patch. The illusion of simultaneity is a result of hard work. The eye is synthetic: it is incapable of seeing green as a combination of blue and yellow. The ear, on the other hand, is analytic: it can distinguish instruments and notes in a complex orchestral chord. Therefore, to make a soundtrack seem as complex as the image looks, many voices and timbres had to be created, each one requiring a different audio patch. Consequently, the soundtrack is multitracked in contrast to the single pass needed to produce the image. (Vibeke Sorensen, in Victor Ancona, ‘Vibeke Sorensen: Demystifying Video Technology’, Videography Magazine, February 1979, http://visualmusic.org/ Biography/Temple-Making.htm.) Aquarelles, Voyage, Tempest, and Rejuvenation were made in collaboration with Tom DeWitt and Dean Winkler. Tempest evoked a tempest seen through the ‘eye of a storm’. 132 NLoops was produced at the CalArts Computer Animation Laboratory and exhibited at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the ACM SIGGRAPH ’89 Art Show in Boston, the Post-Currents ’89 Festival at the State University of New York at Buffalo and, in its single-channel version, at the MANCA New Music Festival in Nice, France and the Euro-Video Festival in Paris in 1989, in addition to numerous other locations around the world. 131

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two- and three-dimensional animation loops using a 3D solid modelling system called the Cubicomp (modified with her own software) and then produced three videotapes for distribution on nine monitors for live musical performance as well as installation. A leap forward was the series of stereo stills starting with Microfishe (1985), Fish and Chips (1985), and Parroty Bits (1986). Stereoscopy was produced through two flat images of the same subject that vary to a small degree in their perspective and that are graphically made one for each eye. Due to the phenomenon of stereopsis, the human brain fuses the two images into a single picture that is perceived as having a real dimension of depth. The 3D spatial effects seem to Sorensen the right way to give an impression that has both physical characteristics – ‘stereography is a palpable construct’ – and ethereal qualities similar to music.133 In 1989, her investigation went further with the Reflection Studies, a group of 15 thematically related abstract works in which the exploration of perception focuses on spaces in surfaces. This study was useful to ‘deeply question how we process visual information between our eyes and our minds, and how we construct our mental models of the ‘real’ world’.134 Maya (1993) is like a Wassily Kandinsky painting come to life, as the seven-minute animated short ‘pays homage to the continuing tradition of abstract art and to the liberating effects of new and developing technology’.135 Stereoscopic computer animation, music, sculpture, and painting interact endlessly, generating organic 3D forms.136 The title, derived from Indian philosophy, means ‘the conflict between illusion and reality’. On another level, Maya stands as a personal experience of the artist, who traces the natural changing of the cycle of life. As far as topics are concerned, similar themes were present in Solstice (1986) and Concurrents (1989). Based on

the archetypal ritual of the summer solstice, the namesake film compares women persecuted as witches in Northern Europe during the fifteenth century with women who are still, though differently, oppressed in current times. Concurrents is a nine-monitor installation137 in which the camera is used as a paintbrush. The monitors juxtapose organic and geometric forms through human gestural interventions, thus suggesting a concern for the natural environment. After that, the artist would often debate the role of technology in sustaining and destroying nature. In the 1995 Head, Space, Earth, Time – a series of stereoscopic satellite photographs of the Earth, together with 3D model data of her own head – Sorensen underlined the necessity of not withdrawing from nature in virtual worlds because ‘technology should inform us about nature, including human beings, and motivate us to preserve rather than destroy it’.138 Multimedia installation would become Sorensen’s favourite form of expression. Her Global Visual Music Project (imagined in 1972) was produced in the late 1990s with Lemma 1 and Lemma 2, in collaboration with University of California at San Diego professors Miller Puckette and Rand Steiger. Lemma 1 took place in 1997, at the International Computer Music Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece. It was a networked musical performance that incorporated texts, images, sounds, and a lot of improvisation. Lemma 2, also networked, was performed two years later at the Interactive Computer Arts Festival, Columbia University, New York City. These performances were intended to offer a multisensorial experience that involved different cultural approaches based on ‘a continuously flowing river of visual thinking’.139 Sorensen said: ‘As a musician and visual artist, I wanted to perform space and time, the same way a musician performs a musical instrument, both solo and together with other musicians and their spaces located around the world’.140

For further information about 3D computer stereographics, see Vibeke Sorensen and Robert Russett, ‘Computer Stereographics: The Coalescence of Virtual Space and Artistic Expression’, Leonardo 32, no. 1 (1999): 41–48. 134 Vibeke Sorensen, http://visualmusic.org/text/reflect.html, retrieved on 5 January 2012. 135 Vibeke Sorensen and Robert Russett, ‘Computer Stereographics: The Coalescence of Virtual Space and Artistic Expression’, Leonardo 32, no. 1 (1999): 45. 136 Vibeke Sorensen explained: ‘In one scene stereoscopic images are projected onto flat discs making up a small sculpture. Each disc is a circular window to another 3-D space. The result is a perceptual paradox: you see the edges of the disks in a sculpture made up of flat surfaces. But when you look at each separate, flat disc, you see windows to spaces that extend far beyond the space of the sculpture. The two spaces contradict each other, but the mind holds them together’. http://visualmusic.org/Biography/MAYA.htm, retrieved on 5 January 2012. 137 Concurrents was produced at CalArts and exhibited in its first version at the MANCA New Music Festival in Nice, France, in 1988. 138 Vibeke Sorensen, http://visualmusic.org/Biography/head.htm, retrieved on 5 January 2012. 139 Vibeke Sorensen’s expression, http://visualmusic.org/Biography/GreenMemories.htm, retrieved on 8 January 2012. 140 Vibeke Sorensen, lecture given at Anifest, Teplice, Czech Republic, April 2010. 133

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Color Story (1998), made from digitally processed photos, focuses on colours and the meaning we ascribe to them; Frames of Mind (1999) is the title of two installations: House of Memories141 and Memory Matrix. What can memory be? The artist explores narrative as an internal process made by colours, shapes, words, and a few representational images and reconstructed by our minds. Morocco Memory II (1999) is an interactive architectural installation142 that recollects memories experienced in Morocco during the 1960s and 1970s. Documented stereoscopically, it is another comprehensive sensory experience in which people are invited to make connections between personal and cultural memory fragments in sound, film, and animation by employing additional sensory inputs that include smell and touch. The spectator experiences the memories of Morocco by sitting in a small house made of wood and satin and looking at the images projected on a wall-sized screen in the house, and also by opening and closing six wooden boxes with spices in them. The audience response is stimulated by smell, touch, light, the movement of body in space, visual images, text, and sound. Each person creates a unique association of memories and a unique experience in engaging with the memories of the artist and shared memories of the participants stimulated by the senses and interactive devices. With a similar intention, in 2005 the artist made Sanctuary, an interactive architectural installation143 consisting of a small wooden house with wall-sized screens. The floor is made of wood, too, but it has wires under it that connect objects in the space such as tables and bowls, chairs, and plants. At times the walls/screens appear to be windows opening onto landscapes, while other times they become surfaces. Thousands of elements collected from around the world over more than five years144 are rear-projected onto the screens, and instrumental and digital music composed by Shahrokh Yadegari ‘fills’ the space. In addition to this, the living plants, as well as water and objects,

can be touched by the visitors and their interactions are detected by sensors that send signals to the system and affect transformations of the images, animation, and music. The whole environment produces a cross-cultural interpretation of ‘safe haven’, where humans feel they are part of an ecosystem shared by all creatures of the world. Vibeke Sorensen commented: ‘I began to question more deeply what a sanctuary is. I came to the conclusion that it is “home.” A place where one can live and dream in harmony with the environment.’145 Sanctuary offers a trip in a global poem of peace, the whole world being a sanctuary. In Green Memories (2005), a 50-minute real-time visual music performance with animation, video, photography, and motion paintings, Sorensen continued to express the necessity of living in harmony with nature and people, and of seeing ‘ourselves as intricately connected with nature and the Earth, and not separated from it, and to encourage positive and peaceful engagement in saving the Earth and its peoples’.146 The work is based on the poem ‘I Pity the Garden’ by Persian female author Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–1967). Shahrokh Yadegari composed the music to this piece as well. Memories of Diamantina (2006/2009) is another visual music voyage based on a trip through Brazil and photographs taken in that country. Green Space (2011) is an exploration of a dynamic space, an abstract experience generated from the screen with stereoscopic digital photography. This 3D stereoscopic work is dedicated to the memory of the artist’s parents and uncle, and it was completed shortly after their deaths. A real-time, interactive, twelve-screen visual music installation, Illuminations (2013), is inspired by Asian traditional folding screen, Tibetan medicine mandalas, and the atmospheric phenomenon known as the aurora borealis. Each screen is uniquely illuminated and connected to its own computer and projector, and all of the screens ‘perform’ the space visually – in an arched zigzag shape

The installation was part of the exhibit ‘Reconstructed Thoughts’ held at the Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California at Riverside, January–March 1998. 142 It was installed at the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California as part of the Interactive Frictions Art Exhibit of the Labyrinth Research Initiative, from 4–18 June 1999. 143 The world premiere took place on 17 October 2005 at Gallery One-One-One at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. 144 Images, sounds, texts, and movies were recorded in many countries, including Italy, Bali, China, Japan, Denmark, France, Bolivia, and Brazil. Production and postproduction assistance was provided by the Midi@rte Laboratory, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, directed by Professor Heitor Capuzzo. 145 Vibeke Sorensen, interview by Dee-Marie, contributing columnist on ‘Renderosity’ at SIGGRAPH 2007, renderosity.com/news. php?view StoryPrinter=13699. 146 Vibeke Sorensen, interview by Julia Carnahan, http://visualmusic.org/Biography/GreenMemories.htm. 141

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that provides ‘spatial harmony and counterpoint’147 – and auditorily as a polyrhythmic music composed by the artist intertwines with the screens’ images. At the same time, all of the computers are connected through sensors located in the environment. The audience is invited to play three Tibetan singing bowls, which are just in front of the folding screens, and the music simultaneously alters the colours and the images on the screens. Animations on the screens visually express the phenomenon of the northern lights in a continuous stream of changing images. The sound produced by the Tibetan bowls evokes the chanting of the ‘Om’, and the plants in the environment suggest a reconnection with nature. Vibeke Sorensen explained that the idea was ‘to create a kind of uplifting feeling [. . .] that puts people in a more open state to perceive things and to be more meditative’.148 Vishwaroop (2014, 4:30, 4k digital dome film)149 is a tuning of harmonically related waveforms and a real-time recursive process that causes interaction among the elements of colour, shape, forms, and movement of 2D and 3D animation. It periodically goes into ‘state transitions’, where the animation literally bursts into something completely unpredictable but highly ordered, like moving mosaic patterns and crystalline forms dancing at the intersection of geometry and organic form. These are always in the process of appearing and disappearing, always different and unique in an everlasting process of birth, death, and rebirth.

Deanna Morse Deanna Morse (b. Sioux City, Iowa, 26 February 1950) produced, directed, and animated more than 40 short films. Sometimes she focused on soft, ironic subjects for children. At other times she dealt with people and their issues, and later she collected languid impressions about

time’s passing. Morse’s world is populated by swans, cats, butterflies, seagulls, stars, flowers, plants, and smiling faces. Her irony is polite and gentle, miles from sarcasm, as we can see from the shorts she made for Sesame Street: Dogs (1991), Monkey’s T-Shirt (1991), and Night Sounds (1992). Charleston Home Movie (1980) is probably her most famous film, celebrating the welcoming city in South Carolina. Partly thanks to its warm country music, the film carries the viewers into a homely atmosphere. Hand (1982) is about hands: white, purple, overlapping, intersecting, appearing, disappearing to music. August Afternoons (1985) focuses on the feelings and sensations of a summer day. Time is the main subject in Morse’s later works. She analyzes nature through its lens in Time Flights (2007) and explores light through time’s lens in Breathing Room (2009). In the latter, Morse shot images from nature one frame at a time and presented them in time-lapse. Time as variation, growth, and decay is treated in Postcards from My Backyard (2007), where a single space is presented through time-lapse footage and motion graphics.

Joanna Priestley Joanna Priestley (b. Portland, Oregon, 25 November 1950) is not afraid of showing her fears and obsessions, with a whimsical irony. The four-minute Voices (1985)150 explains her view on her art. ‘I am an animator and [. . .] of course I could use this time to entertain you [. . .] or I could draw a little cartoon character [.  .  .] or I  could go very deep, symbolic, let you guess what I am trying to say.’ Most of the time, she chooses the third option. Voices is Priestley’s first significant work. Addressing the viewer directly, she talks humorously about the phobias we share and suggests that fear is a choice. The main character in All My Relations (1990, drawings on paper with 3D

Vibeke Sorensen, Illuminations, exhibition catalogue written by the artist and published by the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2013, p. 2. The exhibition opened at ADM-NTU, and was held from 30 August to 5 October 2013. 148 Vibeke Sorensen, interview by Cinzia Bottini and Javad Mohammad Khajavi, 12 September 2013. 149 The title Vishwaroop (vishwa, ‘universe’, and roop, ‘form’) is from Hindu philosophy and refers to the appearance of God or Brahma in forms that incorporate the creation of worlds and the universe within them. The five main elements of the universe in Hindu philosophy are fire, earth, air, water, and ether (space). This animation is produced using Pure Data/GEM, and the process is a real-time emergent system that continuously generates new forms and includes these elements as sources of data. It was premiered at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego, California as part of the NWEAMO Festival on 23 March 2014. 150 Her previous films are The Rubber Stamp Film (1983), which used new and old rubber stamps, and The Dancing Bulrushes (1985), codirected with Steven Subotnik. 147

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Figure 2.15  Joanna Priestley, Voices, 1985.

frames)151 is an abstract figure, recognizable as a woman passing through a romance – from infatuation to disillusionment and pain, and finally renewal, thanks to a new encounter. Joanna said in an interview: ‘I try to draw in other people’s experience. Very often I’ll interview friends and get their ideas but the core inspiration usually comes from my own experience.’152 She-Bop is a sort of celebration of female power and an ode to the goddess. Women are powerful divine creatures (‘She is Andromeda, She is the Pleiades, She is Gaia’), fertile (‘She is pregnant with the Earth’), and eventually violent (‘She is the volcano, she is the earthquake’). This feminine point of view is also evident in Grown Up (1993) and Streetcar Named Perspire (2007). ‘A lot of people wonder

how I can expose myself to people so blatantly,’153 she says. The first of these films shows the virtues of turning forty and the latter is a roller-coaster ride through the ups and downs of another life. With the five-minute Utopia Parkway (1997), Priestley’s works became more abstract and symbolic. The film took inspiration from the box sculptures of the artist Joseph Cornell,154 who lived in the same house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, nearly all his life. Utopia Parkway combines different techniques and opened a new stage for Priestley. From this point on, abstraction was the best medium for her ideas: ‘Abstraction has really begun to appeal to me. It’s taken a while to get to this point. There have been certain things I wanted to say and now I’m sort of moving beyond that.’155 Surface Dive (2000) was inspired by a snorkeling adventure in a lake in the Yucatán, Mexico. Andaluz (2004) pays tribute to the region in southern Spain and was created after a trip the filmmaker made with the film’s codirector, Karen Aqua. Dew Line (2005) refers to an abandoned DEW – Distant Early Warning – station in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, built during the Cold War. The latter film was made using Flash, a perfect tool to abstract the complex forms of the botanical diversity that impressed Priestly. The film is visually enriched by references to Miró’s and Kandinsky’s paintings and has constantly changing shapes and fluid movements. Extended Play (2007) was also made with digital animation – a tribute to old childhood play and games. In her own way, Joanna Priestley is the quintessential independent American animator. Her films (there are many

151 Prior to All My Relations she directed Jade Leaf (1985), in which a leaf turns into a geometric red-violet-pink and black abstraction; Times Square (1986), Candyjam (1988), and She-Bop (1988). Candyjam was coproduced and codirected with Joan Gratz. As the title suggests, it is an odd ‘jam of candies’, animated by ten filmmakers from different countries (David Anderson, Karen Aqua, Craig Bartlett, Elizabeth Buttler, Paul Driessen, Tom Gasek, Joan Gratz, Marv Newland, Christine Panushka, and Priestley herself). 152 Sharon Mizota, ‘Joanna Priestly Will Have a Retrospective of her Works at REDCAT’, latimes.com, last modified 12 April 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/12/entertainment/ca-priestly12. 153 http://archive.itvs.org/external/AW/Priestley.html. 154 Joseph Cornell is thought by many to be America’s premier assemblage artist. 155 Rose Bond, ‘Joanna Priestley: A Continuing Dialogue’, awn.com, last modified 1 September 1997, http://www.awn.com/articles/ people/joanna-priestley-continuing-dialogue. Abstraction has been a constant presence in Priestley’s films since Jade Leaf (1985). It is worth remembering not only that she was mentored by Jules Engel at CalArts, but also that her influences include Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren. Elements in her films are reminiscent of Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, and Salvador Dalí.

As an animator, she loves experimenting, using rubber stamps, sand, candy, meat, puppets, cutouts, glass, computer paint programs, index cards, and other found objects. On the topic of experimenting, she has said: ‘One of my main goals in making films is to try to push the boundaries of what I know, as far as I can. In every film, I try to do something new and different. I try new techniques, new subject matter, new styles or new colour palettes’. (Harvey Deneroff, ‘Joanna Priestley’, deneroff.com, last modified 3 May 2008, http://deneroff.com/blog/2008/05/03/joanna-priestley/.)

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more than the ones mentioned here) are sketchbook pages about everything that comes freely to her mind – personal, social, or spiritual. She has a unique artist’s touch.

Maureen Selwood Maureen Selwood was born in Ireland (Dublin, 29 July  1946) and emigrated with her family to the United States as a child. Her works employ simple line drawings (which facilitate movement and colours), marriages between drawings and live footage, and video projections and installations. Odalisque: Three Fantasies of Pursuit (1980) is made with line drawings that constantly change and create different atmospheres. The film reverses the traditional relationship between the artist and the female model; here, the woman fantasizes about herself. Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir (1995) evokes metaphoric allusions drawn from childhood. Hail Mary (1998) tells a humourous tale of love, using a centuries’ old prayer. The images are in black and white, with an emphasis on voice-over. The film’s structure is based on the Catholic rosary. Mistaken Identity (2001) mixes archival footage from Robert Aldrich’s film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955) with Selwood’s animation to create a memoir of growing up female in the postwar nuclear age. Selwood added new layers to Aldrich’s film: ‘I find the way he uses artificial lights to give the city character absolutely fantastic; he filmed it in an abstract, modern way.’156 Velda, a female character in the original Kiss Me Deadly, is reinvented by Selwood to give a ‘personal meditation on romantic myth and self-deception’.157 The characters are sketched through simple animated lines or close-ups on details from Aldrich’s film, but Selwood succeeds in powerfully evoking their sensuality and physical attraction. I Started Early (2007) is an astonishing film based on a poem by Emily Dickinson (‘I Started Early – Took My Dog’). It explores the sexual awakening of a young woman as she visits the sea and discovers her depths of self and her desire for adventure. Selwood’s films are delicate, strong, and sensual. Her work voyages deep in the inner

soul through suggestion, metaphor, allusion, and symbolism. Every film is a surrealistic trip made by interiorized and unconscious drawings. In 2012, she presented her latest film, A Modern Convenience (2012), along with her other productions, in a solo show at the REDCAT.158 She said: ‘The REDCAT event was just amazing. I really put something special together with the first and last of [my] seven films being accompanied by live music. It was a great success.’159

The Soloists Bill Plympton160 A serious, emotionless man in a dark suit stands still while a little man sprouts from inside him, opening his way with a chainsaw. Once out, the little man quickly chainsaws the big man’s legs. The same suited man (or his clone) grabs and pulls his own tongue; his head comes off and then is strung along like a yo-yo. Elsewhere the suited man’s head transmutes, turns inside out like a glove, pops like a balloon, shatters like a stone. It changes form, state, consistency, and perspective, hands penetrate it like jelly, it engulfs itself in its own tongue. These are just a few examples of Bill Plympton’s work, filled with his trademark black humour and his surrealistic, often transgressive, approach to drawings. Plympton is an animation one-man-band, a standard-bearer for American independent animators, and has been a key figure in the American animation scene since the early 1990s. He invented and developed his own very recognizable style, taking an uncompromising road in both art and production. Bill Plympton was born on 30 April 1946 into a middleclass family in Portland, Oregon. In 1964 he entered Portland State University and joined the movie club, where he did his first animation experiments. In 1968, after graduating in graphic design, he relocated to New York City and launched a career as a cartoonist and illustrator. His works appeared in periodicals as diverse as Film Society Review, The New York Times, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Screw, Penthouse, National Lampoon, Glamour, and Vanity Fair.

Mario Sesti, ‘Maureen Selwood’, Animac 2 (2003): 35. The film is set in Los Angeles. ‘Animated Film, Drawings by Maureen Selwood at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica’, blog.calarts.edu, last modified 10 November 2010, blog.calarts.edu/2010/11/10/animated-film-drawings-by-maureen-selwood-at-track-16-gallery-in-santa-monica/. 158 The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts centre for innovative visual, performing, and media arts. It is located in downtown Los Angeles, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. 159 Joanna Priestley, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 31 May 2012. 160 By Gianluca Aicardi. 156 157

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In 1975, the Soho Weekly News began to feature Plympton, a satirical comic strip whose circulation spread to over twenty different newspapers. But Plympton’s true lifelong desire was animation. His first professional animated film was made in 1983. His opportunity came through Valeria Vasilevski of The Android Sisters (a cult-status singing duo formed in the early 1980s). Vasilevski hired Plympton to shoot a six-minute film that she produced, in which the animated sisters perform an antimilitarist song, Boontown, by the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. After this experience Plympton felt ready to produce a short film of his own, which he self-mockingly called Drawing Lesson #2. In the film, a line shows and tells the art of drawing before going astray by recalling his unfortunate love affair with an attractive model. From that moment on, Plympton self-produced all of his personal works and did only some commercials and animated music video inserts on commission. In Drawing Lesson #2, Plympton’s style is already fully defined. It is a continuous burst of very fast sequences, filled with chain-linked visual contraptions. His drawing technique employs a rough hand-coloured pencil line on white paper sheets, directly shot under the camera, with no cel transfer. During a hiatus in the production of Drawing Lesson #2, Plympton began a second project called Your Face.

Figure 2.16  Bill Plympton, Your Face, 1987.

The appearance of the singer changes and swirls in all conceivable ways; this inventive, irreverent visual trait would be a stylistic constant in Plympton’s work. The song was written and performed by Plympton’s friend Maureen McElheron, whose voice was manipulated to make it sound more male. Your Face was acclaimed upon its release and collected awards at the Seattle, Aspen, Los Angeles, and Hiroshima festivals, as well as a Best Animated Short Film nomination at the 1988 Academy Awards. American and European MTV networks showed great interest in Plympton’s peculiar style. These networks would become a showcase for many of his subsequent works, self-produced under the logo of his Plymptoons studio with a very limited number of coworkers. Usually, he had just a musician, camera operator, and editor; all other duties (production, direction, screenwriting, key animation, inbetweening, colouring, etc.) were entirely on Plympton’s shoulders. The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was the most successful period for Plympton’s short film production. One of Those Days (1988) depicts a terrible day in the life of the protagonist, whose extreme misadventures are represented from his point of view. This project allowed Plympton to experiment with more complex camera movements. In How to Kiss (1988), a parody of

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old edutainment, Plympton demonstrates his interest in social rituals linked to sex. 25 Ways to Quit Smoking (1989) is composed of 25 quick sketches illustrating the unlikeliest ways to quit smoking: closing one’s throat with a giant clip, replacing the cigarette with dynamite or the lighter with a flamethrower, or going inside oneself to look at one’s devastated lungs. Plymptoons (1990) was Plympton’s first experiment with comic anthologies. Each sketch is introduced by a title, like a newspaper cartoon. There’s no true linking theme: there are sketches about a cloud hunter, a musical kiss, a hungry mailbox, and so on. Plymptoons set a format Plympton would come back to, especially in the second half of the 1990s, with Plympmania (1996), Sex & Violence (1997), More Sex & Violence (1998), and Surprise Cinema (1999, a candid camera parody). The Plymptoons template is the least corrosive of Plympton’s work, being almost sweet in parts. However, it also displays the least dynamic camera work and the sequences are visually quite similar. At the beginning of the 1990s, Plympton began to plan his next, much-anticipated, move: to make a feature. Entirely self-financed and self-produced, The Tune (65 minutes) was two years in the making and debuted in the festival circuit in 1992. Del is a music writer experiencing creative troubles. The tyrannical boss of the music firm for which he works gives Del 47 minutes to deliver a new hit song. A panicked Del hits the road, seeking inspiration and meeting a broad range of strange characters. Musical acts pay tribute to different popular American genres (country, blues, rock and roll, surf music). The songs provide the perfect occasion for fancy animations and protean transfigurations of objects and characters, giving life to the lyrical metaphors. Written with cartoonist P. C. Vey and longtime associate Maureen McElheron, The Tune displays some captivating sequences and a sweet-tempered mood. However, all the musical and visual inventions, though riveting, are often unrelated and random-seeming. The film’s disjointed nature is its greatest inherent fault, caused by the necessity of selling bits of it as shorts before its completion. After some live-action filming experiences,161 Plympton made another animated feature in 1997. Again it was self-funded and entirely drawn by him, with the written collaboration of P. C. Vey. Grant, a newly married man, is suddenly able to make anything he wishes become real,

which dismays his sexy wife Kerry. It is a good pretext to perform another run of Plympton’s surrealistic situations with slightly greater narrative coherence than The Tune. A media mogul, who is alerted to Grant’s power and plans to exploit him to take over the global communication market, sends an army after him. The satire on media and military is reminiscent of Bruno Bozzetto’s Vip, mio fratello superuomo, which Plympton quotes among his references. It is filled with bizarre scenes involving distorted sex and larger-than-life violence. The film also marks Plympton’s first large-scale shift to cel animation. It had a higher budget than its precursor, allowing for more animated backgrounds (and requiring less background recycling). Plympton would increasingly focus on his features, although his short films continued to provide his main income. Among his shorts, it is worth mentioning Nosehair (1995), a line play reminiscent of Saul Steinberg’s or Osvaldo Cavandoli’s works; and The Exciting Life of a Tree (1998), the story of a centuries-old tree seen from its point of view. In 2001, Plympton released the feature Mutant Aliens. Cosmonaut Earl Jensen is lost in space, sabotaged by his evil supervisor, Dr. Frubar. Twenty years later, Jensen returns to Earth seeking revenge, escorted by five grotesque aliens to help him in his destructive spree against Frubar. The film works best in its first part – a long flashback to Jensen’s strange adventures in space – and when the visual gags deliver a harsh satire of American values and corporate media power. But the film loses most of its thrust when it has to pull its elements together to achieve some resolution. Hair High (2004), the fourth feature film, is a gothic comedy set in a 1960s high school and pays homage mainly to Brian De Palma’s Carrie. After Mutant Aliens’ financial success (it was Plympton’s first feature film to do more than just repay its costs), Hair High took advantage of a higher budget. Plympton could hire background artists and other collaborators, speeding up production and improving the overall quality of the art department. The story is a love triangle involving two murdered teenagers returning from death for revenge. It’s a perfect ground for Plympton’s routines with a better-crafted narrative structure. Also in 2004, Plympton received another Academy Award nomination for the gag-filled short Guard Dog (the

J. Lyle (1994), a feature-length comedy about a wheeler-dealer with a magic dog, provided some space for animation sequences. The mockumentary Guns of the Clackamas (1995) is about the fictional making of a western film whose production goes terribly wrong (inspired by Jean Harlow’s death and its pathetic cover-up during the shooting of Saratoga). Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet (1995) is a real documentary about, and codirected by, a poet friend of Plympton’s from Oregon.

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first in a ‘canine trilogy’, followed by the weaker sequels Guide Dog [2006], and Hot Dog [2008]). The short, heavily influenced by the American cartoons of the Warner/ MGM era, showcases Plympton’s comic timing. However, a true turning point in Plympton’s career might be The Fan and the Flower (2005). Softly narrated by actor Paul Giamatti, this black and white short film about a tender, impossible love between a ceiling fan and a plant in a vase is Plympton’s most moving and intense character study. It makes use of some of his ‘mutating moments’ while taking out the gruesome and irreverent aspects and demonstrating the essential love for life that Plympton embraces. Idiots and Angels (2008) follows this lead. A selfish, harsh, and abusive man hanging out at a local bar finds himself changing into a white-winged angel. He initially fights the wings and their influence but eventually follows their indications and achieves true love. Entirely speechless, with elegant ‘film-noirish’ colour saturation, Idiots and Angels is probably Plympton’s most mature feature. It is perfectly tuned and crafted and overcomes his customary visual clichés (or puts them to subtler, more nuanced use). Plympton’s deviant humour, applied to everyday life, is the most distinctive trait of his world throughout his career. His films are borne by cultural references (such as Dalí and Escher), animation ‘role models’ (Tex Avery, Marv Newland), and slapstick comedy (Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy). Everything in Plympton’s world can reveal macabre dark sides, changing a rainbow into a meat slicer or a cup of a tea into a devouring menace. Faces and bodies are deformed, mutilated, hacked, and slashed in juicy lines without visible trauma. Plympton’s animation fluxes back and forth in endless kaleidoscope mutations or flashy rapid gags. This formula has created a successful business for Plympton over the last twenty years. It generates income from art books and graphic novels, home video sales, TV

networks, and those American theatres that still request short films to show before the main screening. Apart from the flexibility of his business approach and the freedom of speech allowed by his independence, Plympton’s success resides in his recipe to craft a marketable film. In his own words: make it cheap (no more than 1,000 or 2,000 dollars per minute); make it short (no more than 4 or 5 minutes long); and make the audience laugh.

Igor Kovalyov162 A ‘whimsical charismatic artist’,163 Igor Kovalyov is both a jester type and a deeply melancholic observer of times and mores. He was an expat who left success at home for a new career abroad and an auteur who went into the cartoon industry, only to continue making personal high-brow animation projects. Kovalyov was born in Kiev on 17 January 1954. Right after high school he went to the Kiev animation studio, where he worked in inbetweening and cleanup. There he met another young man heading in a similar direction, Aleksandr Tatarsky. They would become Siamese twins, as Igor would repeatedly say.164 Both were accepted at the Higher Courses for film directors and screenwriters in Moscow. However, students were supposed to be sent by the bodies with which they were affiliated, and the Kiev studio bosses approved only Kovalyov. The school was known for openness and a relatively liberal spirit. Its teachers included Khitruk and Norstein. Even the live-action genius Andrey Tarkovsky would come in for lectures and master classes. In Kiev, Kovalyov’s exposure to foreign films had been occasional at best; in Moscow, the screenings were fabulous. Kovalyov discovered inspirations in live-action cinema, most notably in the work of Robert Bresson.165 In contemporary animation, he was hooked on Borowczyk and Dovnikovic;166 not

By Mikhail Gurevich. Katrina Kaufman, ‘Animated Igor Kovalyov’, Venice Magazine, April (2005): 86. A real globetrotter, Kovalyov could have been discussed among the Russian or the Ukrainian animators instead of with the Americans. He is discussed here as he did his best work in California. 164 He said this most directly, perhaps, in an on-camera interview for Alexander Tatarsky, or How to Embrace the Immense (a documentary about Tatarsky directed by Natalia Lukinykh, Moscow, 2008). Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotes from Kovalyov are taken from personal conversations with Mikhail Gurevich over many years, and also from more structured and targeted interviews conducted in September–October  2010 and in February–April  2013. The same relates to the quotes from Delioussine, Malanichev, and other collaborators. 165 Kovalyov remembered his first impression of Diary of a Country Priest: ‘It was a whole new world: the organic harmony of the film, the simple story, how the characters moved, and the ideas.’ (Jayne Pilling, ed., Animation. 2D & Beyond, Rotovision, London, 2001, p. 73.) 166 A few years earlier he had been struck by Priit Pärn’s Triangle. Later, the film Street of Crocodiles by the Quay brothers was a revelation. 162 163

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surprisingly, his first term project was a diligent exercise in the Zagreb style. Meanwhile, Tatarsky had moved to Moscow too, where he was hired against the odds by Multtelefilm, who were in a rush to produce promotional reels for the 1980 Olympics. Together, Tatarsky and Kovalyov made a short, Plastilinovaya vorona (‘A Plasticine Crow’; Kovalyov was only credited as the art director). It was released in 1981 to accusations of ‘ideological nonsense’ and old guard studio resistance. However, it had unexpected back up from some major names in the cinema establishment. The film was a breakthrough, proposing a novel concept of childhood and the reshaping of dialogue between the generations. Eventually Kovalyov and Tatarsky made films together officially, as codirectors: Kubik-Rubik, Klounada (‘RubikCube’, ‘Clownade’, 1985), and Krylya, nogi i hvosty (‘Wings, Legs and Tails’, 1986). The latter was a laconic joke on ‘how the vulture teaches the ostrich to fly’ and hinted at the future distinctiveness of Kovalyov’s graphic and narrative approaches. There followed a larger project in several parts, Sledstvie vedut Kolobki (‘The Kolobki Investigate’, 1986–1987), a gentle parody of TV police crime series with two buffoonish heroes. It was an immediate and enduring hit. Another kind of support was available outside the studio walls. Seminars and conferences at Filmmakers’ Union retreats regularly brought together animators from different territories in the continental empire. At these events, the artists could present and watch films and mingle. Kovalyov felt a special kinship with Estonian Priit Pärn, whose influence is clearly traceable in Kovalyov’s own work, both in visuals and narrative. In 1988, the Pilot Studio was born. When an ulcer landed him in hospital, Kovalyov drew virtually the whole storyboard of his first truly personal film. Tatarsky and the studio producer-cofounder Anatoly Prokhorov167 regarded it in bewilderment but accepted it as a studio project. The 14-minute Ego zhena kurica (‘My Wife Is a Hen’, 1989) premiered at the Krok festival in Kiev. It won an award, starkly dividing the professional audience. The film has strange, oscillating graphics; Kafkaesque characters; and a semi-inenarrable narrative mixing family drama and grotesque fable. The film unfolds in a distantly melancholic tone and a slowed-down, unsteady

rhythm. All this was enchanting for some viewers, maddening for others. Andrei Svislotsky (id., 1990) is the most Bressonian of Kovalyov’s films. It uses almost direct quotations – angles, moves – from Diary of a Country Priest, and it is perhaps Kovalyov’s most immediately introspective film, a study of existential dead ends and choices. Again, the narrative seems supplanted by pure graphic moves, which strive to manifest meaning on their own. The palette is close to monochrome. Gabor Csupo, then a big producer in Los Angeles, had long been trying to lure Kovalyov away, promising backing for his own projects, and finally Kovalyov accepted. In the summer of 1991 he left for America with his wife and daughter. At Klasky-Csupo, he jumped into the ongoing Rugrats project as one of its principal directors. The show, made for Nickelodeon, became one of the most popular children’s TV shows ever. The apparent ease with which the immigrant adapted to the new environment was remarkable. An American colleague recalled: ‘Igor (Kovalyov) was one of the first Russians to come here. His English was somewhat limited then. In the early days, when we’d all sit around the table and talk about the story idea, he’d be quiet and you wondered if he was getting the American humour. Then he’d make a comment and you’d know that he had followed every word. He is always aware of the emotional context.’168 In 1998, Kovalyov codirected Rugrats the Movie to general acclaim and box-office success. His individual touch is noticeable in tone and tempo, and in not-quiteconventional montage. He adjusted, of course, to the production norms and stylistic codes,169 yet not unconditionally. In another TV show, Aahhh!!! Real Monsters, for which he made the initial pilot, Kovalyov deftly handled the gags and attitudes. When the moment came, the gentlemanly Csupo kept his word (which he had given to Kovalyov on a mere handshake). In between commissions, Kovalyov started doing his own projects, with the studio allowing him a certain period of time and a limited crew. Bird in the Window (1996), in its director’s own eyes, ends an informal trilogy. Kovalyov returns to troubled family

Prokhorov is another curious personality: a physicist-turned-critic and an in-house theorist who articulated a business-artistic strategy. Julie Prendiville, ‘Aahhh!!! Real Monsters’, Animation Magazine, January 1995, 37–38. 169 Gabor Csupo noted: ‘His style was totally different from what typical Hollywood TV productions require. But I just trusted in his talent – I thought that he could easily modify his skill and I was right.’ (Pilling, Animation, p. 73.) 167 168

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Figure 2.17  Igor Kovalyov, Bird in the Window, 1996. matters but goes in deeper, exploring relations, disconnects, and (self) betrayal. A man comes and goes, leaving the scent of timid machismo in his trail. A woman is tense, pliant, and protective of her child. There is also a gardener, and others, and a tiny web of oddly indispensable details. The design becomes more brightly transparent, as if counterpointing the mood. Imagine a noir with Klimtonesque ornamentation, despair framed in weird elegance. Flying Nansen (2000) can be taken just as an ‘exercise in comics’, as Kovalyov used to claim, almost seriously. Again, its core is obliquely multilayered. It swings between extremes of home-movie stylized inserts and Giotto frescoes reincarnated on the back of northern lights, between a showily light-hearted homage to a polar explorer and what is almost a harsh parody of a heroic saga. More than ever, the comedic devices shield the secretive lyricism. To the director’s dismay, Flying Nansen received special acclaim in some places as a purely funny piece. In Milch (2005)170 he pictured another quest. It revolves around home in time and space and the void of childhood – its fears, tensions, embarrassments, and insights. It’s Kovalyov’s Amarcord, albeit a partial one, a fragment. There is the unsteady tightness of the family circle under the green lampshade; there is lust and deceit, the first itch of puberty and the anxiety of death, angled through the boy’s eyes and packed into the scratchy narrative. The faces here seem double-layered and wear loose graphic masks. The visual metaphors shame gags and trickery; rather, they emanate the sensations and sensibility of inner experience. In later years, Kovalyov was developing more deeply as a graphic artist. His artwork got its own exposure, in a Los Angeles gallery and at festival exhibits. It became apparent

that his independent drawings and films have a complex interrelationship. This makes it all the more interesting that Kovalyov needed a designer and nearly always worked with the same one – Dima Malanichev.171 Their symbiosis is remarkable. The designer, ostensibly responsible for colour and texture, actually serves as an ‘animator at large’, bringing the whole graphic environment to life. Starting with Nansen, Dima Malanichev convinced Kovalyov to finally switch over to computer drawing. In terms of iconography, graphic rhythm, and texture, Kovalyov’s drawings can present subtle links: to Picasso’s drafts, to early Soviet leftist graphics, to German Expressionism, and to caricature as an entire genre-form. Naive painting, the exquisite primitivism of folk art, and children’s drawings are all woven together. Clearly, however, these borrowings are rendered with a new twist, a melancholic irony of distancing. Despite his preoccupation with extremes of ‘formalism’, Kovalyov really works in old-fashioned character animation. He relies on storytelling through action and the power of gags. Aesthetically, he doesn’t fight or negate the conventional wisdom of the craft; instead, he employs it in different dimensions of artistry. An involved viewer gets the impression that almost everything in Kovalyov’s animation is driven by a certain graphic gesture. The accented points in his graphics themselves, the pointed pulsation of his textures – these are what radiate, creating meaning beside and beyond the plot, characters, and clear-cut links to reality. In Kovalyov’s drawings, the focus also falls on gestures and postures – those of the human face or figure, or an expressive angle-twist of the line-stroke itself. As if taking limited animation further and deeper, Kovalyov uses a distinctly syncopated rhythm of key moves, with changes in frame composition and cuts. Somehow it shifts the very nature of animated motion. That’s precisely where Kovalyov enacts a quiet revolution – ‘on a molecular level’, as Zhenia Delioussine, an animator on most of the projects, put it. In his working routine, Kovalyov emphasizes timing. The slowing down and/or speeding up of the pace and changes inside the micro-fragments break conventional appearances, bringing a vague sense of brisk irregularity. Probably it is this cool fusion of slow jumps, from gesture to posture and back, that lends a sense of irrational tension to seemingly simple moves of characters and plots.

American-Russian coproduction, Klasky-Csupo in association with Genrikh Padva. He was trained as a stage designer in a reputable Moscow theatre school and worked as an animator-designer with Tatarsky at the Multtelefilm and Pilot studios before Klasky-Csupo. His industrial credits include The Simpsons and other renowned titles. 170 171

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Every film, and the whole body of Kovalyov’s auteur filmmaking, provokes sharply divided responses and interpretations on the festival circuit and beyond. These range from the straightforwardly Freudian (in which an elevator rising would certainly indicate an erection),172 to essayistic psychologizing (in which Kovalyov’s world appears as ‘a dark landscape of paranoia’),173 to literary parallels with Joyce’s stream of consciousness,174 to politicized readings that seek social commentary in the context of falling empires.175 Kovalyov himself did not believe in ‘making statements’ through art. Delioussine, from inside the game, pointed out that his films are about nothing in particular; they are objects that fool the eye. They are empty forms for us to fill, though they are fully charged emotionally. They avoid clear dialogue and make only limited use of music, usually reserving it for culminating moments and emotional peak. What the films do employ are thorough sound designs. Noises and sounds, arranged in a kind of ‘concrete music’, build up a whole audio environment. On a deep level, it helps keep the deliberately loose narrative together. When a viewer penetrates the patina of complex, stylish forms to the core of the ultimately simple stories about awkward and lonely creatures, these tales of solitude reveal their leitmotif, their deeper theme: the unavoidable presence and drama of our human providence. The last project Kovalyov made on Klasky-Csupo, adapting Charles Bukowski’s cult prose, seemed to promise a bridge to seriousness within the commercial realm. Instead it turned into a marginal Web exercise. By that time the studio was already in sharp decline and downsizing. Kovalyov left in 2005 and started teaching at CalArts; it seemed like a step into the classical path of the American independent. At the same time, he was looking for suitable commissions. Aleksandr Tatarsky died in the summer of 2007 from a sudden heart attack. Kovalyov was a few hours late for the funeral due to visa hurdles. In the fall of 2010, Kovalyov visited the Moscow animation festival. The associated art exhibit of his work was called ‘Pilot from Abroad’. He was treated as an unlikely

celebrity, with TV cameras, reporters, and producers lining up. In interviews, he said he would be ready to go back to Russia if there were serious job prospects. Those soon materialized, and Kovalyov moved back the following spring. Two years later, still in Moscow, he said: ‘I’ve just come to work on a particular project, that’s it.’ It is a commercial serial about the adventures of Alisa, a teenage character in the Soviet fantasy classic by Kir Bulychev.176 The project is ambitious by Russian standards, with ten 26-minute installments for the first season. Kovalyov embarked on this work with his brother-in-arms from the Pilot days – Anatoly Prokhorov was the creative producer once again. Kovalyov made yet another drastic style shift, adopting the deliberate stylization of refined Hollywood of the 1990s. The ‘old’ Kovalyov was hard to recognize. ‘They just seem to have missed this phase here, and to me it’s interesting to play with.’ His position was creative supervisor, but his schedule and workload was tough nevertheless. ‘As I’d always been, I’m a studio guy; the lion’s share of my lifetime is spent at the work place.’

Canada177 After experiencing a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the production of the National Film Board of Canada fell into crisis in the 1990s, when many artists who had dominated its history reached retirement age. The death of Norman McLaren on 27 January 1987 symbolized the end of the boom years. Mostly because of severe budget cuts in 1994, the agency lost half its resources. At that time, the National Film Board’s production refocused around a series of commercial films with social messages. From 1992 to 1996, the series Rights from the Heart consisted of 21 films inspired by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 1996, the series ShowPeace consisted of six films addressing conflict resolution, and so on. The rigid thematic framework of these series restricted the inspiration of the filmmakers, who hardly managed to live up to their reputations. The notable exception was Janet

Alexei Orlov, ‘AniFreud. Freudian Symbolism in Animation’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski (Film Studies Notes) 52 (2001). (In Russian.) Chris Robinson, ‘Being Igor Kovalyov’, in Unsung Heroes of Animation, John Libbey, London, 2005, p. 42. 174 Larisa Malyukova, ‘The Hen and the Bird’, Iskusstvo kino (Cinema Art) 12, (2012). (In Russian.) 175 Stanislav Ulver, Flying Nansen in the catalogue of Tough Eye: Turku International Animated Film Festival, 2001. 176 Kir Bulychev was the pen name of Igor Vsevolodovich Mozheiko, a Soviet Russian science fiction writer and historian. His magnum opus is a children’s science fiction series, Alisa Selezneva, although most of his books are adult-oriented. 177 By Marcel Jean and Giannalberto Bendazzi. 172 173

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Perlman, whose Dinner for Two (1996) told of the funny rivalry between two chameleons. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (RadioCanada in French), formerly a home to Frédéric Back, Graeme Ross, and Paul Driessen (who made Elbowing there), closed its animation department in 1987, shortly after the release of The Man Who Planted Trees. The producer Hubert Tison (b. Montreal, 1937), who had been in charge of the section since it began in 1968, remained in the company’s employ until 1994. He produced a final film with Frédéric Back, La rivière aux grandes eaux (‘The Mighty River’, 1993). The crises of the public authorities promoted private production. This soon benefited from technological developments that made the animation process more accessible. Thus, a Montreal production company that specialized in commercials, called Productions Pascal Blais, coproduced

two prestigious films that won many prizes: The Old Lady and the Pigeons (Sylvain Chomet, France, 1997) and The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, Russia, 1999). In 1996, Pierre Hébert and David Verrall (b. Ottawa, 16 March 1948) became the heads, respectively, of the animation studios of the French and English Programs of the National Film Board. Their appointment heralded a wind of change. At the turn of the century, the presence of NFB films at international festivals grew again, and they won an impressive number of awards. One powerful film was Le chapeau (‘The Hat’, 1999), in which a stripper relives the nightmare of the childhood sexual harassment she suffered from ‘a man with a hat’. Its director, Michèle Cournoyer (b. Saint Joseph de Sorel, 14 November 1943), had started her career way back in 1969 with Papa! Papa! Papa!/L’homme et l’enfant and slowly rose to international fame in the early 1990s (A Feather’s

Figure 2.18  Michèle Cournoyer, Le chapeau (‘The Hat’), 1999. Le chapeau © 2000 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

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Tale, 1992; An Artist, 1994). In ‘The Hat’ she addressed a very thorny topic with deep sensitivity, without giving in to either pathos or pornography. In 2004, Cournoyer made the almost abstract Accordéon (‘Accordion’; ink-on-paper, like ‘The Hat’). In 2008, she completed Robes of War (using the same technique), about Muslim women suicide bombers. The film hasn’t the strength and consistency of her previous works, and the use of imagery and music with Christian connotations confuses the message. Cournoyer’s approach draws its inspiration from Dada and surrealism. She has a taste for outlandish situations (Spaghettata, ‘Dinner with Spaghetti’, 1976, codirected with Jacques Drouin; Toccata, 1977) and borrows the ideas of collage (Old Orchard Beach, PQ, 1982). She also tends to advance a discourse through successive metaphors and constant metamorphoses. From Dolorosa (1988) on she used rotoscoping, but her expression reached a higher level with ‘The Hat’, with its gestural approach to drawing. How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels (1998) is a macabre comedy by Craig Welch (b. Windsor, 27 September 1948). It evokes the atmospheres of some Polish films and also of some films by Larry Jordan. Welcome to Kentucky (2004) is a visual poem whose beauty and mystery are let down by an unimaginative soundtrack. Welch’s possible weakness is his focus on the visual side of his film.

Eugene Fedorenko, already an Oscar winner for Every Child (1979), returned to the forefront with Village of Idiots (1999, codirected with Rose Newlove). It uses an impressive paper cut technique to tell a story from the traditional Jewish Chelm Tales. Martine Chartrand (b. Montreal, 4 January 1962) began by making TV Tango (1992) as part of the series Rights from the Heart. After an internship in Russia, where Aleksandr Petrov introduced her to painting on glass, she made Black Soul (2000). It evokes the history of African-Canadians with a beautiful soundtrack, blending African rhythms and American jazz. The film won the Golden Bear for short film at the Berlin Festival. Following in the wake of his first film, Cordell Barker returned with two comedies, Strange Invaders (2001) and Runaway (2010). They won acclaim, even if they do not reveal a strong artistic personality and lack the spirit of The Cat Came Back. An original designer, Chris Hinton (b. Galt, Ontario, 31 March  1952) became known thanks to several lively comedies. Some were made at the NFB (Blackfly, 1991), others independently (A Nice Day in the Country, 1988; Nibbles, 2003). To date, his most significant film is Flux (2002), where his comic sense is mixed with tenderness in a story evoking the cycle of life. A  surprising energy is given to the film by its bold treatment of space. His cNote (2004),

Figure 2.19  Craig Welch, How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels, 1998. How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels © 1997 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

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an abstract work with music by contemporary composer Michael Oesterle, benefits from the dynamism of Hinton’s comic films. It contributed to the renewal of the abstract film, with unique imagery and hyperbolic colour. A comic-book artist, Claude Cloutier (b. Montreal, 6 July 1957) first made a short film inspired by his job, The Persistent Peddler (1988); its humour is absurd and offbeat. After working on various educational projects, Cloutier directed From the Big Bang to Tuesday Morning (2000), a fantasy about the evolution of species made with brush drawing that evoked aquatint. He honed this technique with Sleeping Betty (2006), which focused on anachronisms and resumed the tone of his comic book work. The film was a great success. Cloutier continued with The Trenches (2010), a nightmare vision of World War I in which he used rotoscoping for the first time. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new generation of filmmakers emerged at the NFB. Patrick Bouchard (b. Quebec City, 21 October 1974), made several puppet films, setting up a nocturnal and murky world filled with disturbing characters (The Brainwashers, 2002; Dehors novembre, 2005; Subservience, 2007). Nicolas Brault (b. Montreal, 18 August 1975) draws on a graphics tablet. His work has themes of learning (Antagonia, 2002), isolation (Islet, 2003), and bereavement (Hungu, 2008; The Circus, 2010). Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski released Madame Tutli-Putli (2008), a spectacular puppet film about the metaphysical journey of a woman on a train. Their film’s technical innovation is its digital overlay of human eyes on puppets. Munro Ferguson (b. New York City, 1960) made the funny Falling in Love Again (2002). A stereoscopic film, it uses the SANDDE (Stereo Animation Drawing Device)

technique to communicate the delicious giddiness of infatuation. Some prolific artists – Theodore Ushev, Malcolm Sutherland, Félix Dufour-Laperrière – alternated between films made at the NFB and those made independently. A graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, Ushev (b. Kyustendil, Bulgaria, 4 February 1968) was primarily known as a poster artist in his home country before settling in Montreal in 1999. From 1999 to 2004 he produced some ten short films for broadcast on the Internet, exploring several graphic styles. Aurora (1999) cites the Soviet avant-garde, while Dissociation (2001) and Well-Tempered Heads (2003) skillfully evoke the woodcut. The three-film series with the collective name Needles (2002) and the subsequent Early in Fall, Late in Winter (2002) employ both rigid animation and a rigid line; they are made to look as if they were animated mechanically by a computer. In contrast, Walking on by . . . (2003) uses a light and fast pencil touch. Time is . . . (1999), an allegory recalling the myth of Sisyphus, has a frank brushstroke and lavish textures. Vertical (2003), Ushev’s first collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, closed this period of his work with a tribute to Jan Lenica. In 2005, he began a trilogy exploring the link between avant-garde art and the ideological and artistic excesses of the twentieth century. The first two segments of this work – Tower Bawher (2006) and Drux Flux (2008) – had considerable success. Inspired by famous musical pieces (Georgy Sviridov in Tower Bawher, Alexander Mossolov in Drux Flux), the filmmaker cites and reorganizes stylistic marks from architecture, the visual arts, and films that employ constructivism (Tower Bawher) and futurism (Drux Flux).

Figure 2.20  Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, Madame Tutli-Putli, 2008. Madame Tutli-Putli © 2007 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

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Figure 2.21  Theodore Ushev, Tower Bawher, 2006. Tower Bawher © 2006 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

In parallel with this work, Ushev made two other films on his own: L’homme qui attendait (‘The Man Who Waited’, 2006) and Tzartitza (2006). The first is based on Kafka, returning to the style Ushev developed from the time of Dissociation. The second is a children’s film about immigration in which Ushev uses an opulent and dynamic graphic style that assembles diverse elements (drawings, photographs, objects, etc.) and gives the film a character feeling close to cut paper. Les journaux de Lipsett (‘Lipsett’s Diaries’, 2010), from a screenplay by Chris Robinson, was Ushev’s most ambitious film. This imaginary biography of the famous Canadian experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett (1936–1986) has themes of madness and suicide. Malcolm Sutherland (b. Calgary, Alberta) studied at the Alberta College of Art before moving to Montreal in 2002, where he studied at Concordia University and drew comics. In 2003, he made False Saints, a short experimental film about architecture and urbanization in the modern world. There followed several films with varied graphic styles, though they shared a taste for science fiction and a spiritual approach to the world: Birdcalls (2006), The

Tourists (2007), Forming Game (2008), The Astronomer’s Dream (2009), and Umbra (2010). Félix Dufour-Laperrière (b. Chicoutimi, 9 September  1981) studied at the Université de Montréal and at Concordia University. His work oscillates between a desire to tell a story (Rosa Rosa, 2008) and abstraction (M, 2009). Most of his films incorporate elements of a narrative enigma within a framework of a plastic exploration (Black Ink on Sky Blue, 2003; One, Two, Three, Dusk, 2006). An important figure among Canadian independent filmmakers, Bruce Alcock (b. Corner Brook, Newfoundland, 1964) studied the tuba and comparative literature. He moved to Barcelona and became familiar with animation under the leadership of Dirk Van de Vondel.178 Later he moved to Toronto, where he took classes at Sheridan College and made animated commercials. He then moved to Chicago where he worked for five years before landing in Vancouver and founding the production company Global Mechanic. Apart from making commercials with a variety of techniques, Alcock directed personal films for which, again, he used various materials. Wrong Number Phone Message (2003)

Dirk Van de Vondel is a Belgian animator born in the Congo and living in Barcelona. Since the early part of his career at top London animation studios, Dirk’s style has always been rooted in fine art and innovation, with an inspired sense of movement and transformative beauty. 178

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recycles a message left by mistake on Alcock’s answering machine; At the Quinte Hotel (2005) is a vibrant adaptation of a poem by Al Purdy;179 and Vive la Rose (2008) illustrates a traditional French song from Newfoundland. Linear Dreams (1997) by Richard Reeves (b. England, 1959, has lived in Canada since 1960) was considered a wonder by everyone who specialized in abstract film.180 Reeves also made Sea Song (1999), which integrates figurative elements evoking the sea, and Element of Light (2004). Formerly a photographer, Jesse Rosensweet came to attention with his first film, The Stone of Folly (2002). In a medieval world, a doctor diagnoses and operates on a patient to remove the stone causing the patient’s madness. Clearly inspired by Švankmajer, the film (which uses cork, wood, rope, stones, and dust) is very different from Rosensweet’s next work, Paradise (2007), whose technique is inspired by mechanized toys of the 1960s. Rosensweet gives his characters mechanical gestures, affirming their nature as objects, and constantly works on the idea of representation. His films are aloof yet playful. Tali (the pseudonym of Nathalie Prévost, b. Buckingham, Québec, 1964) directed the amusing Under the Weather (1997) and Pirouette (2002); Diane Obomsawin

(b. Montreal, 1959) is an artist with an original graphic style (Elbow Room, 2002; Here and There, 2006); and Pierre M. Trudeau (b. Sherbrooke, 1961) directed Kid Stuff (1990), Cuckoo Mr.  Edgar! (1999), and other good films. Last but not least, Marie-Josée St-Pierre specializes in animated documentaries (McLaren’s Negatives, 2006; Passages, 2008). Michèle Lemieux (b. Quebec City, 1955) entered the world of illustration in the late 1970s and quickly reached an international rank. In 2003 she turned her hand to animation. By the end of the decade, she had discovered the pinscreen technique thanks to Jacques Drouin. Le grand ailleurs et le petit ici (‘Here and the Great Elsewhere’, 2012) is an outstanding film, described in the press-release notes thus: ‘Lost in a reverie, a man reels with sudden, piercing awareness of his own state of being [.  .  .] Bounded by a walled enclosure, he is both unique and no different than anyone else [. . .] Filmmaker Michèle Lemieux takes a mischievous look at the profound reflections of this everyman, whose questions are part of humanity’s eternal quest for meaning.’ After many years of silence, Joyce Borenstein made Mother’s Colours in 2011, a sensitive and strong film. Its

Figure 2.22  Michèle Lemieux, Le grand ailleurs et le petit ici (‘Here and the Great Elsewhere’), 2012. ‘Here and the Great Elsewhere’ © 2012 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Al Purdy (1918–2000) is considered one of the best Canadian poets of the twentieth century. Maureen Furniss writes: ‘A handmade score is combined with both abstract and more representational imagery suggesting mandalas, planetary forms, humans, animals and explosions of light or particles in space. Flashing images evoke the concept of memory, perhaps of a collective unconscious that unites humanity. At times, z-axis movement pulls viewers through space – for example, through a mountain range, the most representational image in the film. These sequences provide a perceptual break from the other nonstop, more abstract images. Viewers are also given a rest when Reeves pauses the information stream for a moment, with no sound or imagery.’ (Maureen Furniss, The Animation Bible, Abrams, New York, 2008, pp. 164–165.) 179 180

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combination of techniques was enriched by her unmistakable colours and timing.

Steven Woloshen Steven Woloshen (b. Montreal, 1960) began making animated films without a camera while he was a student at Vanier College and Concordia University (Brushstrokes, 1977; Son of Dada, 1982). After a dozen years, he returned to directing in 1996. He worked at outside institutions and, usually without the help of supporting bodies, directed more than twenty films in fifteen years. His works are a model of consistency; they also show how possibilities widen when an experimental filmmaker combines talent, discipline, and curiosity. Woloshen’s works contradict the prejudice that the abstract film has to be austere and boring. No other current works are simultaneously as formally strict and as festive. Significantly, his first films seem to owe nothing to Norman McLaren. Son of Dada is, rather, influenced by Kurt Schwitters. Didre Novo (1983), perhaps because of the Maasai rhythm of its soundtrack, is more reminiscent of Len Lye’s Free Radicals. For Get Happy (1999), which used music by Benny Goodman, Woloshen used CinemaScope for the first time. The wide screen let him accentuate the exhilarating and spectacular shapes that move across the screen. MeMeMaMa (2000) takes inspiration from techno beats. Ditty Dot Comma (2001) is an exercise in visuals punctuating music played by Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. It is a luxuriant and ambitious work, demonstrating Woloshen’s amazing technical mastery. A good period began for Woloshen when he made a film based on systematic intervention into live-action footage (The Babble on the Palms, 2002). He also returned to his dadaist sensibility (Bru Ha Ha, 2002) and made an elegant, enigmatic film (Two Eastern Hair Lines, 2004) by working directly on images from an American feature film. Another remarkable work is SNIP (2004), on the theme of editing, with scissors dancing on the notes of Fats Waller’s music. Jazz music, a seemingly inexhaustible inspiration, is also at the heart of Cameras Take Five (2003) and Minuet (2003). The real world is regularly present from The Babble on Palms and becomes even more pronounced in The Curse of the Voodoo Child (2005). It starts with a sperm anthropomorphized as a character running to the music of Jimi

181

Hendrix and celebrates the birth of the filmmaker’s first child in an erotic-psychedelic atmosphere. Woloshen was inspired by his daughter again in Changing Evan (2006), where the child is compared to a puzzle (she was actually suffering from a virus). Working at breakneck pace, the director made a humorous film responding to a Bill Plympton short181 mocking experimental cinema (Rebuttal, 2005) and made an installation from which emerged another film (Phont Cycle, 2006). Shimmer Box Drive (2007) and RH Factor (codirected by Alexandra Grimanis, 2007) seem to initiate a new period based on the materiality of the image, the blurring and questioning of representation. La dolce vita (2008), Chronicle Reconstructions (2008), and Zero Visibility (2008) bear this out. They are iconoclastic experiments made from found footage. In contrast to his usually very short films, Woloshen made the eight-minute Homestead Act, using music by John Adams (Shaker Loops). This is a fascinating experience, imbued with melancholy.

Normand Roger Normand Roger (b. Montreal, 18 September 1949) began to study music at the age of 12. He became a guitarist and composer in a progressive rock band and experimented on his own with short animated films that set out to illustrate famous paintings of the twentieth century. His curiosity and creativity extended to the visual arts, and he entered the Montreal École des Beaux Arts. When Pierre Veilleux, a schoolmate there, settled at the National Film Board of Canada and started his first project, he asked Roger to take care of the soundtrack. It was Dans la vie (‘In Life’, 1972), the first in a long roll of honour. Roger should probably be considered the world’s greatest ever composer of soundtracks for animation. As a composer he was versatile and sensitive, but in terms of the music alone, half a dozen of his colleagues (from various countries) were at least as good. But Roger went further. He enclosed his pentagrammatic music into the larger concept of motion picture sound, together with voices, noises, and effects. He gave the soundtrack an importance that equaled the visuals; in other words, the soundtrack amounted to 50  percent of the value of the film. Roger perfected and asserted the figure of the sound designer as the person who gives a film its voice.

The short was called Spiral (2005), which Plympton made under the name P. J. Murton.

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Figure 2.23  Normand Roger. When I did my first work at the Film Board, they already had a tradition where the composer would take charge of the whole soundtrack. The term ‘sound designer’ did not exist at that time, but the composer would decide when there will be music in the film, or if there will be sound effects, and whether these effects will be reality or caricature.182 Because of Roger’s humility, he always accomplished the director’s intentions. Hugely versatile, he excelled in comedy and drama, rock and melody, description and interpretation. He presented cinemagoers with innumerable new sounds, created with the most sophisticated means, and the most rudimentary. Roger composed music for documentaries, live-action films, television dramas, and many other formats in Canada and the US. But his international reputation was largely due to the animated films he worked on, as he designed well over 200 soundtracks in about 40 years. These films garnered hundreds of prizes at international festivals and received various nominations for Academy Awards. Among the actual Oscar winners were Crac! (1981) and The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) by Frédéric Back, The Old Man and the Sea by Aleksandr Petrov (1999), and Father & Daughter by Michael Dudok de Wit (2000).

If you have a unique sound for a film, a unique concept, I believe it makes the film more memorable, it makes the film more distinct from others. It’s not always possible. Sometimes a film calls for the worst clichés – you know, in the positive sense. Especially in comedies, for example, you make all sorts of stupid references, and that’s [what works]. But [in] some other films, if you succeed in finding a sound that is distinctive, you make this film unique, and that’s a great thing by itself.183 For Eugene Fedorenko’s Oscar-winning Every Child (1979), Roger invented his most famous work, based on sounds produced by the human voice. The film was good overall, but the soundtrack was overwhelming. Roger noted: There are three figures. There is the director, the film and the composer. The film is a major participant, as a lot of my inspiration will come from [it] [. . .] I like to concentrate on the film and see what will come out of it [. . .] I listen carefully to the directors’ goals or needs and I’m very sensitive to their general aesthetic and the feelings I get from them [. . .] I’ve found that when you combine music with sound and film, the result is more of a surprise than people like to believe.184

Jon Hofferman, ‘The Sound of Animation: An Interview with Normand Roger’, Animation World Magazine, April 29, 2008. Jon Hofferman, ‘The Sound of Animation: An Interview with Normand Roger’, Animation World Magazine, April 29, 2008. 184 Karl Cohen, ‘An Interview with Normand Roger’, Animatoon 10/11, no. 75 (2008). 182 183

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Wendy, Amanda, and the Others When the Day Breaks (1999) is the minimalist story of a woman-pig and a man-rooster. The film is balanced between surrealism, pity, melancholy, and everyday life, with excellent design, editing, and music. The directors, who also wrote the lyrics for the beautiful music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer, were Wendy Tilby (b. Edmonton, Alberta, 28 March 1960) and Amanda Forbis (b. Calgary, Alberta, 10 September 1963). Their success came almost out of the blue. Tilby’s previous work included Tables of Content (1986) and Strings (1991). Forbis was animation director on the NFB Vancouver production The Reluctant Deckhand (1995). The films were good, but not on the level of this delicate, detailed masterpiece. Originally, the characters were human, and we experimented with many styles and techniques (cutouts, naïve line drawings, paint-on-paper), before arriving at the paint-on-video prints method using animal characters.  We immediately found the critters to be much more engaging than the humans, not to mention fun

to draw, and by retaining some of the photographic underpinnings of the video prints, we were able to give the city setting a needed reality and dimension [. . .] Judith Gruber-Stitzer worked with us from the very early stages of the project and endured several big changes in our thinking about the music. The first song, where the pig greets the day, was the only constant through the whole four years. Judith created a scratch track, and we choreographed and animated to it. The other two songs were written closer to the end of the project, and we edited the sequences to them.185 In 2010, Forbis and Tilby completed a new short, Wild Life. It concerned the fate of a British man from a good family who emigrates to Western Canada in 1909 and must cope with the harshness of pioneer life. The film lacks the grace and universality of When the Day Breaks, but it is an involving drama, told with delicacy and intelligence and with a completely different visual style. Vancouverite-Californian Marv Newland continued his work both as director and producer under the aegis of the Rocketship International Company. As a producer he was, consistent with his own inspiration, the godfather of angry young men, who themselves were lovers of bad manners

Figure 2.24  Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, When the Day Breaks, 1999. When the Day Breaks © 1999 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

185 Lois Siegel, ‘On a Roll: NFB Film Wins at Cannes’, siegelproductions.ca, n.d., http://www.siegelproductions.ca/filmfanatics/ daybreaks.htm.

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and inhabitants of anything except reality. It was a courageous, against-the-mainstream choice. As a director, Newland’s most ambitious film was Pink Komkommer (1990), based on the same formula as Anijam (1984). Various filmmakers were invited to make segments on the theme of dreams and eroticism. The link between the episodes was Chris Hinton’s old lady preparing tea and falling unfailingly asleep; the main collaborator was Paul Driessen, but segments were made by Newland himself, Craig Bartlett, Janet Perlman, Stoyan Dukov, Alison Snowden, and Denis Fine. The film was inspired by Richard Condie and Wendy Tilby: a true cream of the crop. Pink Komkommer is a masterpiece containing masterpieces, though its open sexuality and frequent vulgarity banned it from the mainstream festival circuit. Fuv (1997) takes us back to Newland’s solitary inspiration. It tells the enigmatic story of a little human/monster/freak born from a flaming woman. The creature offers a ball looking like the Earth to many odd characters. As mysterious as it is, Fuv is pure comedy, slow-paced and originally timed. Beijing Flipbook (2003) is what the title promises: an animated sketchbook drawn by Newland during a trip in China. A completely different film was CMYK (2009), standing for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. It explores the primary-coloured codes hidden on the edges and inside flaps of packages and printed materials. (On every cardboard package, the printer puts a code with the four colours he used to make his own printing colour selection. It is always hidden; such codes have a variety of shapes, and some are very beautiful.) Strangely enough Newland, a humorist and caricaturist, turned to abstraction in CMYK with such confidence that he made one of the best Canadian abstract animated films. Even in his daring experiments, the artist’s unconventionality was true to itself.186 The American-born Chris Landreth (b. Hartford, Connecticut, 4 August  1961) graduated in engineering from the University of Illinois (1986), specializing in fluid mechanics. After several years of work in that field, he

learned computer animation and in 1994 he was hired by Alias/Wavefront (which later became Autodesk) to test the limits of its software. It is here that Landreth produced his first short films, The End (1995) and Bingo (1998). The former is a self-referential narrative; a director enters into discussion with the characters of his film and becomes an animated character himself. It was nominated for an Oscar. In Bingo, a young man suffers cruel brainwashing in a circus atmosphere, in a film based on a short play by the Neo-Futurists. By then a rising animation star, Landreth embarked on an ambitious project, Ryan (2004). For this film, he worked for the first time with Copperheart Entertainment and the National Film Board of Canada. This animated documentary about animation filmmaker Ryan Larkin was described by Landreth as ‘psycho-realism’, an aesthetic approach in which the body becomes a metaphor for a character’s soul. Ryan won over 50 awards, including an Oscar, and was instantly enshrined as a contemporary classic. With the same team of producers, Landreth then made The Spine (2009), a story of a self-destructive relationship. The filmmaker continues to seek original images to translate the torments of human psychology.

Jacques Drouin187 The Quebecois Jacques Drouin (b. Mont-Joli, 28 May 1943) studied art at the Fine Arts School in Montreal and then filmmaking at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1973 he joined the National Film Board of Canada. He was immediately attracted to the pinscreen that the NFB had acquired from Alexandre Alexeieff in 1972 but never really put to use. Drouin’s entire filmmaking career would be dedicated to the pinscreen, though he never refused to help other artists. He became the only true heir of this pinscreen technique, preserving a knowledge that would have otherwise been lost.188

186 On 9 July 2011, Newland sent Giannalberto Bendazzi the following message: ‘All visual images in the picture are created from found objects collected over a ten-year period and recycled for this production. The paper and cardboard printed images have been scanned into computer animation programmes in their original form, or as cut-out animation. Music was composed for CMYK by Lisa Cay Miller. The animation and music are intended to complement each other [and] also to operate independently of each other with the animation occasionally taking a solo. CMYK uses commonplace industrial images into an evocative tapestry of pranic (life force) elements, breathing new life and sensuality into images usually hidden from human eyes.’ 187 By Giovanni Russo and Giannalberto Bendazzi. 188 His knowledge of the pinscreen was so thorough that, so many years after Alexeieff’s death, he was the only one who could restore Alexeieff’s original pinscreens.

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Drouin’s path diverged immediately from Alexeieff’s. While the Russian/French master used the pinscreen’s typical ‘fuzziness’ to create enigmatic images, rarely obeying the rules of narrative, Drouin’s approach was much more clear-cut, even when it came to the staple of pinscreen animation – not movement but metamorphosis. Alexeieff’s metamorphoses are enigmatic and disturbing. Drouin used metamorphosis in the opposite way, as a clarifying process, a kind of unveiling. His first film collected three free experiments with the tool: Trois exercises sur l’écran d’épingles d’Alexeïeff (‘Three Exercises on Alexeïeff’s Pinscreen’, sub-titled Le piège, Entr’acte, Le temps passe, with music by Denis La Rochelle and Maurice Blackburn). As mentioned in Volume 2, this film was considered an essay and had limited distribution, but it was actually fresh and inspired. It was followed by the official Le paysagiste (‘Mindscape’, 1976). This is the story of a painter who gets inside the landscape he has just painted, in a dreamlike voyage that includes memories, hopes, and visions, a metaphor of art as the quintessence of human emotions. It was fresh and exciting, and it incorporated many good visual ideas, but it was spoiled by a shade of intellectual self-control. The comparison between Drouin’s first two films already shows the check that would put on his creativity for many years. Too often, he would avoid ‘selfishly’ giving rein to his imagination, believing his art had to be a ‘decent’ public service from the public NFB. Drouin’s next film, L’heure des anges (‘Nightangel’, 1986), was a collaboration with the Czech puppet animation master Brˇetislav Pojar. It’s the story of a man who sees a woman with a bouquet of roses from his window. He tries to follow her and is involved in a car accident that makes him temporarily blind. During his blindness the woman, whose presence is half-real, half-angelic, stays by him, offering help and comfort. A romantic love story, L’heure des anges successfully mixes two very different techniques (puppets and pinscreen animation) into a coherent whole. While the story is told traditionally by means of Pojar’s puppets, the pinscreen’s fuzzy, blurred images add a layer of ‘special effects’. They turn the woman into an ethereal angel and effectively bring the fantastic world imagined by the blind protagonist to life. The happy ending’s colours and atmosphere suggest Chagall. The depiction of blindness is effective: objects appear from the dark only when touched, rendered

189

By Francesca Pirotta.

in a uniform gray that obliterates superficial details and emphasizes the shapes. In 1994 Drouin directed Ex-enfant (‘Ex-child’), the story of a child taken from his family to become a soldier. Made as part of a campaign for human rights, the film is too explicit in its message to be truly moving. From a stylistic standpoint, it shows an evolution towards stronger and more expressive, almost expressionist, images. Une leçon de chasse (‘A Hunting Lesson’) was made in 2001. A  boy becomes friends with a hunter, who has retired; the boy asks him for hunting lessons but is told of an experience in Africa that led the man to give up hunting. The hunter shot a baboon; to the man’s amazement, the other monkeys mourned and took the corpse away as if they were humans. Inspired by a novel by Jacques Godbout, the film marks Drouin’s first true use of traditional storytelling. It uses believable characters and dialogue, against his friends’ warnings that the pinscreen was not meant for realistic stories. Drouin’s parable is honest in style and righteously uplifting, but emotionally it is barely moving. Once more, Drouin places his social duties before his genuine inspiration. In 2004 Drouin directed his best film, Empreintes (‘Imprints’). This time, he did not use the pinscreen in the normal way, to achieve pictorial effects through the contrast between light and shadow. Rather, he explicitly emphasized the pins’ relief. The result is fascinating. The relief appears and disappears continuously and objects seem to move just under the surface, as if pressing under the Earth’s very skin. There are bodies of shadows. The baroque soundtrack (François Couperin’s ‘Les Barricades mystérieuses’, 1716) contributes to the remarkable result. Jacques Drouin found his originality, using the pinscreen in an innovative, exciting way, when he renounced telling a story or explaining a subject and instead let his mind wander into a relationship with the object of his creation itself.

The Evolution of Pierre Hébert189 Pierre Hébert (see Vol. 2) continued his performances in the 1980s and the 1990s. He recorded those performances and often mixed them with new scenes. He did so in

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Technology of Tears (1987) and repeated the process in his feature film La plante humaine (‘The Human Tree’, 1996).190 This work is a milestone in Hébert’s career. It contains every subject he researched: film engraving, mass media and communication, people’s lives, the city. The film’s protagonist is Monsieur Michel, a quiet old man who spends his time at home, at the library, at the supermarket. His life has few meetings, little action, and lots of memories. The film shows many flashbacks to Michel’s former life. It also features a travelling African storyteller called Ba Wamn’dé, whose journey interlaces with the main plot. The unifying element is an investigation into communication. The old man has a TV set. On it he watches pieces of Hébert’s performances and speeches about mass media and how knowledge is transmitted. The conclusion is that oral tales are the best way to get to know the world (like those Ba Wamn’dé tells). In contemporary society, television has the same role that myths had in a preindustrial world. The film’s interest in television can be found in its depiction of TV-style zapping. Here, it is the key to connecting the interlacing elements.191 After La plante humaine, in 1999, Hébert left the National Film Board of Canada. His operational methods changed, though at first he continued using his traditional engraving technique.

In 2002 he used it to make Variations sur deux photographies de Tina Modotti (‘Variations on Two Photographs of Tina Modotti’), a video background for a Louise Bédard ballet. Hébert took two photos of Tina Modotti,192 elaborating on and transforming them. The film was a work in progress, as the director created the sequences during three rehearsals and edited the video in the studio, focusing his attention on the music (from a Huichol193 ceremony) and the ballet. The result was a harmonic organism in which music, images, and bodies moved as one.194 Variations ended Hébert’s engraving period.195 He and Bob Ostertag, an experimental musician who became his collaborator, shared the view that audiences shouldn’t passively stare at the screen. Rather, they should be involved in the action, ‘feeling’ the movements and the gestures of the actors. Hébert thinks the animator is a puppeteer who hides himself but reveals his presence through the life he gives to his puppets/images.196 Through the engraving technique, the animator reveals his presence through discontinuous images and intermittent movements. A  live performance shows the body, the gestures, and the animator’s efforts. The spectator can critically reflect on the challenge that lies between what’s on the screen and the animator’s activity as a dancing source of movement.197

The title comes from Hébert’s idea of mankind and his recent production: ‘I have to say that there is a connection between the title and the way my project grew. Show after show, the film I was screening was taking more and more importance. My feeling was the film was not drawing out, but proliferating. Every new addition took place within the whole, and the growth of the images [resembled] the growth of a tree’. (‘Je dois dire qu’il y a un lien entre ce titre et la façon dont le projet s’est développé. Parce que, au fil des spectacles, le film que je projetais prenait de plus en plus de place. Il m’est cependant apparu que ce film ne s’allongeait pas, mais qu’il proliférait. C’est-à-dire que chaque chose qui s’ajoutait prenait place à l’intérieur de l’ensemble, et que la croissance de la bande image évoquait celle d’une plante’). Marcel Jean, Pierre Hébert, l’homme animé, Les 400 coups, Laval, 1996, p. 195. 191 Pierre Hébert, L’ange et l’automate. Propos sur le cinéma d’animation et autres sujets, Les 400 coups, Laval, 1999, pp. 86–87. 192 Tina Modotti (b. Udine, Italy, 17 August 1896–Mexico City, 5 January 1942) emigrated to the US in 1913. She became photographer Edward Weston’s model, assistant, and lover in 1921. The two went down to Mexico, where Modotti became both a great photographer and a fervent Communist. 193 Native American people also called Wirrarika, or Wixarika, who live in Mexico’s western Sierra Madre. 194 ‘My animated images were influenced by Tina Modotti’s work, which I knew very well; by my intimate connection with the development of dance; obviously by my own energy which I could express with a certain degree of autonomy; and, last and on a more personal level, by the life within the little human bubble we had formed during that time.’ (‘Mes images animées étaient chargées à la fois de la fréquentation assidue de l’œuvre de Tina Modotti, du rapport d’intimité avec le développement de la danse, évidemment de ma propre énergie qui pouvait s’exprimer avec une certaine autonomie, et finalement, sur un plan plus personnel, du cours de la vie au sein de la petite bulle humaine que nous avons formé au cours de cette période’). Pierre Hébert, e-mail message to Francesca Pirotta, August 2007. 195 In October 2009, in a performance with the Italian musician Andrea Martignoni at Area Sismica (Meldola, Italy), Hébert used film engraving again, mixing it with digital animation. For him it was a new beginning, and he began new performances with the technique. 196 He called it ‘dramaturgy of dissimulation’. Pierre Hébert, Corps, langage, technologie. Textes 1985–2004, Les 400 coups, Montréal, 2006, p. 37. 197 ‘I can’t but consider filmmaking as the body’s rebellion against the ideology brought by the technological device; in other words, I can’t but assert the inevitable dissimulation of the body in favour of the subject, the animated/inanimated considered as the image of an “I” speaking to you.’ (‘Je ne puis donc concevoir la pratique du cinéma que comme rébellion du corps contre l’idéologie portée par son dispositif technique, c’est à dire affirmer la dissimulation inévitable du corps au profit du sujet, l’inanimé-animé comme image d’un je qui vous parle’). (Hébert, Corps, langage, technologie, p. 49.) 190

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At the start of the new century, computer technology replaced engraving. Using interactive software (MAX/ MSP/Jitter) to combine different media, Hébert could create his visual and sound universe more easily and more quickly. The legacy of his past work was absorbed: this innovation held the same dimension and speed as the engraving technique.198 The creation gained in immediacy, ease, and musical accordance. The Living Cinema project opened in 2001 with the performance of Entre la Science et les Ordures (‘Between Science and Garbage’). The work was born after the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. It dealt with the perception of the world after that event: something virtual had become real. The media coverage gave a strong concreteness to the attack, changing our view of technology. Hébert’s work suggests that artists should intervene to reduce man’s fear of its creations, through the beauty of the arts.199 In 2006, Hébert made Special Forces, drawing inspiration from the clashes between Israel and Lebanon that summer. As in every war, civilians were the real victims of the conflict and Hébert pronounced a universal condemnation.200 With the collaboration of musician Bob Ostertag, Special Forces was presented at many festivals and the filmmakers were invited to Lebanon too.201 During his performances, Hébert drew and mixed short videos and

photos while Ostertag controlled the music using a joy pad. The soundtrack seemed directly taken from a video game, emphasizing the absurdity of war. Live-action videos and photos conveyed the tragedy experienced by many unnamed people. The work ends quietly, suggesting destruction and death. In 2007, the artist made Herqueville. The poet Serge Meurant and the engraver Michelle Corbisier, both Belgian, showed him photos of Herqueville, a small town in Normandy. In the background of the beautiful natural scenery is a nuclear power plant. Hébert mixed some videos recorded with a mini-DV, animation, engravings of the landscapes by Michelle Corbisier, and poems by Serge Meurant. The film’s aim wasn’t to condemn nuclear energy but rather to explore the place and the relationship between man, technology, and territory. Hébert inserted the figure of Icarus: he is ‘a metaphor of mankind’s arrogance, excessive confidence and lack of prudence in handling technology to intervene with the very structure of matter and life, as is the case with nuclear energy’.202 Icarus represents the meeting point of man and technology, as if nature and industry were two parts of an underlying chaos.203 Icarus also represents the poet who never gives up the pursuit of beauty, trying to find a place in the surrounding chaos.

198 Pierre Hébert, ‘Matériaux pour l’étude de la pensée d’André Martin’, pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http://www.pierrehebert. com/index.php/2009/03/13/116-materiaux-pour-l-etude-de-la-pensee-d-andre-martin. 199 ‘The digital device of the Living Cinema performances seems more appropriate to me than my old mechanical device, the hand film engraving, as a means of intervention in this post-September 11 era. I certainly don’t see this change as progress, but as an adaptation to the catastrophic course of our time.’ (‘Le dispositif informatisé des performances de Living Cinema me semble plus approprié que mon vieux dispositif mécanisé de gravure sur pellicule en direct pour intervenir dans cette époque de l’après 11 septembre. Je ne vois certainement pas cette mutation comme un progrès, mais plutôt comme un ajustement au cours catastrophique de notre époque’). (Hébert, Corps, langage, technologie, p. 210.) 200 ‘It was not so much a question of political position and analysis about the historical situation of the Middle East; it was firstly a visceral reaction to a situation of madness, to the bloody and destructive evidence of how crazy our world has become for such things to happen. And how dangerous it was? And not as a reaction to something terrible that is happening far away over there but as something very personal, immediate, that concerns us intimately, about which we bear some responsibility.’ (pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http:// www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2007/03/25/3–2007–03–25–8h-30-beirut.) 201 The ethical question of showing death and destruction in a nation that has lived with these things every single day created many discussions. ‘One of the troubling questions of the last months that Bob and I have been discussing is: what the hell are we coming to Lebanon for? What is the point of coming to Beirut to show the Lebanese the bombing of their cities and the corpses of their dead children, things they have been experiencing in real life? Are we here just to create a hot profile for the piece and make it easier to sell to promoters?’ (pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http://www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2007/03/25/3–2007–03–25–8h-30-beirut.) Eventually, they decided to go there in order to respect the ideas that had led to the making of their work. Their efforts were repaid and the performance was a success. 202 Pierre Hébert, pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http://www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2007/07/31/31-new-version-ofherqueville. 203 Pierre Hébert, pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http://www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2007/07/31/31-new-version-ofherqueville.

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In 2008 a new series of performances followed, under the name Seule la main. It revolves around the sentence seule la main qui efface peut écrire la vérité (‘Only the erasing hand can write the truth’). This film contains all the ‘removal’ elements of Hébert’s creations, and its simple novelty was revealed during the tour. In each country where he performed, Hébert translated the sentence into the local language to create a stronger connection with the audience.204 There was still audience involvement on the physical, aural, and visual levels, but now the animator and musician205 created a sociological connection too. For Seule la main, Hébert experimented with combining film engraving and digital drawing, making the show even more involving.206 At the same time as Seule la main,

and interlaced with it, Hébert did a tour called Exercises d’animation. Each performance was recorded, and during a studio re-elaboration, correcting and reediting some of the videos, the artist selected some exercises for a new work, Triptyque (2009). In Triptyque, the screen is divided into three parts. The central part of the screen is independent, while the two on the sides are specular and form two halves. The images are the result of the overlap of different videos, carefully following the musical structure.207 Hébert decided to include a map of constellations in the last part of the film, having noticed a sequence of the side screens seemed to show two dragons, fitting with the mythical animals of the firmament and giving the work an allegorical allure. Moreover, the star chart unifies the screen.

During some of the Italian dates on his tour, he also translated the sentence into local dialects: this was the case in Rome and in Meldola (near Forlì). 205 Depending on the location and the nation where Seule la main was performed, Hébert had different musicians with him. 206 Pierre Hébert, pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http://www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2009/11/21/157–6-de-nouveau-lagravure-sur-pellicule-en-direct. 207 Pierre Hébert, pierrehebert.com, last modified 2009, http://www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2009/11/01/150–2-elaborationdu-film. 204

3

EUROPE

Great Britain: The Wonderful Years1 It is not possible to discuss British animation2 from the 1990s onwards without talking about Channel 4. Channel 4 was created in 1981 as a public utility by an Act of Parliament. Its purpose was to be an alternative to BBC and ITV, and it started broadcasting on 2 November  1982. Unlike the public utility that was the BBC, Channel 4 – though public – didn’t receive any public funding. All of its programs were financed by its commercial activities, including advertising.3 British animation peaked at the end of the 1980s. From 1989 to 1996 it was dominated by short films that vied for the Oscar category,4 mostly commissioned by Channel 4. It was extraordinary that a television channel – an entity usually devoted to all that is commercial and profit-making – produced and financed experimental animation that was often hermetic and difficult and certainly not readily appealing to a wide range of viewers. The result was a patronage system of coproductions (only rarely were works completely financed by Channel 4). ‘The bulk of Channel 4’s commissioned animation was

intended for adult audiences, and quite deliberately so. That policy was formulated on the basis of trying to be different from other television channels. Animation for adults was scarcely seen on British television.’5 Channel 4 was instrumental in the production of some remarkable films of the 1980s, from the works of David Sproxton and Peter Lord (the founders of Aardman Animations) to those of the Quay brothers, to Murakami’s When the Wind Blows, to Alison De Vere’s The Black Dog. At the beginning of the 1990s, Michael Grade, Channel 4’s chief executive, forwarded a proposal for a possible privatization of the channel. After some months, he changed his mind and decided to maintain Channel 4 as a public service. Privatization would have risked reducing the channel’s artistic freedom. Channel 4 faced, and solved, many different problems. From the outset, the animation product had to be submitted in a different way to the ‘classic’ half-hour TV program. Animation was costly to make, which led to the creation of shorts (in addition, animation is best suited to short productions). The channel’s animation had to gain high audience shares. To achieve this, animation shorts were broadcast in two different slots: a five-minute one at

By Maddalena Ramolini. We thank Andrew Osmond for his important contribution. 3 Originally, Channel 4 was a subsidiary network of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). Later it became the property of Channel Four Television Corporation, a public entity, after the IBA’s abolition. Channel 4 also owns the Welsh public channel S4C. 4 In 1989, Mark Baker was nominated for The Hill Farm. In 1990, the award went to Nick Park for Creature Comforts and a nomination to Nick Park for A Grand Day Out. In 1991, the award went to Daniel Greaves for Manipulation. In 1992, Paul Berry was nominated for The Sandman, Peter Lord for Adam, and Barry Purves for Screen Play. In 1993, the award went to Nick Park for The Wrong Trousers and nominations went to Mark Baker for The Village, Bob Godfrey and Kevin Baldwin for Small Talk, and Stephen Palmer for Blindscape. In 1994, the award went to Alison Snowden and David Fine for Bob’s Birthday and nominations went to Erica Russell for Triangle and Tim Watts and David Stoten for The Big Story. In 1995, the award went to Nick Park for A Close Shave. In 1996, Peter Lord was nominated for Wat’s Pig. There were three nominations a year until 1991, and five each year after 1992. 5 ‘Animation and Channel 4’ (1987) by Paul Madden, animation consultant at Channel 4. 1 2

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7:55 p.m., after Channel 4 News, and another fifteen-minute slot at 9:45 p.m., after the popular series Dispatches. This schedule capitalized on the coattails of established programs to show productions that otherwise would be seen by very few people. At this time, Channel 4 Animation made particular choices. It promoted and celebrated women animators, devoting strands of programming to them and to their works; it also presented animation productions from such Slavic countries as Czechoslovakia, virtually unknown in the rest of the world. Channel 4’s choices were good: the works it made were never commonplace or uninteresting. The idea was to create a sort of everlasting animation festival on TV, introducing dozens of different cultures and styles in a few hours. Another mission for the channel was to find and promote new talents, both British and foreign. For this purpose, it coined the name Four-Mations, a pun indicating its interest in new talents. Most animators living and working in Great Britain today began their work with Channel 4. Young animators can’t live off projects: they need a patron. Every year, Channel 4 gave four young people a threemonth internship at the Museum of the Moving Image in London (MOMI) to develop a project and the channel produced the best ones. The Museum closed in 1999 due to lack of funds. Another challenge for Channel 4 was to make experimental films that could attract a wide audience and not just animation fans. It wanted to screen films that were captivating, unusual, and well made, mixing art and film technique.

Channel 4 Animation Below we consider some of the most famous and talented animators who started their careers through Channel 4.

She made an excellent debut in 1987 with Girls’ Night Out about a group of female Welsh factory workers who go to a male strip-tease joint. It was made with funding from Channel 4 and S4C. The same year, Quinn moved to Cardiff, attracted by the activities of the Chapter Film and Animation Workshop. She formed Beryl Productions with the writer and producer Les Mills, who had previously been one of her college teachers. Like most animation companies, Beryl Productions alternated between rent-paying commissions and more personal work. Joanna Quinn wanted to represent women, their neuroses and their weaknesses, which can become strengths. She used comedy and irony to explore feminine experience and relationships between genders. In her first two films (Girls’ Night Out [1987] and Body Beautiful [1991]) she features Beryl: an overweight, middle-aged woman, less sensual than insecure, who is always fighting not to gain pounds. However, through the films, Beryl proves herself strong and resolute; she gets what she wants through her efforts while males are vain timewasters. Quinn teases women and their whims, but she does so with affection. She also developed an instantly recognizable, highly detailed hand-drawn style of artwork with a strong visual rhythm. Especially in Body Beautiful (1991) she talks – with irony – about how it is of the utmost importance today to own a beautiful and healthy body and she details the effort and tactics necessary to achieve it. The difficult path, however, is to accept oneself and one’s physicality, which never matches with the image imposed by media. The film Elles (1992) imagines that Toulouse Lautrec’s models decide to have a spot of lunch before resuming their poses. In 1993 Joanna Quinn made Britannia, moving away from her previous themes. It is about Great Britain, represented by a fat bulldog that wears a T-shirt bearing the Union Jack. The dog plays, jumps, and makes a mess through the entire nation, from Scotland to London.

Joanna Quinn One of the very best talents that Channel 4 ever produced is Joanna Quinn, a cornerstone of British animation. Quinn was born on 4 February  1962 in Birmingham but soon moved to London with her family. When she was four, she won a drawing competition; from then on, drawing became her main passion. She attended a yearlong art class at Goldsmiths College in London then spent three years studying graphics and design at Middlesex University.

Figure 3.1  Joanna Quinn, Body Beautiful, 1991.

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The film portrays the British sureness that comes from conquering half the world. Through the bulldog, Quinn traces the wars and the dead, the colonization of India, the split from Rome, the greed, hypocrisy, and Puritanism – finally reaching the multicultural London of today. Quinn’s next films were Famous Fred (1996) and The Canterbury Tales [The Wife of Bath’s Tale] (1998). The latter is based on part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, about a knight who rapes and kills a maiden. To avoid punishment, he must wander the world asking the question: ‘What do women want above all?’ and always getting different opinions. The final answer is that women want everything and its opposite: husbands and lovers, security and uncertainty. Women are incoherent creatures, impossible to understand. In Dreams and Desires: Family Ties (2006), we meet Beryl again, on new adventures. She buys a digital camera and becomes obsessed by it, using it to make a movie diary. She tries to imitate famous film directors while filming her friend’s wedding, with hilarious results. Quinn gives voice to the wild side of the world of ageing women who give free rein to their drives and sexual desires (as in Girls’ Night Out). The result is tender and funny. Joanna Quinn’s women are suggestive, irreverent, and joyful, ashamed of nothing – well, almost nothing.

Candy Guard Candy Guard (b. Ealing, London, UK, 1961) belongs to the same generation as Joanna Quinn and shares her interest in the modern woman’s life. Like many other budding animators, her passion for drawing and moving pictures started in childhood. She studied fine arts, first at Newcastle Polytechnic and then at St Martin’s School of Arts in central London. She began to experiment with live-action before being commissioned by Channel 4 to make some short films in the series Woman In View (1988). The most successful are Alternative Fringe (1988), Wishful Thinking (1988), and Fatty Issues (1988). The latter is about an overweight woman who weighs herself and realizes she has gained weight. She decides to begin a regime, but all day she can’t resist

nibbling food. She exercises for only five minutes (because it’s enough), eats peanut butter (‘because at bottom, peanuts are fruits!’), and finds she has gained more weight. The series talks about women’s weaknesses and small neuroses. Two years later, Candy Guard made three shorts for a youth programme by S4C: Moanologue (1990), What about me? (1990), and The Wrong Type (1990). The latter features an ordinary and insecure woman looking for a job as a typist. The interview is conducted by a beautiful and sensual woman who embarrasses her. Guard deals with the frustrations and difficulties that every normal woman faces daily with a stylized and snappy design and a humour that can turn thorny and extreme. The thinly-veiled complaint is that today’s women are apparently free but actually slaves of social customs and expectations. The pictures are simple and compelling; Guard focuses on the characters’ depth and thoughts, rather than on their graphic representation. She uses flat drawings and traditional 2D animation. After many successful independent works, Guard had wider success in 1996 thanks to Pond Life (1996–2000), a series commissioned by Channel 4 about Dolly Pond,6 an independent and neurotic single woman. Even though the production was big and complex, and the stakes much higher, Guard kept the spontaneity and immediacy of her first works. The series was an amazing success. Dolly Pond is about thirty years old. Outwardly she’s a single woman, but in fact she has a submissive idler as a boyfriend. Pond smokes, drinks, eats junk food, and hates physical exercise – though sometimes she forces herself, when trying to lose weight. Her female friends drag her into adventures that leave her breathless; she’s goofy and confused but she loves having fun. Tiny female weaknesses are perfectly represented in her character. All the episodes, never more than 10–15 minutes long, are compelling and sharp. The graphic style is simple and linear, without frills (a little like Cavandoli’s La Linea), increasing the charm and immediacy. Hair, for instance, consists of a few lines radiating from the top of characters’ heads. Pond Life won for best primetime TV series and best director at the Los Angeles Animation Celebration and also won best series prizes at Annecy and Ottawa.

The voice of Dolly Pond is provided by actress Sarah Ann Kennedy. She is also an animator. Her first film, As It Happens (1985), was a satire about the main aspects of 1970s feminism. Subsequently she made Carol and Mary, about rivalry and competition between women, and On the Rail, about two girls in Spain. Sarah Kennedy’s works explore the border between desire and reality. In 1993, Kennedy made the series Nights, a mix of puppet animation, 3D, and live-action. It told the love story of Bob and Carol, two ordinary people, though the characters are often grotesque and caricatured. Crapston Villas (1995) is an animated soap opera with clay animation. It focuses on the occupants of an old folks’ home in a creepy London and was produced by Channel 4.

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Erica Russell In 1988 Lee Stork, a Channel 4 producer, saw the pilot of Feet of Song, a short film made by a New Zealand animator, Erica Russell (b. New Zealand, 1951), and decided to produce it immediately. Russell’s parents migrated to South Africa in 1953, and she spent her childhood there, finding inspiration in local folk traditions and especially in African music and dance. Moving to London in the early 1970s, she joined Richard Williams’ animation studio as a paint-and-tracer and gained valuable experience assisting veteran Disney animator Art Babbitt. Through the 1970s and 1980s she worked for a number of animators and animation companies, including Gerald Scarfe, Paul Vester, and Rocky Morton. Then she established her own studio, Eyeworks, and made her solo directing/animation debut with Feet of Song (1988), about African ballets. Russell drew the dance through stylized and flexible lines, symbolic and sensual bodies, colours and motions, in tune with the music. In Triangle (1994), the passion of two young lovers is mixed with that of a mature woman, expressed through paint, colour pencil, crayons, and dance. In this film, Russell makes powerful use of music and art styles, ranging from classical drawing to pure abstraction. In 2001 Russell made Soma, dealing with the effects of postmodern culture: dislocation, fragmentation of identity, and violence. The work is inspired by street culture, with urban dance and graffiti.

Chris Grace Chris Grace, the director of the animation department at S4C, received a BAFTA for his creative career. A producer and a film writer, he also won an Emmy for The Canterbury Tales. In 1992, Grace produced Superted with Mike Young, an original series about a teddy bear who receives superpowers. The characters were drawn by David Edwards; the story was written by Robin Lyons. Made with clay puppets, Fireman Sam (first, second, and third series: 1985–1994; fourth series: 2003–2005; fifth series: 2008–2009) was broadcast on Channel 4. It’s a series for young children telling the adventures of Sam, a brave fireman, and his fellow firefighters in the Welsh town Pontypandy. For S4C, BBC Wales made the Animated Shakespeare series (1992/1994), adapting Shakespeare’s plays as animated short films for children. Grace also contributed to the production of The Miracle Maker, a feature based on the life of Christ and released in

2000. It was directed by Derek Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov and mixed puppet animation with CGI. It shows the miracles of Jesus, simply told without special effects, from the viewpoint of the women in the Passion. The characters are voiced by famous British actors such as Ralph Fiennes and Julie Christie. The puppets are made with a special resin called Fastflex, which is very ductile and tough. Grace was also executive producer on a two-part television production of The Canterbury Tales (1998), which included a ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ segment animated by Joanna Quinn (see above). His other executive producer credits include the series Book Box: Animated Tales of the World (2000) and the live-action/animated feature Y Mabinogi (2002), an adult adaptation of the medieval Welsh story collection The Mabinogion. The film was called Otherworld in English.

Marjut Rimminen Marjut Rimminen (b. Finland, 1944) is another animator connected with Channel 4. In 1968, she graduated from Helsinki College of Applied Arts as a graphic designer. She made her first animated commercial for Vivante Bubble Bath. It received an award for best commercial at the 1972 Zagreb Animation Festival. The following year, Rimminen was invited to the UK to join Halas  & Bachelor Animation. From 1974, Rimminen worked independently in London, directing and animating commercials for Finland and producing short films for Channel 4 such as the family psychodrama The Stain (1991). She created the puppet animation children’s series Urpo  & Turpo (1996) in partnership with Liisa Helminen for Finland’s Lumifilm. Two teddy bears act in funny and eccentric ways, inventing nonstop strange games and new realities in their boy owner’s room. Rimminen’s style mixes puppets, hand drawing, computer graphics, pictures, live-action, and collages. The

Figure 3.2  Marjut Rimminen, Learned by Heart, 2007.

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tones are dark and hidden, mysterious and disturbing, probing the psyche. Probably her best film is Many Happy Returns (1996), a live-action short with inserted puppet animation. A little girl ghost persistently creeps into a young woman’s consciousness, asking for care and attention. At the end, the woman shuts her in a bottle and goes away. The traumas of her childhood, represented by puppets and manipulated images, still disturb her. In 1998, Rimminen made Mixed Feelings, four personal and subjective stories in which women talk about abortion. She was interested in social subjects in wider terms: in 2001 she made Red Ribbon, a contribution to a film about AIDS commissioned by UNICEF. In 2007 she made Learned by Heart, a five-part film exploring the post-World War II period in Finland. Rimminen discovers small hidden stories, unspoken things, mysteries that live in people for years. The film mixes animation, period pictures, and archive material, combined and manipulated.

Gaëlle Denis Another Channel 4 discovery was the French animator Gaëlle Denis (b. 27 May  1975). She studied graphic design at ENSAD in Paris then moved to London for an MA in animation at the Royal College of Art. She had a four-month exchange visit at Kyoto University, where she learned the Japanese approach to making cartoons. Her graduation film was Fish Never Sleep (2002). Naoko, a young sushi chef, chops fish all day and also keeps a goldfish in a bowl. After several scenes of Naoko’s insomnia, and many fish heads chopped off, the girl wonders: do fish ever sleep? The film mixes computer-generated images and scanned hand-drawn images. City Paradise (2004) was made for Passion Pictures. Tomoko, a Japanese girl, arrives to stay in London where everything seems weird and alien and the people are apparently cold and unfriendly. But a trip to a swimming pool leads to an amazing adventure. The film uses CGI and live-action. The underworld characters were inspired by some creations of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, which Denis had seen on a catwalk. And they all animated in Britain. In the 1990s–2000s, more and more people were studying animation in the United Kingdom, and many universities established new animation, graphics, and fine art courses. These schools included the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland, the Royal College of Art, and Goldsmiths College in London. Many new talents emerged from these fertile grounds.

Jonathan Hodgson Jonathan Hodgson (b. Oxford, 1960) studied at Liverpool Polytechnic and received a BA in graphic design. He attended the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1985 in film and TV. His first commission after he left college (made with codirector Susan Young) was an animated short about nuclear disarmament, The Doomsday Clock. In 1991, Hodgson was a founding member of Bermuda Shorts and a director at Speedy Films. In 2003 he set up Hodgson Films as an outlet for his personal work. Feeling My Way (1997) is about a man who walks in the suburbs, between city traffic and urban desolation. Light pastel colours mix with scattered words written on the screen, some angry. They make the viewer reflect, between images of homeless people and rubbish. The man perceives other people as x-ray skeletons. Images and colours become confused; the atmosphere is sad and disturbing. All of Hodgson’s works, though, are full of energy and spontaneity. He is fascinated by American culture and inspired by artists identifying with the working class – for instance, the writer Charles Bukowski. While still at the RCA, Hodgson searched for the right poem to provide the basis for a film, but he realized Bukowski’s violence and sexism were too much for sensitive viewers. He finally made The Man with the Beautiful Eyes (1999), combining strong, dreamlike images with Bukowski’s words. The film describes children’s fascination about a man on society’s margins, drunk and doped, yet real and free. In 2001 Hodgson made Camouflage, part of a video series about children who have grown up with schizophrenic parents. The animation intersects with live-action. Hodgson’s style is in tune with these people recalling their experiences. Forest Murmurs (2006) mixes collage, small Victorian figures, and Hodgson’s typically confused hues. In a wild forest long ago, men contend for domain of the earth. The film shifts to the present day, when the forest is almost destroyed. Yet the illness and degeneration of the modern world intersect with the forest’s purity.

Phil Mulloy Phil Mulloy was born in Wallasey, Merseyside, on 29 August 1948. His drawings are stylized, gaunt, and deliberately unpleasant. He aims for immediacy; his images are cruel and troublesome and reach viewers unfiltered. He’s not interested in aesthetics: what’s necessary for him is to destroy every certainty, every superstructure, and to gain

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as much truth as possible. The soundtrack is very important too. Mulloy works mainly with two musicians, Alex Balances and Peter Brews. Eye of the Storm, his first film, was made in 1989. In 1993, Mulloy began the series Ten Commandments, completed in 1996. It is a desecration of the biblical commandments, consisting of ten short films of about five minutes each. In contrast, The Wind of Change (1996) is poetic and delicate. It is based on the life of Hungarian violinist Alex Balances and is about the resistance against the Communist dictatorship. In 1998, Mulloy made The Sealift of a Chair, an absurdist film about the hypothetical sex life of a wood chair. From 2000 to 2004 Mulloy made his masterpiece, the Intolerance trilogy: Intolerance I (2000), Intolerance II – The Invasion (2001), and Intolerance III – The Final Solution (2004). It meditates on intolerance but is much richer than a mere pamphlet. The first film is about Zog, an alien people identical to humans except that their heads and genitals are switched around. The aliens are unbearable for humans, who decide to make war on Zog’s planet. But Zog have the same thought, and in The Invasion they decide to overrun Earth. At the end of the third film we understand that maybe Zog never existed, except as a product of intolerant minds needing a scapegoat. The story begins somewhere else.

In 2006, Mulloy made The Christies, a parody of family sitcoms. It is about a family of four portrayed as black silhouettes; they are weird and frustrated, suffering from phobias.

Vera Neubauer Phil Mulloy’s wife, Vera Neubauer (b. Czech Republic, 1948),7 studied art and drawing in Prague and advertising in Germany. She specialized in drawn animation, first in Stuttgart and then in London. Neubauer’s works are created through women, for women. Every gender stereotype is questioned, mixed up, to obtain a new result. Vera borrows stories from Genesis and legends and fairy tales from Eastern Europe and transforms them through visual poetry, representing the complex, fragile, feminine soul. Misogyny is shown as the machismo that permeates the modern culture. Neubauer presents animation for adults that never forgets the child within, via 2D animation, live-action drawing with sand, and clay animation.8 The Lady of the Lake (1995), made with ink on paper mixed with live-action, is based on a legend in which a mermaid falls in love with a man. She can live on earth with him, provided he doesn’t scold her more than three times. If he does, the mermaid must return to the sea,

Figure 3.3  Phil Mulloy, Intolerance, 2000–2004.

Vera Neubauer should not be confused with the Austrian-German abstract animator, Bärbel Neubauer. They created many workshops for young animators together. Neubauer also has her own studio, Spectre Film, and writes stories and novels.

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where she can live wild and free as her nature requires. Wheel of Life (1996) is based on the Old Testament, made with live-action and 2D animation. The Dragon and the Fly (1999) and I Dance (1999) followed. La Luna (1999) is a story of love and fear, despair and murder, about rats wanting to become men and men forced to live as rats. It was commissioned by Channel 4 and the British Film Institute. Woolly Wolf (2001) presents, through clay and puppet animation, a new version of Red Riding Hood, where the girl escapes the wolf without a man’s help. In 2003, Channel 4 commissioned Vera Neubauer to make Hooked, an animated documentary about women’s lives in Latin American countries such as Peru and Guatemala. Puppets reproduce the features of spirits and totems from these places, such as Hooked, a Guatemalan skeleton. The Last Circus (2004) is a mythological life story with animated puppets. The legendary Lady Godiva rides into the ring on a horse and climbs into her wheelchair. Her life unfolds before her eyes, woven with myths of her childhood, dreams of her youth, and visions of her death. It is a captivating fairy tale of birth and life, war and death.9

Mark Baker During his school year at St Martin’s School of Art in London, Mark Baker (b. London, 1959) met Michael Dudok De Wit and followed him to the West Surrey College of Art and Design. While there, Baker made his amazing diploma film, The Three Knights, and became an assistant animator. In 1983, he returned to study at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and focused his graphic style. In 1989 he made The Hill Farm, a simple story about a couple living peacefully on the title farm. The Village (1993) is Baker’s masterpiece: a simple but incisive apologue about human vice, set in a claustrophobic village where people have dark and wretched souls. Only one man is really free; for this reason, the other villagers want to kill him. The characters are subhuman, locked in their defects. The only thing that can unite them is hate. The Village led to a further Channel 4 commission, Jolly Roger (1998), about a pirate ship and a bridesmaid in danger. It masterfully and poetically mixes 2D traditional drawing with the new computer technology. In the same

period, Baker, along with animator Neville Astley10 and producer Phil Davies, established Astley Baker Davies Ltd. The studio made a series for the BBC called The Big Knights (1999), a funny show about three brave and goofy medieval knights. A remastered special edition was produced in 2009, with expanded scenes and redefined images. In 2004, Astley Baker Davies Ltd made the preschool series Peppa Pig, about a feisty little girl pig called Peppa and her funny family. It was a huge success worldwide. In 2009 the studio made Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom, a series for young children with elves and small fairies; they live in a tiny kingdom in the blades of grass of a meadow.

Paul Bush Paul Bush (b. London, 1956) studied fine arts at Central School and at Goldsmiths College in London. He learned cinema as a member of the London Filmmakers Co-op and of the Charter Film Workshop in Cardiff. His first short and medium-length films were made in the 1980s and had success with audiences and critics. However, it was in the 1990s that his work reached a wide audience. In 1996, he founded his own production company, Ancient Mariner Productions, to make his films without market influence. He also directed commercials and his clients included Panasonic and Philips. The technique through which he became famous was direct painting on film – specifically, making little scratches directly on each frame then repainting them with contrasting colours. The final result is extremely suggestive. Bush often used pixilation, as in Furniture Poetry (1999), where furnishings are animated and coloured through the technique to show the soul of daily objects. Bush loves literature and poetry, which inspire some of his works such as His Comedy (1994) and The Albatross (1998). The first is based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the second on Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Through his works, Bush explored new visual ideas rather than creating stories and plots; his works are close to avant-garde. The Albatross, particularly, is rich in atmosphere and visual magic. Still Life with Small Cup (1995) is dedicated to Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, reborn in three dimensions through pixilation. The Rumour of True Things (1996) is a mid-length film exploring such modern phenomena as video games,

Neubauer’s other films include Pip and Bessie (1973–1975), The Decision (1981), The World of Children (1984), and The Mummy’s Curse (1987). Neville Astley (b. Keighley, Yorkshire, 1957), Mark Baker’s collaborator, graduated from Middlesex Polytechnic in London. His first animation films, which he made by himself, are Mobile Home (1985) and The Jump (1989). In 1999 Astley and Jeff Newitt made Trainspotter, a puppet animation set on a small, isolated railway platform.  9 10

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x-rays, medical exams, and war. In 2000, Bush made Flik Flak, a two-part film11 showing a future world of stupid, useless robots. After these films came Lie Detector (2001) and Pas de deux de deux (2001), both using pixilation, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2001), in which the camera has schizophrenia. In 2002, Bush made Busby Berkeley’s Tribute to Mae West, with sexually explicit images, and Secret Love. Geisha Grooming (2003) used Lisa Milroy’s paintings; While Darwin Sleeps. . . (2004) concerns human evolution and was made with frame by frame insect animation.

Richard Williams During the 1990s, Richard Williams devoted himself to teaching animation around the world at such studios as Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Warner Bros. His popular master classes led to the best-selling book The Animator’s Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion, and Internet Animators (2002). The book includes techniques, advice, tips, tricks, and general information on the history of animation. A second edition followed in 2009 (The Animator’s Survival Kit – Expanded Edition, featuring a 16-volume DVD box set). It combined the text with footage from the master classes and animation of examples from the book. Williams offers explanations and examples of topics such as timing and spacing, soft and hard accents, the ways to turn a head from a side to a front view, or change a smile to a frown. The Animator’s Survival Kit was used by animation students worldwide. In 2009, Richard Williams completed a nine-minute silent short called Circus Drawings, which premiered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy in September 2010. It originated in 1953, when young Williams was living in Spain near a village circus and drew the clowns, acrobats, and onlookers. Twelve years later, Williams filmed the drawings; nearly 50  years after that, he completed the film. It first shows the 1950s drawings, then how they were animated, moving from black and white to colour, reflecting Williams’ experience and the influence of past masters.

Barry Purves Barry Purves (b. Woodbridge, 3 July 1955), originally an actor, is a director and writer of puppet animation and a 11

The second one was animated by Phil Mulloy.

designer and director of stage plays. He is also a connoisseur of music and opera. Purves dedicated his university studies to classical Greek history and culture. He began a career as an actor before addressing himself to direction and production. In the late 1970s Purves started working in cinema animation. Initially, he joined Cosgrove Hall Productions Ltd, one of the most important children’s studios in Great Britain. While there, he contributed to the animation of many television series including Dangermouse (1981) and The Wind in the Willows (1984). In 1986 he moved to Aardman Animations Ltd in Bristol, where he refined his animation technique. His film Next: The Infinite Variety Show (1989) is a puppet animation. Using mime and props, William Shakespeare summarizes his plays on stage, all without saying a word. It’s a celebration and magnification of drama. After leaving Aardman Studios, Purves collaborated with Bare Boards Productions. Screen Play (1992) is about an impossible love between a high-ranking lady and a humble gardener, representing the Japanese art of kabuki. Rigoletto (1993) is a 30-minute puppet version of the opera by Giuseppe Verdi, dark and gothic. The puppets were created by Mackinnon & Saunders. In 1995, Purves made Achilles, possibly his most significant work. Against the background of the Trojan War, the film presents the homosexual love story between the warriors Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles’ real ‘heel’ is his love for Patroclus. The film is full of sensuality, with explicit (but never vulgar) love scenes. Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models (1998) is the last film Purves made for Bare Boards Productions. It recounts the lives and works of librettist William Schwenck Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. In five chapters, it shows their working relationship and their very human relationship too. The style is original and fascinating: the puppets look simultaneously like human beings and statuettes of paper-pulp. In 2001 Purves produced Hamilton Mattress, a mid-length film featuring Hamilton, a shy aardvark with a passion for music. The director, who had found inspiration in such an intimate subject as the homosexual love between warriors, could also build a marvellous musical, full of action. Purves said: I like working with puppets (not clay) as they give me the texture that you can’t have in drawn films, or on most computers on our scale of budgets. I like the detail and

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Figure 3.4  Barry Purves, Achilles, 1995. richness possible with puppets. But working with puppets is a very intimate form of animation. It is just your hand controlling the puppet, and not a whole team or committee working out what to do. Unlike other forms of animation, it is also spontaneous, giving the most direct equivalent to an acting performance. And the audience are aware that the puppets have existed, in a real space, and that the human hand has been part of the process. I enjoy watching puppets because you are always aware that they are puppets. You are aware of the trick and thus you share part of the performance and contribute to it. A  puppet should always be allowed to be a puppet, and not a cheaper version of CGI. Its peculiar qualities should be embraced, and not seen as limitations.12 In recent years Barry Purves directed the 52 episodes of Rupert Bear for Cosgrove Hall Films (UK, 2007); wrote, directed, and animated the dramatic Plume for Dark Prince (France, 2010) and the melancholic Tchaikovsky: An Elegy for Studio M.I.R. (Moscow, 2011); directed 52 episodes of Toby’s Travelling Circus for Komixx and Mackinnon and Saunders (UK, 2013); and was supervising director on Ragdoll’s latest series, Twirlywoos (UK, 2014). He was also involved in significant roles on the features Mars Attacks! (1995) and King Kong (2003). Restless Barry Purves also had three books published on puppet animation and had a concert of Tchaikovsky 12

music dedicated to him in 2014 at the Tchaikovsky house, where the puppet from his film now resides.

Snowden and Fine Alison Snowden (b. Nottingham, UK, 3 April 1958) and David Fine (b. Toronto, Canada, 13 September 1960) are a couple both personally and professionally. Alison Snowden studied graphic art at Mansfield Art College and Lanchester Polytechnic. However, she ended up applying to the National Film and Television School to train as a live-action director. There she met David Fine, who introduced her to the National Film Board of Canada’s work and persuaded her to attempt animation. They graduated from NFTS in 1984 with the degree film Second Class Mail and moved to Canada, where they worked at NFBC in Montreal for many years. There they made George and Rosemary (1987), about elderly romance, which received an Oscar nomination. In and Out (1989) crams a lifetime from birth to death into nine minutes. After moving back to London, the couple made Bob’s Birthday (1993) and the TV series spinoff Bob and Margaret (1998–2001, funded partly by Channel 4), numerous TV ads, and other material in between. Bob’s Birthday is a 2D traditional short film, about Bob, a frustrated middle-aged dentist. A group of friends plan a surprise party for his birthday. They all hide in his parlour, but Bob is having a midlife crisis and is confused and

Barry Purves, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 17 January 2011.

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depressed. When he comes home, he acts like a fool, unaware of the people who can hear him. The film was coproduced with the National Film Board of Canada and won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 1995. In the 2000s, Snowden and Fine continued to make TV commercials. They also developed Aardman’s series Shaun the Sheep (2007) and Snowden wrote scripts for Peppa Pig (their daughter Lily originally voiced the character). They returned to Canada in 2004 to make – in collaboration with Studio B. Production – the series Ricky Sprocket (2007). It is about a superstar child actor who tries to balance family, friends, and school with the pressures of his showbiz life.

Ruth Lingford Ruth Lingford (b. London, 20 May 1953) made What She Wants (1993), an experimental film made entirely on a home Amiga 1500 computer. It is about a woman on the underground who indulges in fantasies about wild shopping and lust. After a three-month residency in animation at the Museum of the Moving Image, Lingford received a Channel 4 commission for Death and the Mother (1997), another Amiga work based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale. A  desperate mother is ready to meet Death in person in order to save her ill daughter. The black and white drawings are filled and stylized, creating a dark mood. In 1998, Lingford made Pleasures of War, an animated documentary. The style is dark and biting. The film (written and designed with writer Sara Maitland) is based on the epic story of Judith and Holofernes, about a besieged city and the woman who tries to save it by offering herself sexually to the enemy chief. Animated images intersect with live-action documentary, showing cities destroyed by war. In 2002 Lingford completed The Old Fools, illustrating the Philip Larkin poem, which was commissioned by Channel 4. She was a principal animator on Silence (1998, Halo Productions for C4) and winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and a Special Prize at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. Since 2006, Lingford has been Professor of the Practice of Animation at Harvard University.

Laurie Hill Laurie Hill (b. 1970) studied animation at the Royal College of Art and graduated in 2006. His first film was My Life at 40 (2005). In the film Hill, aged 34, imagines a special collaboration with his 12-year-old self. They both look

forward to a glorious future as a 40-year-old conservation hero and Lamborghini owner. This film uses various techniques: real and computer animated cutouts, drawing on paper, photography, and time-lapse photography. Weather Report (2006) is a collage of footage recorded at home on one UK channel over the space of a year. The supposedly banal is transformed into cultural gold, as hundreds of linear fragments play simultaneously. My First Taste of Death (2006) is based on a story Hill wrote when he was 12: it is the tormented offspring of half-remembered adventure movies. The film is a kind of angry, tormented take on Hollywood action cinema, full of surreal detail. Photograph of Jesus (2008) is probably Hill’s masterpiece. He participated in a competition run by Getty Images, which invited filmmakers to create a piece with images from its Hulton Archive of historical photographs. Rather than set a rigid brief, the challenge offered key words and phrases as prompts. In Hill’s film, black and white figures from the archive come alive, meeting in an original silhouette animation. The past and present mix; modern pop stars kiss old Hollywood actors. The short won many awards. Replete with dogfights, undead dodos, and Edwardian hussies, it is a work of meticulously executed chaos, full of unexpected and entertaining juxtapositions.

Joan Ashworth While studying graphic design at Gwent College of Art and Design, Newport, Joan Ashworth (b. Lancashire, UK, 16 October 1959) was introduced to animation and embraced it as her means of expression. Later, Ashworth studied at the National Film and Television School and graduated in 1987 with her short film The Web, based on Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. The Web was shown at film festivals worldwide. It won the Mari Küttna Prize for Best British Animation 1987 and was broadcast on Channel 4. After graduating, Ashworth cofounded 3 Peach Animation. She directed many commercials, title sequences, and stings for TV and cinema. She joined the RCA in 1994, becoming Professor of Animation in 1998. Her bestknown work is the 10-minute How Mermaids Breed (2002), which is inspired by Bronze-Age Cycladic fertility figures and the drawings of Henry Moore. The film, made with 3D computer animation, envisages mermaids made of sand. They live in a matriarchal underwater society and catch men to take sperm to fertilize their eggs, like sea turtles. The film is original and sensitive. In 2010, Ashworth completed the seven-minute The Mushroom Thief. The dialogue-free film has puppet animation

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and pixilation and features a girl swimming through a lush green meadow.

Suzie Templeton Suzie Templeton (b. Hampshire, England, 2 August 1967) came to animation after a science degree and nine years of self-forming, spent mostly travelling and temping in different roles. Finally, she enrolled at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in Farnham. Her graduation piece was Stanley (1999), a puppet animation film. Stanley is a nostalgic, middle-aged man. He loves agriculture and dreams of growing the biggest cabbage in the world. His cabbage reminds him of his lost sexuality because its interior looks like a vagina. His jealous wife decides to cook it; to save the vegetable, Stanley kills the woman. After graduation, Templeton went to the Royal College of Art in London and made the clay animation Dog (2001). It is the story of a traumatized boy whose mother and dog die in quick succession and whose equally traumatized father is unable to help. Suzie Templeton’s clay figures are deliberately disturbing and in no way endearing. She depicts the dark side of the soul, conflicting feelings, and desperate environments. Her narratives combine sincere anxiety and sincere compassion. A leap forward was her puppet film Peter and the Wolf (2006), which won the Oscar for the Best Animated Short. Peter is a boy with large, scared, resentful eyes who is bullied by the youngsters of the village. He goes out, encounters a wolf, and fights and defeats it – although he loses a friend, a duck. He goes to the village to sell the captured wolf, but he and the wolf make eye contact; they have the same eyes now, fortified by experience. Peter releases the wolf, which leaves the village with dignity. There isn’t actually very much of Sergey Prokofiev’s famous music in the film, which is all Templeton. If Stanley was a story of sterility, and Dog a story of death, Peter is a story of birth. Not a note is heard until Peter, after several attempts, actually gets out of his walled house-uterus.

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When he does escape, the music erupts with the sunlight, sudden and cheerful. It’s a story of strength too. Peter endures humiliation, seclusion, loss, and the temptation of triumph as well. The village bullies use violence and firearms. Peter uses an inoffensive web to overcome his enemy. He wins through courage and trial and error. According to narrative structures, Peter had to win through his rite of passage. But he doesn’t become a hero; his victory looks like every spectator’s victory in everyday life.

Geoff Dunbar From 1994 to 1997, Geoff Dunbar collaborated on the animated series The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, based on the stories by Beatrix Potter. Once more collaborating with Paul McCartney (see Vol.  2), Dunbar made Tropic Island Humm (1997) and Tuesday (2000), which became children’s songs. The Cunning Little Vixen (2003) is a feature film based on Leoš Janácˇek’s work, with music performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; it is a sort of animated opera.13

Ken Lidster Ken Lidster (b. Outlook, Saskatchewan, Canada, 21 November  1960) made many commercials for the drink Brisk Lipton. Using clay, he parodied scenes from films such as Rocky (1997) and actors such as Danny DeVito. His first important work is Balloon (1991), made in clay animation, about a little girl and an evil man who tries to steal her balloon. Clown (1993) combines puppets and drawings. Inspired by Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci, it tells the sad story of the clown Pagliaccio. (The protagonist sings the famous aria, Ridi, Pagliaccio!) In 2000 Lidster made the short Interrogating Ernie; in 2008 he was an animator on the feature film Coraline, produced by Laika and directed by Henry Selick.

Serge Kornmann writes: For a year, [Geoff Dunbar] listened to music while drawing at the same time: thus was born a beautiful animatic, with all the sketches of characters and sets ranked in order of appearance. Thirty good animators and a whole studio worked at it. In 2003, Opus Arte (in association with the BBC, the Los Angeles Opera, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin and the European Centre for Opera) took delivery of The Cunning Little Vixen [. . .] The three acts of the opera are divided into two scenes linked together, despite the changes of place and time, like the editing of modern cinema. Animation brings to the scenes an extremely soft transition. It has this superiority over operatic mise en scène, to represent both a mosquito singing and a human being. [. . .] The wonderful landscapes and the animation, fluid and graceful, cause total enchantment. (Serge Kornmann, ‘Le Chrononaute: Opéra et dessin animé, La petite renarde rusée’, La lettre de l’AFCA, Paris, 2010; Giannalberto Bendazzi’s translation from French.)

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Figure 3.5  Suzie Templeton, Peter and the Wolf, 2006.

Sandra Ensby Fast Spin Fling (1998) is the first notable work by Sandra Ensby14 (b. Dorset, England, 19 January  1972). It is a funny short film about Muriel, a woman who lives with her attractive friend Pippa, who has many admirers. Muriel has a friendly relationship with Kevin, Pippa’s boyfriend, and when the frivolous Pippa betrays Kevin yet again, Muriel is there for him. Ensby made The A–Z of Love and Sex (2001) and Protect the Human: Measles (2006); the latter is a film/commercial for Amnesty International. Throwaway (2007) is a short film made with the Sweetworld Collective. A dining couple has a quarrel that appears as a balloon on their heads. Incomprehension increases until the final collapse. In the end, peace is restored, but for how long? Ensby also made the special animation effects for Girls in Love (2003–2005), a live-action series based on the popular teenage books by British writer Jacqueline Wilson.

Other Directors Who Have Benefited from Channel 4 The following directors have also distinguished themselves and benefited from Channel 4. Andrew Higgins graduated in 1996 from the Royal College of Art with Gourmand. It uses pencil on paper, soft colours, stylized figures, and slow and shivery animation. Higgins then collaborated on three eight-foot mosaic panels for the Machynileth Museum of Modern Art and

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worked on Famous Fred, directed by Joanna Quinn. Afterward, he returned to London to join Picasso Pictures as an animation director. Tim Webb’s graduation film was Smoke Rings (1986), a critique of the hypocrisy of the big cigarette companies. In 1992, Channel 4 planned a TV season on disability. After a long time studying the subject, Tim Webb – helped by Dick Arnall – made an animated documentary, A is for Autism (1992). It animates paintings made by autistic people. Simple and snappy, the film takes a warm look at the world of autistic youngsters and adults. It uses their stories, live footage, and commentary in a way that enthrals and educates. The film became a reference work both for autism and animation studies, winning awards and acknowledgements. Iain Gardner graduated in 1993 from the Glasgow School of Art with a BA in illustration. His graduation film, The Gilded Man, was screened on Channel 4 and programmed at Edinburgh Film Festival the same year. He received a master’s in animation at the Royal College of Art in London with the short Noah’s List (1996). In 1999 Gardner made Akbar’s Cheetah, a touching film about two wild cheetahs in the emperor of Hindustan’s menagerie. The Loch Ness Kelpie – or just Kelpie – (2004) tells of the monster that lives in Loch Ness. Kelpie looks similar to a seahorse and drags its victims into the lake. Ewan, a brave young boy in the Highlands, fights Kelpie and wins in a terrific battle. Kunyi Chen made Rien (1998) using pencil on paper. A  little girl tries to learn French; the images and letters intersect with words and sounds.

Sandra Ensby was married in 2008, after which she changed her surname to Salter.

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As noted earlier (please see Vol. 2), Raymond Briggs (b. Wimbledon, UK, 18 January  1934) is a famous illustrator specializing in books for children (including The Snowman, made into a film directed by Dianne Jackson in 1982, and When the Wind Blows, made into an animated feature by Jimmy Teru Murakami in 1986). Later films based on Briggs’ books are Father Christmas (1991), by Dave Unwin and Dianne Jackson, The Bear (1999) by Hilary Audus and Joanna Harrison, and Fungus the Bogeyman (2004), by Mark Haddon. Briggs also wrote the original screenplay for Ivor the Invisible, directed in 2001 by Hilary Audus. In Petra Freeman’s The Mills (1992), a girl begins a journey inside a windmill wheel, taking the viewer through a strange stream of consciousness. The crosswise images of metamorphosis focus on bees and beekeepers. Karen Kelly graduated in animation from the Royal College of Art in 1989. Her most notable film is Stressed (1994), about the daily tensions and stresses affecting people in a suburb. The film shows various events and people’s reactions: some become aggressive and impatient, others passive and ill. The technique is crayons on paper and traditional 2D animation. The drawings are full of confused lines, with vibrant and violent colours. Jim Lefevre’s short film The Little Princess’ Birthday Party (1997) was made with clay animation and pencil on paper and produced by the Edinburgh College of Art. The animator is shown as he creates the story; the characters and scenery change gradually with his thought. Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes graduated from the Royal College of Art’s animation course in 1997 and teamed up with producers Chris O’Reilly and Charlotte Bavasso at Nexus Productions in London. Their portfolio includes a range of short films, music videos, commercials, and film title sequences (for example, ‘The Littlest Elf ’ sequence at the beginning of the film Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events, 2004). In 2008, they made This Way Up, nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 2009 Oscars. Made in 3D, the eight-and-a-half-minute film features the two sad employees of a funeral director who go through dark and creepy swamps and woods but end up in Beyond, a happy and colourful land. An Vrombat is an illustrator of children’s books more than an animator. She has made two short films and one animated series. Little Wolf (1992) is a children’s short in which a small wolf plays with the moon; When I Grow Up I Want To Be a Tiger (1996) is about a quiet little cat who dreams of being a terrible tiger. The animated series 64 Zoo Lane was conceived by Vrombat in 1993 and broadcast in 2000. It tells the story

of Lucy, a little girl who lives next to a zoo full of funny animals, which become her friends. Every night Lucy enters the zoo by sliding down the long neck of the giraffe Georgina, and every animal tells her a story. Brian Wood has a particular animation style: dark, grotesque, and politically incorrect. His first notable work is Mr Jessop (1994), made with black backgrounds, sharp and stylized drawings, white pencil, and crayon. A little man leaves home to buy something in a mall, a sick and stupid Heaven of Consumerism. In this dark and lonely world, everyone is miserable and intolerance and neurosis reign. The animation is frenetic, irregular, and confusing. Wood’s School Disco (1999) is a raw and cruel animation about the difficulties of growing up. A group of kids get drunk and insult classmates and teachers at a high school party. The Cramp Twins (2001–2006) is an animated series about twins Lucien and Wayne. They live in the town of Soap City with a mother obsessed with cleaning and a father addicted to western movies. Daniel Austin (b. 1981) made Guy’s Guide to Zombies (2006), a definitive A to Z guide about living with the dead, in 2D animation and CGI. Ed Taylor’s Sticky Business (1997) mixes 3D computer animation and live-action. Two figures, a man and woman, escape the drawn world and run around the artist’s studio. Tiny Planets (1998–2000) is an animated series about a funny alien and his weird dog, called Bing and Bong, who explore the universe from the comfort of their couch. Taylor also made advertising spots for Picasso Pictures: The Boy who didn’t stop to look and listen, The Girl who didn’t dress bright in the dark, The Boy who didn’t look for a safe place to cross. The latter were all made for the British Department of Transportation to teach road safety to children.

Animation Meets Video Art Many video artist animators decided to experiment with animation and created works halfway between two artistic worlds.

Oliver Harrison Oliver Harrison’s works are based on typographical choreography, with words and script moving harmoniously, gradually illustrating the sung words. They resemble old art deco advertisements. Harrison has made many animated commercials for Nike, MTV, and Delta Airways. His graduation film, Amore Baciami (1988), should be described as the first kinetic typographical film. He also

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made Times (1989), Spirit of Place (1991), and Love Is All (2000), an animated video created for Deanna Durbin’s song.

Tim Hope Tim Hope’s The Wolfman (1999) is a traditional 2D animation that features simple and stereotyped – in a good way – figures. A  girl in a wood is followed by a big bad wolf, watched on screen by a mad scientist. With the full moon, the scientist becomes a werewolf. He loses his mind and is mad to possess the world.

Jo Ann Kaplan Jo Ann Kaplan’s An Anatomy for Melancholy (2000) explores the melancholy of death and things that are gone. It is a kind of strange anatomy book, animating drawings of desperate hands and skeletal faces. In the background are the words of ‘Ode on Melancholy’ by John Keats.

Reeza Dolatabadi Reeza Dolatabadi made the puppet animation short OctoDancing in 2008. An octopus dances in an aquarium, with electro music in the background. Koda (2008) was made with computer graphics, 3D, and 2D. Composed of more than 6,000 paintings, it is a short psycho thriller exploring the potential and fears of the human mind.

Kayla Parker Kayla Parker (b. Birmingham, 16 June  1955) explored subjectivity and sense of place. She used animation, photography, performance, found objects, drawing, writing, and digital technologies. Parker was interested in embodied experience and the intersection between the natural world and urban environments – particularly liminal spaces, such as the city’s industrial outskirts. As an artist, Parker chose animation because of its unlimited possibilities. While at art college she cofounded the feminist video and performance group Dark Bananas. Her video about mother-daughter (non) communication, A Family Conversation, was broadcast on BBC television in 1984. She graduated in 1985 and joined the South Wales Women’s Film Group. She learned animation under the guidance of Les Mills and Joanna Quinn at Chapter Arts

Centre, Cardiff. While there, she made her first 16mm film, Adult Day Return (1986). Parker moved to Devon in 1986 and became a management committee member of Exeter Film and Video Workshop (EFVW). She continued to develop her practice as an experimental filmmaker and presented work at Plymouth Arts Centre and Watershed Media Centre, Bristol. She has been based in Plymouth since December 1989. Works since 2000 include Walking Out (2000), a woman’s retracing of the interior landscape of sexual abuse; Inner City (2001), for The Year of the Artist; and the Super 16mm diptych Verge (2005) for Salt Gallery, Hayle, Cornwall. Recent commissions include the high-definition film Small World (2007) for the Definitive Stories screening program at the National Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow. She made three films for Animate. Cage of Flame (1992) explores menstrual dreams, using a combination of liveaction, puppet animation, and scratching on the film to convey haunting and powerful imagery. Sunset Strip (1996) is about a day-by-day diary showing a year of sunsets, rendered directly onto 35mm film stock using various materials including nail varnish, magnolia petals, hair, and net stocking. Time-lapse becomes transcendent in this record of light and cloud. The third film was Teign Spirit (2009). In 1997, Parker cofounded the production company Sundog Media Partnership with Stuart Moore. The company has produced many innovative projects including films for satellite-driven screenings in bars and clubs across the UK and social short films and adverts on behalf of disabled people and the environment. In 2009, the company won the Media Innovation Award for Collaboration between Business and Young People for There 2 Care, a clay animation made with young carers.

David Anderson David Anderson (b. London, 20 July  1952) was another artist whose practice lay between animation and video art. He trained at Bath Academy of Art and the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. His first film, Dreamland Express (1982), won a British Academy Award. Made with silhouette animation, it shows a small train crossing a nocturnal, enchanted landscape. His next film, Dreamless Sleep (1986), won the Hiroshima Peace Prize. He collaborated with the writer Russell Hoban to make Deadsy (1989) and Door (1990). Deadsy is close to video art, mixing 2D traditional animation, CGI, and live-action. Deadsy is a neo-punk figure who eats live insects and loves

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everything that is dark and deadly. The narrator is a 3D rolling head. Door is an animated documentary made for Channel 4, with puppet animation. The setting is a postapocalyptic world marked by confusion and the loss of language. In 1994 Anderson made In the Time of Angels, another animated documentary. Its themes include traumatic events and the belief that memories are imprisoned in various items, to be freed when the subject realizes and metabolizes his lived drama. David Anderson’s later films were Motion Control (2001), Sense of Gravity (2003), and Tongue of the Hidden (2008). The latter is a short animation film based on the book Ten Poems from Hafez by the Iranian writer Jila Peacock. The film’s aim is to bring the work of the metaphysical poet Hafez, who lived in the thirteenth century, to the screen. Using Hafez’s words, the film shows an aerial shining landscape where letters slide away like leaves of a tree, arise from a hot fire like smoke, and undergo many other changes.

JoWOnder15 JoWOnder (b. Taplow, 1958) began as a painter. In 1983, her works were shown in London art galleries and she participated in the itinerant exhibition Pandora’s Box, which revisits the Pandora myth in a modern way. She had been educated in fine art at Kingston University and then studied experimental film at St Martin’s School of Art in London. She studied filmmaking more formally at the National Film and Television School. Her friendship with the Brothers Quay was very encouraging to her, although her work is influenced more by fine art, especially that made by women in the twentieth century. During her artistic career, JoWOnder combined animation, art, and classic drama. Her first film, made with a Super 8 camera, is The Poet of Half Past Three, named after Chagall’s painting. It is a tribute to Jean Cocteau’s poetry, scratching and drawing directly on film. Her second film, The Hump Back Angel, is a dark tale inspired by Vera Neubauer’s works. Thanks to The Hump Back Angel, JoWOnder was able to join the National Film and Television School. While there, she produced the live-action The Discreet Call of Nature, about the inner desires of a group of town people on a country trip. Her graduation film at NFTS was The Brooch Pin and the Sinful Clasp (1990). Two-dimensional paper

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Real name Joanna Woodward.

figures, puppet animation, and live-action are used to tell the story of a man who falls in love with a dancer he sees on the top of a skyscraper. In the end, he discovers she’s only a mechanical figure. JoWOnder’s other works include The Weatherhouse (1991); Sawdust for Brains and the Key of Wisdom (1992); The Cat (1997); Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (2003), based on the Max Ernst painting of the same name; and the stop-frame video installation Don’t Submit To A Moments Passion With A Stranger (2008). Another video installation, 6 Days Goodbye Poems of Ophelia (2009), is a high-definition video of a ‘time-lapsed bacterial painting’. It is based on John Millais’s painting of Shakespeare’s doomed Ophelia, remade in the colours of living bacteria. JoWOnder made the paintings over a six-day period, filming them in time-lapse. The installation invites members of the public to leave voicemail messages for Ophelia.

Run Wrake Run Wrake (Aden, 24 November  1963–Ashford, Kent, 21 October  2012) was born in Yemen but soon moved to rural Leicestershire and Sussex. He saw Alan Parker’s The Wall, which inspired him to take an art foundation course and then go on to study graphic design at Chelsea School of Art and animation at the Royal College of Art in London. His graduation movies are Anyway (1990) and Jukebox (1994). Anyway (made with 2D traditional animation, computer graphics, and clay animation) is a surreal artwork with weird and graceless images. Jukebox was also made in 2D traditional animation and computer graphics, adding paints and pictures. A boy walks along the streets of a suburban town, meeting strange people, weird animals, and hallucinations. In 1998 Wrake made Ping Batter Pong, showing a ping-pong battle between a modern man and a cowboy. Graphically, Wrake’s influences are dadaism and pop art. He likes to use collages like Max Ernst, mixed with hand drawings and Super 8 short films, in a quick and dense mix of different styles. For soundtracks he favours digital and electronic sounds, metropolitan music, and collaborations with artists such as Howie B, Manu Chao, and The Charlatans. He also made music video clips and commercials.

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Wrake’s masterpiece is Rabbit (2005), based on a 1950s children’s picture book (with words written over pictures to help children read). The myth of purity is upset: the main child characters are evil, and the apparently idyllic landscape hides dangers and cruelty. The story is a simple morality tale about greed, subverting classic children’s pictures in a punchy way, and it won several awards. The music was by Howie B. The Control Master (2008) is a short commissioned by Veer, the Canadian visual elements agency, to promote their Charles S. Anderson collection. The film is animated using images from the vast archive; the story has a mysterious heroine and her unknown ally fighting an evil scientist.

Stuart Hilton Stuart Hilton (b. Leyland, Lancashire, 1965) studied at Liverpool Polytechnic and at the Royal College of Art and almost immediately became a director of commercials. He was a video artist at heart, putting together images and abstract paintings in his videos. The soundtrack is also very important to him. Since Starting (1988), he has made many films: Machine Word (1988), Procession (1990), Argument in a Superstore (1992), and Save Me (1994, video art mixed with spare and stylized animation, as emblematic words are crossed with images, colours, symbols, and music). Save Me was made with Jonathan Hodgson. In 1998 Hilton made Six Weeks in June, the animated version of a road movie, in which he covers 11,000 miles in six weeks through the US in the company of a music band. The animation is black and white, an ensemble of words, lyrics, and spare paints, illustrating details of the trip and the landscape it crosses.

Figure 3.6  Run Wrake, Rabbit, 2005.

Lucy Lee Lucy Lee (b. Twickenham, UK, 16 February 1971) made her graduation film Bird Becomes Bird (1997) in Ekaterinburg, Russia, where she learned a huge amount from the local artists. This film, made in 2D traditional animation, shows a small crane as it follows golden fish in a lake in snow, before the eyes of an astonished little girl. For the girl, the wonderful bird becomes the symbol of a longdesired freedom, to escape from a strict mother. Lee’s next film, Waiting (2002), is about love and loss and how hard they are. In 2004 she made The Gates of Heaven, about the difficulty of achieving one’s dreams. Lee makes animated films with various techniques: oil paint on glass, drawing, puppet work, animating the environment, photographic sequences, live-action, and digital media. Her films use dreamlike paintings and animals that become other animals in the desperate search for sense, following their personal dreams.

Simon Pummell Simon Pummell (b. Norwich, UK, 1959) crossed the boundaries of traditional animation. He used shadow and silhouette animation, digital manipulation and postproduction, live-action and frame by frame. His films turn on the anxiety caused by having a physical body and the need to find one’s self in a world of new technologies. Following works such as Secret Joy of Falling Angels (1991), about the Annunciation, Pummell’s most important animated film was Butcher’s Hook (1996). It is a Daliesque surrealist documentary, dealing with a taxidermist who embalms animals. A  succession of sequences shows the

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stuffed animals, as well as the inexpressive face of the taxidermist (a real man), with melancholic music in the background. In the same year, Pummell made Evolution, about the technology artist Stelarc and his inventions, such as the robotic ‘Third Hand’. It was an animated documentary, commissioned by the music band Queen as a hypothetical promo for their song ‘This Could Be Heaven’. Ray Gun Fun (1998), commissioned by Channel 4, mixes digital animation with live-action figures. Stuck in a traffic jam, a boy fidgets restlessly beside his mother. To placate him, his mother allows him to open a present, a plastic toy ray gun. When they arrive home, the boy continues to play with his new gun – unfortunately for the objects in his room. The film opens in a 1950s world with toned-down characters from Dr Seuss and a visual style that’s quite otherworldly. Pummell’s most touching work is Blinded by Light (2000), an animated documentary with special effects. It is about a man, born blind, who gains sight through surgery at the age of fifty. The film tells of the yearning, confusion, and pain of a person who must learn to see the world after spending his life in darkness. It was followed by the liveaction How Long Is a Minute (2000) and Bodysong (2004), a documentary about human life with a soundtrack composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. It was made with funding from Channel 4. In 2011, Pummell premiered the feature film Shock Head Sou, at the Venice Film Festival. Through documentary interviews, dramatic reconstructions, and CGI animation, it tells the true story of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German lawyer confined to an asylum at the turn of the twentieth century. He believed he was receiving messages from God and turning into a woman; during his confinement, he wrote his autobiography, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Although much of the film is in live-action, Pummell says: ‘This film relies very substantially on sustained animation sequences to create the metaphysical visions of the main character.’16

Chris Shepherd Chris Shepherd (b. Liverpool, UK, 4 December  1966) studied animation at West Surrey College of Art and Design. After graduating, he became studio manager at Speedy Films and coordinated adverts and short films for

TV. In 1995 he set up a company called Polkadot Productions Ltd and directed and produced the multi-awardwinning The Broken Jaw (1997) for Channel 4. In a desperate future suburbia, the only spark of light is the titular pub. Made in 3D computer animation and live-action, the film has scurrilous language and dark backgrounds. After this, Shepherd realized Big Train (1998) and Pop Skool (2000). The latter is an irreverent animated series with clay puppets, showing famous singers and bands discussing history and current affairs – for example, Oasis talks about the Vietnam War. There followed The Worlds of Interiors (2001), People’s Britain (2001), and Dad’s Dead (2003). The latter is told through a series of flashbacks. A boy puts together memories of the past, permeated by the admiration he feels for his friend Johnno. At the story’s end, Johnno reveals his cruelty and violence, and admiration becomes revulsion. Chris Shepherd’s most successful film is Who I Am and What I Want (2005). Pete is a man who lives alone in the woods, surviving by hunting and killing, happy on society’s margins. The drawings are linear, with a simple black line that’s rather caricatural. In 2006 Shepherd made Silence Is Golden in both liveaction and animation. Billy, a young boy, is scared by his neighbour Dennis. The story is creepy, sad, and full of injustice. Dennis is taken to a mental hospital and Billy wonders why this happens.

Bolexbrothers In the last thirty years, various small animation studios arose in Britain. They proved vital for the development of new creative ideas and for the patronage and market integration of young talents. One of the most interesting independent studios is Bolexbrothers, which operates in Bristol. It was founded in 1983 by Dave Borthwick, Dave Riddet, and Nick Upton. The studio’s name comes from the Bolex, a legendary camera that revolutionized the job of filmmakers in the 1960s. Bolexbrothers made strange films, on the border of animation, which went against market requirements. They also made successful commercials – for example, for Budweiser – but only to have revenue to make independent films.17

Simon Pummell, e-mail message to Andrew Osmond, 17 May 2012. In 1996, Bolexbrothers financed The Saint Inspector, a multi-award-winning clay animation film directed by the young Mike Booth (b. Birmingham, 19 February 1971). Two years later, Booth created Little Dark Poet (1998), a five-minute short combining animation and liveaction, and Tastes like Tuna (2000). Bolexbrothers also produced Keep in a Dry Place and Away From Children (1999), directed by Andy Brown (b. 22 February 1967) and Martin Davies (b. 9 February 1969). 16 17

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The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (a 1993 feature, originating in a ten-minute pilot in 1989), is the studio’s most notable work. Directed by Borthwick18 (Bristol, 26 July 1947–Bristol, 27 October 2012), it’s made especially for adults. Tom is a fetus-like infant living in a grim and squalid urban environment. He’s taken to an experimental laboratory but escapes to a community of similarly-sized people in a swamp, who help him on his journey. The film is largely dialogue-free, limited mostly to grunts and other nonverbal vocalizations. It uses a combination of frame-by-frame animation and pixilation; puppets often share the scene with the pixilated live actors. In 2004, Bolexbrothers Studio made the feature The Magic Roundabout, directed by Borthwick with Jean Duval and Frank Passingham. In Daily Variety on 9 February 2005, Derek Elley wrote: ‘The only way to get some entertainment out of the picture is to forget the original series and yield to its generic, all-purpose flavour. [. . .] [though the film has] plenty of incident and smoothly wrought 3-D digital animation.’19

Aardman A basic reality of British animation was Bristol’s Aardman studio, which in the 1990s and 2000s became established worldwide as Britain’s most important animation studio, both for audiences and critics. This happened through the success of the characters Wallace and Gromit, as well as through the studio’s captivating stylistic choices. Aardman has operated in Bristol since the 1970s. It has gone through many different aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic stages while keeping some essentials: the use of clay animation (later accompanied by unobtrusive computer animation in postproduction); the veil of melancholy and loneliness present under the surface humour; the focus on the daily and social problems of ordinary people (beginning with Animated Conversations, 1978); and strong characterization mixed with anthropomorphism. The final product is very obviously animated but seems entirely real. Aardman love cinema homages, tributes to tradition, and looks back to the past. Wallace from Wallace & Gromit is a classic, old style, English man. He loves the ritual of

tea with crackers and cheese, reading the daily newspaper on his couch, and building strange but working objects. In their works, Aardman seems to be always researching a sort of perfect time, an ideal period where things are exactly what they should be. As mentioned above, the studio was founded by school friends Peter Lord (b. Bristol, 4 November  1953, President and CEO of Aardman Animation), and David Sproxton (b. Bristol, 6 January 1954). Initially, Aardman was a small studio with a very low budget. However, in 1989 Channel 4 commissioned a series of five short films, Lip Synch, which included Aardman’s War Story, Going Equipped, and Babylon. The first feature created by Aardman was Chicken Run (2000) – basically, The Great Escape with hens and a rooster. It was inspired by the classic British World War II movies but set on a Yorkshire farm whose owners decide to move their operation to making chicken pies. The film plays with some of the darker overtones of farm-as-concentration camp but weakens its possible messages with character comedy centred on the circus rooster Rocky, voiced by Mel Gibson. Yet the film, under a glaze of humour, treats serious issues such as imprisonment where the individual is exploited to the limit. Chicken Run was the first European film to use Digital Intermediate Process technology, allowing for the postproduction of every single frame and manipulating them before final editing. The film won many prizes, including two BAFTA Awards and a Golden Globe. In 1998 Aardman created the series Angry Kid, about a repulsive 15-year-old boy. The technique is a mix of clay animation, pixilation, and live-action. Following Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), discussed below, the third feature film by Aardman was Flushed Away (2006), in partnership with the American studio DreamWorks Animation. This was the first Aardman film made completely by 3D computer technology, though the CGI images are created over clay figures made previously, through special software developed by Aardman. The film tells the story of Roddy, a posh pet mouse, who falls into the sewer and has many adventures. It is not possible to explain the success of Aardman without focusing on Nick Park, the creative mind behind the two most famous characters created by the studio: Wallace and Gromit.

Borthwick’s career in animation had begun in 1986, with Grass Grow and Creatures, followed by Vikings Go Pumping (1987), Igors Horn (1988), and From A to H and Back Again (1993). 19 Derek Elley, ‘The Magic Roundabout (Movie Review)’, Daily Variety, 9 February 2005. 18

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Nick Park20 Nick Park was born in Preston, Lancashire, on 6 December 1958. While he was a child, his father, Roger, a photographer and amateur inventor – if this reminds you of a certain inventor called Wallace, you’re not wrong – regularly showed a variety of 8mm films to his family on Sunday afternoons. Nick was soon attracted to animation, admiring films by the Halas & Bachelor studio, Ray Harryhausen, and later TV animation by Terry Gilliam. These influences soon prompted ‘bedroom’ film experiments, such as Archie’s Concrete Nightmare (1975), which reveal Park’s eye for a visual gag and his ability to create comic situations from everyday characters and experiences. Park has always been attracted to verbal and visual puns and to eccentric and obsessive behaviour, epitomized by Wallace’s commitment to Heath Robinson-styled inventions. These machines are consistently characterized by the way they offer an over-the-top and unworkable solution to a simple problem. Breakdown, defeat, and chaos are inevitable comic outcomes. Park was also a fan of the British comics The Beano and The Dandy. They played an important role in the formation of his humour and storytelling, in which local British characters are incongruously placed in Hollywood-style genre adventures.21 At fifteen, Park entered a European Young Filmmaker of the Year Competition. He didn’t win, but the BBC broadcast a short extract from his film. Park had already decided that animation was what he wanted to pursue. In 1980, he graduated in communication arts at Sheffield Art School and then moved to the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. Park worked on the dancing chicken sequence of Peter Gabriel’s music video, Sledgehammer (1985), and on some animated sequences on Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986). He was also spellbound by all the small aspects of human foibles. His film Creature Comforts (1989) combines voice recordings of real people’s attitudes to zoos and reflections on their home environments. This enables Park to represent their perspectives in the guise of animals seemingly commenting on their various habitats. Everyone is satisfied with his life but thinks he deserves better. While staging these supposed interviews with the animals, Park inserts background visual gags so the people’s everyday problems

clash with the funny images. For this short, Park won his first Oscar. In 1990, the Creature Comforts concept was adapted for a series of commercials for ‘Heat Electric’ for the GGK Agency. The animals effectively encapsulated a domestic comfort recognized, embraced, and aspired to by the British public, and the adverts were popular and critically acclaimed. In 2003, Creature Comforts also inspired a TV series using ordinary people talking about a range of topics, made both in the UK and the US. The series version was directed by Richard Golezowski.22 Park’s most famous characters, eccentric inventor Wallace and his mute, knowing, canine companion Gromit, first featured in Park’s graduation film from the National Film and Television School. A Grand Day Out (1989) features Wallace’s handmade efforts for journeying to the moon. The film was only completed when Park joined Peter Lord and David Sproxton at Aardman. Lord and Sproxton recognized Park’s talent for producing witty and whimsical, inherently British, puppet animation. Wallace and Gromit run out of cheese, so they decide to build a (homemade) rocket and go to the moon – which, as everybody knows, is made of cheese. Their second adventure, The Wrong Trousers, was made in 1993. Wallace builds a pair of robotic trousers that can take Gromit for a walk with no effort for Wallace. Then Wallace rents a room in their house to a suspicious-looking penguin and the film takes a police-story twist. Everything ends happily with a glorious action finale – Ben Hur in a Wigan back bedroom. The screenplay was written with the help of Bob Baker, a Bristol writer for cinema and television, and in collaboration with the young animator Steve Box. Wallace and Gromit’s clay figures are, from the very beginning, realized in a special way – raw and dirty – so the creator’s fingerprints are clearly visible, helping to make them real and captivating. The music and soundtrack are integral to the films and are always composed by Julian Nott. Wallace’s voice belongs to Peter Sallis, a famous British actor born in 1921. Gromit never speaks. There really is only one Wallace and Gromit story. Wallace embarks on a scheme, often distracted by a new potential companion or interest; Gromit seems initially marginalized; Wallace rebukes him; Gromit sees the error in Wallace’s actions, and the ways he is easily taken in by

By Paul Wells. Park guest-edited the 70th anniversary edition of The Beano in 2008. 22 Golezowski (b. Suffolk, UK, 1959) joined the studio in 1983 and collaborated on Wallace & Gromit projects. Aardman has many other excellent directors, such as Jeff Newitt, who made Loves Me. . . Loves Me Not (1992), and Darren Walsh. 20 21

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others, and thus saves the day; Wallace ultimately appreciates Gromit but learns nothing from the adventure, to everybody’s amusement and acceptance. This last point was lost on DreamWorks’ executive producer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who requested a more formulaic conclusion to Wallace  & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), in which Wallace could recognize his failings. This is not the way of British comedy, in which innocence, ignorance, and embarrassment are the staple points of recognition and amusement for Englishmen. Wallace is a master of them all. The third Wallace and Gromit outing was A Close Shave (1995), the first with a love interest for Wallace. Wendolene is the daughter of an inventor who becomes part of a sheep-rustling scam led by her dog, Preston, who turns out to be a robot-dog-gone-wrong. Park, once more, engages in set piece chases. In one sequence, Wallace and Gromit chase Preston on a motorbike and sidecar. Plunging over a precipitous cliff, Gromit’s sidecar becomes a plane. In Japan, Astroboy is empowered with rocket legs and laser weaponry, but only in Britain, and perhaps only in Park’s vision, could a sidecar-cum-plane be armed with a porridge gun. This third film won an Oscar and a BAFTA in 1996. Preston’s Mutton-O-Matic in A Close Shave, in which he hopes to make dog food, anticipates the pie-making machine in Chicken Run (2000, see above), which Park codirected with Peter Lord. A Close Shave also marks the debut of Shaun the Sheep, who finds himself accidently shorn in Wallace’s Knit-OMatic. In 2007, Shaun became the star of his own spinoff series, while Wallace’s machines became part of another spinoff, ten short films called Cracking Contraptions (2002) initially for Web-exhibition. These two-minute vignettes (featuring such inventions as the soccamatic, the bullyproof vest, and the snowmanatron) further defined Park’s world as a safe, retro-styled Britain, with 1950s values and conservative outlooks. They are more pictorial gags than short films. As noted earlier, Park particularly enjoys playing out the British parochial sensibility in the frameworks of Hollywood narratives. The feature Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, codirected with Steve Box, is a Jekyll and Hyde-cum-werewolf story of a monster rabbit plundering village vegetable patches. The gothic tale is exploited for the ways it provokes fear but inspires fun. Park recognizes that horror and humour are close. He chooses the laugh not the scare and makes the monster anything but monstrous. Wallace and Gromit are the accidental heroes, now running a humane pest control service. Wallace vies with

Lord Victor Quartermaine for the affections of Lady Tottington, and Park mines Britain’s class system for its petty conflicts, status issues, and behavioural foibles. In an often-overlooked aspect of his work, he uses old-fashioned contexts to make ironic points about contemporary attitudes. Aardman developed 3D software that reproduced the appearance of clay perfectly, with scratches and fingerprints, for scenes impossible with stop-frame alone. In 2006 the film won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Park’s A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) premiered in the UK on Christmas Day with an audience of 14 million viewers, which is extraordinary in the multi-channel era. Another mock-thriller in the style of Hitchcock, Wallace’s love interest is the embittered murderess, Piella Bakewell, who mistreats her pet dog, Fluffles. Gromit foils Bakewell’s attempts to kill Wallace and wins the heart of Fluffles; Piella is eaten by a crocodile. Park’s comic invention remains undiminished, and Wallace and Gromit are acknowledged stars worldwide. They export an old-world Britain, reassuring for its subjects, insisting that good humour, warmth, and affection can conquer all. In 2010, Wallace and Gromit hosted a BBC series called World of Invention, featuring technological innovations. Once more, progress is made safe by the comforting context of the lost, better, and imaginary past that the duo represent. One of Wallace and Gromit’s strengths – besides their funny appearance and surreal humour – is their deep and intense relationship. Wallace has his head in the clouds and is a little neglectful of his faithful dog, who follows him through crazy adventures. Often Gromit is isolated, ignored, and sacrificed by Wallace. Despite this, the viewer gets the feeling that Gromit will always be on Wallace’s side. This sort of devotion is truly fascinating. The intrinsic belief in the goodness of people, even if they have temporary aberrations, is at the heart of Park’s stories, as is a genuine affection for their small-scale passions and pastimes. Park situates his work in the tradition of the novelist and playwright Alan Bennett, the poet John Betjeman, the filmmaker Mike Leigh, and the comedienne and actress Victoria Wood.

Londoners Arthur Cox Arthur Cox Studio specializes in all things moving. The studio was originally founded by animators Sally Arthur and Sara Cox and grew in size and diversity through the

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years. The studio’s visual style is determined on a job-tojob basis. Sally Arthur (b. Chester, UK, 1 October  1971) did a one-year Fine Art Foundation course at Mid Cheshire College of Art and Design before venturing north to study fine art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She earned a degree there and became interested in animation. Local teacher and animator Peter Leake helped make her first film, Picassoesque, based on a poem by Julia Darling. Funded by Northern Arts, the film was her ticket to the RCA Animation course, where she made Cupotea (1999) and Dear Dairy (2000). She set up Arthur Cox Studio with Sarah Cox in 2002 and directed Perfect (2004), about a suburban 1970s couple and their deteriorating possessions, and A–Z (2007), about the A–Z map of London. Sarah Cox (b. 6 August 1966) graduated in 1992 from the Royal College of Art in London with Reel to Reel, made with abstract colours and drawing on paper. In 1997 Cox made 3 Ways to Go, a short exploring the meaning of death and last moments. Three people will die separately – one by suicide, one in a car crash, and one by drowning – but they are united by an invisible thread. Then came Pain Pleasure (2001), commissioned by Channel 4, and Heavy Pockets (2004), a sad story of school bullies. Cox’s recent works include Don’t Let It All Unravel (2007), made with 2D computer and animated objects for Aardman, and A Time and a Time (2009), made from archive footage and screened in competition at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. In 2007, Arthur and Cox codirected The Peculiar Adventures of Hector, a road safety miniseries for Texaco and VCCP.

Studio AKA Philip Hunt (b. Bidcock-upon-Avon, UK, 1966) is the Chief Artistic Director of Studio AKA, an animation studio based in London. His first short film was Spotless Dominoes (1991). In 1994 he made Ah Pook Is Here!, which illustrates the words of William S. Burroughs and was inspired by his live reading performances. The film is made in black and white, with overlaps, collage, and puppet and objects animation. The visual style is dreamlike and stylized and the animation rocky, immediate, and punchy. In 2008, Hunt directed Lost and Found, an adaptation of the children’s book by Oliver Jeffers celebrating loyalty and friendship. The studio’s leading director is Marc Craste, who made the thirteen-minute Jo Jo in the Stars (2004), inspired by a

Nick Cave song, ‘The Carny’. Jo Jo is a silver trapeze artist, secretly beloved by a mysterious figure. In a brutal and wretched world, the two lovers desperately resist jealousy and selfishness. In 2008, Craste made a thirty-minute film in CGI, Varmints, based on the children’s books by Helen Ward. A  strange little creature has the strenuous task of protecting the world and risks losing itself in pettiness and indifference. Craste’s Stuck on a Sunday (2009) is a dark tale made for the Royal Opera House about a family living in complete harmony. But everything, it is soon revealed, has its dark side. One other member of Studio AKA is Kristian Andrews. In 2008 he made Rabbit Punch, about the life and drama of a 14-year-old boy. He contends with a confused sexual identity, the responsibilities of growing up, and dangerous friends. The film gained attention worldwide.

Daniel Greaves and Tandem Films In 1977, Daniel Greaves (b. Woburn-Buckingham, 1 October 1959) went to the West Surrey College of Art to study animation and he graduated in 1980. From 1986, he worked as a freelancer for several studios, but in the same year he founded his own London studio, Tandem Films, with Nigel Pay. His main themes are metamorphosis and the collision of reality with fantasy. He often revives ideas from the past, which he sees as relevant to the present. He regards the soundtrack as very important and as an element that can completely change one’s perception of a story. Manipulation (1991) won an Oscar. A small drawn figure suffers harassment and manipulation by its creator. Then it goes wild, becomes three-dimensional, and runs away through a wastebasket. The film is a good colour play in red. Rabbit Rabbit (1995), made by Tandem Films, shows a stylized rabbit that multiplies itself continuously, first in blue on a white background and then in white on a blue background, following the pattern and graphic of a kaleidoscope. Greaves animated the film as a single character hopping round the screen; the art was then defined using water-based ink. This simple action becomes a complex graphic pattern, thanks to the complicated repositioning of each original drawing. In 1997 Greaves made Flat World, about a threedimensional world where the objects and people are twodimensional. Greaves’ next film, Rocking’& Rollin’ (2001), made with Richard Jack, is about a shy and lonely bowling ball. In Little Things (2004), Greaves mixes CGI and traditional drawing. The film consists of small examples

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of human foolishness, each told briefly. Beginning, Middle and End (2005) mixed live-action and 2D in a poetic play of Chinese boxes that contain flowers, fruits, letters, and animals. It is the circle of life, presented in an unusual way. The Tandem Films studio, cofounded by Greaves and Pay in 1986, is now based in Islington in London. It counts many talented animators among its collaborators, including Suzie Templeton and Chris Gavin. Gavin’s film Evo (2006) tells the story of human evolution in two and a half minutes. Following are some of Tandem Films’ main animators and recent works. Ignacio Ferrera directed How to Cope with Death in 2002. Death comes in person to Earth to take away a very old lady, who has no intention of being taken. Simon Tofield directed the series Simon’s Cat (2007), consisting of fiveminute films in a very simple and endearing style about a touchy, stinking lounge cat. John Dunleavy’s debut, The Technical Hitch (2007), won a BAFTA award the following year. Also in 2007, Dunleavy and Jason Isaacs made the series Mummy and Baddy. It tells the story of an evil little man who has designs on the whole world but still lives with his old and oppressive mother.

Shynola Shynola is the collective name of a group formed in 1994. Gideon Baws (who died in 2008), Chris Harding, Richard Kenworthy, and Jason Groves all met at Kent Institute of Art and Design. The Shynola group made video art works and music videos for British music bands, including Radiohead, Coldplay, Beck, and Blur. They also made adverts for clients including Nike, NatWest, and Orange, and visual and animated effects for such films as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2004). They made only a few shorts, but these were of great quality. The Littlest Robo (1999), for example, is about the unlikely friendship between an orphan boy and a small robot, both alone, exploited by neglectful grown-ups.

Animus Film Sylvie Bringas founded Animus Film. She trained in France as a visual artist and moved to the UK in 1989. After studying animation filmmaking, she joined forces with the documentary and animation producer Orly Yadin. They established Halo Productions as a creative home for independent animation filmmaking aimed at adult audiences.

In 1997 they wrote, directed, and produced the short documentary animation Silence for Channel 4. It is the story of a Jewish girl who must keep her silence about her traumatic experience during World War II. But she needs to talk about what has happened; the pain can be overcome only when shared. (It is based on the true case of Tana Ross, a Jewish woman who was a child in Terezin concentration camp.) At the start, the animation is black and white; later, colours appear. At Halo, Bringas and Orly also coproduced the comedy animation series Treasure (1999) for BBC2. It involves a teenage terrorist, his suffering mother, and his indomitable grandmother. In 1998, Bringas produced Andares in Time of War, written and directed by Alejandra Jimenez, about a man’s last breath travelling through the world to reach his mother and girlfriend. In 2001, she produced The Cat with Hands, which was written, directed, and animated by Robert Morgan, about a cat slowly becoming human. In the same year, Bringas produced Bye Bye, created by Italian animator Liana Dognini (b. Milan, 26 January 1963). It used pencil on paper and 2D animation to tell a poetic tale about a grandmother and a child walking in the woods with a bag full of kittens. At Animus Film, Bringas produced The Separation (2003), another film by Robert Morgan. Made with 3D computer animation and puppets, it is the story of two Siamese twins who are separated, and the extraordinary consequences. There is no dialogue, only sound effects and music. With Morgan as writer-director, Bringas produced Monsters (2005), a live-action film. In collaboration with animator Monika Forsberg, Bringas made His Passionate Bride in 2004. An animated softporn film, it is a story of love and passion, betrayal and death, with an ironic aftertaste and a gaunt graphic style.

Pearly Oyster In 1983, Emma Calder (b. London, 7 May 1959) made the animated short Madame Potatoe, a cult film of its time. In 1989, with fellow animator Ged Haney, she set up Pearly Oyster Productions in London. The Queen’s Monastery (1998) was the first animated film to be funded by the National Lottery. It received many prizes, including a Silver Hugo in Chicago. Using watercolour on paper, and inspired by the Sinfonietta by Leoš Janácˇek, the short depicts a woman watching as the man she loves, a fanciful and passionate acrobat, returns from war changed into another person. The film rails poetically against the horrors of war that change a person

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deep inside. Memories, fantasies, obsessions, and guilt are mixed in a masterful way. Emma Calder also made the animation sequences for the Channel 4 documentary The Great British Black Invasion (2006).

Other London-Based Studios Amblimation, a big studio active from 1991 to 1995 and founded by Steven Spielberg, dealt with big American animation productions, in association with Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. The studio closed after the making of the feature film Balto (1995). Afterwards, many of its animators worked for DreamWorks. Asylum Film worked in commercials for many famous brands and produced animation special effects. This Is Where We Live (2009) is a commercial made for the twentyfifth anniversary of the publisher 4th Estate. A  paper man comes out of a book on a shelf and begins walking through a city made of print paper. Hibbert and Ralph Studios, based in Oxford Circus, central London, produced such series as Stressed Eric (2000), an irreverent cartoon about Eric Freeble, a stressed 40-year-old man persecuted by his children and ex-wife; Tractor Tom (2003), a children’s series about a truck called Tom that lives in Springhill Farm with many friends; and the new 3D version of Fireman Sam (2003–2005).

Cosgrove Hall’s later series included Rocky and the Dodos (1998) in clay animation, Little Robot (2003), and Postman Pat (2004, a version of a character previously animated by Woodland Animations). The comedy Albie (2004), about the zany adventures of a little boy, combined traditional drawings with CGI textures. Cosgrove Hall was closed by ITV in 2009. Later, it was relaunched as Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick Entertainment, led by Hall’s son Simon, with investment from the Irish entrepreneur Francis Fitzpatrick.

In Cardiff Dinamo Productions, founded in 2004, dealt with 2D and 3D animation as well as CGI and special effects for liveaction films, TV, and the Internet. In 2009, the studio was commissioned by S4C to make Happy Valley, a preschool series illustrating nursery rhymes and doggerel. Other projects included Grandpa in My Pocket (2009), a mixture of live-action, CGI, and green screen, about a grandpa so small he can be put in a pocket; and Telly Tales (2008), produced by BBC Wales. Griffilms Studio deals with original niche productions, realized for the most part in 3D and computer graphics.

Scotland In Manchester Cosgrove Hall Films was one of the biggest and most productive European studios, dealing with every kind of animation. It was founded in 1976 by Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall, directors and producers. The studio’s most famous series was Danger Mouse (1981–1992), a hilarious actioncomedy series about a mouse secret agent who protects the world. Count Duckula (1988–1993) was a perhaps more sophisticated comedy about a neurotic, vegetarian vampire duck and his towering castle servants, Igor and Nanny. On the puppet side, the studio’s series included young children’s fare such as Chorlton and the Wheelies (1976–1979) and shows for older viewers. For example, there were puppet versions of The Wind in the Willows (1984–1987, following an initial TV animated feature in 1983) and Truckers (1991), an adventure serial about small people called ‘Nomes’, from a novel by bestselling author Terry Pratchett.

By Laura Buono.

23

The producer and director Leslie MacKenzie established West Highland Animation in 1988, based in Perthshire, Scotland. The studio’s aim is to promote Gaelic language, culture, and local stories to a wide audience.

Ireland23 Sullivan Bluth Studio found itself in financial difficulty after the poor box-office returns of its features All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989) and Rock-a-Doodle (1991). In 1995, it closed. Emerald City closed soon after, and Fred Wolf Films Dublin downsized. All this coincided with the introduction of digital technology, which caused the downsizing of animation studios worldwide and allowed indigenous entrepreneurs to think big and spend little. These events also coincided with Ireland’s rapid economic growth, which led to the country being nicknamed

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the Celtic Tiger. What had been one of Europe’s poorest countries became one of its wealthiest. The gap left by the big studios started to be filled by brand-new ones. Animated auteur shorts also got under way, mostly thanks to the reestablishment of The Irish Film Board in 1993.24 The board’s initial policy didn’t include financial aid to animation. However, in 1991, a group of animators and animation students, led by Steve Woods and Cathal Gaffney, established the Anamú Animation Base, promoting the growth and development of independent animation in the country.25 Anamú and other groups lobbied the new film board, and eventually it extended its funding system to include animation. In 1996, the film board, RTÉ, and the Arts Council, in association with the Northern Ireland Film Council, instituted a new funding scheme for animation. It was called Frameworks and was an annual money award for a selection of animated shorts. These shorts were launched at the Galway Film Fleadh, the oldest animation festival in Ireland.26 Frameworks was followed by similar schemes including Oscailt and Short Shorts, open to both live-action and animation. Irish Flash, made to encourage new animators working in this digital format, opened in 2000 and ran for four years. As well as schemes for shorts, the agency also invested up to 1.2  million euros annually in Irish-driven animated features and TV series, through production and development funding. The Irish Film Board was an enormous supporter of the animation industry, developing and investing in new and established talent through the late 1990s and the 2000s. Such funding helped the industry grow and gave independent animators opportunities to develop their own projects. Despite all of this, the industry was – comparatively – still small. The legacy of Sullivan Bluth Studio influenced

Irish animation, as did the country’s historic tie with the United States. Many studios produced series for international clients and developed original projects in parallel. This continual change of register is probably the strength of Irish animation. It often focused on Ireland’s national past and folklore – for example, The Secret of Kells, Steve Woods’ Ireland 1848, and Naomi Wilson’s An Cailleach Bhéarra (‘The Old Woman of Beara’). All were funded by the IFB. There were also several literary adaptations. As Darragh O’Connell put it, Ireland is ‘a small country which has a history of being good storytellers and writers’,27 and this is reflected in its animation.

Studios Among the large studios, Quin Films28 and Fred Wolf Films remained active in the mid-1990s, mostly producing television series. Slowly, new companies were set up, including Monster Production and Terraglyph Animation (both by Don Bluth alumni). Terraglyph coproduced several feature films with European companies; they included Carnivalé (2000) with Millimages (France), Duck Ugly (2000) with Estudios Moro (Spain), and Help! I’m a Fish (2001) with A Film (Denmark). Terraglyph was Ireland’s largest studio until it folded in 2008. Monster Production was founded in 1995 by Gerard O’Rourke and Andrew Fitzpatrick. In 1997, it split into Monster Distributes, which finances and distributes TV series worldwide, and Monster Animation, which creates the animation. One example of their work is Matthew Darragh’s Pilgrim (2006), about a delirious fridge that gets lost in the desert. The studio’s staff included creative director Jason Tammemägi (b. London, 1974), creator of the

24 The IFB was first established in 1981 but this incarnation only lasted until 1987. It was reestablished in 1993 under the Film Board Act 1980 (published at http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1980/en/act/pub/0036/index.html). 25 Anamú also published a directory of freelance animators and small studios and sponsored two short animations with RTÉ. It ran three years of animation festivals at the Irish Film Institute. Anamú ended in 1996 because the members were too busy developing their own projects – so it succeeded in its aim. 26 It is also worth pointing out the role of festivals in Ireland. The Cork International Festival often programmed short animations before features. The Galway Film Fleadh – whose cofounder (Steve Woods) worked in animation – staged the first Irish Animation Retrospective in 1989, which included the first-ever meeting of Irish animators. For three years (1994–1996), Steve Woods and Cathal Gaffney ran an Animation Festival in Dublin from the Irish Film Centre. In 1999, the Darklight Festival was set up in Dublin; it ran an animation prize, as did Derry’s Foyle Film Festival in Northern Ireland. The establishment of these festivals encouraged the spread of animation over the country and the circulation of Irish animation internationally. 27 Darragh O’Connell, personal communication with Laura Buono, 7 October 2009. 28 Jim Quin opened his studio in 1977. His son David joined the studio in 1984 as an animator and director of puppet TV series. Among his works are To Forget (1992), an oneiric telling of an unhappy love story narrated by a child in metaphysical scenery devastated by war; and T’was a Terrible Hard Work (2008), an animated documentary describing the life of miners from the Slieveardagh coal fields. Its narration is taken from interviews with former miners, who speak of accidents, hard underground work, and death.

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series Fluffy Gardens (2006) and Ballybraddan (2008). He also directed the shorts Dublin 1 (2004) and Not There Yet (2004), the latter about the Irish transport system and the daily obstacles for travellers using it. In 1994, Cathal Gaffney (b. Dublin, 1970) and Darragh O’Connell (b. Dublin, 1972) founded Brown Bag Films. The studio began with commercials then expanded and made successful TV series such as Cat Little’s Wobblyland (2005), Nicky Phelan’s Crap Rap (2007), and Darragh O’Connell’s Olivia (2008). In 2001 Brown Bag made the short Give up Yer Aul’ Sins, directed by Cathal Gaffney. It originated in a set of 1960s recordings of children reading Bible stories, made by a teacher as a learning aid. Animated in a documentary style, complete with wobbly camera moves, the film has a little girl give her own version of the John the Baptist story. The childish style of the visuals suits the child’s amusing speech, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. In 2009 another Brown Bag production was nominated: Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (2008), by Nicky Phelan. It is a comic version of Sleeping Beauty, made in a mix of 3D and droll flat animation. Raw Nerve Productions was established in 1995 in Derry, in Northern Ireland’s interactive multimedia arts centre.29 The studio produced live-action and animation series, plus excellent shorts by John McCloskey (b. Derry, 1964). His first film, Midnight Dance (1997), is a visual interpretation of the Danse Macabre by Saint Saëns, with drawings photocopied on sugar-paper and then coloured. The short renders the nineteenth-century cultural mood in a nightmare atmosphere mixed with irony, ridiculing death to exorcize it. In 2000, McCloskey directed The King’s Wake, a 30minute featurette that takes an ancient Irish ghost legend and gives it a suggestive dark outlook. Loocymoon (2006) is a 3D dreamlike story about a little girl who is enchanted by the moon. In 2007 McCloskey directed The Crumblegiant, nominated for a BAFTA in 2008, with traditional animation. Made all in black-on-white, the raw, exquisite drawings depict a metamorphic journey into an old woman’s memories, recalling an episode in her childhood. In 2009 he directed Guns, Bees and Tadpoles in which a summer day for an ordinary family becomes the pretext for a depiction of 1970s Northern Ireland.

In 1999, Tomm Moore and Paul Young brought together a group of young animators and started an informal partnership. This grew into the Cartoon Saloon studio in Kilkenny, southeast Ireland. The studio produced high-quality commercials, films, and series such as Skunk Fu! (2006), broadcast in more than one hundred countries, and the beautiful Anam an Amhráin (‘Soul of the Song’, 2009), a reinterpretation of Irish folk songs. In 2009, the studio collaborated with Les Armateurs, France 2 Cinéma (France), and Vivi Film (Belgium) to create the first animated Irish feature film, The Secret of Kells, codirected by Moore and Nora Twomey. In 2009 the studio made the short Old Fangs, directed by Adrien Mérigeau (b. Besançon, France, 1983), about a young wolf who visits his father many years after his parents’ divorce. A comic artist and illustrator, Tomm Moore was born in Newry in 1977. After founding Cartoon Saloon, he worked on most of the studio’s productions: he directed commercials for such clients as Cadbury and Irish Independent and worked as an animator on TV series and feature productions. He directed two shorts, Dress Rehearsal (2001) and Couch Potato (2004), before devoting himself to his first feature, The Secret of Kells. The project, developed and directed with Nora Twomey, came from an ambition that Moore had since his college days to base an animated film on something significant in Irish art. The Secret of Kells derives its title from The Book of Kells, an amazingly beautiful illuminated manuscript containing the Gospels that is Ireland’s most famous handiwork. The film imaginatively retells its creation. Brendan is a twelve-year-old orphan who lives in the Kells monastery and likes to spend his days in the scriptorium. Brother Aidan, a master illuminator, appears one day with a manuscript of great beauty. The monk initiates the lad into

Figure 3.7  Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, The Secret of Kells, 2009.

29 Another studio based in Northern Ireland was Flickerpix Animations, established in 2003 by Joel Simon (b. Malmédy, Belgium, 1975). The studio produced commercials, shorts, and animation series, including Days Like This (2008), mixing various styles and techniques. In 2007, Joel Simon directed the humorous short Horn OK Please. It shows a noisy and restless day in the life of a Bombay taxi driver who is trying to earn enough to buy the air-conditioned car of his dreams.

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the art of illumination, thus finding Brendan’s real talent, and charges him with finishing the book. The boy is also helped by the fairy girl Aisling, who becomes his best friend and a vital ally. The overall style is inspired by Celtic and medieval Irish art – from the masterly backgrounds created and overseen by the art director, the painter Ross Stewart, to the character animation. The latter was originally planned in a Disney style but went through a progressive simplification. It melded with the whole visual style, ‘flat with false perspective and lots of colour’; even the clean up was deliberately planned to obtain ‘the “stained glass” effect of thicker outer lines’.30 The film is a beautiful succession of colours, intricate lines, and patterns, with an apt soundtrack from French composer Bruno Coulais and Irish folk band Kíla. The movie was applauded by the critics and the public, receiving an Academy Award nomination in 2010 and audience awards at the Annecy and Edinburgh film festivals. Nora Twomey (b. Cork, 1971), codirector of The Secret of Kells, was one of the founding members of Cartoon Saloon. In 2002, she directed her first short, From Darkness, blending traditional hand-drawn figures with computergenerated backgrounds. The plot is from an Inuit folk tale. A woman cast into the sea returns in the form of a dreadful skeleton and appears to a lonely fisherman. The young man’s pity and his breath of life regenerate her. The poetic, wordless film has a superb opening sequence and a touching passage portraying the regeneration of the body; such elements make the film at once powerful and delicate. Made as a fake commercial, Celtic Maidens (2004) pokes fun at the international Rose of Tralee competition, celebrated among Irish communities all over the world. Maeve Connolly observed Celtic Maidens sharply identifies it as a point of convergence for a set of enduring myths concerning Irish emigration, feminine purity and rural identity [. . .] Much of Celtic Maidens is characterized by the linear aesthetic of cel animation and graphic caricature, but the opening sequence employs photographic landscape imagery, evoking an array of cinematic and photographic texts,

from The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952) to the postcards of John Hinde and photomontage pastiches of Sean Hillen.31 Cúilín Dualach (‘Backward Boy’, 2004) is based on a short tale of Jackie Mac Donacha and is entirely spoken in Irish. A boy, born with his head backwards, manages to be accepted by other people and, above all, by his father. The short blends various techniques to create different textures and the comedy and drama are well mixed. Magma Films, in Galway, focused on feature films as well. In 2003 it coproduced The Ugly Duckling & Me,32 followed by 2008’s Niko  & the Way to the Stars.33 They were both directed abroad by the Danish Michael Hegner. Boulder Media in Dublin provided TV series for US channels, such as Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (2004), directed by Robert Cullen and nominated for an Emmy Award. The studio also produced shorts, such as Mick O’Sullivan’s amusing Barber Shop (2005) and Paul O’Flanagan’s Carte de Visite (2006). Kavaleer Productions was founded and led by Andrew Kavanagh (b. Dublin, 1973). It would become one of the most prolific companies in Ireland, engaging in commercials and children’s television series in addition to creating some award-winning shorts. In 1998 Kavanagh received a commission from the Irish Film Board to make his first film, From an Evil Cradling (1999), codirected by Keith Foran. Based on Brian Keenan’s account of his experience as a hostage in Beirut, it was narrated by Keenan himself. The film uses an extract about an extreme inner journey in the prisoner’s mind, spiralling into madness before returning to sanity. The animation follows his stream of thoughts, creating a colourful, changeable mental universe through crude, raw drawings and expressionistic colours. The beginning of the ‘Hell’ sequence is remarkable, combining figurative and abstract approaches. In 2000 Kavanagh directed The Milliner, an allegorical tale about the individual versus the masses. The short is set in a perfectly organized world populated by identical individuals drawn as hundreds of jigsaws all wearing the same bowler hat. A random error sets off a chain of events that will eventually break the mechanical efficiency.

Bill Desowitz, ‘Moore Illuminates “The Secret of Kells” ’, awn.com, last modified 15 December  2009, http://www.awn.com/ articles/2d/moore-illuminates-secret-kells. 31 Maeve Connolly, ‘Theorizing Irish Animation: Heritage, Enterprise and Critical Practice’, in John Hill and John Rockett, eds, Film History and National Cinema Studies in Irish Film 2, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, p. 86. 32 A coproduction between A Film (Denmark), Futurikon (France), and Ulysses (Germany) in collaboration with TV2 (Denmark), M6 (France), and WDR/ARD (Germany). 33 A coproduction between Animaker (Finland), A Film (Denmark), and Ulysses (Germany). 30

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Drawing on such diverse sources as the surrealist paintings of René Magritte and Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, the short – compared to Jirˇí Trnka’s The Hand34 – reaffirms that change, however improbable, can happen. The Depository (2003) is inspired by the 1994 visual novel by the English/Polish Andrzej Klimowski. The short shows the troubled dreams of a writer who falls asleep on his notebook. In his dreams, his spirit tries to fly off on book-leaf wings, but even in his mind he’s imprisoned by dark forces until his artistic muse rescues him. The essential, elegant drawing and symbolic colours suit the fine characterization. Hasan Everywhere (2009) bases its narrative style on the article ‘The Exile’s Return’ by Dorit Rabinyan and partly adapts its animation from Hasan Hourani’s illustrated children’s book (also called Hasan Everywhere). It’s a moving, delicate story about the passionate friendship of an Israeli novelist and a Palestinian artist who met in New York in 2003. The short depicts real and imaginary scenarios, climaxing in a poetic ending. In 2002, Alan Shannon (b. Dublin, 1972) co-founded JAM Media with John Rice (b. Kerry, 1971) and Mark Cumberton. He directed and animated commercials and series as well as a short. Badly Drawn Roy (2005) is an ingenious fake-documentary about an animated boy born in an ordinary live-action Dublin family. Retracing Roy’s unique case, we meet his family35 and learn about the ordinary life of this extraordinary lad. Barley Films, set up in Dublin in 2002, is a small studio under the care of experimentalist Barry O’Donoghue. Among the high-quality shorts by its young animators are The Red Ball (2008) by Alan Holly (b. Dublin, 1981), animated in a fresh, naive style, and The Rooster, the Crocodile and the Night Sky (2008) by Pádraig Fagan (b. Dublin, 1985). The latter is a witty tale made in a cut-out style. It combines a range of materials and elements – cardboard, tinfoil, paint on glass animation, and Super 8 film footage together create a dreamy, handmade look. In 2007, Louise Bagnall (b. Dublin, 1985) joined the studio. She animated and directed Colour Contamination (2008)

portraying a white, clean-cut businessman who must face his worst fears in a colourful world, and Donkey (2009).

Independents One of the first Irish animators was Steve Woods (b. Drogheda, 1955). He began creating a Saturday morning series for RTÉ, which included his first children’s short, Oíche Sí (‘A Fairy Night’, 1989). After a visit to the Annecy festival, he changed his view about animation and came to see it as a form of art. He became involved in raising Irish animation’s profile, working as a journalist and programming animation festivals. In 1994, he produced his second children’s short for children, Timmy the Ticket. After that, he used animation for criticism and denunciation. Ireland 1848 (1996) is a documentary about Ireland’s Great Famine, a period of mass starvation, disease, and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is presented as if through a camera, forty years before the birth of cinema. The photos refer to illustrations of the Great Famine, such as those published in the Illustrated London News. The references to early cinema and photography reflect the self-reflexive medium.36 In 1998, Steve Woods directed Window, based on the writings of Bobby Sands, who died in prison during the Irish Hunger Strike.37 The first part is made, like Ireland

Figure 3.8  Andrew Kavanagh, Hasan Everywhere, 2009.

Maeve Connolly, ‘Theorizing Irish Animation: Heritage, Enterprise and Critical Practice’, in John Hill and John Rockett, eds, Film History and National Cinema Studies in Irish Film 2, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, p. 88. 35 It is actually Shannon’s family, with the author himself appearing as Roy’s brother. 36 Maeve Connolly, ‘Theorizing Irish Animation: Heritage, Enterprise and Critical Practice’, in John Hill and John Rockett, eds, Film History and National Cinema Studies in Irish Film 2, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2005, p. 83. 37 Robert Gerard Sands, commonly known as Bobby Sands (9 March 1954–5 May 1981), was a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Jailed for possession of a firearm, accused of an attack for which he was never actually proven guilty, Bobby Sands spent the last years of his life in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison, where many Irish nationalists were detained. Here he died on hunger strike in 1981. During his detention he wrote as a journalist and poet, to inform the world about the inhumane conditions of prison life and to protest against the denial of his status as a political prisoner. 34

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1848, through the animation of photographic stills, photocopied to high contrast in black and white then coloured by pastels and shot under a rostrum camera. It describes the prisoner’s cruel reality – an atmosphere of restless agony, highlighted by the use of extradiegetic sounds. The yells of the protests echo in the prisoner’s head while he shows his personal political protest, writing on the wall with his excrement. The rest of the short uses traditional cel animation to describe, through almost achromatic and childish drawing, the inner world rising from his yearning for freedom. The Trial of Solomon (2002) depicts the trial of Solomon Tellirian. In 1921 in Berlin, he shot a Turkish diplomat, who was responsible for the murder of Solomon’s family during the Armenian genocide. Timothy Booth (b. Dublin, 1943) began a career as a painter and designer and in the course of this work discovered animation. In 1983 he made The Prisoner, a look at the life and work of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Ulys (1997) is an irreverent caricature of James Joyce, dealing with his struggles to write Ulysses. Both films had music composed and performed by Booth’s band, Dr  Strangely Strange. After making these films, Booth left animation to work as a painter, musician, and comic-strip artist. Born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1969, Edith Pieperhoff studied film and animation at the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design. In 1993 she and Maria Murray directed An Bonnán Buí (‘The Yellow Bittern’), based on a traditional Irish song that mourns a bird dying of thirst on New Year’s night. A lonely old man sees his life reflected in the bird’s struggle to survive. The story is told without words and homages Frédéric Back’s animations. Pieperhoff made many literary adaptations from myths and legends. Orpheus (1998) retells the Greek myth. Pangur Bán (‘White Fuller’, 1999), made with crayons on paper, is taken from an early Irish poem. A monk spends his day copying manuscripts but the harsh working conditions inspire flights of fancy; his poetic imagination compares his life to that of his cat. How It All Began (2001, made with oil on glass), is a lighthearted retelling of a Central American creation myth. Skeleton Woman (2003) reinterprets an Inuit tale, animated with a powerful, high-contrast, stylized stroke. Fairy Wind (2005) again uses crayons on paper, in a beautifully naive style. Another German woman in Ireland, Stefanie Dinkelbach (b. Dernbach, Germany, 1962) started making films

38

after studying ceramics in Cardiff. Nicer Than They Think They Are (1991) is her first short, developed ‘when the figurative sculptural work I was developing at the time started to need a storyline and a soundtrack’.38 In this film, a woman steps out of her everyday life to discover the potential of her ‘other self ’. In 1993 Dinkelbach moved to Ireland, where she directed the shorts Game of Rules (1994), Hurry-Hurry (1994), and The Imperial Message (1997). The latter, based on a Franz Kafka story, deals with the endless journey of a messenger sent by a dying emperor. Completely shot in black and white, it uses suggestive weaves of shadows, a mix of model animation and cutout. The cutouts enhance the evocative, enigmatic atmosphere. Aunt Bridget (2003), based on a story from the childhood memoirs of the poet and novelist Patrick Galvin, is set in Cork in the 1930s. A woman courageously lives the life of an artist at a time when this role was restricted to men. In 2005, Dinkelbach moved into more experimental language with the black and white Joy. A live-action sequence of a dancer is superimposed with shots of Cork St  Fin Barre’s Cathedral organ. The film represents the ascent of a spirit to heaven, accompanied by the music of Olivier Messiaen. The result is rather abstract, with music as the key element. Based in Northern Ireland, Stephen McCollum (b. Letterkenny, Donegal, 1967) directed Pullin the Devil by the Tail (2002), then turned it into a six-part series screened in 2009. Both the short and the series are eclectic mixes of tales told by Puca Ryder, an old Irish musician in his last days. They concern the exploits of himself and his fellow band members, Ciaran McGinley and Frank Murphy, who made up Stoisis, Ireland’s first punk-folk band. The stories combine many elements of rural Irish life: superstition, down-toearthiness, hell, black humour, and verbal brutality. In 2005, McCollum directed a music video for The Frames, Fake, again with Puca Ryder as protagonist. Dead Murphy (2006) is an absurd, hilarious story about a dead man meeting a killer. All of these films reinterpret the Irish stereotype, spoken in extremely vulgar English with strong Irish accents. Naomi Wilson (b. Dublin, 1965) studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. After spending ten years in New York, she returned to independently produce her films. In 1999, she and Brian Doyle set up Loophead Studio in West Clare, with Doyle providing sound and music for all the shorts.

Stefanie Dinkelbach, personal communication to Laura Buono, 29 December 2009.

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Wilson has recurring themes: tensions between man and nature, the presence and power of the Atlantic Ocean, and Irish folklore. They are all inspired by the studio’s location in the Loop Head peninsula, a remote part of Ireland’s west coast. Rehy Fox (2002), drawn on sand, is based on a folk-tale about a fox who outwits everyone around. Among Strangers (2005) is based on the opening of the autobiographical book People of the Sea by David Thomson (1914–1988). It tells of a significant moment in Thomson’s childhood, when he first sees a group of seals, his life’s passion. It was made with sand, a material between the land and sea, and the film’s soundtrack includes a local fisherman. An Cailleach Bhéarra (‘The Old Woman of Beara’, 2007) is based on the legends of Cailleach. She is a figure of Celtic folklore, an immortal woman linked to the landscape, the changing seasons, the storms, and the sea. The film gives a poetic treatment to the ancient tale, introducing elements of contemporary life juxtaposed against the archetypal language of myth. The pixilated animation is excellent and the film enchanting. Matthew Talbot-Kelly (b. Dublin, 1963) started Glimpse Digital Ireland in 2005 and Glimpse Digital Canada in 2008. In 2007, he made his first short film, Blind Man’s Eye, which used both a physical model and 2D and 3D computer animation. It is a collage of different moods, objects, and music, delicately depicting an old man’s memories. Surreal imagery and incongruous juxtapositions of everyday objects climax with the unfolding of the man’s city of memories. Rory Bresnihan was born in Dublin in 1974. After the success of The Chameleon (1996), he was hired by Aardman Animation (UK) and trained under Nick Park, working on projects such as Chicken Run and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. He then returned to Ireland to direct his own projects. Guy’s Dog (1998) looks like an irreverent interpretation of Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit. Animated in the same style, it’s about the desire to be someone else: an alcoholic dog dreams of being human. In 2001, Bresnihan directed Ape, a spoof of Mafioso-style films with an acute sense of humour. Like many Bresnihan characters, the protagonist is a maniac, a zookeeper obsessed with catching his escaped orangutan. In 2003, Bresnihan made the black-humoured The Butterfly Collector and, in 2004, God’s Early Work, a pert tale of God creating humans. The latter short is in Bresnishan’s prickly sarcastic and bitter style, with an amusingly represented Lucifer. Damien O’Connor (b. London, 1972) studied in Dublin. In 1996, he directed Mutt, loosely based on the true

story of a small boy who finds his younger brother’s body while looking after his sick mother. Le Dog (2001) was inspired by Henri Georges Clouzot’s live-action film, Les Diaboliques. Spied through an eyehole, an old man takes a stray dog into his house; this action will cause his ruin. The black and white, rough-sketched drawings give quaintness to the nightmare scenario. Dick Terrapin (2005) uses a more childish animation style for a crudely humorous story about a boy and his pet turtle. Ruairí Robinson (b. Dublin, 1978) earned a degree in visual communications at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. His graduation film was The House on Dame Street (1999), a dark and gloomy story. An investigator gets lost in a house and faces absurd, grotesque situations. Fifty Percent Grey (2001) was Robinson’s second work and won an Academy Award nomination. With a paradoxical humour, the film reflects Robinson’s view of his time. He effectively puts us in the character’s shoes, waking in a universe devoid of spatial and temporal coordinates, where even heaven is a widescreen TV. The spectator is dazed and amused at once. In 2005, Robinson directed a series of six commercials, Milk, made for the milk board of Canada. The campaign exemplified Robinson’s brilliant timing and won several awards. Later, he directed several award-winning commercials, including Einstein (2006) and Thorntons Chocolatiers (2006). A completely self-taught animator, Glenn Marshall (b. Belfast, 1973) made his first commissioned short, Butterfly, in 2002, using 2D and 2D software. Its dominant pattern is of wings in movement, creating a hypnotic world. The combination of light and dark, and abstract shapes, sounds, and colours creates inner resonance and synesthesia. The peculiar, recursive technique used to create Butterfly became the leitmotif of Marshall’s next works. They included generative art pieces created entirely by the computer with programming and mathematical codes. These works employ algorithms applied on a biomorphic shape. Among them were Quiet Steam (2007), The Nest That Sailed the Sky (2009), and various applications for Apple’s iPhone. Lorcan Finnegan (b. Dublin, 1979) founded Lovely Productions (2004) with Steven Courtney and Brunella Cocchiglia. In 2005 he directed Changes, an ironic story of two caterpillars, animated with a mix of drawings and real backgrounds. His style combines flat drawings with filmed reality, continually exploring new technologies and forms of expression. He made several video clips and commercials, as well as a music video for the band Sickboy, Silence in Conversation (2008).

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Eoghan Kidney was born in Dublin in 1982 and studied at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design. With Paul Madden, Eoin Whelehan, and Andy Clarke, he created the group Delicious 9. It was active from 2001 to 2006 in the production of experimental music videos, performances, interactive installations, comics, and workshops.39 In 2005, Kidney directed Stars. It tells the story of Sophie, an ill young woman who experiences synesthetic hallucinations. The film constructs a dual reality between our perception and the woman’s altered reality through treatment-induced hallucinations. The short was first shot in live action, then edited and used as both storyboard and animation reference. The style switches from 2D rotoscoped animation to fully rendered CGI to motion graphics, in order to reflect the experiences of the characters. Visionary and versatile, David O’Reilly (b. Kilkenny, 1985) was a supreme talent of his era. He never formally studied the trade but in 2004 he started working as an animator for Shynola and as Marc Craste’s assistant at Studio AKA. Later he quit to work independently and develop his own projects. He also freelanced for clients such as Sony and the BBC. He was hired to create animation sequences for Garth Jennings’ features The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and Son of Rambow (2007) and the video for U2’s single ‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’ (2009) with the designer Jon Klassen. At that time, he started to experiment and created his first works. These include the visionary short WOFL2106 (2006) and RGB XYZ, an animated series between 2004 and 2008. Octocat Adventure (2008) was released in five parts on YouTube; it is presented as the work of Randy Peters, a nine-year-old kid from Chicago. The series tells of a cat with octopus tentacles looking for his lost parents. It deliberately looks like a child’s raw computer animation and went viral on the Web. O’Reilly constantly seeks a graphic expression befitting CGI, with a freedom of expression only this art form gives. His style mixes many contemporary visual sources: manga and anime, video games, TV, and traditional animation. RGB XYZ, for example, has an insignificant plot, but its rough animation, inspired by early video games, appeal to different ages – to viewers who relate it to their childhoods and to those who find it old-fashioned. A similar approach was used in O’Reilly’s shorts Serial Entoptics (2007) and especially Please Say Something (2009).

The latter, the story of a dysfunctional mouse and cat couple in a futuristic city, resisted any polished appearance. Please Say Something was a huge public and critical success; its awards include a Golden Bear at the Berlinale Film Festival. In 2010, O’Reilly directed The External World. It is a visionary, crude look at contemporary society, in which reality and fiction become indistinguishable.

France40 Between 1990 and 2010, French animation changed radically. The impetus given by government programmes, the rise of digital animation, and the growing number of dedicated schools propelled the nation into becoming the third largest animation-producing country, behind the United States and Japan. (In 2007, animation accounted for 35 percent of foreign sales of audiovisual programmes, worth 41.7 million euros.) French production grew so much that it became almost impossible to screen all of the films produced in France, including the ones made for television and the Internet. The number of animated features multiplied. TV series adopted a modern tone and digital fabrication. Short films were made in abundance and screened throughout the world. Special effects ‘made in France’ flourished. Animation penetrated everywhere, including video games, another French specialty. The media informed the public (at last) of the nature of animation, declaring that it was an art form and boosting its position in the culture. In addition to the increase in quantity, there was also an evolution in the styles and work philosophy. It was now possible to work cheaply from home, and a large number of people in animation could live from their trade – a breakthrough made possible by the digital revolution.

The Feature Film Not long ago, the production of an animated feature film seemed financially unrealistic. The prevailing attitudes were that this format should be aimed at children and therefore had a limited audience; that originality

The collective also included these members: Mark Flood, Ciaran Crowley, Barry Gene Murphy, Katya Rinaldi, Sue Pendrid, Tim Redfern, Teemu Auersalo, Karen Regan, Rob Power, and Ray Forkan. Trolley Boy by Auersalo was animated in 3D to obtain an underground graffiti look. A boy faces a monster made out of the same supermarket trolleys he pushes every day. 40 By Olivier Cotte. 39

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represented a major risk; and that international distribution was unpredictable. All of these attitudes dampened the spirits of producers. But the new American features (especially Pixar’s) and the high number of animation professionals led to the emergence of a few different projects. The race began with Kirikou et la sorcière (‘Kirikou and the Sorceress’, Michel Ocelot, 1998). It was made with a modest budget and drew from African, not French, culture. Its sequential narration was outside the norm; it was from a director known only to fans; and it was unexpectedly successful. That Ocelot could make an art-house film for a large audience and profit from it was a revelation to the industry. The door had opened at last. There was one French animated feature produced in 1990, eight in 2003, and seven in 2006. More animated features were made in France in the early twenty-first century than ever before. Generally they were made with European partners, as much to limit the initial investment as to ensure presales to distributors. This way of operating contributed, of course, to the identification of a common European culture – even if the films lean more toward specific cultures. The Secret of Kells, for example, has many references to Ireland, and it would be difficult to find anything more French than Les triplettes de Belleville, ‘The Triplets of Belleville’. Since 1998, nine animated feature films have been seen by more than a million viewers around the globe (seven in France). Ten out of 31 films made in France had more sales abroad than in France. This was not only true for productions intended for the international market (Arthur et les Minimoys, Igor) but also, surprisingly, for the personal films (‘The Triplets of Belleville’, Persepolis). The expansion in production represented a feast for directors who had dreamed of making a feature. Jean-Francois Laguionie had encountered difficulties in producing and directing Gwen in the beginning of the 1980s. However, he followed up with Le château des singes (‘The Castle of Monkeys’, a.k.a. ‘A Monkey’s Tale’, 1999) and L’île de Black Mór (‘The Island of Black Mór’, 2004). The latter is a magnificent homage to the adventure story, in the mode of Robert Louis Stevenson. The two features signal the changeover from paper cutouts, which the director loved, to classical animation on cels. In the same way Michel Ocelot, a storyteller if ever there was one, considered the feature an opportunity to develop richer narratives and a chain of productions. He

41 42

Directed by Claude Zidi and starring Gérard Depardieu, 1999. Directed by James Huth, 2008.

came to public attention with Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998); then he reworked short animated silhouettes as a feature compilation, Princes et princesses (‘Princes and Princesses’, 2000). He was artistic director on Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages (‘Kirikou and the Wild Beasts’, 2003) before creating a pure jewel, Azur et Asmar (‘Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest’, 2006), which gave free rein to his humanist spirit. This latter work, made on computer, is absolutely representative of its author’s style – further proof that it’s not the tool that makes a film, but the director’s will.

Animation and Comic Strips The success of the contemporary comic strip in France, an art now recognized by official authorities and a flourishing publishing domain, couldn’t stay on the margins of animation. The relationship between animation and the comic strip has always been narrow and debatable. Very often, the film just enhanced the printed original. Two important factors modified the relationship between the media: the growing number of adult comic readers and the emergence of creators with different influences who were familiar with both arts. Of course, classical adaptations didn’t disappear completely. Asterix et les Vikings (2006), a coproduction between France and Denmark, is typical. However, compared to the output of Belvision or Gaumont in the preceding decades, it seemed there was less demand for such productions. Also, the growing number of diverse American and French adaptations of comics into live-action films encouraged the public to accept a drawn figure becoming a flesh and blood actor. It was no longer always necessary to draw the characters to make them live on the screen, and animation became optional. French live-action examples included Astérix et Obélix contre César, ‘Asterix and Obelix Vs. Caesar’,41 and Lucky Luke.42 The low cost of publishing a comic strip facilitated the freedom of expression and style that one finds in animation when creators jump from one domain to the other. Among writers, Jean-Luc Fromental (b. 1950) began as a scriptwriter for comic books then created scripts for Grégoire Solotareff (b. 1953) and adapted the graphic novels of Mandarine and Cow (2007) by Jacques Azan and Chico Mandarine for the small screen. Stéphane Blanquet (b.

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Figure 3.9  Jacques-Rémy Girerd, La prophétie des grenouilles (‘Raining Cats and Frogs’), 2003. © FOLIMAGE.

Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, 15 May 1973) used cutouts to add movement to the graphic universe stemming from his colourful, morbid comics. The result was the seven-minute Mon placard (‘My Wardrobe’, 1999). The two arts could represent two facets of the creator’s palette. Vincent Paronnaud (b. La Rochelle, 1 January 1970), alias Winshluss, is a comic strip author and artist (his Pinocchio won best comic book at the 2009 Angoulême festival). His work also includes several short films in liveaction. He codirected the animated feature Persepolis (2007,

nominated for an Oscar) with Marjane Satrapi (b. Rasht, Iran, 22 November 1969), who wrote the comic on which the film was based. The film stands out from the usual adaptation of the comic strip to animation in several ways. It is based on an independent graphic novel, about Satrapi’s life in Iran following the 1979 revolution. The film was faithful to the spirit of the strip – one legitimate change was that the strip was in black and white, whereas the addition of movement and the scale of the projection encouraged the filmmakers

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to add levels of grey. Only a short time before, the subject matter would have been an insurmountable bar to the production of an animated feature film. Peur[s] du noir (‘Fear[s] of the Dark’, 2008) is a collective work that played the very graphic card of pure black and white. Etienne Robial, a publisher of comic strips, was the film’s artistic director. He gathered together talents from comic strips, illustration, and animation including Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire. Each artist directed a sequence, which resulted in a patchwork film with very graphic interludes. Renaissance (id., 2006), by Christian Volckman (b. Avalon, 9 July 1971), was a futuristic film noir with a very rich script and visuals. Again, it used only black and white, which matched the drama magnificently. Sylvain Chomet (b. Maisons-Laffitte, 10 November  1963) received a diploma at Angoulême School at the same time as Nicolas de Crécy (b. Lyon, 29 September 1966). Early on they made comic strips together. Chomet worked for a while in England at the Richard Purdum animation studio before returning to comic strips in France. His animation career really began with La vieille dame et les pigeons (‘The Old Lady and the Pigeons’, 1998), which won numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix at the Annecy Festival and an Oscar nomination. This success allowed him to continue with a feature, ‘The Triplets of Belleville’ (2003), which was inspired by Crécy’s drawings although Crécy was not credited in the film. The story is the quest of an old lady to find her grandson, a cyclist kidnapped and taken to the United States by the Mafia. The success of the film (with its two Oscar nominations) owes much to its originality, offering a finely caricatured ‘Old France’. After a detour in live-action, Chomet returned to animation with L’illusionniste (‘The Illusionist’, 2010), taken from an unfinished script by Jacques Tati. It is about an ageing stage musician (modelled on Tati) who ends up travelling to Edinburgh with an impressionable young woman. There are moments of perfection in the film, which exhibits spectacular know-how, though the soul is a bit lacking. In a short time Chomet found a personal style, though not without influence, centred on the dramatic quality of his characters, who are often caricatured and animated with care. Chomet also knows how to avoid chatter, one of the plagues of animation. Jacques-Rémy Girerd (b. Mars, 7 March 1952), founder of the studio Folimage, was the producer and director for numerous shorts, feature films, and TV work. He started in animation directing little Plasticine films such as 4000

images foetales (‘4000 Fetal Images’, 1979). In his long filmography, one outstanding film is L’enfant au grelot (‘Charlie’s Christmas’, 1998) a short feature for children. It is a Christmas tale with an honest technique based on pastels. Another is La prophétie des grenouilles (‘Raining Cats and Frogs’, 2003) a variant on the Noah’s ark story. Its graphic style is typical of the studio, heavily inspired by the aesthetic of children’s book illustrations. There is a sort of paradox here, because the films made at Folimage are immediately recognizable but are often made using very different techniques. Mia et le Migou (‘Mia and the Migoo’, 2008) has a more conventionally Manichean script and is visually close to TV work. The Brizzi brothers, Paul and Gaëtan, managed the French Disney studio starting in 1989, where they produced and directed several series and TV specials. Departing for Los Angeles, they worked on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and directed one of the best sequences in Fantasia 2000, ‘The Firebird’.

3D and Infography In the beginning of the 1980s the French government, under the influence of its culture-loving president François Mitterrand, made many grants available. Their purpose was not just to launch a traditional animation industry but also to prepare France for the arrival of new technologies. These were criticized at the time, on the grounds that such a ‘cold’ tool as a computer could never compete with traditional drawing, but their presence grew during the 1990s and they were well established in the industry in the 2000s. The union of Sogitec, a company specializing in flight simulation, with Thomson Digital Image, gave birth to Ex Machina. For a time, this was the most important studio for computer images in Europe. Companies such as Duran-Dubois, Mikros Image, BUF Compagnie, and Mac Guff Line, working in postproduction, also created departments dedicated to computer graphics. They worked first for the advertising sector, then for feature film and shorts, which were often directed by young talents during their spare time. This development in special effects, often using animation, soon crossed frontiers and the know-how was used in big American productions. This competence sometimes passed from the framework of special effects to encompass whole productions, as with the live-action/animated feature Arthur et les Minimoys (‘Arthur and the Invisibles’, 2006), by director Luc Besson and BUF Compagnie.

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These productions, as well as new specialist schools such as Supinfocom (created in 1988 and rated number one in the world by the magazine 3D World in 2007) and the opening up of older establishments like Gobelins L’école de l’image to computers, created a new generation of classical animators and directors. They grew up with the aesthetics and techniques of contemporary computer images. Additionally, the annual ‘high mass’ at Imagina from 1981 to 2000 encouraged the spirit of emulation and enthusiasm characteristic of the beginning of a new art form. Creators explored several routes, determined to master the tools and yet keep their own style. The tools used were very diverse, especially at the beginning, and the choice of tool had a crucial impact on the visuals and final animation. In the beginning of the 1990s, computer imagery still had restrictions that the directors had to get around, one way or another. Character representation remained especially delicate. Invisible Man in Blind Love (1991) by Pascal Vuong (b. Paris, 6 March 1960), for example, has an invisible man as the main character, so only the objects he touches needed to be animated. Les fables géométriques (‘The Geometric Fables’, 1990–1993) by Fantôme (Renato, Georges Lacroix, and Jean-Yves Grall), based on La Fontaine’s fables, uses very primitive shapes. The purely 2D tools, initially used in digital postproduction, were exploited by directors possessing a painter’s sensibility or background. They often hijacked classical works. Examples of this can be seen in L’escamoteur (‘The Conjurer’, 1990) by Eve Ramboz, after Hieronymus Bosch, and Double Secret (1991) by Cécile Babiole (b. Paris, 12 October 1956), after Magritte. Numerous bridges created by the tools encouraged certain artists to mix 3D, rostrum camera, classic animation, and video effects. An example is the title sequence of L’œil du cyclone (‘The Eye of the Storm’, 1992) by Jérôme Lefdup (b. Paris, 9 June 1961). Other directors mixed live-action and animation, laying smoke trails and abolishing barriers between techniques, risking rejection by festivals because their films didn’t fit into any category. Examples include Lakmé (1992) by Pascal Roulin (b. Sosoye, Belgium, 27 June 1958), part of the Opéra Imaginaire programme, which carries the spectator into a dreamlike world; KO Kid (1993) by Marc Caro (b. Nantes, 2 April  1956); and the work of Alain Escalle (b. Argelès-sur-Mer, 27 May 1967), who made Icarus’s Drownings (1994) and Le conte du monde flottant (‘The Tale of the Floating World’, 2001). Olivier Cotte (b. Soisy-sous-Montmorency, 20 June  1963), a distinguished animation historian and comic-book creator, made 1995’s Terra Incognita (id.), featuring actor

Michael Lonsdale. This beautiful and almost unknown short imagines that a nineteenth-century merchant is given a map that draws itself according to the place it is brought to, with fantastic results. Above all, the digital image developed around the traditional idea of a visual show, with a desire for formal research at the same time. Nevertheless, the creators linked to the development of the technique were often programmers who pursued deeper research. For example, Michel Bret (b. 1941), painter and mathematician, made films consisting of applications of his programmes. Elorap (1992) is based on an animation of behavioural synthesis; Cahincaha (1996) uses a connectionist method. The work of Bériou (b. 1952) is more classical in its approach but it develops a contemporary aesthetic, using the opposition between 2D and 3D. Ex Memoriam (1992) is largely based on metamorphosis. Limbes (‘Limboes’, 1995) and Cloison (‘Bulkhead’, 1997) are obsessed with the transformations of organic matter. Sometimes the graphics aren’t very different from those of classical technical productions. Un jour (‘A Day’, 1997), by Marie Paccou (b. Dakar, Senegal, 6 April 1974), develops graphics close to wood engraving; in the symbolic story, a woman has her husband plugged into an orifice in her stomach. Afterwards, Paccou’s production methods became more traditional but no less imaginative, as in the excellent Le jardin (‘The Garden‘, 2003). Jérôme Boulbès (b. Casablanca, Morocco, 2 November 1969) distinguished himself in CGI with his first film, Le puits (‘The Well’, 1999), followed by La mort de Tau (‘Tau’s Death’, 2001), Rascagne (id., 2003), and Masques (‘Masks’, 2009). The fantastic and poetic universe of this master of timing was developed in a realistic way, using the full possibilities of the computer and with special attention to lighting. Philippe Grammaticopoulos (b. Brussels, Belgium, 29 December  1970) received a diploma from Supinfocom and was an illustrator and author of comic strips. He developed a very personal graphic style in films such as Le processus (‘The Process’, 2001), Le régulateur (‘The Regulator’, 2005), and Les ventres (‘The Stomachs’, 2009). The imagination, the highly developed soundtrack, and the deliberate choice of crude lighting give his style a powerful identity. ‘The Regulator’ shows a couple living in a futuristic town devoid of humanity, searching for a kit to build a child. Grammaticopoulos bends the computer to his artistic wishes, offering an original and personal vision. Yann Jouette (b. Strasbourg, 12 August 1972) directed several films with dark eccentric humour such as La fabrik (‘The Faktory’, 2001) and Space Feet Attack (2003). In Berni’s

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Doll (2008), a character with an outsized head is trapped in a dark universe, endlessly building a sex robot. Geoffroy Barbet Massin (b. Lisieux, 2 June 1970) worked at Mikros Images. He directed short personal films, such as Merveilleusement gris (‘Marvellously Grey’, 2004) and La chute de l’ange (‘The Angel’s Fall’, 2005).

TV Series Nourished by American and Japanese productions and helped by contemporary production methods, the new TV directors constituted one of the spearheads of French animation. Totally Spies was a typical model of diverse influences, an American concept with anime-inspired graphics that accounted for 50  percent of the market in Italy on Channel Italia 1 (2006/2007 figures). Code Lyoko accounted for 46  percent in Galicia (Spain). Les nouvelles aventures de Lucky Luke had more success in Germany than in France (from 2006 to 2007, 43 million Germans watched the series, compared to 41 million French). It was a completely new situation. Before the beginning of the 1990s the number of productions was low and, in spite of some courageous attempts, often very conventional. The opening to exterior influences brought new creativity. The most surprising thing about the new generation of French TV productions was its diversity. What was the connection between the adaptation of Titeuf (from the comic strip by Zep), Skyland by Emmanuel Gorinstein (b. Thiais, 27 April 1970), and Foot 2 rue by Marco Beretta? It was no longer a dishonour to work for TV series, because this sector had passed from the level of ‘bread and butter’ money to that of a creative network. The producers proposed modern concepts, encouraged by commercial success and the renewal of ideas and graphics.

The Short Film Many things are clear when one considers the development of short films. First, the script – very often the poor relation in personal films – came back into play. Influenced by the American cartoon and with generally similar techniques (mainly 3D), or influenced by British productions (with Plasticine), some of the new directors wanted to entertain as much as they wanted to make a personal film.

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This desire to please caused them to abandon slow timing and minimalist animation. The Anglo-Saxon animation models were popular, as was the Japanese model (France was the second biggest consumer of manga after Japan), because the classical history of animation was scarcely known by newcomers. They fished in common waters for models, and influences passed from one director to another. There was a tendency towards uniformity in production, especially in graduate films. Yet the models were often excellent and lifted the quality of their imitators. This led to French films being regularly represented at festivals and being nominated for Oscars, even winning one (Logorama, 2009, by the collective H5).43 The outburst of expression was made possible by a large number of new production companies appearing from the 1990s: Les films de l’Arlequin, Les films du Nord, Vivement Lundi!, Sacrebleu Productions, Je suis bien content, Autour de Minuit (also specializing in the pop promo), and JPL films. These appeared alongside existing companies, such as the above-mentioned Folimage (founded by Jacques-Rémy Girerd) and La Fabrique (founded by JeanFrançois Laguionie). The panorama of styles was amazingly wide. Another evolution, not to be ignored, concerns the marginalization of short films. At one time many directors, in spite of personal and financial difficulties, would dedicate an important part of their career to making shorts. However, for many newcomers, the short only represented a parenthesis in production. Fewer professionals continued to make short films after their graduate work. These school films often served as just a professional trampoline, made expressly for festival presentation. The new animator, armed with his film as a passport to the professional world, often abandoned the short once he was established. Graphic artist Daniel Guyonnet (b. Paris, 30 July 1960) is the director of several films, starting with L’escalier chimérique (‘The Chimerical Stairs’, 1986), which won the César for best short film. He directed the well-known Nous sommes immortels (‘We Are Immortals’) in 1999, made in charcoal drawing with a superbly designed universe. Lolo Zazar (b. Neuilly-sur-Seine, 26 March  1958) worked primarily in pixilation and most of his films were directed with Franck Maigne. These shorts were technically prepared with extreme care for months, which ruled out nearly all improvisation.

H5 was formed by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, and Ludovic Houplain.

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Figure 3.10  Émilie Mercier, Bisclavret, 2011.

Bruno Collet (b. 1965) started his director’s career in 2001 with Le dos au mur (‘The Back to the Wall’). In Calypso Is Like So (2003), he gave a new life to the film star Robert Mitchum as a puppet. This was followed by several series before he directed Le jour de gloire (‘The Day of Glory’, 2007). The film described the horror of World War I trenches; the clay soldiers mix into the background mud. Philippe Jullien (b. Paris, 8 August  1964), a collaborator at JPL Films, directed his first film, Le cyclope de la mer (‘The Cyclop of the Sea’, 1998), a sensitive work, in model animation. He followed it with Tadeus (2000) and Ruzz et Ben (2005), coproduced with the National Film Board of Canada. Jullien’s films are often without words, a refreshing change from the often overly wordy French productions. Émilie Mercier (b. Paris, 13 October  1968) made her first film, Bisclavret (id.) in 2011, after a long professional career. With elegance and fineness, the film adapts The Lais of Marie de France44 in images. Jean-Luc Gréco (b. Saint Chamond, 30 July 1965) and Catherine Buffat (b. Bourg de Péage, 6 June 1966) studied graphic art and worked at Folimage. They launched themselves into animation with Bouche cousue (‘Sewn Mouth’, 1998), a model animation of a new visual kind. In La sacoche perdue (‘The Lost Bag’, 2004), a scene of people in a church is disturbed by the discovery of a bag of gold. The

film was followed by Colchique (‘Colchicum’, 2008) and Les perdrix (‘The Partridges’, 2010). The already mentioned Dominique Monféry (see Vol. 2), a former student at l’Ecole des Gobelins, worked on TV series and at the French Disney Studio. At Disney he did animation for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Tarzan. Most importantly, he was the director of Destino (id., 2003), a short film from a project initially developed by Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí. Its surrealist spirit and catalogue of obsessions respected the work and the notes that Dalì had developed during his stay at Disney and the film won Monféry an Oscar nomination. In 2006 he made the children’s feature Franklin et le trésor du lac (‘Franklin and the Treasure of the Lake’, 2006). Kerity la maison des contes (‘Eleanor’s Secret’, 2009) was codirected with Henri Heidsieck; it is faithful to the spirit of a children’s picture book and refreshingly poetic. Sarah Van Den Boom (b. Antony, 4 January 1975) studied at l’École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs. Her first film, Novecento pianiste (‘The Pianist Novecento’, 2005), adapted the work of Alessandro Baricco45 and received a great deal of attention. The classical graphics present the beautiful story of a man born on a ship whose only reason for living is his piano. Van Den Boom also animated for Persepolis by Satrapi and directed very personal commercials for Acme

A lais is a narrative poem in langue d’oil, the ancestor of the current French language. We know very little about its writer, except her name (Marie), her times (the twelfth century), her country (England), and her origin (France, in those times meaning only the area around Paris). In the French milieu, the choice by Émilie Mercier of a forgotten middle age text was original and daring. 45 Alessandro Baricco (b. Turin, Italy, 1958), wrote Novecento (1994) as a theatre monologue, but many people consider it a novel. 44

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Filmworks. La femmesquelette (‘The Womanskeleton’, 2009) tells of a woman’s grief for her lost lover. Arnaud Demuynck (b. 11 August  1966) created the companies Les films du Nord and Suivez mon regard, both active in the production of short films from Northern France and Belgium. After producing nearly 25 shorts, Demuynck decided to direct the live-action L’écluse (‘The Sluice’, 2000) based on choreography. His sensibility for dance was developed in the framework of three short animated films. Signes de vie (‘Signs of Life’, 2004), is a black and white film about mourning. It is obscure and full of sensibility. At the end, Demuynck plays with the images in a surprising way. In À l’ombre du voile (‘In the Shadow of the Veil’, 2006), a Muslim mother dances in front of her daughter to make her abandon the veil. L’évasion (‘The Getaway’, 2007) is set in the world of prisons. Inspired by the culture of Northern France, Mémoire fossile (‘Fossil Memory’, 2010) describes a miner who died of silicosis, seen through the eyes of his grandson. Hymns to motion, the films of Arnaud Demuynck have a profound humanity. Gilles Cuvelier (b. Lille, 6 February 1977) was discovered by Les films du Nord. Chahut (‘Uproar’, 2005), his first short, describes the slow peregrinations of a solitary character who discovers an invisible carnival, in the tradition of Belgian surrealism. Love Patate (2010) is more traditionally scripted and is about a man’s passionate love for a potato and his wife’s reaction. Serge Avedikian (b. Erevan, Armenia, 1 December  1955) was an actor (in films and theatre) and film director. Obsessed with memory, he specialized first in documentaries. His work in animation is also an illustration of history. Ligne de vie (‘Life Line’, 2003) was inspired by a Raymond Delvax novel, Quelque part dans le nord de l’Allemagne (‘Somewhere in the North of Germany’). Despite a certain technical awkwardness, the film is characterized by real honesty. It was followed by Un beau matin (‘On a Beautiful Morning’, 2005), and Chienne d’histoire (‘Barking Island’, 2010, winner of the Palme d’Or for short film at Cannes). The latter film, based on Thomas Azuélos’ paintings, denounces the brutality of the Turkish government, which decided to destroy thousands of stray dogs at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a metaphor for the Turks’ ambiguous attitude towards the European way of life. Serge Elissalde (b. Besançon, 30 July 1962) is primarily an artist and teacher who taught himself animation. His first short, Le balayeur (‘The Dustman’, 1990), was made on his own over four years. He then created a team and collaborated on TV series while continuing

his personal production with such films as La vie secrète d’Émile Frout (‘Émile Frout’s Secret Life’, 1994). Raoul et Jocelyne (2000) is sensitive and funny, with beautiful, simple graphics. Elissalde’s feature film U (2006) was based on drawings by Grégoire Solotareff (who previously codirected a short with Elissalde, Loulou, in 2003). A little girl flees the brutality of her adoptive parents and seeks refuge with a unicorn. While we sometimes wonder what audience the film is addressing (children? adolescents?), its modernity resides in its graphic style – which is very different from an animated feature’s usual emphasis on movement – and a script that doesn’t set goodies against baddies. It is a director’s film. Claire Fouquet (b. Paris, 30 December  1971) made a remarkable graduate film, Chéri viens voir! (‘Come and See, Darling!’, 1997). Then she directed Vos papiers! (‘Your Papers!’, 2006), using excellent visual ideas to criticize the expulsion of illegal immigrants. Her style in water colour is immediately recognizable. The personality of Georges Sifianos (b. Khanyá, Crete, 14 August  1952) emerged in such films as Odeur de ville (‘City’s Smell’, 1994), about a woman tortured by solitude. Tutu (id., 2001), codirected with Pascal Dalet, had crude, slightly aggressive graphics, telling the story of an adolescent who encounters incomprehension and cruelty. C’est Môa (‘It’s Mee’, 2007) is conceived like a ballet, mixing two actors and two marionettes. Laurent Gorgiard (29 March  1965–16 August  2003) directed L’homme aux bras ballants (‘The Man with the Wobbling Arms’, 1997). This film, made with marionettes, gives a poetic explanation for the moon rising in the sky; it is a little slow but saved by a mind-blowing ending. Jean Rubak (b. 1947), originally a violinist, first worked at Films Paul Grimault. There he made his first film, Les chouettes (‘The Coquettes’), in 1970. In 1972, working with the humour artist Mose and Jean-François Laguionie, he directed Animoses (id.). On his own, Rubak produced and directed Les noces de Viardot (‘Viardot’s Wedding’, 1999), using mixed techniques. The film plunges the spectator into the nineteenth century in the company of Alfred de Musset. After La politesse des rois (‘The Kings’ Good Manners’, 2001), Rubak directed the presentation of a compilation of Ladislas Starewitch films called Les contes de l’horloge magique (‘The Tales of the Magic Clock’, 2003). In 2009–2010, he coordinated the making of Tout autour de l’île (‘Around the Island’) and Comme un poisson dans l’eau (‘Like a Fish in the Water’), made by prison inmates. It was acclaimed at the Festival International du Film de La Rochelle.

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Arthur de Pins (b. 22 September 1977) directed Géraldine in 1999, a graduate film that won the prize for best short student film at Annecy. The rhythm and drollery of the principal female character (or, rather, a male character who wakes up turned into a woman) brought de Pins immediate recognition. He worked in video games then directed La révolution des crabes (‘The Crabs’ Revolution’, 2004), a film overflowing with mockery. Without abandoning animation, his career moved more towards the graphic novel. Aline Ahond is a visual artist who sometimes directs films in live-action (often with live special effects) or in animation. Carnavallée (‘Masquerade’, 1998) won a prize at the Krok festival and is an explosion of colour and motifs. L’amour à la sauvette (‘Love in a Hurry and Secretly’, 1996) shows an Eastern European influence with its great control of rhythm and lighting. Laurent Pouvaret (b. Saint-Étienne, 30 July  1965) directed Ferrailles (‘Wrecks’, 1996), in which animated spare parts try desperately to repair an impossible machine. La canción du microsillon (‘The Long-Playing Record Canción’, 2002) is an inventive and fascinating model animation, in which everything seems to have a soul. There are also several representatives of a new school with a diversified style. Franck Dion (b. Versailles, 9 January 1970) came from the theatre to direct L’inventaire fantôme (‘The Ghost Inventory’, 2003) and Monsieur COK (‘Mr  COK’, 2008). He always employed a baroque and techno style and his lighting is well conceived and presented. L’inventaire fantôme criticizes the industry of war, projecting the spectator into a sombre universe with symbolic elements. Cédric Babouche (b. Savigny sur Orge, 18 December  1976) made Imago (id., 2005), the moving story of a boy mourning his father’s death in an airplane accident. Gaël Brisou (Tassin demi Lune, 8 December  1971–23 October  2010), who often collaborated with Folimage, directed the very aesthetic Sucré (‘Sweetened’, 2005), in which cooking serves as bait for love. Jérémy Clapin (b. Paris, 13 February 1974) made Skhizein (2008), a CGI story of a man hit by a meteorite who finds himself geometrically offset from the rest of the world. It is a very good idea (or probably a real schizophrenic mania) and is well directed. Pierre-Luc Granjon (b. Annemasse, 29 March  1973) made a good number of productions in the 2000s,

including Petite escapade (‘Little Escapade’, 2002), Le génie de la boîte de raviolis (‘The Genie of the Ravioli’s Can’, 2005), Le loup blanc (‘The White Wolf ’, 2006), and Le printemps de Mélie (‘Mélie’s Springtime’, 2009), among others. These were made in a very personal style, using models or paper cutouts, with a quality of imagination suitable for children. Fabien Drouet (b. Le Mans, 21 April 1969) is a director whose name is linked to Ponpon, a model dog animated with humour in such films as Ponpon (id., 1999) and Ponpon le pilote (‘Ponpon Pilot’, 2004).

That Famous Touch The ‘French Touch’ is often used as a label of quality and as an identification. Things are not so simple. What is the chief characteristic of French animation at the beginning of the 2010s? In this writer’s opinion it is diversity. If the politics of auteurs (considering the director as a project supervisor) generated many unsatisfactory films, the same politics have also encouraged a liberty of expression and allowed the development of original styles. On the other hand, timidity and defiance towards the industrialization of production no longer exist. But, thanks to the high quality of animation schools, the profession was nourished and replenished with new influences.

Michel Ocelot Michel Ocelot,46 who had already worked for television and directed several of the best French short films, saw his career take on a new lease of life in the 1990s. His transition to feature films, especially, brought him public success and international recognition. That he made the transition so late in his career might seem surprising, but for Ocelot the short format corresponded to a certain idea of precision and concentration that suits animation. Nor did he abandon the short film. Like all creators who have fought a long time to finance and direct short animated films, Ocelot overflowed with projects and ideas. Thus, when Didier Brunner from Les Armateurs proposed a feature, he barely hesitated and pulled out a project that he reworked in a week. He stuck to a sequential narration, traditional dress for the African women (who are often bare-breasted), and the nudity of

Ocelot is a pseudonym that was eventually recognized as an official surname by the French state. He was born in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, in 1943. 46

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Figure 3.11  Michel Ocelot, Kirikou et la sorcière (‘Kirikou and the Sorceress’), 1998.

the infant hero, out of respect for a culture he knows and admires. With Kirikou et la sorcière (‘Kirikou and the Sorceress’, 1998), we rediscover a director who had already shown us that he is a storyteller. One day he confided to this writer that he didn’t know what he would have done with his life if he hadn’t been an animated film director. I  answered that he would have been a storyteller under a baobab tree. The reply seemed to satisfy him. The success of Kirikou established Ocelot financially as a director and generated a second theatrical release, a compilation of silhouette animated TV shorts collected under the title Princes et Princesses (‘Princes and Princesses’, 2000). While he was supervising a second Kirikou film (Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages, ‘Kirikou and the Wild Beasts’, 2005), Ocelot developed a more ambitious feature, Azur et Asmar (‘Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest,’ 2006). After conducting research and testing techniques to bring his vision of Persian miniatures to the screen, Ocelot chose the computer, mixing 2D and 3D aesthetics. He wanted to blend the essence of a beautiful drawing with the magic of movement. The flamboyant result is possibly Ocelot’s best film. In times troubled by the rebirth of conflicts between cultures and religions, the film is a humanist work showing human idiocies of all kinds. In the story, a foster mother brings up her son Asmar, brown-skinned with black eyes, and Azur, the son of her master, who is white with blue eyes. After the foster mother and her son are banished by Azur’s father, the adolescent Azur begins a quest for the Djinn fairy, from the story told him by his foster mother. When he reaches a distant land where the people are scared of his light-coloured eyes, he pretends to be blind and is guided by a beggar full of bigotries. There is a happy ending and the brothers are reunited.

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After making Azur et Asmar, Ocelot was so impressed by the digital technique’s advantages, especially in the field of colour control, that his next project, a new collection of tales animated in silhouette, was made entirely by computer. (It was a 13-part TV series for Canal+, called Dragons et Princesses [‘Dragons and Princesses’]; select episodes were later compiled into the 2011 feature Les Contes de la Nuit [‘Tales of the Night’].) Why return to the animated silhouette? Ocelot, who loves purity and wishes to focus on the essentials, is attached to its simplicity and appreciates how well it works with the short-story format. Ocelot’s desire is ‘to reach a wide audience and to bring enchantment with a lasting meaning’.47 Ocelot’s films are important because of how he brings together content and style. If the aesthetic desire, which is always present in his work and visible from the first image, has become increasingly important with time as he deploys more complex techniques, still his heart stays joined to a humanist quest. In Ocelot’s work, the picture never overrides the message. Thus his cinema is universal, or should be (certain countries have frowned upon the breasts of the African women), because the questions he asks concern everyone. These are not pedantic films that stifle the audience with reminders of morals and duty. His films are exactly the opposite, returning to a classical form, the tale. Strangely enough, because today the tale is neglected, it communicates in a way that naturally calls for reflection. It is about telling a story where nobility is never in danger of being spoiled by Manicheanism. There are no goodies or baddies; Ocelot does not impose a message by shortcuts and caricature. Rather, it is by having confidence in the audience’s intelligence that Ocelot reaches his goal, by talking simply to the heart.

Florence Miailhe Painting and animation have always maintained a close relationship. Numerous directors come from the plastic arts, and many, including Florence Miailhe, share their time between the two spheres. This can be a bad combination. The artist who wants to be recognized for his graphic talent can’t always envisage animation’s potential beyond that of adding movement to his images. Florence Miailhe hasn’t fallen into this trap. She studied fine arts but she also fell in love with animation.

Michel Ocelot, personal communication to Olivier Cotte, September 2010.

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Figure 3.12  Florence Miailhe, Hammam, 1991.

When Miailhe (b. Courbevoie, 24 January  1956) was studying engraving at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, she was already planning to move into animation at some point. Moving images, particularly the animation of paintings, already fascinated her. She wished not only to make paintings move, but also to tell stories through movement, or through painting with movement. The influence of painting is obvious in her first film, Hammam (id., 1991). In order to preserve the pictorial aspect and the traditional working method, the animation was done directly by successive modifications of the basic image. The choice of theme wasn’t naive. One of Miailhe’s most common motifs is the sensuality of the human body. Languishing nude female figures frequently appear in the history of art. Shéhérazade (id., 1995) follows a similar route, and Au premier dimanche d’août (‘On the First August Sunday’, 2000) is based around dance. Considering the nudity on posters for Conte de quartier (‘A Neighbourhood’s Tale’, 2006), it’s hard not to find them crude because they’re linked to a soliciting advertisement. The obsession with the body is focused by sensitivity to the sensual gesture. As the characters are voiceless (the director doesn’t like the artificiality of animated mouths), they communicate, encounter, and live by their bodies. They dance and touch; there are many embraces in Miailhe’s films. The use of a thick line and areas of bright colour give legibility to the bodies, with the sense of a party, a celebration. Les oiseaux noirs, les oiseaux blancs (‘The Black Birds, the White Birds’, 2002) is a special case. The technique, sand,

limits Miailhe’s characteristic use of colour. The procedure is more complex than it appears. There are several different types of sand, lit from beneath and on top to increase the range. Finally, levels of paint are placed over and under the glass supporting the sand. Apart from her interest in finding a new technique, Mailhe’s approach reflects the film’s reference to the teaching of Tierno Bokar, a Soufi master, who instructed by drawing in sand with his stick. Miailhe’s films are not traditionally scripted. However, since Shéhérazade, she has entered into collaboration with the writer Marie Desplechin. The idea is not to create a narrative with classic rules. Text and dialogue, for instance, might be written in preproduction but could be replaced by music composed after shooting. Mailhe and Desplechin collaborate more in structuring the concept, each bringing ideas the other enhances. In ‘A Neighbourhood’s Tale’, a real story is developed. The title area is seen through the eyes of different characters; the passage from one to another is smooth, linked by the symbolic passing of a doll from hand to hand. Miailhe uses paint, exchanging the sparkle of pastels in her previous films for a more contemporary, dramatic texture that is closer to a story. The tools are linked to the subject – colour for stories with carefree characters, dyed sand for philosophical demonstrations, and monochrome tints portraying the district’s changes. In Miailhe’s work, a picture speaks through its substance. It isn’t a closed system; even the movements are

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worked in a different way from one film to another. It is partly calculated, partly intuitive, and the result is midway between the spirit and the heart.

Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli Folimage, the production company created in 1981 by Jacques-Rémy Girerd, was active in numerous areas: the production of short and feature films, presentations in schools, artists’ residencies, a school of international repute (La Poudrière), and theatrical distribution. They produced work in several formats: shorts, TV series, TV specials, and feature films. The studio also works in association with others (for example, the National Film Board of Canada and Ciclope Filmes from Portugal). Their production is diversified, both stylistically and technically. Over the past thirty years, numerous artists have started there and developed their own styles, as in the case of Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli. From his first aspiration to be a comic book artist, Alain Gagnol (b. Roanne, 13 May 1967) turned towards detective novels and at the same time started with Folimage as a graphic designer and animator. Jean-Loup Felicioli (b. Albertville, 18 July 1960) studied in several art schools before deciding on animation. He directed two films prior to collaborating with Gagnol. Their first work together was L’égoïste (‘The Selfish One’, 1995). It was originally planned in model animation but was made in cel animation to produce a colourful result (painted on the back of the cel and highlighted in chalk on the front). The directors’ inimitable style is recognizable by the graphics in Felicioli’s saturated colours. Gagnol writes the script and draws a rough storyboard, which is adjusted by Felicioli. Then, after numerous discussions, Gagnol animates while Felicioli handles the graphics, the backgrounds and colours. They share the direction. Gagnol and Felicioli’s films find their identity precisely in the combination of the erudite narrative text and the illustrative image. Their partnership is often considered at odds with traditional filmmaking. With Gagnol, the influence of literature, and particularly of novellas, is obvious; the text could exist without the support of the image. Les tragédies minuscules (‘The Tiny Tragedies’, 1999), a miniseries for television in ten parts, develops little scenes with a kind of nonchalance that would make numerous

48

By Giannalberto Bendazzi.

contemporary novelists proud. Could it have been shot in live-action? Yes, but the judicious choices of the shooting script, the extreme stylization of the characters, and the colour harmonies, all build an illusory world where one recognizes oneself and would like to live. Also, the image’s purpose is to illustrate. A  relationship that is too direct a reflection of reality, through liveaction cinema, would impoverish the story. Therefore, the translation into animation is essential. The marriage of the scripts and graphics, born of the directors’ love for the graphic novel, transports the viewer into a completely commonplace universe that develops adult dramas and strange narrative contexts. Le couloir (‘The Corridor’, 2005), a longer film of 16 minutes, is another experiment. Having played with dialogue in more than ten short films, the two authors decided to work on a purely visual narration. As usual, the accent is on one character and even one place (which, again, is ‘anti-cinema’). In the story, a man accepts a job that seems useless, spending weeks watching a door at the end of a corridor, which is supposed to protect some valuable objects. This difficult exercise, the directors’ best short, uses narrative development to draw the audience into a maze of questions. Unable to avoid the trend to make features, Gagnol and Felicioli directed Une vie de chat (‘A Cat’s Life’, 2010), based on a detective story about a child and a cat. The resulting 70-minute feature gives intelligent attention to the characters without the kind of complex writing that might hamper a young audience’s understanding of the film. The film is faithful to the visual style that the directors had established. French culture is attached to language, literature, theatre, film dialogues, and even diaries. It also studies the nature of the self. The animated film rarely explores this vision, leaving literary and psychological aspects to liveaction. For this reason, Gagnol and Felicioli’s productions are very French and also rather unusual.

Borislav Šajtinac48 Borislav Šajtinac (b. Melenci, Yugoslavia [Serbia], 29 July 1943) focused his artistic life on painting, illustration, and cinema. A satirical fine artist of great imagination and black humour, he premiered his first film, Analyse (‘Analysis’), in 1968. In 1969, he made Izvor Života (‘The Spring

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Figure 3.13  Borislav Šajtinac, Hôtel 12 étoiles (’12-Star Hotel’), 2013.

of Life’) in collaboration with Nikola Majdak. He subsequently released Nije ptica sve sto leti (‘Not Everything That Flies Is a Bird’, 1970); Nevesta (‘The Bride’, 1971), winner of the Grand Prix at the Annecy Festival; Iskusenje (‘Temptation’, 1971): Don Kihot (‘Don Quixote’, 1972); and Trijumf (‘Triumph’, 1972). When he emigrated to Germany, first to Essen and later to Munich, Šajtinac continued to produce short films: Befreiung der Hauptperson (‘Liberation of the Main Character’, 1973); Black Power (1973); Wir sind viele (‘We Are Many’, 1974); Wortspiele (‘Word Game’, 1975); Zirkus ABC (‘Circus ABC’, 1976); Der Meister (‘The Master’, 1981); and the feature Nicht alles was fliegt is ein Vogel (1978, sharing the title of Šatjinac’s 1970 short film).49 The artist abandoned film for a long time and devoted himself to painting, illustration, and illustrated stories. He eventually settled in Paris and became a French citizen in 1989.50 He returned to animation in 2007 with the 50-minute Le tueur de Montmartre (‘The Killer of Montmartre’) and the feature Hôtel 12 étoiles (’12-Star Hotel’, 2013). ‘[Hôtel 12 étoiles] is what is called here a multimedia movie, i.e. it is far from a classic cartoon, but rather a film composed of different things: drawing, limited animation,

manipulated photographs, videos, archive footage and elements of comics.’51 According to the critic Ranko Munitic´, Sajtinac was able to create a ‘poetically absurd world of his own, with dark colours, gloomy spaces and grotesque drawings; his films are characterized by sequences showing different degrees of intensity, by speeded-up or slowed-down rhythms and a visionary mood within the style of black humour’.52 Sajtinac’s output is as original as that of Boris Vian and other surrealists and can be appreciated by reading his writing, viewing his drawings, and watching his scattered films.

Belgium53 The fantastic and surrealistic vein that typified Belgian animation and the work of its best-known master, Raoul Servais, was followed by other artists, including Manuel Gomez (b. 1956) and Willy Kempeneers (b. 1939). However, more recently, Gomez has strayed into more marginal and sometimes provocative films, even working in live-action features.

In 1978, Stockmann-Filmproduktion distributed this animated feature film, a compilation of all the filmmaker’s previous shorts in addition to 20 minutes of new material. Since it was strongly inspired by the short that Šatjinac made in Yugoslavia in 1970, it bore the same title. 50 One consequence was that his last name, originally pronounced ‘Shayteenats’, changed its pronunciation to ‘Sazhteenaak’. The first letter went from ‘Š’ to ‘S’. 51 Borislav Sajtinac, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 7 November 2012. 52 Ranko Munitic´, ‘Off Zagreb, Yugoslav Animated Film 1960–1980’, Animafilm 8 (1981): 21. 53 By Philippe Moins. 49

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Picha (Jean-Paul Walravens, b. 1942, see Vol.  2) returned briefly to animation. The feature Blanche neige la suite (‘Snow White: The Sequel’, 2007) adopted the parodic style seen in Tarzoon, la honte de la jungle (‘Tarzoon, Shame of the Jungle’, 1975). There seemed to be little sign of any replacement artists at the beginning of the 1990s, until a new generation emerged. It should be remembered that the first big names in Belgian animation were self-taught, trained through trial and error or work experience in scattered studios. The new generation came mainly from schools and gave a new slant to auteur animation. The training at the KASK Academy in Ghent (Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten) and La Cambre School in Brussels (École national supérieure des arts visuels) had always been focused more on the development of the artistic personality than on the acquisition of a particular skill. However after 1990, the teachers, who were mostly from a visual arts background, were more interested in the link between animation and live-action cinema, seeing the incentives rather than the creative restrictions. The schools regularly submitted student productions to international festivals – which became more and more interested in graduation films – and also established production facilities. Given the technical and economic changes in international animation as well, the twenty years between 1990 and 2010 looked completely different from previous decades. The gap between independent and industrial animation seemed smaller, with one sometimes influencing the other. There was a growing audience for animation, including viewers for even the most demanding auteur animation. The notion of auteur films changed and, some would say, was degraded. Additionally, a few young Belgian animators went abroad and had the opportunity to work on some of the best international productions. Guionne Leroy (b. 1967) worked on Toy Story, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. Kim Keukekeire (b. 1967) worked on Chicken Run and Fantastic Mister Fox. In the field of animated shorts, a new kind of producer appeared. Filmmakers from the generation before 1990

had no other choice but to become their own producers. However, from 2000 real producers began to appear. Studios such as La Boîte Productions, Lumière, La Parti, SOIL, and Zorobabel were able to draw from the talent pool of former students and give viability to a genre that was still underfinanced, despite government aid. This encouraged the emergence of new auteurs. Geert Van Goethem’s company SOIL produced such shorts as Bzz (2000) by Benoît Feroumont (b. 1969), Elegant (2005) by Daniel Wiroth (b. 1969), and Lost Cargo (2006) by Efim Perlis (b. 1974) and Pieter Engels (b. 1974). Van Goethem also produced the series Dicht/Vorm,54 inspired by a similar initiative in the Netherlands. Based in Brussels, La Boîte Productions developed an original policy. It relies on cross-border and/or regional aid, in collaboration with its sister companies in the north of France or in coproduction with Lumière or Folimage. The founder, Arnaud Demuynck (b. 1966), was himself a director of short films in this context (L’Évasion, ‘The Getaway’, 2007 and Mémoire fossile, ‘Fossil Memory’, with AnneLaure Totaro, 2010). Over time, La Boîte built up a pool of artists to whom it provided a certain continuity of work, while allowing each one in turn to take the reins on a personal project. Some of these artists include: Cecilia Marreiros Marum (b. 1969); Vincent Bierrewaerts (b. 1973, director of Le Portefeuille, ‘The Wallet’, 2003); and Frits Standaert (b. 1964, director of L’Ecrivain, ‘The Writer’, 2003), along with filmmakers from Films de l’Enclume (Constantin Beine, Rémi Durin, Paul Jadoul, Jérémy Mazurek), all from the Cambre school. Lumière, which is also a distribution and theatrical exhibition structure, produced several shorts in the 2000s, including Jazzed (2009) by Anton Setola (b. 1976). Finally, there were producers who concentrated on feature animation, such as Vivi films, active in coproductions on a European level (Les triplettes de Belleville, Brendan et le secret de Kells). Some 3D studios, including Digital Graphics, Walking the Dog, Victor 3D, and Grid, worked across the range from features to advertising. Belgium showed a certain prowess in puppet animation. The movement seems to have originated from La Cambre,

54 The Il Luster project ‘Closed/Form’ (Dicht/Vorm) comprised two series of short animated films based on Dutch poetry: the classics and the modern, Dicht/Vorm (2002) and Dicht/Vorm Klassiekers (2005). SOIL conceived a similar project for Flanders, though the concept was slightly changed. On the one hand, it focused more on the creation of opportunities for young animators. On the other, it provided a representative overview of Flemish poetry and put both animation and poetry in the spotlight. In December 2006, the Belgian series was released during the International Short Film Festival in Leuven. It was also presented at the Anima festival in Brussels, and some films were selected for the 2007 animation festival in Annecy.

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with Eric Blésin (b. 1969), Claude Grosch (b. 1966), Kim Keukeleire, and Guionne Leroi, among others. Puppet animation came to prominence with Vincent Bierrewaerts, a highly original and unusual personality who was constantly researching new ideas, and with Gerlando Infuso (b. 1986), a creator of dark and tortured worlds with some of the Burton aesthetic. Zorobabel, a Brussels collective bringing together professionals and amateurs, produced at least one short film per year, often (but not always) in puppet animation. The workshop was also active with children. In the Beast Animation studio, created in Brussels by Steven de Beul (b. 1969) and Ben Tesseur (b. 1975), there was a proper structure for shooting puppet animation. Vincent Patar (b. 1965) and Stéphane Aubier (b. 1964) were special cases. After winning over audiences with their crazy cartoons (their PicPic André was a very successful TV show in 1999), they converted to puppet animation without losing any of their vitality. On the contrary, their series Panique au village (‘Panic in the Hamlet’, produced by La Parti), caused a sensation in the mid-2000s. It became a feature in 2009, inspired by the series characters but with an original screenplay. A survey of Belgian animation would not be complete without mentioning the workshops for children, youth, and nonprofessional adults. This focus on education is a real Belgian specialty and for decades these workshops were also exported to many other countries. Workshops such as Caméra enfants admis, Blanc Murmure, Pantalone, Stichting Raoul Servais, ABC, Graphoui, and Zorobabel have all taught the art of animation to many people, and some of them have done so for many years. We should also mention commercial animation for television. A driving force in the 1960s, Belvision was no longer strictly a studio, but it was still part of the Dargaud audiovisual group. Also linked to a well-known publishing house, Dupuis Audiovisual followed an active policy in the field of TV series, exhibiting its catalogue of comic book characters. The once peripheral sector of stereoscopy also had its Belgian pioneers, Ben Stassen (1959) and his team. Their studio Nwave has made feature films in 3D for multiplex cinemas, including Fly Me to the Moon (2008) and Samy’s Adventures (2010).

Luxemburg A tiny country (with only 450,000 inhabitants) ruled by the Grand Duke at the beginning, Luxemburg was financially very rich but structurally dependent on other countries. Its national animation started in the early 1990s with some aides à l’audiovisuel (financial help for audio-visual production) bestowed by the government. In 2007, the director of the authority that distributed this aid, Guy Daleyden, calculated that ‘the Luxemburg studios give work to more than 200 professionals. Our financing mechanism [.  .  .] permitted the surfacing of a real industrial platform.’55 In 1997 Stephan Roelants founded Studio 352, and a little later Melusine Productions. The two companies (one for actual production and the other a think tank) always worked hand in hand, employing about 80 people. In addition to the TV series for children and participation in international feature projects, one auteur work stands out: the Spaniard Raúl García’s The Tell-Tale Heart (2005), based on an Edgar Allan Poe story and narrated by Bela Lugosi (in a voice recording thought lost for many decades).56 Lux Animation and Lux Studio were created in 2002 by Lilian Eche and Ariane Payen. They produced highbrow TV series with budgets of seven to eight million euros. In their first five years, the two Lux companies made more than twenty TV series and four feature films. Also in 2002, Christine Parisse and Jean-Marie Music created Fabrique d’images. Many producers relied on their expertise and didn’t hesitate to give them parts of their projects, from scripts to the final images. At the same time, the two partners developed ‘home projects’ with Bruno Murer, a mainstay of the company’s graphics research. The company’s success led to Fabrique d’Images becoming an autonomous production company in early 2008. It changed its name to The Picture Factory.

The Netherlands57 The Netherlands, a small country crowded with 16  million people, has no real animation industry. However, it is well known for its high-quality animated shorts made by independents. They showcase different animation styles

Valérie Ganne, ‘Au Luxembourg, des studios dynamiques’, Écran total 663, 13 June 2007. This film should not be mistaken for the 1954 UPA short of the same name. That version was narrated by James Mason and directed by Ted Parmelee. 57 By Hans Walther. 55 56

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and explore exciting new kinds of narrative and unique designs. From 1998, the state-supported Dutch Film Fund counted animation as a separate category. The Dutch Film Fund offered subsidies for various projects, provided the film had a producer, a distributor, a television network willing to participate, and also provided that the project satisfied a committee of professionals. Dozens of animated films could not have been made without this subsidy, though the occasional short finds alternative financing. More commercially viable projects have been made with private funds, especially those targeted at television audiences. The Netherlands’ first animated feature was Als je begrijpt wat ik bedoel (‘Dexter the Dragon & Bumble the Bear’, 1983), directed by Frank Fehmers (b. Amstelveen, 1942). The Netherlands can count Beertje Sebastiaan (‘Sebastian Star Bear: First Mission’, 1991) as one of its projects because it was funded by Netherlanders’ money and produced and directed by a Dutchman, Frank Fehmers, but it was written in the UK and entirely produced in China. The film wasn’t a huge success but had some nice moments and a cute theme song. The two decades around the turn of the century brought many new faces to Dutch animation, mainly because many art academies started including animation in their curricula. Some students teamed up with classmates after graduating to start their own production companies. These included Ka-Ching, House of Secrets, Carambolas, Anikey, Lemonade, Urrebuk, Mosquito and Job, and Joris & Marieke, to name a few. Other students started small studios focusing on motion graphics, the Internet and games. Many old-timers of Dutch animation still made films after 1990. Hans Nassenstein (b. Den Haag, 1939), who had made a promising start with his Nog Eens (‘Once More’, 1982), made Fuga (1996), a story of a piano-playing man who occasionally looks out of the window into his own history. Gerrit van Dijk (Uden, 5 December 1938–Haarlem, 4 December  2012) made Janneke (1990) and the very successful I Move, So I Am (1997), which won the Golden Bear Short Film Award at the 1998 Berlinale. In this mainly rotoscoped work, van Dijk draws himself till he is fully realized, surrounded by fragments of his older films. It is a very personal and inventive work. Ties Poeth (b. Tegelen, 1957) made such varied films as Joelfeest (‘The Carnaval Shout’, 1994), Loc Light Louis (1998), and Klein Concert voor een Uil (‘Music for an Owl’, 1999). A Short Passion Play (2002), about the last days of Jesus, is made in pixilation, a technique that is not often used in Dutch animation.

In September 1993, the Netherlands Institute for Animation Film (NIAf) was founded in Tilburg. It has an artists-in-residence program, produces and distributes animated shorts, holds an archive of documentation, books, films, and artwork, and organizes educational projects. It holds various workshops and master classes by specialists from all around the world, featuring such famous names as Yuri Norstein, Gil Alkabetz, Paul Driessen, Andreas Hykade, Normand Roger, and Barry Purves. The artists-in-residence work in studios, known in Dutch as the Animatie Ateliers, where they can make their own animated film and use the NIAf ’s extensive library. Out of the studios came such popular films as Sientje (1997) by Christa Moesker (b. Groningen, 1967), Jazzimation (1999) and Scratch (2000) by Oerd van Cuijlenborg (b. Driebergen, 1973), Stiltwalkers (2002) by Sjaak Meilink (b. Groesbeek, 1960), Shipwrecked (2005) by Frodo Kuipers (b. Piershil, 1976), Jazzed (2008) by Anton Setola (b. Brugge, Belgium, 1976), and Fast Forward Little Red Riding Hood (2010) by Sjaak Rood (b. Obdam, 1962). Moesker’s short Sientje, which won the prestigious Gouden Kalf award at the Netherlands Film Festival in 1997 for best short, was turned into a successful television series of the same name, telling the everyday adventures of a little girl named Sientje. The series was produced by AnimationWorld, which made several other television series, including The White Cowboy, Bobby’s Body, and Egoland. Only a few computer-animated films are worth mentioning. Escape from Paradise (2001) by Freark Broersma (b. Drachten, 1957) tells the story of a giant turtle who meets Adam and Eve. André Bergs (b. Ijsselstein, 1979) made Teddy (2005), about an old man in a busy city. With his slow pace it seems impossible for him to connect with anyone until he meets a little girl who seems just as isolated from the hectic world as he is. By far the most successful computer-animated short is Barcode (2001), made by Adriaan Lokman (b. Haarlem, 19 January 1960). Among many prizes, it won the Grand Prize at the Annecy festival and at the Holland Animation Film Festival in 2002. Lokman’s Shredder (2002) is a combination of live-action and computer animation, again exploring the boundaries of animation. In 2003 Lokman moved to the countryside in France, but he continues making computer-animated films, such as Forecast (2006), showing the beauty of a cloudy sky in a unique fantasy world. As with Lokman’s other films, sound and music play crucial parts. Evert de Beijer (b. Driehuis, 1953) was studying graphic design when he became interested in photography and animation. He continued his studies at the Dutch Film &

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Television Academy, and his background can be seen through his strong designs and inventive camera angles. De Beijer’s film De Karakters (‘The Characters’, 1986) was voted the best Dutch animated short of the twentieth century by the Dutch Animation Association. He made a last 2D film, Hotel Narcis (1994), and then turned to computer animation with Car Craze (2003) and Get Real (2010). The digital tools let de Beijer combine 2D and 3D animation, translating his strong flat designs to computer animation in a stylish and innovative way. One of Holland’s most experienced puppet animators was Maarten Koopman (b. Amsterdam, 1951). His De Slaapkamer (‘The Bedroom’, 1990) runs one minute and shows the bedroom at Arles, as painted by Vincent Van Gogh, in a very inventive way. ‘The Bedroom’ won several prizes, among them the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Inspired by this success, Koopman made 11 more short films and combined them into Beroemde Schilderijen (‘Famous Paintings’, 1996). Through different animation techniques, we see famous works by Hieronymus Bosch, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco De Goya, Salvador Dalí, and Piet Mondriaan take shape. The Dutch pioneer of animation production, Nico Crama (b. Leiden, 1935), produced his last animated short in 1998: Paul Driessen’s 3 Misses. In 1996, Arnoud Rijken (b. De Bilt, 1968) and Michiel Snijders (b. Utrecht, 1972) decided to follow in Crama’s footsteps and start their own production company, Il Luster, specializing in animated films. Learning the trade from Crama, Rijken and Snijders produced their first short in 2000. Their resume is impressive. Based in Utrecht, they have produced over 50 animated shorts, mainly independent shorts partly funded by the Dutch Film Fund, but also commissioned work and television series. They produced two animated poetry series, in which a total of 25 Dutch poems were animated. The pair gave experience to many young Dutch animators, such as Juan de Graaf (b. Rotterdam, 1971), Sander Alt (b. Haarlemmermeer, 1971), Lucette Braune (b. Houten, 1976), Bouwine Pool (b. Amsterdam, 1974), Violette Belzer (b. Rotterdam, 1971), and Liesbeth Worm (b. Amsterdam, 1969). The poetry series, called Dicht/Vorm (2002) and Dicht/ Vorm Klassiekers (2005), were also part of an educational program for high schools and were distributed through the Internet, television, and cinemas. Cineventura was a production company located in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Founded by Ruud den Drijver (b. Rotterdam, 1957), it produces artistic theatrical shorts such as Hisko Hulsing’s Harry Rents a Room (1999) and

Seventeen (2003). In the latter film by Hulsing (b. Amsterdam, 1971), a timid 17-year-old construction worker tries to connect with the girl of his dreams at the village fair. However, events turn into a psychedelic nightmare. Other shorts that Cineventura produced include Red Light Diaries (1997) by Juan de Graaf, De Kat van Oblomov (‘Oblomov’s Cat’, 2006) by Hans Richter (b. Amsterdam, 1955), Magic Show (2009) by Milan Hulsing (b. Amsterdam, 1973), and Topor et Moi (‘Topor and Me’, 2004), directed by the actress Sylvia Kristel (b. Utrecht, 1952). Topor and Me brings to life the Paris art scene at the start of Kristel’s career, when she played Emmanuelle in the erotic film of the same name. Dutch animated television series are a rarity. Besides the series made by AnimationWorld, there was Purno de Purno (‘Purno’, 1989–1996), created by Marcus Vlaar (b. Judibana, Venezuela, 1964) and Hans Wessels (b. Rotterdam, 1963), who knew each other from their studies at the art academy in Rotterdam. The series was originally done on an Amiga 2000 computer with just 32 colours and a frame rate of 12. The series evolved to a more professional level and was popular with both children and adults. Keepvogel (‘Coppernickel’, 2000), made by Wouter van Reek, tells the adventures of a bird that wears a cape and lives in a small house near the woods. Coppernickel and his loyal dog Tungsten make inventions, take long adventurous walks in the woods, eat pancakes, and have philosophical conversations. Café de Wereld (‘Café the World’, 2003–2006), a daily five-minute program, was hugely successful. In it, caricatured CGI celebrities meet in a bar and discuss day-to-day topics in a humorous way. Directed by Hans Walther (b. Amsterdam, 1958), it was the first Dutch television production to use motion capture as the basis for animation. Targeted towards an adult audience, Colin (2007) was a series about a gay guinea pig. With his fortieth birthday approaching, the title character looks back on his life. Directed by Peter Lindhout (b. Leiden, 1958), the series combined 3D with traditional 2D animation styles. Kika & Bob (2008), created by Vincent Bal and Colette Bothof, is a fast-paced series about a smart little girl named Kika and the brave but not too clever fireman, Bob. They are blown to the other side of the world by a typhoon. During the 26-part series they try to get back home, overcoming obstacles and meeting strange people and animals. Holland’s most popular theme park, the Efteling, inspired a series about the different characters in the fairy tale forest. It was called Sprookjesboom (‘The Fairy Tale Tree’, 2006–2010), and almost 200 five-minute episodes were made for this preschool computer animated series.

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The Efteling also produced De Grobbebollen maken lol (‘The Furryburbles Have Fun’, 2010), spun off from the very popular live-action series Ti-Ta Tovenaar (1972 and 2008), telling the silly stories of Jelly and Bro.58

Rosto59 Filmmaker, musician, and visual artist Rosto (b. Leeuwarden, 1969; his real name and biographical data are secret) brought a rockstar-like narcissism to animation. He put himself at the centre of his artistic experience, but this was bearable because of the almost naive sincerity of the operation. A sensitive person despite his maudit look, Rosto is the typical example of a shy man who builds an assertive and ultimately fictional character around himself. His personal appearance is inspired by the dark and gothic music scene; his films are reminiscent of the dark surrealist atmosphere of certain David Lynch films. All of his works relate to a unique personal mythology, particularly developed in the online graphic novel Mind My Gap. Here, Rosto depicts a surreal word with a giant eye looking down through a hole in the sky. The main characters, Diddybob and Buddybob, are TV anchormen involved in strange journeys and encounters. The graphic novel, first published in Dutch magazines, suffers from its awkward online presentation, suggesting the early, goofy experiments to find new interactive narrative forms on the Web. Rosto’s operation seems especially inspired by the Sandman saga, created by British writer Neil Gaiman and graphic designer Dave McKean. Like Mind My Gap, Sandman was noteworthy for developing a coherent

inner mythology. McKean’s sophisticated design – which involved every detail of the books, including typography, index pages, and so on, and used different techniques in refined patchworks, clearly influenced Rosto’s films. Rosto’s mythology is not as developed and interesting as Gaiman’s. His films work better as independent visions; ignoring the underlying mythology adds to their enigmatic nature. According to the narcissistic nature of his myth, Rosto himself is a character in his films, appearing as Virgil, the evil ‘God’ of his world. We see Virgil in the live-action prologue of Rosto’s first full-fledged film, The Rise and Fall of the Legendary Anglobilly Feverson. It uses many different techniques: drawings on paper, 2D and 3D computer animation, and live-action footage. A man realizes the sun is a giant eye peeping from a hole in the sky; he tries to reach the hole using balloons but fails. More ambitious is the subsequent Jona/Tomberry, a film about ‘nasty illusions’ and a fascinating illusion in itself. It is maybe not as deep or disturbing as it would like to be, but it’s enjoyable as a good goth-metal rock song is, with a sophisticated sound and look and high production values. There is a little transgression, but overall it is mainstream animation at its best.

Michael Dudok de Wit60 The masterpiece Father and Daughter (2000) harvested every Grand Prix at every festival at which it was shown in competition (plus an Academy Award), between 2000 and 2004. In its own way, it was the ultimate auteur film, the epitome of a genre.

A few other Netherlands animators must be mentioned. Piet Kroon (b. Baarn, 1960) went on to have a career in the US, after making his cartoony DaDA (1994), which won the award for best film at Anima Mundi in Brazil in 1997. While working for the big studios in America, he completed another independent short, called T.R.A.N.S.I.T. (1997). Father and son Paul (b. Eindhoven, 1943) and Menno de Nooijer (b. Eindhoven, 1967) made a string of short films, including At One View (1989) and A Fortified City (1990). Arjan Wilschut (b. Dordrecht, 1971) made Shadows (2002), Penguin’s Christmas (2004), and Hard Boiled Chicken (2006). Erik van Schaaik (b. Maartensdijk, 1968), a relative newcomer, made Vent (2004), which won numerous prizes at international festivals. Animated in silhouette against a background of fast-moving clouds, a man struggles to get from the right of the frame to the left. The style of the film is a little reminiscent of the work of Lotte Reiniger, as is Van Schaaik’s The Phantom of the Cinema (2008), in which we see behind the projection screen when a film jams and breaks. Floris Kaayk (b. Tiel, 1982) made The Order Electrus (2005) as a final exam student film for the Academie St. Joost. In this mockumentary, Kaayk looks at what might happen if nature adopted some of the destructive habits of humans. After that he made Metalosis Maligna (2006), another (very disturbing) mockumentary about a disease that affects patients with medical implants. In The Origin of Creatures (2010), Kaayk shows us an imaginary future in which the world is hit by a catastrophe. Eveline Lohbeck (b. Rotterdam, 1983) also studied at the Academie St. Joost and graduated with 17 short films, as well as her final exam film, Noteboek (‘Notebook’, 2008). Noteboek was one of 25 winners in the prestigious YouTube Play Video contest, a collaboration between The Guggenheim Museum in New York and YouTube, to which more than 23,000 videos were submitted. 59 By Giovanni Russo. 60 By Giannalberto Bendazzi. 58

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Figure 3.14  Michael Dudok de Wit, Father and Daughter, 2000.

The first component of a classic is to be reassuring. A classic stands: you can trust it. This film tells an understandable story: ‘A father says goodbye to his young daughter and leaves. She awaits his return for days, seasons, years. When her life is eventually over, she can hug him again.’ The technique is traditional pencil and charcoal. The images show recognizable human beings, bicycles, a rowboat, landscapes,61 water, grass, rain, wind. The music is tonal, with hints of both cultivated and folkloric themes. The ending shows the old daughter lying in a fetus-like position in her father’s sunken rowboat (which looks like a womb). Suddenly she feels something is changing and she sits up; she walks, she runs, she becomes younger and younger, and she eventually embraces the man for whom she had been longing. Did she dream? Did she fantasize? Did she die and join him in the afterlife? We will never know – but we are familiar with this narrative procedure, used for decades in films, books, and comics. The daughter’s point of view is remarkable. Dudok de Wit perfectly describes the sense of loss that accompanies her for her whole life. The presence of the father, or rather the presence of his absence, is constantly evoked by her riding a bicycle. The bicycle, especially, is the link between past, present, and future. We see the daughter, a child, going back to the place where the father left. She must go against the wind to reach the tree where her father’s bicycle still lies. A little older, she faces the rain in a lonely land. Then we see her growing up and coming back to the same

place – as a teenager with a group of girls, and as a young adult in love with a man. Life goes on, passing through every season. After young love, she experiences maternity, with a deeper awareness of loss through memories, and eventually a meaningful old age. The musical variations go hand in hand with the changes induced by life’s seasons: at first, very sad; secondly, allegro and skittish; mature in the middle; and sad but liberating at the end. Time is touching; time passes by in a woman’s life, in her conscious orphan loneliness. The final moment of nostalgia, before the daughter finally reaches her father, is acute – it is aptly prepared for in the previous moments and awaited with a delicate suspense. A classic is reassuring within the boundaries of its own genre, too. An auteur film, Father and Daughter is neither linked nor linkable in a series. It is a one-of-a-kind work, like a poem or a painting. It doesn’t try to please the audience; it conveys a special feeling and a special appearance, which the audience is free to accept or not. It doesn’t mind entertaining or filling some leisure time and it also has a serious message. It is written, designed, animated, and directed by one person, whose inspiration can’t be misrepresented or modified by too many collaborators. ‘Classic’ doesn’t mean ‘traditional’ or, worse, ‘déjà vu’. Like a real classic, Father and Daughter has its share of innovation without revolution. For instance, as an animator, Dudok de Wit has a special talent for creating movement. Both in this film and his previous The Monk and the Fish, characters act and gesticulate in an expressive staccato

61 The landscapes are typically Dutch and historically datable. Since 1932, and especially since the early 1950s, many Dutch marshes have been drained and transformed into grassy land (polders).

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style not seen before. The digital colouring improves on the possibilities of airbrush, with some granularity and subtle vibration that emphasize emotions and atmosphere when needed. The harsh light on the characters is never so eloquent as in the final sequence of this subtle drama. There is even a mistake, which makes the perfection more human and closer to the spectator. When the father and the daughter eventually hug, she’s an adolescent, not the child he had left at the beginning. When asked about this, the filmmaker patiently repeated: ‘An adolescent is more up to the feelings I wanted to convey.’ It might be an explanation a posteriori of a choice made instinctively, but it’s true and beautiful. Dudok De Wit was in charge of everything, including the sound (he plays the piano and always listens to music when working on his personal films). For the sound he relied on stalwart Normand Roger, telling him, ‘I want a film with a lot of sentiment, but above all I don’t want a sentimental film.’ Normand Roger made a masterful contribution, especially in manipulating an old, melancholic popular tune.62 Dudok de Wit (b. Abcoude, Netherlands, 15 July 1953) first studied engraving in Geneva and then graduated in 1978 from West Surrey College of Art (Farnham, UK) with his first film, The Interview.63 ‘My student film was not a talented one, I think, so commercials were the practice I needed to improve my skills and push the limits of my talent. [Commercials were] my real training. [Commercials] give you continuous feedback, and you can learn how to be clear and understandable. If you work alone on your film, you may find out too late that your clear visions are not so to the eyes of the audience.’64 He then spent a year in Barcelona, working for a couple of small studios, until he settled in London, without ever breaking off his connections with the Netherlands. From 1981 to 2003 he worked with Richard Purdum Productions, which he considered the real forge for his creative personality. In 1992 he created the pilot film Tom Sweep: The Bin, a three-minute film that shows the misadventures of Tom the

dustman as he tries to keep his neighbourhood clean. The story takes place against a sparsely-drawn background. There is only Tom, the trash can, and various characters who drive him mad by throwing garbage everywhere except in the bin. The series was not given the green light. In the meantime, the filmmaker had established a contact with Folimage, the Valence-based production company that had a program for artists-in-residence. His next film was Le moine et le poisson (‘The Monk and the Fish’, France, 1994), based on a Serge Besset adaptation of Arcangelo Corelli’s La follia.65 In a Romanic monastery, equipped with a sumptuous aqueduct, a monk tries to capture a fish in every possible way, leading both characters on a spiritual journey. This film was nominated for an Oscar, won numerous prizes including a César, and gave its author an international reputation, a 41-year-old ‘discovery’. After Father and Daughter and lots of work as a book illustrator, The Aroma of Tea (2006) left Dudok de Wit’s admirers wrong-footed. The film differs significantly from his past titles: it’s an abstract three-minute work in which a small dot moves rhythmically with the music (by Corelli, again) through unreal landscapes, all painted with tea. The ‘de Wit’s way to movement’ is easily recognizable, the dot’s abstract navigation is sometimes captivating, but in all The Aroma of Tea seems a divertissement before something really challenging – a feature film.

Germany after Reunification66 There was a boom in animated film in Germany in the early 1980s, before the reunification. The main filmmakers with a noticeable impact on animation started work in the 1960s and were strongly linked to experimental film. Most of them were college teachers. Two of the most important directors of this generation were Franz Winzentsen and Helmut Herbst. Herbst started with a teaching assignment at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (DFFB) as early as the late 1960s. From 1985 to 2000, he was a professor at the HFG Offenbach.

The tune’s title is Valurile Dunari (‘The Danube’s Waves’), by Romanian composer Iosif Ivanovici (1845–1902). It was first published in Bucharest in 1880. 63 A little man tries to interview various people and finds it difficult to obtain answers. Screened at the Annecy Festival in 1979. 64 Nina Stipetic´, ‘Animation Is Bloody Hard Work’, Zagreb International Animation Film Festival Festivalnews (2004): 7. 65 Serge Besset was the talented musician of Folimage. Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was an Italian composer and violinist, famous for giving shape to the Concerto Grosso. All his creations are included in six opus numbers; they are mostly devoted to serious and popular sonatas and trio sonatas. ‘La Follia’ is in the Sonata Opus 5. Although ‘follia’ means ‘madness’ in Italian, this was not an attempt at describing mental illness but the name of a standardized musical theme. 66 By Ulrich Wegenast. 62

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The German Colleges: Where the Art of Animated Film Began Among the important colleges in the mid-1980s were the HFG Offenbach and the HfbK Hamburg, where Winzentsen taught. The schools encouraged innovative means of creation through abstract film, video clips, and collage film, invigorating the fine-art animation in Germany. A major contribution to the development of this form was made by the cartoon class of the Stuttgart Public Academy of Fine Arts, established by Albrecht Ade in 1977. Animation directors such as Andreas Hykade, Thomas Meyer-Hermann, and Gil Alkabetz studied there. In the early 1990s, the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy was spun off from the cartoon class. The academy’s Institute for Film Animation became one of the world’s leading educational facilities for film animation. The teaching staff at the Film Academy included animation artists like Jochen Kuhn from Hamburg, with his original style developed from painting, his laconic humour, and his experience in literature. He helped shape the younger generation, including the animation director and screenwriter Daniel Nocke. An animation faculty was created at the Film & Television Academy Konrad Wolf in the mid-1980s. It offered one of the world’s most successful animation degree programs. Christina Schindler and the Israeli animation artist Gil Alkabetz taught there. Other very successful schools included the animation programmes at the Kassel College of Art (since 1979) and the College of Media Arts in Cologne. At the Kassel College of Art, the twin brothers Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein (b. Hildesheim, 20 March 1962) won an Academy Award with Balance (1989), as did Thomas Stellmach (b. Straubing, 1965) and Tyron Montgomery (a.k.a. Wolfgang Schröter, b. Miltenberg, 1967) with Quest (1996). Both films were produced under the aegis of Paul Driessen in his capacity as teacher. The animation programme at the College of Media Arts in Cologne, founded in 1990, is at the interface of media arts and film production. In the 2000s, it was supervised by Raimund Krumme. Several private colleges offered degree programmes in film animation, such as the Animation School, Hamburg and the European Animation Master Class in Halle. The number of schools led to an animation boom from the early 1990s. Among the award-winning films were the two Oscar winners Balance and Quest, as well as Wir lebten im Gras (‘We Lived In Grass’, 1995) by Andreas Hykade, Morir de Amor (2004) by Gil Alkabetz, _grau (‘_Grey’, 2004)

by Robert Seidel, and 458nm (2006) by Tom Weber, Jan Bitzer, and Ilija Brunck.

The Renewal of the Abstract Animated Film The success of German animated film is an achievement not only of the colleges but also of independent animation directors such as Bärbel Neubauer and Kirsten Winter, who continuously promoted animated film culture with their work. Neubauer and Winter especially used experimental methods, tracing back to the avant-garde of the 1920s. Those old abstract films, then called ‘absolute film’, contributed to the global reputation of the German film. Winter and Neubauer deal carefully with this cinematic heritage, which is directly connected to the fine arts, and especially painting. At the same time, they added some new aspects. In the abstract Feuerhaus (‘Fire House’, 1998) Neubauer uses the drawn-on-film technique, adding self-composed electronic music with a techno beat. Music plays a major role in Winter’s Clocks (1995), a collage of material that animates painting and photography and provides an associative insight into the work of composer and pianist Elena KatsChernin. The film points out how close many German animated films are to painting. There are no set boundaries between abstraction and representation, or between motion picture and static picture. Together with Gerd Gockell, Winter developed and tested a number of animation techniques in her production studio, Anigraf, in Hannover. She studied graphic design and liberal arts at the HBK Braunschweig. Like many animation directors, she can be placed between the applied and liberal arts. Her longtime partner Gerd Gockell, producer of the outstanding animated documentary Muratti  & Sarotti (2000), on the history of German animated film, also uses many techniques in filmmaking that are usually more associated with painting than with classic cartoons. Such Gockell films as Miles, So What! (1993), like Winter’s films, are literally animated paintings.

Underground, Subversion, and Animation Music plays an important role in Mariola Brillowska’s productions. Musician Felix Kubin adds the soundtrack,

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which is on an equal footing with the visuals, in many of her films. For Der falsche Spieler (‘The Wrong Player’), the author and singer Max Goldt (Foyer des Arts) was also on the team. However, Brillowska’s movies do not refer to the avant-garde tradition of the 1920s. They are, rather, related to the underground comic-book culture. At first glance, her works appear shrill and absurd; the topics wander around lust and are a bizarre fictionalization of the present time. But Brillowska’s films are a kaleidoscope of our society, like contemporary science fiction, brazenly breaking taboos. Her creative film work made it to the stage, too, in a very special form of revue and cabaret. The Polish-born Brillowska acts as grand marshal, often crashing the show. Her colourful and gaudy style occasionally resembles the satirical work of the Estonian animated filmmaker Priit Pärn, combining striking pop art with absurd Eastern European humour. Hanna Nordholt and Fritz Steingrobe, an artist couple from Hamburg, began their film production with anarchic Super 8 movies and the battle cry, ‘We are the audience striking back!’ in the mid-1980s. Their films analyze and reflect on the media, such as Das dritte Fenster (‘The Third Window’) from 1998. In their films they find discontinuities in the media and the aesthetics of reproducible media in a quite satisfying fashion, combined with subversive humour. Their film Yo Lo Vi (title in Spanish meaning ‘I Saw It’, 2003) is the successful attempt to create a convincing, and comparably associative, film response to Francisco de Goya. The title Yo Lo Vi is taken from an etching of Goya’s graphic cycle Los desastres de la guerra (# 44). (The etching shows the Spanish population running from Napoleonic troops.)

Figure 3.15  Gil Alkabetz, Morir de Amor, 2004.

Nordholt and Steingrobe’s film, however, is more an approach to Goya’s work and his creative and social position than a direct illustration. The filmmakers link the Spanish insurgents fighting against the French troops in the early nineteenth century and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. However, they didn’t lose track of Goya’s aesthetic; they successfully revive his complex art and his addiction to the grotesque, using computer animation.

Reduction The bottom line is that the German animated short film is often more closly related to the fine arts than it is to the typical cartoon. The cartoon aesthetics are reduced, even though these films develop cartoon-like structures and characters. One master of this kind of reduction is Gil Alkabetz, who used and enhanced one of Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette techniques in his early film Swamp (1991). Jan Koester also used silhouettes in his award-winning Our Man in Nirvana (2005). However, Alkabetz does not simply use reduction as one stylistic device amongst many. He also extends it to his elliptical storytelling. In Yankale (1995), Rubicon (1997), and Morir de Amor (2004), Gil Alkabetz combines an economic and very effective narration and presentation with subtle and absurd humour. Regular filmgoers probably know Alkabetz mainly from his animated contribution to the internationally successful feature Lola rennt (‘Run Lola Run’, 1997–1998). Alkabetz’s fellow student Andreas Hykade doesn’t like abundance either. He created his own universe of characters in his movies, taken from totally different backgrounds

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than those of the Israeli-born Alkabetz. Hykade was born in Altötting and from infancy grew up with Catholicism and its practices, especially the cult of the Virgin Mary. His short Wir lebten im Gras (‘We Lived In Grass’, 1995) was honoured, among others, with the Mercedes Benz Award at the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film. The film portrays a disturbing confrontation with Hykade’s childhood in Upper Bavaria without being a one-dimensional autobiography or a linear narrative. Childlike fantasies and reality become blurred. The depressing setting of the film becomes almost physical, marked by ecclesiastical repression, family, and suppressed sexuality. ‘We Lived In Grass’ is also a story of finding one’s own identity, rich in metaphors. It is a film about growing up, like Hykade’s later Der Kloane (‘The Runt’, 1996), which won the German shorts award in 2007. ‘The Runt’ is about a kind of initiation ceremony, whereas the protagonist of ‘We Lived In Grass’ must find the way to his own life. In all his films, Hykade finds ways to tell highly complex and psychologically empathetic stories with very simple characters. Ring of Fire (2000) is presented in cinemascope format in the form of a spaghetti western; it is a dark investigation of the nature of sexual fantasy, in the manner of Japan’s Yoji Kuri. As in ‘We Lived In Grass’, the narrative is nonlinear and associative. To explore and explain its details would take days, but its power, Hykade’s hunger for living, his sight-and-sound universe expanding, all capture the viewer’s mind. The characters make do with few visual attributes, yet they are recognizable and emotionally believable. Hykade combines universality with active graphics, creating a completely independent and recognizable style. His animation series Tom & das Erdbeermarmeladenbrot (‘Tom & the Strawberry Jam Bread’, from 2005) and his award-winning music videos for the German punk rock band Die toten Hosen are proof of his success. In the matter of reduction, Raimund Krumme carries minimalism in animation to the extreme. His films are mostly black and white, producing figurative motion with only a few strokes. Seiltänzer (‘Rope Dancer’, 1986), Die Kreuzung (‘Crossroads’, 1991), and Passage (1994) are not simply brittle finger exercises and motion studies. They are also fashionable compositions, playing with perspective and spatial perception in a virtuoso way.

Figure 3.16 Raimund Krumme, Die Kreuzung (‘Crossroads’), 1991. For Krumme, the animated space is narrative space as well. His narratives are mostly about communication and its failure. His short The Message (2000) offers abstract and musical parables on social interaction and the increasing absurdities of daily life. Max Hattler (b. Ulm, 2 February  1976), a wandering abstract animator, made a name for himself both with live audiovisual performances (2007–2015) and for such outstanding films as Collision (2005), Spin (2010), Shift (2012), and 1925 aka Hell (2012). Hannes Rall (b. Tübingen, 4 October  1965) was an illustrator, animation director, comic-book artist, and professor. His films Der Raben (‘The Raven’, 1999) and Der Erlkönig (‘The Erlking’, 2003) won numerous prizes worldwide. His work shows the influence of the comic-book style but equally emphasizes expressionism, art nouveau, and UPA style. Das kalte Herz (‘The Cold Heart’, 2013) is based on a short story by Wilhelm Hauff.67 An ambitious and naive charcoal-burner strikes a deal with an evil spirit of the forest and only another good-hearted spirit can save him and his wife from ruin. The narration is captivating, the animation superlative.

Reflection and Narrative Jochen Kuhn also seeks a minimalistic approach, albeit in a different way. His animated films go back and forth, from static picture to moving picture. Kuhn does not want everything to be meticulously animated and his films often only have a few animated phases. Kuhn is interested in the process of creation; his focus is not on the completed piece of

67 During his short but prolific life (1802–1827), Hauff wrote – among many other things – a collection of Märchen (fables), which have been famous for two centuries in German-speaking countries. They include Das kalte Herz.

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Figure 3.17  Hannes Rall, Das kalte Herz (‘The Cold Heart’), 2013.

art but on the flow of pictures. Similar to the work of South African animator William Kentridge, Kuhn’s paintings are constantly erased or altered by the following picture. He carried this artistic process to the extreme in Exit (2008). However, Kuhn’s films are not aesthetic experiments. Such titles as Lob des Anrufbeantworters (‘Praise of the Answering Machine’, 1989) and Brief an die Produzentin (‘Letter to the Producer’, 1985) show his subtle humour. Kuhn is a great narrator with distinctive powers of observation. He sonorously narrates most of his films and he is also responsible for the music. His micro-stories are about everyday occurrences, pleasant embarrassments, and apparent banalities that show the ups and downs of our lives. In the case of Die Beichte (‘The Confession’, 1990), though, Jochen Kuhn brings up great people of recent history – Pope John Paul II, former East German president Erich Honecker – in his unpretentious way. In the film, the battle of ideologies and religions seems to have ended, leaving banalities, embarrassments, and an almost tender reconciliation. Daniel Nocke, one of Jochen Kuhn’s students, has a similar laconic humour. Besides being an animated filmmaker with an emphasis on puppet animation, Nocke is also a gifted screenwriter. His first 3D-rendered computeranimated film, Kein Platz für Gerold (‘No Space for Gerold’, 2006) won the prestigious Short Tiger award. ‘No Space for Gerold’ is not a typical computer-animated film but a cunning play with genres, animating a fatal conversation between animal roommates, in the manner of reality television. By using an apparently running camera, Nocke stays away from computer animation that is too smooth and polished. Nocke’s puppet films show that he is not an animation artist in the usual sense. His methods and use of puppet animation are too peculiar and independent. The puppets are gnarly and bizarre, comparable to the grotesque

figures of German sculptor Thomas Schütte. His films focus on dialogues. The protagonists of his animated feature Der Peitschenmeister (‘The Whip Master’, 1998), set in the Middle Ages, talk in the manner of people in the 1970s. All of his films are about the subtle complexities of social interaction and barely visible social control. In his 1999 Trösterkrise (‘Comforters’ Crisis’), a kind of Good Samaritan attempts to impose his help on his neighbours, but his unwelcome actions lead to ruin.

The Art of Puppet Animation Heinrich Sabl’s approach to the animated puppet film is quite different. Sabl studied puppetry at the East Berlin Drama School and later worked at the animated film studio in Dresden, then went to Kassel Art College to study animation. His films are influenced by his theatre experience and by authors including Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, and Alfred Jarry. For example, Sabl made an independent animated puppet film adaptation of Jarry’s Père Ubu. Sabl’s theatre background is reflected in the vitality of his puppet films, which are rough and impetuous. His staging is powerful and energetic, involving the audience almost physically. Der Hahn (‘The Cock’, 1995) is a special kind of mechanical theatre. It shows a fight between a rooster and hens, set to the metallic-sounding music of Einstürzende Neubauten’s percussionist, F. M. Einheit. It is a parable on sexuality and power, compressed into nine minutes. Its production was tricky; the animation was done with spring-mounted puppets in the open air, outside the controlled environment of the studio. It was exactly this method that made the film distinctive and breathtaking. Das Rad (‘The Wheel’, 2001) by Arvid Uibel, Chris Stenner, and Heidi Wittlinger enhanced the global reputation

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of the German animated puppet film. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt-based company Scopas Medien AG, specializing in puppet and clay animation, made the first German animated puppet feature since World War II, Sandmännchen – Abenteuer im Traumland (‘Sandman – Adventures in Dreamland’, 2010). Steffen Schäffler (b. Trier, 1968) made a film called The Periwig-Maker (1999)68 that tells the story of a man who seals himself off in a medieval plague-infested London in order to escape infection. The American critic Maureen Furniss wrote: Impressive sets and props lend a great deal to the visuals in the film. A long tracking shot opens the film, taking the viewer from an exterior that includes the water of the Thames and the London Bridge through the streets of London in which the action occurs. The entire set, which is given depth with the use of false perspective, measured 4.5 meters wide by 10 meters long. It contains eleven houses based on historical drawings, which contain handmade and fitted tiles, walls made of individual miniature bricks and other examples of detailed miniature work. Influenced by the legendary Jirˇí Trnka, the filmmakers used a minimalist approach to puppet making, relying on body movements rather than facial changes to create expressions. Only the eyes and eyelids of the puppets’ faces were moveable. The puppets themselves were moved through the use of metal armatures under polyurethane foam, silicone rubber and foam latex exteriors. Wigs were hand-made from mohair. The puppets were built by Mackinnon & Saunders in England on a scale of 1:5; the largest puppet measured 36 cm. Along with animated objects, real flames provided light from candles, a fireplace and other sources. The 15-minute film was created over a six-year period at Schäffler’s Berlin studio, Ideal Standard Film, which the director founded in 1994 with sister and producer Annette Schäffler. The story was based on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.69

Winning Students Artistic animation had its breakthrough in Germany with Balance (1989) by the Lauenstein brothers. It has everything

an animated film requires: a compressed and universal storyline, extraordinary artwork, and precise timing. The plot is simple yet complex. Five men stand on an unstable disc in a dark universe. In their midst is a suitcase. Every man wants to possess it, causing a ludicrous fight and putting the entire disc world out of balance. After all but one of the men has fallen, the suitcase is unreachable at the far end of the disc. The sole survivor can only watch it until the end of his days. The strength of the animated film lies in this concise way of pictorially annotating the human condition. Balance, a student project that is considered an icon of animation history, was started at the HfbK Hamburg and completed at Kassel Art College. Quest was also created at Kassel. Tyron Montgomery and Thomas Stellmach’s work is an animated puppet film, following the logic of a video game. A  sandman looking for water goes through different materials (rock, iron, paper, etc.) and is faced with perils such as a buzz saw throwing out sparks in the World of Iron. He cannot escape his fate.

Humourous Germany? Animated Movie Theatre Productions Animated films made after the reunification became more successful, creatively and commercially. Werner – Beinhart! (‘Werner – Hard As Bone!’, 1990), by producer Gerhard Hahn, and Das kleine Arschloch (‘The Little Bastard’, 1997) by Michael Schaack and Veit Vollmer, were restricted to adult-only, but large, audiences. Their humour is occasionally flat and trivial and was hard to sell outside German-speaking areas. Feature film animation subsequently began to concentrate on young children (and their mothers) as the target audience. There were charming films that reached an international audience: Der kleine Eisbär 1 and 2 (‘The Little Polar Bear’, 2001 and 2005) and the Laura’s Star films (the first in 2004, the second coproduced with China and released in 2009) by Thilo Graf Rothkirch (Cartoon Film Berlin) and Piet de Rycker. Die drei Räuber (‘The Three Robbers’, 2007)70 was a classic cartoon

Although conceived and made in Germany, the film was (and still is) mistaken for a British film. Maureen Furniss, ‘Fresh from the Festivals: December 2000’s Film Reviews’, Animation World Magazine 5, no. 9 (December 2000). 70 Based on a children’s book by the Alsatian draftsman and illustrator Tomi Ungerer and directed by Hayo Freitag. Freitag had revealed his abilities in many shorts and in the feature Käpt’n Blaubär (‘Captain Blaubär’, 1999). 68 69

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feature by Animation X and Stephan Schesch. It was a commercial hit in Germany and reached an audience of 700,000 in France. This made it the most successful German animated film ever released to cinemas, and it won the audience award at Annecy. Some companies faced difficult times during this period, however, and some even had to give up, such as the Hamburg-based Trickcompany and Toons ‘n’ Tales.

New Form of 3D-Rendered Computer Animations From the mid-1990s, computer-aided 3D animation became more and more important. It was encouraged by, among others, Thomas Haegele, head of the Institute of Animation at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy. The first big computer-aided 3D animated movie was Lenard Krawinkel’s Back to Gaya (2004). Subsequently, Holger Tappe’s Hannover-based company Ambient Entertainment, which was responsible for its production, produced a string of feature-length CGI films, including Urmel aus dem Eis (‘Urmel from the Ice’, 2006), Urmel voll in Fahrt (‘Urmel at Full Throttle’, 2008), and Die Konferenz der Tiere (‘The Animals’ Conference’, 2010). Numerous experiments were conducted with computeranimated short films. Robert Seidel’s abstract _grau (‘_Grey’, 2004) combines art and technology. The film achieves extraordinary picturesque effects between twoand three-dimensional spaces, visualizing the fragments of memories of a traffic accident. The usual 3D rendering software was not sufficient for Seidel; he used medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). While producing the film, Seidel attached great importance to the fact that it was not simply abstract pictures but breathing pictures that trigger a reaction in the observer and prompt him to find his own history. ‘_Grey’ makes use of the avant-garde 1920s tradition but dynamizes the abstract forms in real time, exploring organic forms and biological behaviour patterns. 458nm by Tom Weber, Jan Bitzer, and Ilija Brunck is a rather figurative but also experimental film. It begins with a quotation from a poem by Theodor Storm on impermanence:

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A forest engulfed by fog, Has seen your silent happiness; Covered by scent and twilight, This beautiful world will perish. An infatuated conflict arises between two snails – they are a cross between robots and biological creatures – to pulsating electronic music. The students from the Film Academy of Baden-Württemberg were inspired by the nature film Microcosmos.71 which shows two snails apparently trying to kiss. Their film is a contemporary romance, exploring the blurring lines between humans, animals, and machines and generating a new technoaesthetics. A Machinima scene originated in the late 1990s, creating computer-aided animated films on a no-budget basis. One of the most interesting representatives of this genre was Friedrich Kirschner. His work was based on the video game Unreal Tournament. The result, however, does not resemble typical game aesthetics. The so-called Demoscene, which originated in the hacker movement of the 1980s, was very active in Germany. Demoscene’s animations are often abstract and heavy on music, using only a small data volume. They are – sometimes unknowingly – connected to the ‘absolute films’ of the 1920s, tying in with probably the most interesting time for German animation.

Bärbel Neubauer72 The five-minute Feuerhaus (‘Firehouse’, 1998) was one of the best animated films of its century, although very few people realized that. It uses rapid, rhythmic images of leaves and stones, stalks and vegetable veins, linked to no less rhythmic music and sound. It was created by flashlight exposures of plants and stones directly on print stock. Maureen Furniss wrote: To my mind, Firehouse is one of Neubauer’s most fullyrealized films, in part because of the lively, intriguing score she has composed for it, and the way in which this soundtrack works with her images. Like all of Neubauer’s direct-on-film animations, images in Firehouse are primarily abstract in nature, though recognizable

Microcosmos, le peuple de l’herbe, directed by Marie Pérennou and Claude Nuridsany, France, 1996. By Giannalberto Bendazzi.

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Figure 3.18  Bärbel Neubauer, Feuerhaus (‘Firehouse’), 1998. forms appear from time to time. [. . .] Worldwide, she is the most productive and innovative artist specializing in the direct-on-film technique.73 Bärbel Neubauer was born in Klagenfurt (Austria) on 22 April  1959. She studied stage design and film in Vienna, where she began writing poems and making liveaction films in 1980. She says: In 1983 I made my first animation film, OH, by painting on the wall of my room and shooting the single frames. It was partly abstract, partly figurative. The professor of the class of stage design and film (in fact, only stage design was taught) had allowed me not to come, and make my film instead, though he gave me all the papers. So from the beginning I learnt everything on my own. A friend of mine taught me how to use the camera and how to set light. Soon after that, I made my first figurative animation film, Angelika and Ferdinand.74 Neubauer’s first abstract film was made a year later, 1984’s Mond und Tiger (‘The Moon and the Tiger’). It was painted with oil pastels on paper and contained more than 1,800 fade-ins. It divided Neubauer’s friends: some

wanted her to be an abstract filmmaker, others wanted her black humour, stories, and figurative films. In Neubauer’s recollections, this was the first period of her filmmaking, characterized by extremely varied experiments, both in live-action and animation. In 1987 she moved to Munich, Germany. Her second period started in the early 1990s, in which she worked exclusively in the direct-on-film technique. In 1990, Neubauer bought a saxophone and taught herself music. Then she composed the soundtrack of her films. She said: During the production of Roots (1996) I  got a Mac and I started to learn more of the digital parts of the music. At the beginnings of the direct-on-film works the image was first and then came the music. Step by step it changed. In Roots, the sound was first; from then on, it varied: it became a dialogue throughout the period of creation. The music is much quicker to do, and defines [the] content and structure of my work. With Firehouse in 1998 I had explored many direct film techniques.75 ‘Firehouse’ was little seen. Since the 1960s, abstract cinema and direct-on-film cinema had been considered tools of the past (and, for the average festivalgoer, there were no

Maureen Furniss, ‘Fresh from the Festivals: December 1999’s Film Reviews’, Animation World Magazine 4, no. 9 (December 1999). http:// www.awn.com/mag/issue4.09/4.09pages/4.09festival.php3. 74 Bärbel Neubauer, autobiographical notes given to Giannalberto Bendazzi in 2005. 75 Bärbel Neubauer, autobiographical notes given to Giannalberto Bendazzi in 2005. 73

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gags). For years, Neubauer and her films had high respect but little interest. She did nothing to please. Yet her second period was blessed with good films. Samstag Nachmittag (‘Saturday Afternoon’, 1994) still combines figurative and abstract images. It is a description of a walk, lazy moments, and some fantasies; it is vibrant and sweet. Algorithmen (‘Algorithms’, 1994) shows metamorphoses of colour and shapes that are painted or drawn, or stamped directly on blank film. Roots (id., 1996) is again a series of metamorphoses. Mondlicht (‘Moonlight’, 1997) is a poem to the moon; its voice is the saxophone. There were also Holiday (1998), ‘Firehouse’ (1998), and Passage (2002), cumulatively recalling the work of Norman McLaren. The imagery was different, smoother, but the approach and very high quality were the same. In 2000, Neubauer abandoned the direct-on-film technique and started her third period, ‘the beginning of my way to work with digital tools also in image’.76 She explained: ‘Painter software and U&I software were among my first tools. [. . .] From 2000 on, I created libraries of sounds and images; both were like a diary, and in 2002–2004 I made Flockenspiel I-IV out of it.’77 This period of Neubauer’s work is strictly based on digital technology. It was an aesthetic development, not a technical updating. The direct-on-film technique provided a material quality that no pencil or algorithm will ever be able to provide. To Neubauer’s followers, Flockenspiel was a completely new chapter because her inspiration had changed. Although complete and consistent, Flockenspiel is a step in her journey from filmmaking to interactive art and music. Not by chance, she started performing dance (her own dancing)78 at the same time. Flockenspiel is divided into four parts, running 25 minutes in total. Images, sounds, and their combination are astoundingly beautiful and impossible to describe on the page. A few times they risk becoming decorative, but then

Neubauer’s sense of timing intervenes and transforms the film.79 She painted the first part frame by frame, the way she was used to working. This time, she did it with digital brushes, which she created on her own with Painter software. The next part of the film mixes frame-by-frame paintings with animations from ArtMatic software.80 In the third part she used ArtMatic only, and in the fourth she created 3D objects in the traditional way, to get irregular shapes and movements. After Flockenspiel, Neubauer remained with ArtMatic. Her new friends and workmates were fractals. According to Wikipedia: ‘A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.’ The use of this intellectual tool is extremely varied, with applications to geometry, mathematics, medicine, geography, music, and so on. Fractals have generated images since 1975 (and a new section of visual art, fractal art). A spectator or an artist doesn’t need to understand a fractal mathematically, any more than he or she need understand the colour-sensitive layers of film stock chemically. What matters is the result. Neubauer’s Fractal Cycles (2010), running 36 minutes, was among the best fractal works. ‘Making this film’ said Neubauer,81 ‘meant to me to paint in space in a poetic way, which means creating and using irregular shapes and borders; any part of the visual should be irregular, therefore nature-like’. Neubauer did many forbidden things with ArtMatic and achieved the best results. She created systems that worked from, or in, themselves, like little universes. It was only after long experience with that that she went on to use key-frame in ArtMatic. When I  was painting on the film stock, I  got coincidences via chemical reactions of the layer’s surface and

Bärbel Neubauer, autobiographical notes given to Giannalberto Bendazzi in 2005. Bärbel Neubauer, autobiographical notes given to Giannalberto Bendazzi in 2005. Flockenspiel is a pun based on Glockenspiel (chimes, carillon, or also a music box). 78 Neubauer never mixed the two media. Her dancing was a different language to express her creativity with movement, using her body instead of a brush. 79 What is most striking about this film is its rare interactive quality. One ‘sees’ a film, sometimes ‘watches’ it, but here one dives into the abstract action. Flockenspiel is an invitation to a mental dance. 80 ArtMatic software is for the Mac only. It is a graphic ‘synthesizer’ written by Eric Wenger (creator of the original KPT Bryce 1994– 1995). It puts images together and creates motion in systems, or trees, which are built from tiles containing functions. For an artist, creating animations means building trees out of the tiles and functions of his/her choice and knowledge and varying them. The tool is explicitly visual, and the user interface encourages an intuitive way of working. 81 Bärbel Neubauer, personal communication to Giannalberto Bendazzi, Genova, October 2010. 76 77

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the colours and the materials. Coincidences are more complicated and interesting when painting in space with ArtMatic. It was a challenge. What I  wanted to produce didn’t exist yet, so it was impossible to copy from life; nor did I want to imitate anything analogical with it. ArtMatic taught me to think three-dimensional; it taught me not the perception of space (that’s normal in anybody), but the consciousness of it.82 Fractal Cycles is imposing, more than half an hour of moving abstract colour shapes. ‘I never intended to make that new film, I was just playing around (it was the same with all of my films, actually) [. . .] The film grew like the growing of a plant – like a fractal, in short.’83 It is a daring exploration in unprecedented imagery, but it has kind of a skeleton, regarding how the camera moves, or how the image flows under the camera, and especially regarding the content of the image and sound. An architectural, Euclidean skeleton would have made the project impossible. Neubauer’s symphonic approach made it a triumph. At the beginning a sphere multiplies, the first clue to the fractal nature of the film. In the final sequences, the attentive viewer is able, even invited, to recognize the fractal basis. The great trip into the unprecedented colour universe and its metamorphoses finds its (temporary?) destination on a vaguely familiar sensory shore, on a vaguely reassuring return. Shining spheres and corollas, abstract grass, abstract water, and abstract leaves would make a world of lyrical, stainless, but impossible and kitsch perfection. Ken Perlin84 saves the film. Neubauer used the techniques he invented to create soft, out of focus images, and apparently undecipherable discs, smoke, and clouds. Images and sound are the inevitable topics of abstract films. Fractal Cycles enhances the approach used in Flockenspiel. Its sound not only invites the audience to the dance: it accompanies the journey and comments, sometimes ironically, on the images. Synesthesia is far from Neubauer’s interests. Rather, the eye and the ear act like a duo, or even a straight man and a comic.

To achieve her artistic results, Bärbel Neubauer doesn’t ‘take any drugs, not even medical drugs. When I do things that I like I don’t want things that hamper my mental clarity. Mine is a stream of consciousness. It is not voluntarily a research on spirituality. Spirituality is included in my works automatically, every now and then. Inevitably, since I’m a human being; spirituality is the connection to things that might be or also not. It just appears, but it’s not a planned research. It gets unlocked when I do my inspired work.’85

Austria86 Since the beginning of the new Austrian animation movement, many visual artists outside the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts have started making animated films. These artists include: the painter, sculptor, and performance artist Tone Fink (b. Schwarzenberg, Vorarlberg, 1944), who moved to Vienna and met Hubert Sielecki; Thomas Steiner, Wolfgang Hoffmann, Leo Schatzl, and other artists around the self-organized alternative culture centre Stadtwerkstatt in Linz; Renate Kordon (b. Graz, 1952), who studied in Paris; and Peter Putz (b. Ebensee, 1954), who studied animation in Poznan, Poland (1977–1978) and later (1988–1989) went as artist in residence to Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where he made Mont Real with his wife Barbara Putz. The movement of the 1980s led to a great deal of audiovisual production, using affordable Super 8 film and later video cameras. It also led to new structures for the presentation of this work, such as alternative cinemas and self-organized centres in all parts of Austria. Animation was no longer limited to art academies and became part of a much larger antielite culture. Artists concentrated more on animation’s codes and rules and researched the formal relationships between vision and sound. Animation that treated the body expressionistically was supplanted by abstraction or musicalrhythmical animation. Tone Fink’s Aus der Luft Gegriffen (‘Taken by the Wind’, 1983) was surreal and rough, far

Bärbel Neubauer, personal communication to Giannalberto Bendazzi, Genova, October 2010. Bärbel Neubauer, personal communication to Giannalberto Bendazzi, Genova, October 2010. 84 A professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, he invented the Perlin noise in 1985. In 1997, he was awarded an Oscar: ‘To Ken Perlin for the development of Perlin Noise, a technique used to produce natural appearing textures on computer generated surfaces for motion picture visual effects.’ 85 Bärbel Neubauer, personal communication to Giannalberto Bendazzi, Genova, October 2010. 86 By Thomas Renoldner and Paolo Parmiggiani. 82 83

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away from the regularity and severe conception of Falter 4 (1990) and Gepunktet (‘Dotted’, 1990). In the films of Thomas Renoldner (b. Linz, 1960) and Martin Anibas (b. Waidhofen, 1961), music, abstraction, and perception rules are central to the artistic research. (Sometimes the two filmmakers collaborated.) In Renoldner’s Bunt (‘Coloured’, 1991) and Rhythmus 94 (1994), sounds, rhythm, space, and images are reciprocally connected in rigorous pieces. Anibas’ Am Land (‘On the Land’, 1991), Spinning – Bild 14 (‘Spinning – Image 14’, 1991), 60 Seh-Kunden (1993), and Bild 15/16 (‘Image 15/16’, 1993) are free abstract investigations that still keep a strong formal structure. The work of Thomas Steiner (b. Wels, 1956) is in the same vein, such as Ikonostasis (1990). After the year 2000, there was a trend for animation to move away from alternative cinemas to art houses and museums. These became new playgrounds for interactive art, 3D computer animated installations, and more spectacular forms of moving images. One of the best-known artists in the field is Peter Kroger, who produced partly interactive, partly space-filling animated 3D films. In the first decade of the millennium, Austrian animation opened to CGI and a new approach to figurative animation. Mao Tse Tung – Bd. 2 (2001) by Heimo Wallner (b. Salzburg, 1961) is a surreal drawn animation that uses a cycle repetition and the accumulation of grotesque elements to satirical effect. Harald Hund (b. Grieskirchen, 1967) made 2005’s All People Is Plastic,87 a CGI short that uses 3D models to visualize a repetitive life in a cold world of buildings and machines. Herr Bar (‘Mr Cash’, 2007) by Clemens Kogler (b. Steyr, 1980) used a kind of CGI cut-out technique; photos of human body parts were assembled into machines and living beings, moving on fantastic landscapes. Kurzes Leben (‘Short Life’, 2007), by Johanna Freise (b. Kiel, Germany, 1961) and Daniel Šuljic´ (b. Zagreb, Yugoslavia [Croatia], 1968), is both obscure and dramatic, relating the tragic life of a young girl with a continuously varied drawing line.

Switzerland88 Martial Wannaz (Compiègne, France, 7 April 1945–Lausanne, 11 September 2002) made at least a dozen personal shorts (the last was finished and released posthumously),

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Original title in English. By Rolf Bächler.

some collaborations, and several dozen TV episodes. He had a penchant for the darker realms of existence and kept experimenting with visual styles, so his films never looked the same. His outstanding Douce nuit (‘Sweet Night’, 1987), based on a novel by Italian writer Dino Buzzati, features lush, stupendously animated cut-out imagery. A romantically moonlit garden is contrasted with the hidden horrors of the night, where all creatures are predators and prey at once. Another Wannaz gem is À la recherche d’Adèle (‘Looking for Adele’, 1993), a hybrid of animation and live-action in an homage to film noir and comics. A comic collector (played by Wannaz himself) leafs through a graphic novel, drawn in the style of French comic artist Jacques Tardi. The camera enters the panels and follows a mysterious night pursuit through Lausanne, until comic, animation, and reality all merge at Wannaz’s doorstep.

Georges Schwizgebel In Geneva in the early 1970s, Georges Schwizgebel (see Vol. 2) engaged in what in retrospect appear to be a wellconsidered sequence of exercises, designed to develop the hallmarks of his work. Some of these hallmarks were already apparent in his first mature effort: a predilection for a conceptual approach, based on formal choices; a tight relationship to music; and the absence of dialogue. In each film that followed, he introduced new features while pushing others further as his distinctive style evolved. The first of these, Perspectives (1975) is a minute and a half of humans and animals in motion cycles (a wink at Muybridge?). It introduced a graphic style of loose, rather bold brushstrokes on cels. Unlike the ‘lightbulb’ grid of The Flight of Icarus, it had a flexibility and potential for development which was carried through to subsequent films. Also notable was the film’s rotoscoping, to learn about naturalism in movements. In addition, it introduces Schwizgebel’s typical transitions, a kind of painted morphing that replaces traditional editing and results in extended sequence shots. In Hors-jeu (‘Off-Side’, 1977), Schwizgebel further investigated the use of cycles and the rotoscope. In Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein (‘The Ravishment of Frank N. Stein’, 1981), the animation simulated a subjective camera; the point was to make the spectator into the protagonist. The

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film was Schwizgebel’s first attempt at classic storytelling, but the excess of the formal experiment left audiences bemused. The run culminated in 78 tours (‘78 R.P.M.’, 1985), a well-measured blend of all the ingredients that Schwizgebel had explored previously. Inspired by a melancholic accordion waltz, the film alternates between the animated subjective view of a leisurely summer day and the still observation of a man stirring his coffee. No longer depending on the rotoscope, Schwizgebel takes us into his lightly painted world in continuous swirling moves.

A Case of Form La course à l’abîme (‘The Ride to the Abyss’, 1991) sees Schwizgebel the engineer meet Schwizgebel the artist. The original challenge was how to make several minutes of film with a limited number of cels constituting a cycle of only a few seconds? In the film, a cycle of 144 large-format cels, equalling six seconds of film, is repeated time and again. The camera captures a postcard-size part of the whole as it tracks a spiral path, frame by frame, clockwise from the edge to the centre, sweeping the entire surface. At every repetition, the image area filmed is adjacent to the one of the previous round, with no overlap. The result is an extended unedited sequence shot, spiralling in to the centre of the cels, from where the camera pulls out to reveal the whole setup. The music chosen was ‘The Ride to the Abyss’, an excerpt from The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz, during which Mephistopheles takes Faust to hell. Written for a dramatic stage production, it provided the source for the narrative content. Starting with the cavalcade of two horsemen (Faust and Mephisto), Schwizgebel essentially illustrated the protagonists’ dialogue from Berlioz’s libretto, which revolves around Faust’s visions and phantasms as they rush towards the abyss (hell). With the conclusion, the Helvetic animator gives the piece a very personal twist. Instead of meeting the damned, we are received by the orchestra and its conductor, who appears, when the camera pulls back, to be the puppet master of it all. Schwizgebel’s other works are Le sujet du tableau (‘The Subject of the Painting’, 1989), L’année du daim (‘The Year of the Deer’, 1995), La jeune fille et les nuages (‘The Young Girl and the Clouds’, 2000), Nakounine (‘Nakunin’, 1986), Zig Zag (1996, a 30-second homage to Rodolphe Töpffer of Mr Vieux-Bois fame), Fugue (1998), L’homme sans ombre (‘The Man Without a Shadow’, 2004), Jeu (‘Game’, 2006), Retouches (2008), and Romance (2011). The oeuvre is far

more than the sum of its parts, which is a mark of a true body of work, and still a rare achievement after more than a century of animation.

Other Animators Daniel Suter (see Volume 2) resumed production after retiring from teaching. He also revived his original colour pencil style for La chanson du pharmacien (‘The Song of the Chemist’, 2003), a charming little black-humoured ballad of errors, reminiscent of his poetic early work of the 1970s. Histoire d’eau (‘Water Story’, 2009) continued in this vein. Claude Luyet (see Volume 2) began two major projects simultaneously. In Le carré de lumière (‘The Square of Light’, 1992), a boxer fights his own mirror image. Luyet mostly assumes the protagonist’s point of view, but he also extends the subjective perspective to the soundtrack, putting the spectator in the body of the huffing and panting fighter, suffering his futile attempts to block his enemy’s blows on the way to the knockout. The graphic style of acrylic painting on cel, combined with loose white, red, and blue crayon slashes swirling on a black background in front of our eyes, produces images of gut-gripping intensity. They tighten relentlessly to the final revelation that the worst fights happen in our minds. The film is a classic in every respect. At the same time as he was working on ‘The Square of Light’, Luyet joined with La Fabrique again to produce Robert Creep: Une vie de chien (‘Robert Creep: A Dog’s Life’, 1993), a 26-minute film-noir conceived as a pilot for an unmade series. It was codirected by Thomas Ott (b. Zurich, 10 June 1966), a well-known illustrator and comics author who suggested the story and was the art director. After this double feat, it took Luyet almost a decade to come up with his next personal film, Rush (2004), codirected with the Canadian illustrator Xavier Robel (b. Montreal, 1971). Completely breaking away from his previous work, the film sets flickering movements of colours, patterns, and figures to a rhythm-driven electronic noise track. It looks like a fresh transposition of 1920s avantgarde into the twenty-first century and it had a successful festival career. Kilian Dellers (b. Basel, 1959) was a graduate from the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. Starting with pixilation and puppet animation, using everything that came his way for his experimental films, he eventually focused on retouching oil paint. He used this technique in his masterpiece, Vision (1995). It is about tension and release, coming and going, condensation, intensification, and change.

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Luora (2001) by Carlo Piaget (b. 1962) is an astounding emulation of the Disney style, as close as a solitary artisan secluded in his workshop can get. A streetlamp’s filament is set free by a lightning strike, breaking into a dance over the rooftops like a glowing fairy and disappearing in the distance. It reflected Piaget’s own animation career, since this film was the last we saw of him. As Switzerland did not belong to the European Union, its animation was cut off from the incentive programmes of Media Cartoon. Consequently, the confined community had no economic base, no cooperative tradition, and little coherence. It was entirely restricted to private initiative (and, for the most part, private investment), even while animation boomed all around. For ages Swiss film production had no connection with the rest of the world. When Switzerland finally became eligible to join the European media programmes, it was too late to catch up. However, the launch of Fantoche in 1995, the first Swiss international animation festival, was a blessing. Finally a large public discovered animation beyond the offerings of daytime TV and other industry outlets. Because of the growing number of entrants and spectators, the biannual event became an annual one in 2010, making it animation’s most important promoter in the country. Cinematou, a second annual festival, was established in Geneva in 2006. While Fantoche encourages new animation by young directors, Cinematou focuses on films for a young audience. On the production side, the Pacte de l’audiovisuel (Audiovisual Pact) of 1996 was a partnership agreement between the professional associations of Swiss cinema – producers, authors, directors – and the Federal Office of Culture and the national television network, defining the network’s role as a coproducer of independent cinema. The visual authority and black humour of Claudius Gentinetta (b. Lucerne, 9 January 1968), apparent in his exercises of the late 1980s and early 1990s, was confirmed by his first international success: Amok (‘Amuck’, 1997). Poldek (2004) has a bizarre plot about neighbourhood cannibalism which, like Amuck, is evoked rather than told. The stunning visuals veil the diffuse narrative. For Die Seilbahn (‘The Cable Car’, 2008), Gentinetta teamed up with Frank Braun (b. Winterthur, 1965), the founder and president of the Fantoche festival, as a codirector. This may explain why Gentinetta finally managed to break away from his overly complex plots. The narrative is reduced to a single, straight event: a man in a cable car violently sneezes, gradually dismantling the car on its way up. Schlaf (‘Sleep’, 2010), again codirected by Frank Braun, is more a poem than a traditional story.

Basil Vogt (b. Brugg, 21 February 1965) was a jack-ofall-trades and a gifted tinkerer. In 1995, he constructed a series of three sculpture-like mutoscopes as slot machines, like one-armed bandits with a spring motor, flipping clanking metal sheets with animated engravings. For his personal shorts, Vogt used and often mixed different techniques every time. Kapitän Hu (‘Captain Hoo’, 2011) is a gem. With a design leaving space for imagination, it is about a sailor whose ship gets stranded in the Alps during a violent storm. Jonas Raeber (b. Lucerne, 1968) exercised his cartooning skills as soon as he could handle a pencil. He embarked on a series of animated pamphlets addressing core civic issues: the army (Patt, ‘Stalemate’, 1991), business (Hoffen auf bessere Zeiten, ‘Hoping for Better Times’, 1993), national identity (Grüezi, ‘Good Day’, 1995), and religion (Credo, 2000). All abound with biting irony, particularly ‘Hoping for Better Times’, which shows arms manufacturers as ruthless war profiteers, and ‘Good Day’, which is about the bottled-up xenophobia of the petty bourgeois. Zoltán Horváth (b. Geneva, 1966) premiered with Carcasses et crustacés (‘Carcasses and Shellfish’, 1999). It shows the disaster of the Titanic through the eyes of fish and other sea creatures detained in the dining room. Horváth used computer technology to create an atmosphere of decadence before the fall. For Nosfératu Tango (2001, about a mosquito who falls in love with the prince of vampires), Horváth used the computer to create the rich, lush, superbly composed universe of a pop-up book. The story unfolds by turning the pages. Its mechanism naturally makes one world fold for the next to rise. The mosquito’s tragedy is not just its unrequited love but also its inability to grasp the system. Samuel and Frédéric Guillaume (b. Fribourg, 1976) were twins and joint authors of the first Swiss-made animated feature, the puppet animation Max & Co. (2007). It was a monumental achievement and commercial failure; the animation was excellent, though opinions on the script were mixed. While the audience in Annecy celebrated it with the audience award, the film’s box office was disastrous. The Guillaume brothers survived (unlike their company), and the studio technology developed for Max & Co. remained available. One of the first new faces in the new century was Isabelle Favez (b. Berne, 1974). At La Poudrière, the affiliated school of the Folimage studio in France, she discovered CelAction software (based on the cut-out principle but enhanced with digital image processing). It became her standard working tool and the basis of her distinct style. Favez’s Circuit Marine (2003), coproduced by the National Film Board of Canada and her first film to catch

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wide attention, was a diverting ensemble comedy where several characters complicate their lives in pursuit of happiness. In Tarte aux pommes (‘Apple Pie’, 2006), the lives of a baker lady, a butcher, a hunter, a dog, a cat, and a rabbit all entangle – not to everyone’s benefit. Claude Barras (b. Sierre, 1973) started with computers but discovered puppets when he was asked to do character design for the pilot version of the Guillaume brothers’ Max & Co. He took the experience further in Le génie de la boîte de raviolis (‘The Genie from the Ravioli Tin’, 2005), a fairy tale. It was coproduced by the National Film Board of Canada, as was Sainte Barbe (‘Holy Beard’, 2007) and Land of the Heads (2009), which Barras codirected with the Belgian Cédric Louis (b. Liège, 1970). As of this writing, they are preparing their first feature, Ma vie de courgette (‘It’s a Zucchini’s Life’). Herr Würfel (‘Mr  Dice’, 2004), the first film by Rafael Sommerhalder (b. Zurich, 1974), is his least conventional but most interesting work. It is about the last second in a man’s life, with a voice-over analyzing why he is so paralyzed with fear that he will make a wrong decision. The didactic tone is matched by a design reminiscent of infographics and enhanced by deliberately visible computer animation. Sommerhalder never reached the same level of quality in his later films. Marina Rosset (b. Lausanne, 1984) graduated from Lucerne University of Art and Design with La main de l’ours (‘The Bear’s Hand’, 2007). She displayed a sense for laconic (and mostly melancholic) stories and subtle directing as well as a pleasing, efficient graphic style. An unusual talent, she won Annecy’s project competition twice in a row. Maja Gehrig, a 2005 Lucerne graduate, launched her post-school career with Amourette (‘Lust to Dust’, 2009), a puppet gem in the rare (and too often vulgar) genre of erotic fantasy. Jesús Pérez, whose work in his native Bolivia we discuss in the section on Latin America, was offered a part-time job at Lucerne University of Art and Design to teach new animation students the basics.89 Fostering young talent encouraged him to explore his own ideas as well. The blueprint was a spontaneous style exercise he had created during a previous visit to Lucerne, Ejercicios en lápiz (‘Pencil Exercise’, 1995). In this one-and-a-half-minute short, the animator’s pixilated hand draws a stick figure, awakens it to life, and sets it free – a concept popular in the earliest cartoons.

The first of his new works, Punkt und Striche (‘Dot and Lines’, 2005), gives a playful account of a boy-girl (or brother-sister) feud. Pérez again made the artifice visible. The set is the animator’s drawing desk, his hands and drawing utensils keep interfering, and the characters are mere stick figures – as if to attribute the whole weight of expression to the animation. Children, storytelling, and dance make up the essence of Der grosse Bruder (‘The Big Brother’, 2010), cowritten and codirected with Pérez’s wife. A pure drawn ballet, full of charm and love for the characters, it received great festival acclaim. François Chalet (b. Geneva, 17 June  1970) definitely belongs to a new breed. Trained as a graphic designer in Berne, he got into animation by teaching himself how to animate using Flash, the most common digital tool for Web design. Winning a competitive tender for an event hosted by MTV Germany in 1998, he became involved in projections of motion graphics, live and direct, to be shown to large audiences and broadcast in households. For this purpose he developed a simple, quick visual style based on vector graphics – essentially circles but also other geometric primitives. Initially they were black and white, but they soon extended to reduced high-contrast colour palettes, launching a new visual trend for the coming millennium. Chalet’s trademark is not just his style but also his ability to create highly differentiated expressions within the style’s formal constraints. T’es où mère-grand? (‘Where Are You, Grandmother?’, 2003), Chalet’s first professionally produced ‘old school’ type of short, is a Red Riding Hood takeoff that was part of the omnibus children’s feature Loulou et les autres loups (‘Loulou and the Other Wolves’, France, 2003), under the direction of French animator Serge Elissalde.

Denmark90 Since 1985, Denmark has produced about one animated feature film per year and has thus become one of the major animation producers in Europe. The Danish Film Law, revised in 1982, ruled that 25  percent of the total film production budget should be used for films targeting children and young people. The diversity of these films was vast, in terms of themes as well as visual expression. Valhalla (id., 1986) took its theme from Norse mythology. It told its story in an upbeat and humorous way and

Whenever his means and time allowed it, he returned to Bolivia to share his craft and experience through training workshops. By Annemette Karpen.

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was animated in the Disney style. After a long, chaotic production, both its producer and the director were replaced. Eventually Peter Madsen, the artist on whose comic books the film was based, received director credit and Jeffrey J. Varab, who had started it all, was codirector. In 1988, a group of animators who had begun working on Valhalla founded A. Film. They were led by Jørgen Lerdam (b. Gladsaxe municipality, 12 March  1958) and Stefan Fjeldmark (b. 1964). The budgets available for both A. Film and Jannik Hastrup’s Dansk Tegnefilm Kompagni increased over the years and the two companies developed very different approaches to animation. A. Film is the name of the rival company to Dansk Tegnefilm Kompagni. The latter squirreled away as much as possible and had an easy noticeable style. For its part, A. Film had an entertainment-oriented attitude and made films in the ‘international style’. At Dansk Tegnefilm Kompagni, Hastrup preferred to create his films based on things experienced in daily life, although he loved Danish tradition as well. Hans Christian Andersen og den skæve skygge (‘Hans Christian Andersen and the Long Shadow’, 1998), had elegant and subtle pastel backgrounds. Drengen Der Ville Gøre Det Umulige (‘The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Bear’, 2003) features masses of snow and ice. A. Film preferred to work on fantasy, fairy tale, and internationally oriented stories. It was a traditional businessminded company with a continuous production slate and TV, feature film, and commercial departments. During the 1990s, A. Film expanded, founding sister companies in Tallinn, Estonia, and Riga, Latvia. It also established new departments in Hamburg and Berlin, which were in charge of the more demanding parts of the productions. An office in Los Angeles, run by Hans Perk, was also set up. The first feature film made by the A. Film studio was Jungledyret (‘Jungle Jack’, 1993), about the world’s rarest animal. Flemming Quist Møller was the scriptwriter and codirector with Jørgen Lerdam; the film also had a young and promising animator, Michael Hegner (b. 1964). A sequel followed in 1996, Jungledyret Hugo – den store filmhelt (‘Amazon Jack’), again with Lerdam and Møller as codirectors. Both ‘Jungle Jack’ films follow the new thoughtful, critical line of children’s culture in Denmark, but they are still close to Disney style in their backgrounds, character animation, and storytelling. They are quite different from Snuden and The Monkeys and the Secret Weapon, which have more complex story structures. The feature Hjælp! Jeg er en fisk (‘Help! I  Am a Fish’, 2000) cost 101  million Danish kroner (18  million US

dollars); it was prompted by A. Film’s ambitions to follow Hollywood. Directed by Jørgen Lerdam, Stefan Fjeldmark, and Michael Hegner, it featured three children who turned into fish after drinking a potion. In contrast, Terkel i knibe (‘Terkel in Distress’, 2004) is a rough and satirical tale about bullying, psychopathic teachers, and teenage problems. It was based on the stand-up comedian Anders Matthesen’s radio series, with all the voices recorded by Matthesen himself. Peddersen og Findus 3 – Nissemaskinen (‘Pettson and Findus – The Santa Machine’, 2005) was a coproduction for small children, based on the Swedish writer and illustrator Sven Nordquist’s books and presented in a typical Swedish rural style. Asterix og Vikingerne (‘Astérix et les Vikings’, ‘Asterix and the Vikings’, 2006) was a French-Danish coproduction, made in traditional cel animation. It was the most expensive film to date (160 million Danish kroner, approximately 29  million US dollars). France’s M6 Films chose A. Film as its partner on account of the high production standard of ‘Help! I Am a Fish’. Although the film is French, A. Film was active in every step of the project, from the screenplay to the storyboard and animation. Den grimme ælling og mig (‘The Ugly Duckling and Me’, 2006) was made in 2005 and is a new version of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale. It was created in 3D computer animation by the same young team behind ‘Terkel in Distress’. In 2008, the 3D department of A. Film put their efforts into Hugo 3 – fræk, flabet og fri (‘Jungo Goes Bananas’, 2008), which was as fresh and charming as the previous ‘Jungle Jack’ films. With Rejsen til Saturn (‘The Journey to Saturn’, 2008), A. Film tried to reach a more adult audience. In the same year, the company made Niko og vejen til stjernerne (‘Niko – lentë jän poika’, ‘Niko & the Way to the Stars’), in coproduction with a Finnish studio. Although both A. Film and Dansk Tegnefilm Kompagni had success in Denmark and the European cinema market, none of their films had an impact in the US. If it were not for the subsidies and funding from The Danish Film Institute, there would have been no film production in Denmark. The fourth generation of animators and animation directors benefited from state-subsidized educations. A  four-year course training people to be animation directors was established at The Danish Film School in 1992. A three-and-a-half-year bachelor’s degree programme in classical character animation at the Animation Workshop was established in 2003. The two big studios’ monopoly on producing animated feature films was broken with Copenhagen Bombay’s

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production of Princess (id., 2006), the first Danish animated film for adults, telling a grim, shocking story with very explicit sex and violence. In 2009, the same studio made Æblet og ormen (‘The Apple and the Worm’), a funny family film about the strange relationship between an apple and the worm inside it. Both were directed by Anders Morgenthaler (b. Copenhagen, 5 December 1972), a very talented comicstrip artist and writer and a controversial director. In 2011, Copenhagen Bombay presented Den kæmpestore bjørn (‘The Giant Bear’), directed by Esben Toft Jacobsen (b. Gentofte 1977).

Sweden91 Lisbet Gabrielsson (b. 1943) had a career at the Svenska Filminstitutet and started producing animated shorts on her own in 1997. Some of these shorts are based on Swedish children’s books, directed by the respective authors. Anna Bengtsson’s Bollongexpeditionen (‘Expedition on a Balloon’, 2003) is the story of an ant that builds a hot-air balloon and then flies in it on a scientific expedition. Nallars Väntan (‘Nallars Waiting’, 1998), directed by Christina Björk and Maria Brännström, is a puppet animation about the secret life of teddy bears. Gabrielsson’s productions tell pleasant, tasteful stories, but their animation is weak. Despite some growth in the last decades of the twentieth century, and efforts made by the Svenska Filminstitutet, Swedish animation was still small in the 1990s, employing little more than a hundred people. The majority of these animators were disconnected from the big production companies, struggling alone with few economic opportunities and still using craftsman’s methods. Among the distinguished artists, Pernilla Hindsefeldt (b. 1968) and Jonas Dahlbeck (b. 1971) received a Guldbagge in 1995 for best short film for Do Nothin ’Til You Hear From Me. Fully animated on cels, the film stars a couple of male musical instruments who fight for a female violin. The film shows the power of an attractive design, despite a trite story full of clichés. Hindsefeldt created a sequel, Nocturne (1998), a love story built on Chopin music, and Jonas Dahlbeck was hired as a director at Filmtecknarna. Another Guldbagge winner is Ulla-Carin Grafström (b. 1953), who made animated films about the Swedish royal house. Hem ljuva hem (‘Home Sweet Home’, 1997) shows King Carl-Gustaf and Queen Silvia doing household chores. Grafström made two more movies in the style

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she discovered, in which cutouts mix with cartoons. It is a casual and raw style with a personal touch. One of the finest cut-out animators was Lotta Geffenblad (b. Strömblad, 1962), who was one of the few artists working with the multiplane. Geffenblad, together with the animator Gun Jacobson, created many children’s films, including God morgon Gerda gök (‘Good Morning, Gerda Cuckoo’, 1988). With her husband Uzi Geffenblad, she directed Aprikoser (‘Apricots’, 1996). A child spends a day on the beach with his uncle and discovers that the ocean holds many secrets. Petter Lennstrand (b. 1970), who began his career as a puppeteer, created the TV series Sprattlan and Janne & Mertz (1991) for Svt. He also directed and animated the puppet Allram Eest, his most famous creation, in the TV program Allra mest tecknat (‘Most Drawn’, 2002). After Semesterhemmet (‘Holiday Home’) by Birgitta Jansson, Sweden produced few animated documentaries. However, in 2002, the film Gömd (‘Hidden’) was released by Hanna Heilborn (b. 1968), Mats Johansson, and David Aronowitsch (b. 1964). The film combines live-action interview with 3D animation to tell the intense story of Juan Carlos, a 12-year-old South American boy who is not so welcome in Sweden.

Magnus Carlsson Magnus Carlsson (b. Säffle, County of Västra Götalands, 20 April 1965) is a prominent figure among his contemporaries. He is important both domestically and abroad, where his works are sold and where he participates at international festivals. Unlike most of his fellow artists, who work outside large production enterprises, he makes entertainment on an industrial scale while maintaining a high level of quality. While attending art school in Gothenburg in the 1980s, Carlsson was strongly influenced by MTV’s animation, combining drawings and music. Mr Carlsson (1992) was a small collection of poignant short stories. In 1992, Carlsson began working with Filmtecknarna, where he made a TV series entirely in clay, Alice i Plasmalandet (‘Alice in Plasmaland’, 1993) with Jonas Odell. Sweden (1996) is a Plasticine TV series with an element of documentary; its characters express their opinion on various situations. Filmtecknarna’s Robin (1996) is a TV series in traditional cel animation about a young urban idler. The music video

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Paranoid Android (1997), for the British band Radiohead, was derived from the series. In 1996, Carlsson started his own company, Happy Life. In 1998 he made Lisa and The Three Friends . . . and Jerry, both in cel animation, and Da Möb (2002), a TV series in mixed techniques about friends who want to form a rock band. Happy Life was based on the principle of producing high-quality animation in large quantities, through the use of a simple but effective design, made according to an industrial system. Much of the work is done by foreign factories and freelance artists. In 2000, having ended his relationship with Happy Life, Carlsson started Magnus Carlsson Production AB and Thin Baron, adding The Jolly Patron in 2003. Carlsson’s business principles didn’t change in these new companies. He returned to work with clay and made his first features for children, Desmond trashade äppelträd (‘Desmond’s Trashed Apple Tree’, 2003) and Desmond & träskpatraskfällan (‘Desmond & the Swamp Barbarian Trap’, 2006). The little pig Desmond and his forest friends are among the director’s most innovative creations.

Norway92 The professionalization of Norwegian animation began in the early 1990s. The Caprino studio made hugely popular puppet films from 1948 to 1975, but it worked on the margins of the main film scene and never became the catalyst for a wider Norwegian animation industry. This situation changed in the early 1990s. The first national commercial TV channel, TV2, opened in 1992. At last, Norwegian animators could use TV advertising money to make their studios profitable. New technology made animation accessible for young enthusiasts and helped widen the use of animation in TV graphics, advertising, music videos, and computer games. A state-funded animation school opened in Volda, while the NordicBaltic animation festival started in the early 1990s. Most important, the animators began to collaborate, becoming better qualified to get help from the Norwegian film funding system. Two studios were formed at the very beginning of the 1990s: Tegnefilmcompagniet (The Animated Cartoon Company) and Studio Magica. Tegnefilmcompagniet made drawn cartoons; Studio Magica made puppet animation. Tegnefilmcompagniet was a film collective, whose

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owners Øivind Jorfald (b. 1950), Jan Konings (b. 1947), Guttorm Larsen (b. 1953), and Linda Madsen (b. 1967) worked in the same studio but each had responsibility for their own films. Most of these were shorts based on children’s books and funded by state money. Highlights include Snop (‘Candy’, by Jan Konings, 1991), Det opprørske alfabetet (‘The Rebellious Alphabet’, by Øivind Jorfald, 1994), and Filmen om Bodil (‘The Film about Bodil’, by Linda Madsen, 1995). Studio Magica was an extension of the company Camera Magica, run by the cinematographer Morten Skallerud (b. 14 July 1954). Skallerud made several animated shorts in the 1970s and 1980s. Inspired by Norman McLaren, he made Geometrisk dans (‘Geometric Dance’, 1972) and Den hvite streken (‘The White Line’, 1978), in which he animated a white line on live-action film stock. In the 1980s he experimented with time-lapse animation and multi-exposures, which can be seen in his short Vintersolhverv (‘Winter Solstice’, 1984) and – as a special effect – in the live-action feature Havlandet (directed by Lasse Glomma, 1985). An early highlight is Fotspor av en kjærlighetshistorie (‘Footprints of a Love Story’, 1981), where Skallerud animated footprint cutouts. Skallerud’s masterpiece is the time-lapse animation Året gjennom Børfjord (‘The Year along the Abandoned Road’, 1991). It was the only Norwegian film shot in 70mm. With a specially developed shooting technique, Skallerud’s camera travels the only road in an abandoned fishing community in northern Norway. The journey starts in the morning in January on one end of the road. In single frame animation, the camera moves along the road, the snow disappears, spring and summer come, and the summer people return to the little village. But with autumn they leave . . . and when the camera ends its journey on the other end of the road, the snow is back, it is night, and it’s December. Jan Garbarek’s beautiful music accompanies the journey. In Studio Magica, Morten Skallerud was joined by the Russian special-effects artist Natasha Nikitina (b. 1944), the puppet maker Ivar Rødningen, the editor Pål Gengenbach (b. 1943), the producer Lars Tømmerbakke (b. 1950), and the animator Pjotr Sapegin (b. Moscow, 4 December 1955). Besides their many prize-winning commercials, Studio Magica’s most successful films were the clay shorts directed by Pjotr Sapegin. In the early 1990s, he made several shorts featuring a character called Edvard, loosely based on the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.

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Figure 3.19  Pjotr Sapegin, Gjennom mine tyke briller (‘Through My Thick Glasses’), 2004.

The children’s film Katten Mons (‘Mons the Cat’, 1995) was Sapegin’s international breakthrough, winning several international prizes. Huset på Kampen (‘One Day a Man Bought a House’, 1998) won the Hiroshima prize; it is a universal love story for a grown-up audience. Aria (2002) is a complex and intelligent version of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, another multi-award winner. Gjennom mine tyke briller (‘Through My Thick Glasses’) followed in 2004. The four shorts were released as a feature compilation in Norwegian cinemas in 2005, entitled Nå skal du høre (‘Now You Are About to Hear’). Studio Magica closed down in the early 2000s and Sapegin formed studio Pravda with, among others, Mikkel Sandemose, the grandson of Caprino assistant Bjarne Sandemose. In a small country with less than five million Norwegian speakers, a national film industry would not be possible without substantial governmental support. However, Norwegian live-action producers such as John M. Jacobsen (b. 1944) and Aage Aaberge (b. 1954) saw economic potential in animated feature films. Since the late 1990s, continuous production of animated features has played an essential part in developing a professional animation industry in the country. The first success was Solan, Ludvig og Gurin med reveropmpa (‘Gurin with the Foxtale’, 1998), which competed for best feature at Annecy. The feature had a complex history. Gurin is based on the universe created by Kjell Aukrust, which had been the basis for Caprino’s hugely popular puppet feature Flåklypa Grand Prix. However, Caprino’s version of the Aukrust universe differed from the original Flåklypa universe that Aukrust had created. Together with former Disney animator Bjørn Aronsen and producer John M.

Jacobsen, Aukrust entered the world of animation and eventually created ‘Gurin with the Foxtail’, a feature that was a huge critical and popular success. Nille Tystad and John M. Jacobsen shared the credit as directors. Afterwards, Jacobsen was approached by the rights owners to Astrid Lindgren’s book, who proposed a cartoon feature based on Lingdren’s Karlsson på taket (‘Karlsson on the Roof ’). When the film premiered in 2002, Vibeke Idsøe was sole director; Nille Tystad had left during the production. Aage Aaberge produced two animated features together with Oslo’s Qvisten Animation: Kaptein Sabeltann (‘Captain Sabertooth’, 2006) and Pelle Politibil (‘Pelle Policecar’, 2009). They were based on popular Norwegian stories aimed at children and directed by Rasmus Sivertsen (b. 1972). Kaptein Sabeltann was coproduced with the Swedish company Happy Life and codirected by Stig Berqvist. In 2008 Sivertsen made the CGI feature Kurt blir grusom (‘Kurt Turns Evil’), based on the children’s books by Erlend Loe and Kim Hiortøy. His father Thor Sivertsen was credited as codirector. In 2002, the younger Sivertsen made the 15-minute cartoon short Guggen, the best Norwegian film inspired by classic American cartoons. Another success was the hugely popular Web cartoon series Fanthomas (the series premiered in 2009), a celebrity satire based on the Hollywood stylist Jan Thomas. Meanwhile, Qvisten Animation made the animations for the Knerten films (the first premiered in 2009), based on the books by Anne Cath. Vestli is about a wooden stick that comes alive. The comic-book artist Christopher Nielsen (b. Oslo, 20 April 1963) had success with the 3D computer TV series

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To trøtte typer (‘Two Wasted Wankers’) in 2000. Nielsen’s cult comic-book universe is populated with drug addicts and other social dropouts. This provocative production, financed by the national broadcaster NRK, made Nielsen think even bigger. Together with producer Lars Tømmerbakke, he started work on a CGI feature starring the ‘Two Wasted Wankers’ characters and the drug-addicted elephant Jimmy. Slipp Jimmy fri (‘Free Jimmy’, 2006) won the best feature award at Annecy in 2007. The first animation Oscar for a Norwegian film was given to Torill Kove for her film Den danske dikteren (‘The

Danish Poet’, 2006). This was coproduced between the Oslo studio Mikrofilm and the National Film Board of Canada. It followed the Oscar nomination of Kove’s debut film, Min bestemor strøk kongens skjorter (‘My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts’, 1999), coproduced between Studio Magica and, again, the National Film Board of Canada. Kove was born in Furnes, Norway, on 25 May  1958. She lived in Norway and spent several years in Kenya and Botswana before moving to Montreal (Canada) in the early 1980s. Her style is minimalist in form and deep in feeling,

Figure 3.20  Torill Kove, Den danske dikteren (‘The Danish Poet’), 2006. ‘The Danish Poet’ © 2006 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

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so intelligently easy that it may be undervalued. ‘The Danish Poet’ is sensitive, with a deep, subtle humour.93 Me and my Moulton (2014) was nominated for an Academy Award, while the animated feature Hocus Pocus Alfie Atkins (2013) was a Norwegian/Swedish children’s film based on a book by the iconic Swedish picture book author and illustrator Gunilla Bergstrøm. Mikrofilm is owned by producer Lise Fearnley (b. 1969) and animator and director Kajsa Næss (b. 1970). The company has served as producer for many of the talented animators that have emerged since the early 1990s in Norway: Jan Otto Ertesvåg (b. 1969), Julie Engaas (b. 1968), Astrid Åkra (b. 1960), and Kajsa Næss herself. Cathinka Tandberg and Magnhild Winsnes are new partners in Mikrofilm. Special mention should be made of Anita Killi (b. Stavanger, 17 January  1968) and her studio Troll-Film. In a studio up in the mountains in the village of Dovre, she makes multiplane cut-out animation inspired by Yuri Norstein. All four of her major productions have won international prizes. Lavrasiid Aigi (1996) is based on an old myth about how the Sami people used traditional singing to catch reindeer. Kongen som ville ha mer enn en krone (‘The King Who Wanted More than One Crown’, 1999) is a 45-minute fairy tale, made with composer Randall Meyers. Tornehekken (‘Hedge of Thorns’, 2001) won 14 international prizes. Sinna Mann (‘Angry Man’, 2009) a 20-minute film on child abuse carried out by close relatives, made the Norwegian king cry on national television just after the premiere. Elias og kongeskipet (‘Elias and the Royal Yacht’, 2007) is a children’s feature directed by Espen Fyksen (b. 1970) and Lise I. Osvoll (b. 1979). Based on a television show, it was well received by the public. 93

Finland94 The animation boom reached Finland in the early 1990s. In 1993 the Finnish Film Foundation invited animators to present their ideas in order to receive special support. Finland’s first animation school started in Turku in 1994, headed by the Estonian master Priit Pärn. In 1995 Cartoon Forum, the European cofinancing event for animation, was held in Turku. The independent production of animated TV series was revived. Aurinko on keltainen kirahvi (‘The Sun Is a Yellow Giraffe’, 1997–2003), by animator Antonia Ringbom (b. 14 November  1946) and Jaana Wahlforss (b. 1957) depicted poems. The puppet animation Urpo  & Turpo (‘Umpy  & Tumpy’, 1996–1997) featured anarchic teddy bears and was directed by Liisa Helminen (b. Turku, 15 February 1950), Marjut Rimminen (b. 1944), and the Estonian Riho Unt (b. 1956). Marjut Rimminen moved to Britain in 1973 and continued to work there (see the section on British animation). Her 2007 film Learned by Heart, produced in Finland, x-rays the country’s history through the eyes of a child. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Finnish animation makers often cooperated with Estonians on the other side of the Gulf of Finland. For example, the first parts of Urpo & Turpo were animated at the Nukufilm studio in Tallinn. The puppet animation Turilas ja Jäärä (‘Tootletubs  & Jyro’, 2001) is a hilarious series about two bugs, directed by Ismo Virtanen (b. Jyväskylä, 15 November 1965) and Mariko Härkönen (b. Tokyo, 2 December  1970). This 13-part series was completely made in Finland and shot on 35mm film. It was also screened in cinemas as a feature in 2001.

Torill Kove comments about her work: I got involved in animation in the early 1990s, fairly late in life. At the time I had lost my job as an urban planner in Montreal and was not feeling optimistic about finding another one. I decided that I would take a bit of a risk and see if I could find something to do in life that mostly involved drawing from the imagination. I was curious about animation and started watching animation films that I could rent at the library. They were mostly NFB films. This way, I was introduced to a kind of animation that was really quite new to me, and I found them quite intriguing. I audited a semester in the animation department at Concordia University, and afterwards I enrolled in their degree programme. After one year I was hired as an animation assistant at the NFB animation studio. It led to other jobs and taught me some basic animation skills. [. . .] Primarily I like to write and make films about how people relate to each other. I am interested in the dynamics of close relationships, and about what we learn from each other. I think I have a responsibility to make films that actually are about something. My films won’t change the world or even inspire policy, but I do aspire to stir something up, be it thought or feeling, with stories. [. . .] I love animation as an artistic expression. It is perfect for people who don’t mind drawing the same thing over and over again. It’s a very open and forgiving art form and increasingly also very democratic. [. . .] I have written some commissioned scripts, but mostly I just write for myself when I’m kind of stewing over a film I’d like to make. (Torill Kove, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 23 June 2010.)

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By Heikki Jokinen.

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Katariina Lillqvist (b. Tampere, 24 May  1963) made her first animation in 1991. Educated in Prague, she is a puppet animation director who has received several prizes, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The basis of her reputation is the Kafka trilogy, Hiilisangolla ratsastaja (‘Rider on the Bucket’, 1992), Kamarihaikara (‘The Chamberstorch’, 1993), and Maalaislääkäri (‘The Country Doctor’, 1996). Her films are surrealist, often pacifist, visually strong, and made with passion. Lillqvist’s Mire Bala Kale Hin (‘Tales from the Endless Roads’, 2001–2003), is a six-part series based on Rom tales and music. The Rom language version is probably the first animation series telling Rom tales in their original language. The tales best-loved by the audience were those in the third episode, Mustan Saaran legenda (‘The Legend of the Black Sarah’), and the fourth, Laulu hirsipuista (‘Song of the Gallows’). Then Lillqvist made the puppet film Uralin perhonen (‘Far Away from Ural’, 2008), which caused major debate in Finland. It’s about the cruel Finnish civil war of 1918 and hints that the Finnish war hero Marshal Mannerheim might have been gay. The heated debate ended with almost 10 percent of the population watching the film on television. The younger generation of animated filmmakers received a good education in animation from the Turku school or other institutions around the country offering shorter courses. Several former Turku students made their names with independent films. The puppet animation film Lentoposti (‘Air Mail’, 2002) by Kaisa Penttilä (b. 12 April 1975) is a study of a man’s mind. Moni moitti muotoani (‘Many Complained of My Look’, 2003) by Leena Jääskeläinen (b. 2 August 1975) tells a touching story of loneliness, based on Finnish folk poetry. The most powerful film by Tatu Pohjavirta (b. 1977) is the puppet animation Elukka (‘Animal’, 2005), the story of a father turning into a werewolf while his son accidentally gets the brains of a sheep. Ami Lindholm’s (b. 1982) ironic Ilo irti (‘Irresistible Smile’, 2006) received the Zagreb festival student film prize and was a Cartoon d’Or finalist. Lindholm’s simple drawings show an air hostess on the job, suffering all kinds of travellers with an eternal smile. On the edge of media art and animation is Milla Moilanen (b. Paltamo, 6 June 1964). Her experimental films discuss topics like the Western ideal of beauty (PrePost, 2007), racism (Wanted, 1998), and human movement (Vertebra, 2003). The puppet animation passion drama Pizza Passionata (2001) by Kari Juusonen (b. Jyväskylä, 16 April 1967) won prizes at several festivals, including the Prix du Jury in Cannes. His 95

By Jónas Knútsson.

Syntymäpäivä (‘Birthday’, 2004) is a deadpan speechless comedy about the relationship between a father and son. Christian Lindblad (b. 29 March 1963) is an actor and live-action film director who turned to directing clay animation. Space Pigs (2000) reveals that the first spaceman was actually a pig, and Eläköön markkinatalous (‘Last Supper’, 2001) ironically comments on the welfare state. Finland has traditionally been a country without a major animation industry, but this has changed a little. The first feature animation since 1979, Keisarin salaisuus (‘The Emperor’s Secret’) was released in 2006 and directed by Riina Hyytiä (b. 1969). It is based on a motion capture aided TV series called Itse valtiaat, set in the world of politics. This satire was screened on television once a week from 2001–2008 and drew a large audience. The first Finnish drawn animated feature was Röllin sydän (‘Quest for a Heart’, 2007) by Pekka Lehtosaari (b. 1963), though it was actually animated in Moscow. The story is based on a children’s live-action TV series starring the troll Rölli. However, the commercial success story of Finnish animation is the feature Niko – lentäjän poika (‘Niko & the Way to the Stars’, 2008) by Kari Juusonen and Danish Michael Hegner (b. 1964). The children’s film features the young reindeer Niko, who believes his father is one of the heroes of Santa’s Flying Forces and decides to find him. The CGI animated film was the most expensive film ever produced in Finland, but it was also the most successful. It was sold to over one hundred territories and more than two million viewers saw the film in cinemas. The sequel, Niko 2 – lentäjäveljekset (‘Niko 2 – Little Brother, Big Trouble’) was directed by Kari Juusonen. It premiered in autumn 2012 and was well received by the public and the critics. After the year 2000, Finnish animation was faring better than ever. There was a medium-size – by European standards – animation studio, Anima Vitae. The level of education was good. Animation was accepted as an independent art form and subsidized by public funds. Its subject matter included politics, social satire, and humour. All animation techniques were used, though puppet animation was perhaps the strongest of them.

Iceland95 Sigurður Brynjólfsson mined the Icelandic sagas for his 11-minute Auðun og ísbjörninn (‘Audun and the Polar Bear’,

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1993). The dream of Icelandic filmmakers, in live-action or animation, is to share the country’s unique narrative tradition with the rest of the world. One of the challenges of Icelandic cinema has been to render the nuances and complexities of the country’s culture in a way that is appealing to the rest of the world. Brynjólfsson revisited the sagas in his 20-minute puppet-animated film, Hreiðar heimski (‘Hreiðar the Stupid’, 1996). In dramatic live-action films, this has often proven an insurmountable obstacle. Animated cinema, though, relies on a more basic narrative thrust in which the intricacies of the narrative are to be found in the form rather than in the content. Perhaps animators will be the first to translate Iceland’s cultural heritage to universal cinema. In 2002, the Icelandic animation company CAOZ presented its first project, Litla lirfan ljóta (‘The Lost Little Caterpillar’) by Gunnar Karlsson96 (b. Helluvað, 24 April 1959), from the children’s book by Friðrik Erlingsson (b. Reykjavík, 4 March, 1962). The 26-minute tale of a wayward caterpillar was eight years in the making and was screened at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. That same year, CAOZ made a series of innovative commercials for the Icelandic fruit juice company, Svali. ‘The Lost Little Caterpillar’ went on to break Icelandic box office records for a short. CAOZ staked their claim as Iceland’s answer to Disney with Anna og skapsveiflurnar (‘Anna and the Moods’, 2007), a 26-minute animated short with characters voiced by Björk, Damon Albarn, and Terry Jones. It was written by the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón Sigurðsson. The studio then made the feature Hetjur Valhallar – Þór (‘Legends of Valhalla – THOR’, 2011, directed by Óskar Jónasson, Toby Genkel, and Gunnar Karlsson), which was a success at home and abroad. The good times did not last. On 2 March  2012 the company’s CEO, Hilmar Sigurðsson, announced his resignation in the wake of differences with the majority of the board of directors. Gunnar Karlsson’s resignation followed. In an e-mail sent a month later, the manager’s and the director’s new joint venture, GunHil, was born.

The Invasion of the Elves In 1995, Magnús Scheving (b. Reykjavík, 10 November 1964) published a children’s book called Latibær (‘Lazy Town’) to

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promote a healthier lifestyle and diet for children. Scheving followed his book’s success with a stage musical and a sequel, Latíbær á Ólympíuleikunum (‘Lazy Town at the Olympics’). Scheving then had the idea of turning the adventures of ‘Lazy Town’ into an international TV series, produced in Iceland with puppets and live performers, and also making heavy use of CGI. In view of the short history of animation and film production in Iceland, this was folly by any standards. However, what seem like delusions of grandeur to most people are often modest proposals to the average Icelander. The Lazy Town series premiered on the Nickelodeon channel in 2004 and its characters became household names in the United States.

Estonia97 Even when Estonia was still part of the Soviet Union, and all the films and scenarios were financed and approved by the Moscow Cinema Committee (Goskino), the figurative character of animation allowed the creation of unique worlds. Animated films spoke metaphorically about human and social problems, contradicting the ruling cultural policy. The environment of many-levelled bureaucracy was conducive to the creation of artful films. Estonia regained independence in August  1991. Animation succeeded in maintaining its extremely high artistic standards and remained a carrier of elite culture. Yet Estonian film, including animation, changed in character because authors no longer needed to veil their intentions or say things in roundabout ways. In Soviet times, an average of three puppet and three drawn animations were completed each year. The number of shorts fell in the first days of independence, but feature-length drawn films appeared on the scene. Since 1999–2000, computer technology, including CGI animation, has been used in production. In the early 1990s, Estonian animation artists were overpowered by a sense of insecurity, mostly because of their loss of guaranteed financing. Yet a questing spirit remained; in particular, free humour made its way into films. Aarne Vasar (Tallinn, 18 October 1949–Tallinn, 6 June 1994) directed the witty Setu vurle küüsis (‘Caught by Setu Slicker’, 1993). Cartoonist Heiki Ernits (b. Tallinn, 24 March  1953) visualized Estonia’s departure from the Soviet Union as a train ride in Ärasõit (‘Departure’, 1991).

This Gunnar Karlsson is not related to the Swedish animation producer by the same name (1924–1985). By Jaan Ruus.

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Filmmakers like Rao Heidmets (b. Pärnu, 15 September 1956) continued to make ‘pure art’ as a form of protest (Elutuba, ‘Living Room’, 1994), while Hardi Volmer (b. Pärnu, 11 August 1957) ridiculed consumer society (Incipit vita nova, 1992). Both films were pixilated. Peep Pedmanson (b. Põltsamaa, 8 August 1963) portrayed subconscious and childhood introspections in Kilpkonnade lõppmäng, (‘Tortoises’ Endspiel’, 1990), Eesel heliredelil (‘A Donkey on the Music-Scale’, 1993), and Just married (1998). Mati Kütt (b. Tallinn, 15 April 1947) launched a string of surreal films with Sprott võtmas päikest (‘The Smoked Sprat Baking in the Sun’, 1992). Kapsapea (‘Cabbagehead’, 1993) is an hour-long puppet parody of adventure films by Riho Unt (b. Kose-Risti, Harjumaa, 15 May 1956). It involves a nutty Estonian farmer, the KGB, the Chinese, dinosaurs, and EEC officials. Later, Riho Unt continued the Kapsapea series with Tagasi Euroopasse (‘Back to Europe’, 1997) and Saamueli internet (‘Saamuel’s Internet’, 2000), which mocked peasant nationalism. Priit Pärn’s Hotell E (‘Hotel E’, 1992) juxtaposes the living styles of the pseudo-socialist East with the capitalist West. Porgandite öö (‘The Night of the Carrots’, 1998) envisions witty possibilities for human relationships in the integrated European landscape. The film 1895 (id., 1995, codirected by Janno Põldma) sarcastically dissects the history of cinema, calling for a personalized view of history. It garnered wide international acclaim. Janno Põldma (b. Tallinn, 7 November  1950) was a prolific, successful theatre playwright. His directing debut was in the Nukufilm Studio in 1991, with the puppet film Vennad ja õed (‘Brothers and Sisters’). In 1994, his Sünnipäev (‘Birthday’) received a special prize from the prestigious Fantoche Festival in Switzerland. Armastuse võimalikkuses (‘On the Possibility of Love’, 1999) also received accolades. About Põldma, Priit Pärn wrote: ‘He is there [in the memory of common people] together with Heiki Ernits with two long children’s films [Ladybirds’ Christmas and Lotte from Gadgetville, see below]. From my point of view Janno’s shorts [.  .  .] are really important in Estonian animation history.’98 Because they were so expensive to produce, the number of animated films declined. By the end of the 2000s the output had fallen to between four and a maximum of nine films annually. Nevertheless, the artistic level of those films remained high, with prevalent irony and humor. The Soviet-era monopolistic studio Tallinnfilm was closed down and many others took its place. In 1993,

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Tallinnfilm’s splinter studio Nukufilm (meaning ‘puppet film’) was established. It produced cut-out and puppet films, series, and advertising, and turned out 30 to 60 minutes of film annually. Under its managing director and producer Arvo Nuut (b. Tallinn, 13 April  1941), Nukufilm became home for many former Tallinnfilm directors. They included Riho Unt, Hardi Volmer, Rao Heidmets, and Mati Kütt. In 1994, the independent studio Eesti Joonisfilm (Estonian Drawn Films) was formed by drawn animation filmmakers. Its owners included renowned Tallinnfilm animators Priit Pärn, Mati Kütt, Heiki Ernits, and Janno Põldma. It was also where Priit Tender (b. Tallinn, 7 February  1971) and Ülo Pikkov (b. Tallinn, 15 June  1976) began their careers. Olav Ehala (b. Tallinn, 31 July 1950) regularly composed music for the studio’s productions and Kalev Tamm (b. Tallinn, 15 November  1966) kept his position as producer. The annual output was 30 to 70 titles – mostly auteur films, but also TV series. In 1994, the Danish film studio A. Film established a subsidiary of the same name in Tallinn, which became an independent studio in 2011. As a production house, it produced hand-drawn and computer animation for features (Danish, German, Irish, French, Spanish, American, British, Swedish, and Norwegian) and TV broadcasts (Danish, German, French), as well as for educational productions and commercials. The studio produced the characters and animation for Denmark’s Oscar-nominated Kui hing läheb oma teed (‘When Life Departs’, 1996). The studio’s producer and managing director was Kristel Tõldsepp (b. Tallinn, 26 September 1974); the creative head and animation director was Meelis Arulepp (b. Tartu, 9 May 1965). The small universal production studio Multi Film was established in 1999, headed by Mikk Rand (b. Tallinn, 1 August 1970). Short animations were also directed by Heilika Võsu (later Pikkov, b. Tartu, 9 May 1982), Elisabeth Salmin (b. Tallinn, 26 November 1979), and Birgit Demidova (b. Loksa, 26 November 1984). The state remained the primary source of financing. Film production in the small country (1.2 million inhabitants) depended entirely on state subsidies. To improve the situation, the Cultural Endowment Foundation was established in 1995 to support national art projects. It received its income from excise taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. Estonian animation took pride in a new generation of filmmakers born in the 1970s. Ülo Pikkov, Priit Tender,

Priit Pärn, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 4 September 2012.

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and Kaspar Jancis (b. Tallinn, 8 May  1975) towered in drawn animation. Mait Laas (b. Tallinn, 4 August 1970), Pärtel Tall (b. Tallinn, 19 April  1977), Yelena Yemelyanova (later Girlin, b. Tallinn, 10 November  1979), and Mari-Liis Karula (later Bassovskaya, b. Võru, 18 September 1977) similarly dominated in puppet film. Together with the works of the masters born in the 1940s (Priit Pärn, Mati Kütt) and 1950s (Riho Unt, Hardi Volmer, Rao Heidmets), Estonian films continued to shine at international festivals. In the meantime, the country’s main animation studios, Eesti Joonisfilm and Nukufilm, managed to become economically secure by making series for international TV stations. While the overall film production was modest in quantity, cinema was invigorated by short films. Personal self-fulfillment and failures were portrayed with playful grotesquerie by Priit Tender (Gravitatsioon, ‘Gravitation’, 1996; Viola, 1999; and Mont Blanc, 2001); Ülo Pikkov (Bermuda, 1998; Ahvi aasta, ‘Year of the Monkey’, 2003; and Elu maitse, ‘Taste of Life’, 2006. Pikkov also authored an excellent book on the theory of animation, Animasophy, Estonian Academy of Arts, 2010); and Kaspar Jancis (Weitzenbergi tänav, ‘Weitzenberg Street’, 2002; and Maraton, ‘Marathon’, 2006). Mait Laas (b. Tallinn, 4 August 1970) shows the individual’s relationship with the world in a sensitive, naive manner (Päevavalgus, ‘Day Light’, 1997; Teekond Nirvaanasse, ‘The Way to Nirvana’, 2000; and Generatio, 2005). Mikk Rand’s vision is primitivist (Vares ja hiired, ‘The Crow and Mice’, 1998, with Priit Tender; and Sääsk ja hobune, ‘The Mosquito and Horse’, 2001). Cultural mythologies were transformed by Rao Heidmets (Instinkt, ‘Instinct’, 2003; Pärlimees, ‘Pearl Man’, 2006; and Kaasasündinud kohustused, ‘Inherent Obligations’, 2008) and by Hardi Volmer (Barbarid, ‘Barbarians’, 2003; and Lõpuõhtu, ‘Closing Session’, 2007). Instinkt, by the puppet film director Rao Heidmets and artist Navitrolla, depicts the Big Creator losing control over the world that he himself has created. The film was selected to screen at 106 festivals and snapped up prizes. Puppet director Riho Unt continued to make entertaining chefs d’oeuvre (e.g. Vennad Karusüdamed, ‘Brothers Bearhearts’, 2005), as well as contemplations full of existential angst (Pingviinide paraad, ‘The Penguin Parade’, 2002; Põhjakonn, ‘North Dragon’, 2007; and Lili, 2008). Jelena Girlin and Mari-Liis Bassovskaja depicted the woman’s world grotesquely and ingeniously with puppets (Laud, ‘The Table’, 2004; and Kleit, ‘The Dress’, 2007). The possibilities of clay animation were explored in Pärtel Tall’s children’s films (Porgand, ‘The Carrot’, 2003; and

Porgand suvitab, ‘The Carrot on the Beach’, 2008). Among the new filmmakers were Martius Daane Klemeti (b. 21 October  1982, author of Õhus, ‘In the Air’, 2009) and Andrus Tenusaar (b. Tallinn, 22 January 1977, author of Miriami piknik, ‘The Scarecrow’, 2007). Rein Raamat (b. Türi, 20 March  1931), who had founded Estonian drawn animation back in the 1970s, tried his hand at an adventure series for children (Ohtlikud lennud, ‘The Dangerous Flights’, 1989–1992). He founded his own animation Studio B for this purpose. When the studio closed in 1995 he devoted his talents to documentary filmmaking. Tom ja Fluffy (‘Tom & Fluffy’, 1997) was made for children by directors Leo Lätti (b. Tallinn, 9 June 1957), Heiki Ernits, and Janno Põldma, as was Lotte reis lõunamaale (‘Lotte’s Journey South’, 2000), by Ernits and Põldma. Both were drawn animation series depicting the adventures of animal characters with humour and no violence. They became very popular among Estonian families with the advent of DVDs. From 2003, Nukufilm studio also produced the irregular series Mirjam, named after its girl character. The company A. Film proposed a German-Denmark-Estonian series about the world of children called Mis mõttes? (‘Things You Think’), directed by Karsten Kiilerich (b. Slagelse, Denmark, 21 January 1955) and Meelis Arulepp. In December 2004, the drawn animation feature Frank ja Wendy (‘Frank & Wendy’, by script and art director Priit Pärn and directors Kaspar Jancis, Ülo Pikkov, and Priit Tender) opened Animated Dreams, part of the Eighth Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It was a South Park-style political satire. The film followed the adventures of two American super agents, with absurd humour and political incorrectness. Estonia’s grand old man of animation, Priit Pärn, produced a delightfully ironic script. The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) is held annually at the end of November. The Animated Dreams section includes an international short animation contest. Each year, the festival presents a retrospective of one wellknown animation master and a special selection from one country’s animation work. One popular success was Heiki Ernits’s and Janno Põldma’s feature Lepatriinude jõulud (‘Ladybirds’ Christmas’, 2001), about two ladybirds brought into a house on a Christmas tree. In late 2006, the first Estonian animated feature made especially for movie theatres was released, Leiutajateküla Lotte (‘Lotte from Gadgetville’, 2006). Written by Andrus Kivirähk (b. Tallinn, 17 August 1970) and directed by Heiki Ernits and Janno Põldma, it created a violence-free world of whimsical characters.

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Priit Pärn teamed up with his wife Olga Marchenko Pärn (b. Minsk [Byelorussia], 1 January 1976) and continued exploring human communication in Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (‘Life without Gabriella Ferri’, 2008). The animation creates sharp, potent, and surreal visions of danger. So does the film’s successor, Tuukrid vihmas (‘Divers in the Rain’, 2010). The same mood pervades the puppet film Oranus (2009) by Jelena Girlin and Mari-Liis Bassovskaja. Meanwhile, surrealism carried Mati Kütt’s powerful puppet works: Põrandaalune (‘Underground’, 1997); Nööbi odüsseia (‘Button’s Odyssey’, 2002), and Une instituut (‘The Institute of the Dream’, 2006). Kütt became prominent among Estonian surrealist artists. His Taevalaul (‘Sky Song’, 2010) was hailed by critics as a film that ‘overcomes gravitation with surrealist powers and rises into heights where few can breathe’. It explored dream logic on a grand scale – a journey to the moon, meetings with Salvador Dalí and Alfred Hitchcock, and the exploration of Sigmund Freud’s subconscious. A grotesque and melancholic drawn animation, Krokodill (‘Crocodile’, 2009), by Kaspar Jancis, won the highly coveted Cartoon d’Or, the traditional award of European animation. In addition, there were two well-made documentaries about masters of Estonian animation. Pärnography – mees animatsioonist (‘Pärnography – Man of Animation’, 2005; script by Toomas Kall, directed by Hardi Volmer, and produced by Arko Okk) portrays the most celebrated Estonian animator, Priit Pärn. Aja meistrid (‘The Kings of Time’, 2008), by Mait Laas, is a clever film about Elbert Tuganov (Baku, Azerbaijan, 22 February  1920–Tallinn, 22 March 2007) and Heino Pars (b. Mustla, Viljandimaa, 13 October 1925), who founded Estonian puppet film. It reconstructs the era from the 1950s to the 1990s, blending documentary footage with animation. In the course of the Eesti Film100 project in 2012, several classic animated films (by Elbert Tuganov, Heino Pars, Rein Raamat, and Priit Pärn) were restored and a new Estonian Film Museum opened its doors. A department of animation was established in the Estonian Art Academy in 2006, cochaired by Priit Pärn and Ülo Pikkov. Through the decades, Estonian animation kept its spirit of experimentation. For instance, eight directors of Eesti

Joonisfilm produced films based on well-known Estonian poems (Must Lagi, ‘Black Ceiling’, 2007). It was the distribution and funding of the films that caused concern, since the animation still depended on state subsidies.

Priit Pärn99 As a consequence of Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of decentralization and balanced ethnic representation, from the 1950s onwards animation studios gradually began to be built up in Soviet centres such as Tallinn in Estonia, Kiev in the Ukraine, Yerevan in Armenia, and Tbilisi in Georgia. They contributed to the formation of what David MacFadyen calls the ‘Soviet type of cartoon’ which was ‘both national in form and socialist in content’.100 Nukufilm, the animation department at the Estonian Tallinnfilm Studio, was established in 1957.101 The animated films it made were recognized for their authors’ original vision and their appetite for experiments.102 Priit Pärn, born in Tallinn on 26 August 1946, began working at Joonisfilm in 1976. His output includes many short films and advertisements, as well as films up to half an hour in length. His work has been awarded more than 80 prizes at international festivals such as Zagreb, Stuttgart, Hiroshima, Brussels, and Ottawa.103 Pärn distinguished himself through his expressiveness and originality. He was able to find ways to convey satirical messages with subtle, eccentric humour. His drawing style could be described as ‘grotesque realism’; his graphic style came mainly from Poland and Czechoslovakia. As a cartoonist, he presents important issues with absurd black humour. He remained a genuine cartoonist even when he was an animation director. His notion of animation involves satirical pictorial metaphors in incongruent combinations of images and metamorphoses. A basic familiarity with cartoon language and symbolism is probably needed to grasp Pärn’s films. In places where cartoons and caricature are not deep-rooted in the culture, Pärn’s work would likely give the impression of being from a distant planet. What Pärn strove for in his moving cartoons was a caricature of Soviet society. Everyone and everything

By Midhat Ajanovic´ and Doi Nobuaki. David MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film since World War Two, London, McGill, 2005, p. 71. 101 In 1971, the specialized drawn animation department Joonisfilm was established, with the help of Russian master Fedor Khitruk. 102 Chris Robinson, Between Genius & Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation, Varrak, Tallinn, 2003. 103 Pärn won top prizes in Zagreb in 1988 (for Breakfast on the Grass), 1996 (for 1895), and 2010 (for Divers in the Rain, with Olga Pärn). In 1992 he won the Baden-Württemburg Prize in Stuttgart (for Hotel E) and in 1998 he triumphed in Ottawa (for Night of the Carrots). 99

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resembles itself most closely when interpreted as a caricature, which emphasizes its object’s most characteristic features. Through these absurd, paradoxical, and dark images, Pärn gives us a faithful portrait of the Soviet Union and an extremely realistic picture of the horrors that the so-called socialist system inflicted. In addition to certain features of Estonian culture, tradition, and history, Pärn’s films also express the powerful resistance of an artist from a small nation against a huge, domineering empire. Pärn’s cartoons originated from that resistance, which reinforces and binds all of his animated films. On one hand, he artfully observes, decodes, and presents a recognizable reality. On the other, he creates a system of camouflaged messages. To evade the censor he did not use obvious symbols. Instead, he gives only visual indications and allows their meanings to emerge by themselves. Often something can be interpreted in at least two ways. Superficially the meaning is banal, while the real intentions and messages are buried much deeper. Thus his films have a multilayered structure, with several distinct levels of meaning. There is no such thing as an abstract caricature or cartoon, even one drawn freely and carelessly. It always triggers associations with man and his recognizable world. Therefore, these means can be construed as realistic. They show real situations and mental conditions tangibly. As the critic Paul Wells puts it, they show ‘social “truths” in a fashion unavailable elsewhere’.104 Pärn uses his cartoons as a microscope to inspect the deepest levels of his society – those that are not visible to the naked eye and leave no trace in the media of their time. He searches for images buried deep in the subconscious and in even more obscure places. Pärn’s symbolism and expression are characterized by somewhat esoteric imagery. Almost all of Pärn’s films balance on the subtle boundary between the physical reality of everyday life and an individual’s subjective perception. They appear as strange images that we cannot see in reality but that we are nevertheless sure we have seen in some time and place. By describing inner realities, Pärn gives us a credible picture of the world where he is condemned to spend his life. As Wells puts it: ‘Animators enjoy exploiting the fine line between the plausibly “real” and the overtly “surreal”

because it exposes the falsehood of objectivity, and further, and much more importantly, challenges homogenous ideological certainties and illusory cultural stabilities.’105 Pärn’s first solo film, Kas maakera on ümmargune? (‘Is the Earth Round?’, 1977) was a satire portraying ‘unquestionable truths’ as something built on vapour, not reality. According to animation scholar Chris Robinson, and Pärn himself, the film caused some controversy and was only allowed to be screened in Estonia.106 In 1978 he directed . . . Ja teeb trikke (‘. . . And Plays Tricks’), which won the award for the best children’s film at the Varna festival in 1981. He made another satire on society in 1981, Harjutusi iseseisvaks eluks (‘Exercises for an Independent Life’). Right from the title, the film can be read as Pärn’s reaction to his occupied homeland’s situation in the Soviet Union. Here Pärn contrasts two worlds. In one there is a bureaucrat, drawn in a semi-realistic style and painted in fields of dull colour.107 In the other, a funny figure with protruding front teeth moves manically. The pictures on this side are sketchy, bordering on childish; the colour combinations are warm, the animation playful. There is a rapid montage of interchanging and contrasting scenes between the two characters. In this film about father and son, about two generation, Pärn elucidates the irreconcilable conflict between two ‘worlds’. This might also be interpreted as a complaint about the fight between little, West-friendly Estonia and the big, bureaucratic Soviet Union, which begins to break down at the end of the film. That the film got past the censors was partly due to Pärn presenting it as a story of a relationship between a father and son.108 In Kolmnurk (‘Triangle’, 1982), a married couple is visited by a greedy dwarf. Despite the fact that they are stylized in a grotesque manner, Pärn’s characters have almost correct bodily proportions. This was presumably because Pärn wanted to stress their physical sexuality, particularly in the scenes with the woman and the dwarf, which play cleverly with sexual fantasies. ‘Triangle’ was even popular within the borders of the former Soviet Union. The film was shown in cinemas before the main feature and large, mostly young, audiences came to every showing. Aeg maha (‘Time Out’, 1984) used a somewhat simpler drawing style to weave a succession of incongruent

Paul Wells, ‘The Beautiful Village and the True Village’, Art & Design 3–4 (1997): 41. Chris Robinson, Between Genius & Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation, Varrak, Tallinn, 2003, 43. 106 Chris Robinson, Between Genius & Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation, Varrak, Tallinn, 2003, pp. 140–141. 107 The soundtrack is characterized by Western popular music. (Tom Jones accompanies the nostalgic memories of the bureaucrat.) 108 In the documentary Pärnography (Hardi Volmer, Estonia, 2005). 104 105

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animated cartoons that challenge the material world. The film combines cumulative jokes of every kind with instant, static jokes. In the first part, we see a cat-like character in a room. He tries clumsily to follow a schedule that comes in the form of dictates from a clock. But the hand of the omnipotent animator intrudes, throwing the clock into the void beyond the screen, and time ceases to exist. Then Pärn’s character suddenly finds himself in a world of total freedom, a space without beginning or end, unlimited by physical laws or time. Pärn conjures up the limitless possibilities through effective and very inventive incongruous images – for example, a hen laying glasses that hatch into two eyes and a figure filing down waves to calm the sea. According to Pärn, to create animated images is ‘to organize two ways of thinking at the same time and in the same head’.109 The two ways of thinking are ‘fantasy thinking, which means to put together two or more things that have previously never been together; and engineerlike, mathematically structured thinking, which helps us to build up the logical structure of the film’. Pärn’s international breakthrough came in the mid1980s with glasnost and perestroika. Censorship disappeared almost completely, but the state financed various film companies up until the breakup of the Soviet Union. Pärn had the opportunity to produce his 30-minute Eine murul (‘Breakfast on the Grass’, 1987, whose script had been written in 1983). It is one of the most remarkable satirical animated films ever made. Through incongruent images, the body movements and gestures of figures, and an associative montage of intruding mental images, Pärn conveys mankind’s emotional condition, marked by loneliness, fear, and anxiety. The four-part film describes the everyday lives of four characters, two female and two male. Around them is an urban environment, composed of absurd but easily recognizable scenes of ‘real-life socialism’. In Robinson’s words, ‘Pärn trenchantly critiques the absurdities of Communist society by giving viewers a rare glimpse of daily endurance in the Soviet Union.’110 Humanity only exists in the mind of bureaucratic pen-pushers, or scrawled on fake stage walls. Pärn captures strange images that cause unease and creep under the skin. The pessimistic feelings radiated by the drawings are ones that existed deep down in people

imprisoned in an ideological nightmare. The unifying thread is a stylized figure representing Picasso. A flock of black birds flies above his head like vultures circling a carcass, while policemen or secret service agents continually drag him away. In the first story, Anna tries to buy an apple in an almost empty supermarket. This part is made in a greyscale, painting a depressing everyday scene in the socialist metropolis. Uniformly dressed people shuffle around the streets. You can almost smell the brown coal smoke hanging over a city. The only thing that is not grey is the apple, painted in a glowing greenish yellow. The monotony and hopelessness are underlined by scenes of rain, wind, and dead dogs lying on pavements and a market where people sell useless things. After many fruitless attempts to get the apple Anna must sell her body to obtain the desired fruit. In the second story, we see Georg in an aristocratic drawing room, stretching and performing gymnastic moves before a mirror, while beautiful classical music chimes in the background. Suddenly the wind blows the window open and Georg’s dream is blown away. The whole picture melts, the colours fade, and all that is left is greyness. Georg sits in a shabby flat, dressed like everyone else, while marching music from a military band comes in from outside. Berta is the film’s third character. She loses her face when her baby appears. On the empty space where her face used to be she draws on a few clumsy lines to represent her eyes, mouth, and nose. This painful metaphor for the loss of identity culminates in the despairing Berta smashing a wall of portraits of herself while the rain washes away her drawn-on ‘face’. The last character in the quartet, Eduard, initially looks like a giant. But the nearer he comes to Moscow, the smaller he becomes. Finally he has shrunk to a dwarf, so that his one-eyed boss is like a Cyclops in comparison. Eduard uses a teaspoon to gouge out the boss’s eye and ink flows out of the boss’s wound. Finally, the four main characters find comfort and happiness in a fantasy world; they are united in Manet’s famous painting, Breakfast on the Grass. But this escape into imagination lasts only a moment. They are forced to return to their brutal world, where Picasso lies in the street and a steamroller rolls over his painting hand.

Priit Pärn’s quotations are taken from his lecture on narrative techniques in animation at the Festival for Animated Film in Eksjö, Sweden, September 2005. 110 Chris Robinson, Between Genius & Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation, Varrak, Tallinn, 2003, p. 154. 109

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How did Pärn succeed in the post-Soviet era? Support from the government is one factor. Animators got 30 to 70  percent of the money for their productions, though they still needed to make up the cost. In Pärn’s case, the funding came from the studio Joonisfilm.111 Pärn’s attitude is rebellious, his humour a way of resisting for the weak. If you cannot fight with too strong an enemy, you can use a joke that the enemy doesn’t understand. But what should be resisted, after the totalitarian society collapses? The main stage in Hotell E (‘Hotel E’, 1992) is ‘Hotel Europe’. A wall and door divide two rooms: the ugly, grey, monochrome, busy world of the East and the beautiful, colourful, elegant, and slow world of the West. The film was completed in 1992, immediately after Estonia experienced a radical social change and people hoped for a better life in the Western system. The film seems to reflect such a view, but in reality Pärn is warning the viewer. According to the filmmaker, his personal experience was put into the film. Pärn had come and gone between East and West and knew that the West was not as good as Easterners imagined. The film begins with two introductions: The Legend of the Traitor and The Legend of the Redeemer. These two episodes are set in a distant past and their relationship is just like that of the two rooms in Hotel Europe. The filmmaker points out the possibility that society will become worse instead of better. People in the colourful world enjoy the freedom and look graceful. But their words are limited to dumb sentences (e.g. ‘Oh shit’, ‘How are you?’, ‘I’m fine.’) They have the freedom to say anything but have nothing to say. The worst thing is that they seem to think their lives are perfect and their actions are their own. At the end, everybody sits around the table and starts to act in ritualistic ways, just like people in the grey world, without any order or compulsion. It is their voluntary obedience. In ‘Hotel E’, there is a TV series called The American Dream. The end of the Cold War means this ‘dream’ now dominates the world. The characters look happy, but what they really do is destroy everyone, including themselves. This is the world after everyone achieves freedom. Pärn takes notes that power doesn’t always look like power, that it may not be a manifest enemy like a dictator or a totalitarian society. It’s an entity that defines the behaviour of unconscious people. The influence of mass media becomes a major motif in his work.

In 1995 the artist made, for the centennial anniversary of cinema, 1895. It is a fake documentary on the Lumière Brothers and their invention. It is a film about cinema and how it influences people’s memories and understanding of history. Most of the plot consists of citations and parodies from famous films. But the made-up story is interesting and captivating. The viewer feels catharsis at the end, though the film is full of false information. Oddly, these images are in their own way believable because they are based on biased images, on the images we tend to believe. (According to Pärn, the world in 1895 is viewed from the perspective of Paris.) Cinema is deceptive; our perception of the world is transformed by our exposure to cinema, and we don’t notice. The atmosphere of Porgandite öö (‘Night of the Carrots’, 1998) is a fin de siècle one. The film looks like a modern fable, based on the cheap catastrophe stories that are always in the mass media. Many people try to enter a hotel and become members of a mysterious group called PGI. However, they fail, so they surround the building and protest. The happy few who can make it inside are shut in a room. They don’t look happy at all, although they avoid being anonymous and can boast a distinctive personality (like becoming a celebrity). Important point: there is a powerful enemy, evil rabbits, hidden somewhere inside the hotel. Characters dream of a ‘Night of the Carrots’, when every rabbit will turn into a carrot and everything will be peace and happiness. With the visible evil gone, people seek an alternative figure to blame for their own bad lives – even a rabbit. Karl ja Marilyn (‘Karl and Marilyn’, 2003) sums up the first period of Pärn’s post-Soviet films. The characters include Karl Marx and Marilyn Monroe. Karl is trying to escape his position as a superstar who must live up to everyone’s expectations. Marilyn, a country girl, yearns to be a celebrity in the big city. The figures are actual persons, but they become universal images. The film asks: Is there a real personality, separate from the images we expect? Olga Marchenko (who became Olga Pärn in 2008) was born on 1 January 1976 in Minsk, into an animation family. Her mother Elena Petkevich worked as an animation director at Belarusfilm. Olga herself started her career at the studio as an art director and animator. But soon she felt she needed more education and moved to France to study at La Poudrière, in Valence.

Joonisfilm was once a branch of the national production company Tallinnfilm. It became a private company in 1993. Among its creations was a popular character called Lotte, and the income from the series enabled the studio to produce ‘auteur’ short films. Joonisfilm Studio is co-owned by the filmmakers, including Pärn. 111

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Her mother strongly urged her to watch Priit Pärn’s films. Olga found Priit’s films in the school library and soon fell in love with them. The school invited Pärn to run a storytelling workshop at La Poudrière and Olga asked him to be her tutor while she made her graduation film. Olga reignited Priit’s creativity at a time when he had stopped making films. He returned to the movie camera so that Olga could get a visa and move to Estonia so they could make animation together. Their collaboration started with a short segment in Must Lagi (‘Black Ceiling’, 2007), an anthology by Estonian directors. They chose charcoal animation, the first time Priit had used this technique for animation (although he used it frequently as a painter). Olga already had experience making films in oil and sand. Drawing on a frosted glass let Priit draw and erase very easily and do lighting from underneath. ‘Black Ceiling’ animated Estonian poems. Priit and Olga chose Jüri Üdi’s ‘I Feel a Lifelong Bullet in the Back of My Head’, based on the deportation of Estonian people to Siberia and their massacre by the Russians. Priit and Olga added a new dimension. The film is full of intimate feelings and laughter, reflecting strange but strong relationships between lovers. Both a man’s voice and a woman’s voice narrate the poem many times. The voices gradually start to laugh. By repeating the poem again and again, the filmmakers try to break it away from the historic tragedy. The man’s narration is in a ‘true’ Estonian accent, while the woman has a Russian accent. The film insists that the relationship between Estonia and Russia go to the next level of intimate collaboration, exemplified by Olga and Priit themselves. Olga speaks Russian very fluently, and she fell in love with the Estonian Priit. Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (‘Life without Gabriella Ferri’, 2008)112 deals with personal topics. According to Priit, what enabled him to make the film was his personal experience: the death of his first wife in 2004 and his encounter with Olga. A young woman dives into water after grasping one of her own hands softly, symbolizing the parting with her boyfriend. A husband and a wife caress each other enthusiastically, but their lonely son interrupts them. In this world where nobody can get the connections that he or she hopes for, a thief is the exception. He takes everything he wants by his hand, including people, and he really is Death.

112 113

Gabriella Ferri (1942–2004) was an Italian folk singer. By Ieva Viese.

Tuukrid Vihmas (‘Divers in the Rain’, 2010) is about a man and a woman who live in the same house. He works as a diver in the daytime; she is a dentist at night. Their meetings are brief: they just have coffee together and kiss goodbye. The film is a parable about isolation and lack of communication. There is always rain; its sound isolates people softly, matching the overall atmosphere. Purposely, the story does not evolve. Through many tiny episodes, the diver slowly recognizes the tremendous gap between him and his lover. Lendurid Koduteel (‘Pilots on the Way Home’, 2014) illustrates the real and imaginary worlds that three pilots have to face after having survived the loss of their plane in the desert. Another of Priit and Olga’s great films, it is based on an innovative technique that combines drawn and sand animation. Pärn’s career as a director started in the 1970s and endured through many important political changes, but his approach remained the same. He observes people who are trapped in some context. In the socialist era, he contemplated a society that made people obedient. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, he criticized how people trap themselves.

Latvia113 Following the country’s independence from the Soviet Union, Latvia’s transition to a market economy wasn’t easy and sometimes led to productions collapsing. However, animation survived quite well. A  government decision in 1990 proclaimed that all artistic associations were independent from the state. A National Film Centre was established to grant separate financial support to fictional live-action films, documentaries, and animation. It also supported the noncommercial distribution of films. The National Culture Capital Foundation was created to support cultural projects, extending to filmmaking in 1997. These two bodies became the main internal financial sources for animation filmmakers. The puppet animators and the drawn animation filmmakers in the district of Šmerlis joined forces to create the Dauka studio. In 1991, Arnolds Burovs initiated production at Dauka with his last film before retirement, Speˉle ar Dzlıˉvıˉbu (‘A Game with Life’). Piemineklis (‘The

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Monument’, 1991) was the first episode of the comic puppet series AvarijasBrigaˉde (‘Rescue Team’), directed by Jaˉnis Cimermanis. It was a popular hit. Two series of short drawn films followed, made by different directors: Raˉveˉjsleˉdzeˉjs (‘The Zip’) and Krikši (‘Triffles’). The films were made by young artists who had no directing experience, including Inga Praulin¸a and Signe Baumane. There was a different director for almost every episode. However, the initiative was a fiasco overall, and many of the directors never made anything significant. In the meantime, Roze Stiebra and Ansis Beˉrzin¸š directed the educational Kaˉ beˉrnin¸š naˉk pasauleˉ (‘How a Baby Comes into This World’)114 and Ness un Nesija (‘Ness and Nesy’, 1991), the first Latvian animated feature film. However, the techniques of the separate groups were quite different, and their cooperation on these two films wasn’t successful. In 1992, the puppet group split off and Dauka became a studio for drawn animation only. Roze Stiebra and Ansis Beˉrzin¸š115 continued working and directing drawn films, in cooperation with Latvian artists and musicians. Such artists as Heleˉna Heinrihsone, Juris Petraškevicˇs, and Kaspars Zarin¸š joined the team, as well as composers Valts Puˉce, Uģis Praulin¸š, and Ingus Baušk¸enieks. They continued pursuing themes and characters from folklore and literature. The series Pasacin¸as (‘The Little Fairytales’, 26 films in total) was made with storylines based on poems from Latvian authors (Rainis, Aspazija, Fricis Baˉrda, and others) and lullabies. Other significant films included Kakıˉša Dzirnavin¸as (‘The Cats’ Mill’, 1993), Neparastie rıˉdzinieki (‘The Unusual Rigans’, 2001), and Speˉleˉju, dancoju (‘I Played, I Danced’, 2007). Dauka’s films are considered a part of Latvian cultural heritage and the studio is primarily concerned with local children. The national television channel premieres all of their films. The puppet filmmakers called themselves Animaˉcijas Brigaˉde. Jaˉnis Cimermanis (working with the producer, screenwriter, and children’s storyteller Maˉris Putnin¸š) continued the episodes of ‘Rescue Team’. The studio made

other series: Munks un Lemijs (‘Munk and Lemy’), Zveˉri (‘Animals’), and Rezgalıˉbas (‘Mischievous’). In 1998, the group teamed up with the Danish production company Zentropa to found the Aboom Studio for international coproductions. Under this banner, Jaˉnis Cimermanis worked on the puppet features Props un Berta (‘Props and Berta’, codirected with Dutch director Per Fly) and Trıˉs musketieri (‘The Three Musketeers’, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas). Cimermanis directed short films as well. In 2004, he made Poeˉm pa kulšen,116 illustrating the threshing process as a cultural tradition of the same importance as any festival. Latvietis (‘The Latvian’, 2007) is an ironic look at the history of Latvian folk, followed in 2008 by KaruTuleb!117 New talents appeared at the studio: Nils Skapaˉns (b. Riga, 25 September  1969), Dace Rıˉduˉze (b. Ceˉsis, 15 May 1973), Eˉ valds Laˉcis (b. Riga, 1 July 1974), and Maˉris Brinkmanis (b. Tukums, 29 September 1975). Skapaˉns, a former cameraman, started working on episodes of ‘Munk and Lemy’. He soon received the Crystal Bear for best children’s short at the Berlin International Film Festival. Seven episodes of ‘Munk and Lemy’ were followed by the series Zveˉri (‘Animals’). The latter was compiled into the film Cauraˉ maˉja (‘Leaky House’), which won Skapaˉns the national film festival’s Lielais Kristaps Prize for Best Director of Animation. Dace Rıˉduˉze worked with puppets designed by Maˉris Putnin¸š. Among her films are Jaˉn¸taˉrpin¸š (‘Firefly’, 2003), Miega ruˉk¸i (‘Dream Dwarfs’, 2006), and Cuˉkas laime (‘Pig’s Happiness’, 2009). Eˉ valds Laˉcis created Ledus Paveˉlnieks (‘Master of Ice’, 2009) and Jaunaˉ Suga (‘The New Species’, 2008). Maˉris Brinkmanis directed aˉtraˉk, Minhauzen, aˉtraˉk! (‘Hurry Up, Münchhausen, Hurry Up!’, 2005), Cerıˉbu kuģis (‘Ship of Hope’, 2007), and others. Dauka and Animaˉcijas Brigaˉde were the dominant makers of animation until 1995, when the Rija studio was founded. The manager of the studio, the producer Vilnis Kalnaellis, had started working at Dauka, but soon it was clear that his ideas for an animation studio differed from those of Roze Stiebra and Ansis Beˉrzin¸š. Stiebra and Beˉrzin¸š prioritized the local distribution of their films; the

114 During the Soviet period, people were held back from discussing themes connected to sexual life and childbirth. Therefore, this educational film about natural processes had extra significance. 115 After failing – for financial reasons – to finish a feature animation of his own, Ansis Beˉrzin¸š stopped directing and had become a producer by 1993. 116 The title is deliberately put in a dialect. It means ‘A Poem about Threshing’ but it is usually left untranslated in catalogues. 117 This title is not in Latvian but in the Estonian language, meaning ‘the bear is coming’. The storyline was derived from real news: a Latvian bear swam to the extremely distant Ron¸u (Ruhnu) island belonging to Estonia.

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involvement of Latvian artists, writers, and composers; and Latvian children as the target audience. Vilnis Kalnaellis wanted a producer-organized studio, where animators could work on several projects at a time. These would include international coproductions. Much emphasis was put on international distribution, film festivals, and screen time on television and in cinemas. Rija became the best internationally known Latvian film studio. Its first collaboration was Kirikou and the Sorceress (‘Kirikou et la Sorcière’, Michel Ocelot, 1998), with the French companies Tiramisu and Les Armateurs. It made ten times its expected box office income and brought the studio well-deserved attention. Rija’s animators later worked on the Oscar-nominated The Triplets of Belleville (‘Les Triplettes de Belleville’, 2003), the French-Canadian feature directed by Sylvain Chomet. For the feature Lote no Izgudrotaˉjciema (‘Lotte from Gadgetville’, 2006) by the Estonian directors Heiki Ernits and Janno Põldma, Rija provided the services and also took an important part in the production process. Moreover, Rija helped local directors. Signe Baumane, Vladimir Leshchiov, Jurģis Kraˉsons, Reinis Kalnaellis, Aija Bley, Askols Saulıˉtis, Ruˉta Mežavilka, and others have all made their films there and brought the studio international recognition. Dauka, Animaˉcijas Brigaˉde, and Rija are the most important animation producers in Latvia. Gradually, however, the names of other studios have appeared as well and many animators move between studios on different projects. Nils Skapaˉns, despite his success with Maˉris Putnin¸š’ dolls at Animaˉcijas Brigaˉde, wanted to experiment with different materials and storylines. In 2000, he created Klucaˉnija (literally, ‘Brickland’, untranslated in most cases) from wooden bricks. However, he sought new challenges and soon decided to leave the studio for a space where he could express his artistic intentions. He went to Juris Podnieks Film Studio and started to create films under the brand name Nilsons. His first work there was Pavasaris (‘Spring’, 2001). The figures in his works were mostly from Plasticine. His characters were very emotional and he used his abilities to bulge their cheeks, slick down their ears, or move their bodies in a hyperbolic manner. Occasionally Nils invited sculptors (Ilze Emse, Vita Valdmane, and the Estonian artist Annely Poldsaar). However, he was the scriptwriter, director, animator, cameraman, and editor for most of his films. Although the majority of his films were addressed to children, Klucaˉnija (2000), Diversija (‘Diversion’, 2001), and Telefons (‘Telephone’, 2005) are all pungent films for adults.

Signe Baumane (b. Auce, 7 August  1964) graduated in philosophy at Moscow University and worked as an animator at Dauka from 1989. She made her first short film, The Witch and the Cow, in 1991 for the series Trifles. Then she spent two years in Moscow, where she illustrated children’s books and published a book of her own. Subsequently, she returned to Dauka to make Kurpıˉtes (‘Tiny Shoes’, 1993), a spoof of fairy tales. In 1995, she moved to New York and started working in Bill Plympton’s film studio. However, she made several of her own films in New York as well (Love Story, The Threatened One, Natasha – created in close collaboration with Josh Rechnitz – and Five Fucking Fables). All of them have provocative sexual themes and images. At first, they were treated with circumspection by a Latvian public unused to this type of liberty, especially in animated films still associated with children’s entertainment. Nevertheless, Baumane’s films were appreciated worldwide. In 2002, Signe Baumane returned to Latvia to create Sieviete (‘Woman’), made in the Rija studio. In this story, she expresses how a woman lives in her world of passions. On her next return to Latvia, she made Veterinaˉraˉrsts (‘Veterinarian’), an award-winning story of tenderness. In the US, she directed Dentist (2005), followed by Birth (2009). The latter film again illustrates the subjective, intimate feelings of women’s experience, with a dose of humour. In 2009, it was nominated for The Golden Bear at Berlinale. Signe Baumane’s films have an interesting system of characters and images. People’s emotions or states may be expressed with bestial figures; she freely uses hyperbole and very bold metaphors. She plays with fairy tales, fables, and advertisements. Vladimir Leshchiov (b. Daugavpils, 10 March 1970) began working in advertising in 1991. He went to study animation at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Eksjö, Sweden. His first films were Veˉstule (‘The Letter’, 2002) and Vecteˉva Medus (‘Grandad’s Honey’, 2002). The latter is a peaceful, touching story about an old man’s last moments and it brought Leshchiov various festival awards. Each of Vladimir Leshchiov’s films is created in a different technique – lead pencil, oil ink, colour pencils, gouache, and watercolours. He maintains it is the intonation of the film that determines the materials. While working with the script, he already knows what material he is going to use. He is very attentive to detail; by adding background characters and carefully creating the relationships between the characters and their environment, his animated places become highly believable. The first film that Leshchiov made in Latvia was Bezmiegs (‘Insomnia’, 2004), a superb exercise in surreal

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comedy. Zuduši sniegaˉ (‘Lost in Snow’, 2007), on the other hand, was surreal and melancholy, telling the story of old fishermen. Spaˉrni un airi (‘Wings and Oars’, 2009) received the Lielais Kristaps for Best Latvian Animated Film 2009 and many international festival prizes. The action in Leshchiov’s films doesn’t develop predictably from common situations and conflicts. Rather, his films play with subjective views and the restructuring of events. To shift the action to another level, different states of consciousness are used – the passions from emotions, the dizziness from alcohol. Jurģis Kraˉsons (b. Tukums, 14 February 1970) graduated from the Latvian Academy of Arts as a painter. However, he established a career as one of the leading production designers for live-action film in Latvia. He also designed such animated films as Klaˉra un Rubinšteins (‘Clara  & Rubinstein’, 1999, directed by Askolds Saulıˉtis) and Vai Rıˉga jau gatava? (‘The National Hero’, 2001, directed by Rūuˉta Mežavilka), and he directed Melnaˉ Kaste (‘The Black Box’, 2006) and Norıˉt Krupi (‘To Swallow a Toad’, 2010). The latter was shown at the Cannes film festival in 2010. Edmunds Jansons (b. Saldus, 10 May, 1972) began at Dauka. His artistic career includes animating, filming, editing, and directing; he also worked on documentaries and in fiction films. His first animated film was Haikas (‘Haiku’) in 1995. In Dauka, he made Zvaigžn¸u teˉja (‘Starry Tea’, 1999), Baltaˉ (‘The White One’, 2001), and Šk¸eˉrgriezis (‘Scissorman’, 2005). At Studio Centrums in 2007, he directed Little Bird’s Diary, the first Latvian documentary animation. Pavasaris Vaˉrnuielaˉ (‘Springtime on Vaˉrnu Street’) was a musical tale about suburban kids in the early twentieth century that received the greatest number of nominations at the 2007 Lielais Kristaps awards. Jansons also made a bland children’s film, Lupatin¸i (‘Shammies’, 2010). The documentary film director Aija Bley (b. Liepaja, 20 July  1967) created Eža kažocin¸š (‘The Pricky’, 2005), the first Latvian animation using computer graphics. Another of her works was a wholly fresh look at animation, the erotic Doktora D sala (‘The Island of Doctor D’, 2005). It was created with artist Patrıˉcija Brekte (b. Riga, 1981); they also made Sieviete un Veˉjš (‘Woman and Wind’, 2010) – a story of passions between a Western woman and the Eastern wind.

Kaˉrlis Vıˉtols (b. Riga, 21 March, 1979) made animated films to supplement his paintings. Fetišu daˉrzs (‘The Garden of Fetish’, 2006) and Aptumsums (‘Eclipse’, 2010) were created for his exhibitions. However, they are not just meant to be seen with the paintings and have attracted more attention as artworks on their own. Vıˉtols worked in computerized collage techniques, using diverse materials in his films – his own and other paintings, as well as posters and photos. His other films include Trofeja (‘Trophy’, 2004), Mehaˉnisms (‘The Mechanism’, 2007), and Velna Fudži (‘Devil’s Fuji’, 2010). Graphic designer Egils Mednis (b. Riga, 13 November 1962) made Kuģis (‘The Ship’, 2007) in the computergame technology Machinima. It won him the jury prize in the Next Generation Machinima Contest in California, 2008. The same year, it also won at the Machinima Film Festival in New York.

Lithuania118 In the 1980s and 1990s, many Lithuanian animators emerged from the ranks of architects, designers, graphic artists, and cartoonists. After the country became independent again in 1990, some artists founded their own studios.119 In 2004, the Lithuanian Film Studio was privatized, leading to a gradual reduction in production. In 1986, the director Valentas Aškinis (b. Šiauliai, 1959) created the drawn television lullaby De˙de˙ Miegas (‘Uncle Sleep’), commissioned by Lithuanian TV. She also made the animated film Kaktuso paslaptis (‘The Secret of a Cactus’, jointly produced by the Lithuanian Film Studio and Mosfilm, 1989). ‘The Secret of a Cactus’ is based on a fairy tale by the Lithuanian writer Vytaute Zilinskaite. Aškinis worked on the script with the Russian director Vladimir I. Parker, seeking a technique to preserve his hatched drawing style. In 1991, together with Antanas Abromaitis, Aškinis founded the first private animation studio Vilanima and produced Trovas (1992), Smaugliukas Džeikas (‘The Little Boa Jake’, 1993), and the first Lithuanian animated TV series, Normano arka (‘Norman’s Ark’, 1991–1995). Aškinis, as director and producer, also made the first Lithuanian feature animation, Odise˙ja (‘Odyssey’, 1998), with Jolanta Šiugždait˙e.

By Valentas Aškinis and Cinzia Bottini. Some examples include: the Vilanima studio of Valentas Aškinis and Antanas Abromaitis, which also helped produce works by emerging animators; Antanas Janauskas’ Animaciniy filmy studija AJ; Algirdas Selenis and Aurika Seleniene’s Animacijos studija; Nijole Valadkeviciute’s Sezamai atsiverk; and many others.

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At the Lithuanian Film Studio, Henrikas Vaigauskas (b. 1951) made Medkirtys (‘The Lumberjack’, 1991), Kurmiai (‘The Moles’, 1991), Ikaras (‘Icarus’, 1992), Paukšcˇiai kaip žmone˙s (‘The Birds as the People’, 1994), Žiema, žiema (‘Winter, Winter’, 1995), and Aeroplanas (‘Aeroplane’, 1997). The style of his films is reminiscent of comic books. Juˉ rat˙e Leikait˙e (b. 1963) debuted in 1996 with a striking and impressive film for adults, Metamorfoze˙s (‘Metamorphoses’), which took her six years to make. Later, she created Braške˙s ant egle˙s (‘Strawberries on a Fir’, 1999), and three films about a snail: Sraige˙ Maiva (‘The Snail Nellie’, 2000), Svajoniu˛ bokštas (‘The Tower of Dreams’, 2001), and Soliste˙ (‘The Soloist’, 2002). A new stage started with her film Paparcˇio žiedas (‘The Fern’s Blossom’, 2003). At the studio Filmu˛ štrichai, Leikait˙e created films with mixed techniques: Užgave˙ne˙s (‘Mardi Gras’, 2005), based on Lithuanian feasts and traditions; the black-and-white Marti iš jaujos (‘The Daughter-in-Law from a Barn’, 2006); and Margucˇiu˛ rytas (‘Easter Eggs’, 2007), fusing drawings and photography. Ieva Bunokait˙e also worked in mixed techniques. Among her materials, she used appliqués, ceramic dolls, textiles, and flowers. Most of her films are based on Lithuanian fairy tales: Gudri dukte˙ (‘The Clever Daughter’, 1995), Lape˙ ir vynuoge˙s (‘The Fox and the Grapes’, 1996), and Bicˇiu˛ piemuo (‘The Herd of Bees’, 1999). Husband and wife Algirdas Selenis (b. 1956) and Aurika Selenis (b. 1967) created playful, paradoxical films: Arkliavagio gudrybe˙ (‘The Rustler’s Trick’, 1998) and ˇcigonas ir drakonas (‘The Gipsy and the Dragon’, 2006). They made a cycle from Lithuanian fables and fairy tales: Vilniaus mergele˙ (‘The Maiden from Vilnius’, 2000), Žemaicˇiu˛ pramote˙ (‘Samogitian Genesis’, 2002), Lietuviu˛ mitologiniai dievai (‘Lithuanian Mythological Deities’, 2006), and others. ‘Samogitian Genesis’ is the story of a tribe in search of their land. Algirdas Selenis says: ‘This fairy tale is interesting because it connects the Old Testament with Lithuanian myth concerning bygone times [.  .  .] It does not talk only about Samogitians, but also about the origin of all mankind. This fairy tale is archaic because it strongly reflects traces of matriarchy.’120

At his studio AJ, Antanas Janauskas made Ovacijos (‘Plaudits’, 1998), Telegastrovizija (‘Telegastrovision’, 2000), and Trumpas sujungimas (‘Short Circuit’, 2003). The same character passes from one film to another, impersonating the author and expressing his thoughts. Rasa Jonikaite (b. 1984) directed Ocas (‘The Tail’) in 2007, based on a rhyming fairy tale by the Lithuanian poet Kostas Kubilinskas. It is about a fox and a wolf, and friendship and betrayal. Danas Bereznickas (b. 1976) made La la la (id.), in 2007, in which sounds, seemingly improvised, are dominant. In the same year, Iava Miškinytıˉ (b. 1981) created Most121 (‘The Bridge’), a black and white film inspired by a Kafka miniature. Antanas Skucˇas (b. 1983) focused on the functions of a witch in Ragana – ˇcáry ˇcarodeˇjnice (‘Ragana – Witch’s Magic’), using a black and white technique imitating shadow theatre. In 2009, Skucˇas’s Vaikyste˙s dienoraštis (‘Childhood Diary’) won the Lithuanian Silver Crane Award for best animated film. Synchronization (id., 2009), by Rimas Sakalauskas (b. 1985), represents modern experimental animation. The film is intended for lovers of drifting rotating objects, showing the influences of Star Wars, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanley Kubrick.

Belarus122 Independence arrived in 1991. However, at the national animation studio Belarusfilm, Russia still had a strong influence. In addition to Igor Volchek and Elena Petkevich (see Vol.  2), such directors as Mikhail Tumelya (b. Minsk, 18 February 1963), Vitaly Bakunovich (b. Minsk, 1 December 1956), Vladimir Petkevich (b. Tavda, near Sverdlovsk, Russia, 20 October  1952), Aleksandr Shepetov, and Aleksandr Bychkovsky had all studied at the Moscow school of cinema. Leonid Shukalyukov (b. Komsomolsk-na-Amure, Russia, 13 October  1947) and Olga Chikina (b. Minsk, 26 July  1947) founded Studiya-3. The private TV studio TVS-Validiya made cut-out and object animation films by Vitaly Bakunovich. Gori, gori (‘Burn, Burn,’ 1989), for example, used ordinary candles for the protagonists.

‘Anifest Catalogue’, Teplice, Czech Republic, 2010. In 2009, the film won the Golden Panda award for best student film at the Sichuan TV Festival in China. 122 By Antonina Karpilova. 120 121

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Mikhail Tumelya, along with designer Dmitry Surinovitch, directed the puppet feature Volshebnaya svirel (‘The Magic Pipe’, 1998).123 The film, which glorified the ancient Caucasia people of Ossets, received awards at various international festivals. Igor Volchek was the head of the animation branch at Belarusfilm during the 1990s and has been the key figure in the first twenty years of independent Belarusian animation. He brought the idea of auteur films to the country and won many awards at international festivals, both as director and soundtrack composer. Educated as a pianist, he cared as much for the sound as for the images, and many of his films are based on music – for example, Concerto grosso (id., 1988), Skertcho (‘Scherzo’, 1994), and Pastoral (id., 1998). His films deal with inner life and memories, often metaphorically. For a long time, Belarusians considered Moscow the centre of their world and referred to Russian culture. In the new films, however, national principles became visible through such elements as language, music, clothes, and objects. The local mentality was depicted, too – optimism, mild humour, and curiosity towards different cultures. Christian values are at the heart of Belarusian civilization, and films with Christian issues became common. Irina Kodyukova (b. Minsk, 25 July  1954) exemplifies this approach. Her philological studies led her to pay special attention to literary accuracy. Svyatochnie rasskazi (‘Christmas Tales’) is her most ambitious work, a cycle of nine short films that took a decade to complete. She chose the cut-out technique as best suited to her inspiration. The titles are Pritcha o Gasane (‘The Gasan Parable’, 1987), Notchnyu v teatre (‘To the Theatre at Night’, 1989), Svyatochnie rasskazi (‘Christmas Tales’, two films – Kolyadnoe, from a poem by Sasha Cherny,124 and Metel, ‘The Blizzard’, 1994), Devotchka so spitchkamy (‘The Little Match Girl’, from Andersen, 1996), Udivitelny uzhny v sotchelnik (‘A Wonderful Dinner on Christmas Eve’, 1999), Tritcha o Rozdestve (‘The Christmas Parable’, 2000), Sestra i brat (‘Sister and Brother’, 2002), and Legenda o ledi Godive (‘Lady Godiva’s Legend’, 2004). Vladimir Petkevich and his wife Elena Petkevich also deal with Christian issues. Among their works, often based on painting on glass and sand on glass, are Sny (‘Dreams’,

1992), Mesyatch (‘The Month’, 1993), Skazki lesa (‘Forest Tales’, 1996), Zhilo-bilo derevo .  .  . (‘Once upon a Time a Tree . . .’, 1996) and Skazki starogo pianino. Betkhoven (‘Tales of the Old Piano: Beethoven’, 2007). The drawing style of Belarusian animation was originally inspired by book illustrations, for instance by Vyacheslav Tarasov (Rostov-Yaroslavsky, Russia, 17 October  1938– Minsk, 20 January 1997). Later, the best artists were Dmitry Surinovich (b. Vishenka, near Kirovsky, Mogilev region, 31 July  1953), Aleksandr Vereshchagin (b. Arkhalgelsk, Russia, 12 February  1949), the excellent colourist Alla Matyushevskaya (b. Baku, Azerbaijan, 23 December 1950), Tatyana Kublitskaya (b. Khachinka, Mogilev region, 12 October 1956), and Natalya Kostyuchenko. Even in the computer era, manual techniques were highly praised. Most of the Belarusian films were based on drawn animation, puppet animation, two-dimensional puppet animation, coloured sand, and so on. Elena Petkevich made the first well-received computer animated film, Pesenka dlya kanareyky (‘A Song for the Canary’, 2002). Folkloric fairy tales, based on popular lubok illustrations and marionette theatre, remained the principal genre, featuring water spirits, witches, and so on. They include: Tchego na svete ne b’ibaet (‘Nothing in the World Is Missing’, 1996); Terem-teremok (id., 1998); Yama, tanch tchetire struni (‘A Hollow, Some Dances, Four Ropes’, 2002) by Aleksandr Lenkin (b. Minsk, 16 January 1961); and Muzikant-tcharodey (‘The Musician-Magician’, 2001) by Elena Turovaya (b. Mogilev, 26 February 1965). Also popular were Tatyana Zhitkovskaya’s comedies, such as Fantaziy Sidorova (‘Sidorov’s Fantasies’, 1991); Elena Turovaya’s musical Pro pitcharya, kotoriy nitchego ne boyalsya (‘About the Fearless Knight’, 1991); and Mikhail Tumelya’s parody of the Middle Ages, Pesn o Volfgange neustrashimom, dostoslavnom istrebitele drakonov (‘The Song of Wolfgang the Intrepid, the Glorious Dragon’s Hunter’, 1991). In 1994, the first Belarusian TV series, Reaktivniy porosenok (‘The Reactive Piglet’; six more Piglet series followed), was made by Aleksandr Lenkin. In 2004 Igor Volchek revived Nesterka, the Belarusian Robin Hood, in a series named after him. Volchek also directed Povest minuvshikh let (‘The Novel of Bygone Years’, 2006–2008), explaining the origin of the coats of arms of Belarusian cities.

123 This feature film should not be confused with the short of the same name directed in Kazakhstan by Zhaken Danenov in 1973. The feature is based on a traditional story from the northern Caucasus. The young shepherd Atzamaz (whom the gods have blessed with a magic pipe) and the young warrior Soslan both love the beautiful Agunda. After the two friends and rivals demonstrate their heroism and dexterity many times, Agunda chooses the shepherd as her husband. 124 Pen name of Aleksandr M. Glickberg (1880–1932).

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Mikhail Tumelya utilized a computer cut-out technique (called vytinanka)125 for his series Belorusskie pogovorky (‘Belarusian Proverbs’, 2008).

Poland126 Since destiny is derisive, the artists who had openly and courageously opposed the Communist regime spent the decade after its fall trying to save something of what the regime had given them. Production was reduced to opening titles for TV, or commercials. Professionals made a living teaching new generations who might never find jobs. The films of the past were left in warehouses, waiting for distribution, care, and restoration. Like most of the former USSR ‘satellite’ countries, Poland reacted to the end of state film production by establishing a state agency that enabled private entrepreneurs to apply for government grants. A lot of improvised companies sprang up, but most died when it was realized that the agency assured only a part of the budget. There was basically only one other potential partner: Polish Television, which was interested in children’s films, cheap entertainment, and educational series. Within the latter category, there were some jewels: Magritte by Hieronim Neumann and Maciej c´wiek (1995) and Carmen Torero by Aleksandra Korejwo (1996). Korejwo (b. Poznanˊ, 14 June  1958) followed the latter with Carmen Suite (1994) and Carmen Habanera (1995), inspired by Georges Bizet’s work. Her original technique, based on coloured salt grains,127 animated with a condor feather (!), make these films a paradigm of semiabstract cinema. At the Łódz´ Film Studio Semafor, amid innumerable problems and cheap series for children, the career of Marek Skrobecki took off. Born in Kalisz on 18 September 1951, the puppet specialist Skrobecki graduated from the animation department of the Polish National Film

School in Łódz´ in 1990. He earned a scholarship from the British Council that brought him to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and Aardman Animation (1992). When he made D.I.M. (id.) in 1992, few spectators or specialists paid due attention to the film. It was only thirteen years later, when Ichtys was presented at international festivals, that this previous little masterpiece was rediscovered. Animating human-size puppets, in D.I.M. Skrobecki explores the relationship of a couple secluded in an apartment. Their meaningless life has a single justification and tenderness: they feed a little bird that comes from time to time to the windowsill. When the bird doesn’t reappear, it’s their end and the end. The direction and lighting are superlative, as is Michał Lorenc’s musical accompaniment. In 1999 the Semafor Studio was relaunched under a similar name: Se-Ma-For Film Production. Skrobecki’s Ichtys (id., 2005)128 was much richer, probably too rich, and was welcomed internationally. A  man is in a restaurant, the interior of which resembles a sacred building. The waiter takes his order and leaves. Time goes by and everything ages. When the ever-young waiter reappears, the client is seemingly dead. Ichtys is visually original, tragic, and ironic by turns. However, it is so full of allegories and double-meanings that the viewer eventually sees it as a puzzle of Christian religious fragments and not as art. In 2010 Skrobecki made Danny Boy (id). In a town inhabited by headless, blind people, ruled by the logic of beheaded people (for instance, blindness), a ‘normal’ man falls in love with a girl, who flees horrified when she discovers what her suitor is. The young man goes to a guillotine and chops his head off. As a plane hits two skyscrapers, the headless young man and girl walk to the future hand in hand, in a scene resembling one in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Again, we have symbols and multiple interpretations (maybe it’s the story of the twentieth century, inhabited by blind, mindless fools), but also the impact of a powerful personality and a true poet.129

The vytinanka is an openwork pattern cutout of white, black, or coloured paper. It is an age-old craft activity, dating back to when paper was invented. In Belarus, the vytinanka started in the sixteenth century when the first paper-making shop appeared. The vytinanka is characterized by geometric and floral motifs. 126 By Giannalberto Bendazzi. 127 This method is basically the same as the sand or powder animation already utilized by others, with the addition of the graceful brilliance of the little sand crystals. Korejwo made many other films, including the decorative Nad pie˛knym modrym Dunajem (‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’, 1993). 128 In early Christianity, the secret symbol of the Christ was the fish (the Greek word ΙΧΘΥΣ, transliterated Ichtys, was pronounced ‘eekhthys’, with the accent on the last syllable). 129 Skrobecki was also production designer on Suzie Templeton’s Peter and the Wolf (2006) and codirected a documentary on the pioneer of puppet animation with Ladislas Starewitch (Vabzdziu dresuotojas, ‘The Bug Trainer’, along with Donatas Ulvydas and Linas Augutis, Lithuania/Poland, 2008). 125

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Tomasz (Tomek) Kozak (b. Lublin, 7 September 1971) also appeared on the scene in the 1990s. While still a student, Kozak made Czarna burleska (‘Black Burlesque’, 1997) and Opera ocalenia (‘The Work of Salvation’, 1998). His first professional film was 627 Romans dz˙entelmena (‘627th Novel of a Gentleman’, 2000). These were films about obsessions, sexuality, homoeroticism, and the grotesque. He made nonnarrative cinema of a very high quality, using suggestions and impressions and drawing heavily on illustration and graphic design. Despite the acclaim he enjoyed, Kozak abandoned pure animation for experimental film, re-editing found footage. The Polish approach to film animation survived the millennium. Many of the younger Polish animators had been pupils of the filmmakers from the older generation. Many of the older filmmakers were still active, among them the previously mentioned Hieronim Neumann (b. Poznanˊ, 14 November  1948). He began as an animator/experimentalist in 1977 with Wyliczanka (‘Counting-Out Rhyme’) and continued dividing his time between filmmaking and fine arts. His excellent Blok (‘Prefabricated Housing Building’, 1982) owes something to Zbigniew Rybczynˊski’s artistic research. Among Neumann’s later films, Remote Control (id., 2002) and Zoopraxiscope (id., 2005) deserve mention. Wiola Sowa (b. Gniezno, 13 May  1972), for example, showed in Refreny (‘Refrains’, 2007) that she had absorbed the standpoint, if not the style, of her master Jerzy Kucia. There were also self-taught people who absorbed the classic Polish

Figure 3.21  Hieronim Neumann.

atmosphere by themselves, such as Mariusz Wilczynˊski (b. Łódz, 29 April 1964). He was a prolific, multitalented artist. He started out in 1985 with paintings and graphics. In the late 1990s, he created about two hundred ‘book-clips’, video supplements for books, which visually expressed the main themes of the most interesting new books. He also made music videos for many top musical performers. From March  2005, he co-hosted After Hours for many years, a weekly cultural program on Polish Television. His animated films (Allegro ma non troppo, id., 1998; Szop, Szop, Szop, Szope˛ . . ., ‘Chop, Chop, Chop, Chopin . . .’, 1999; Ws´ród nocnej ciszy, ‘In the Stillness of the Night’, 2000; Niestety, ‘Unfortunately’, 2004; and Kizi Mizi, id., 2007) are sarcastic and tender. They employ a surreal, hermetic style based on simple linear drawings. A second Polish approach to film animation began in the new millennium. Young people didn’t know, nor did they want to know, stories about Communists, Nazis, concentration camps, pessimism, and fate. They wanted to know about themselves and possibly their iPods. New digital imagery made filmmaking cheap and affordable. There was a new generalized consciousness of images and sounds. The new way marched alongside with the old one, and audiences, production, and critical coverage grew. Piotr Karwas (b. Łódz´, 11 January 1974) won numerous awards for Maski (‘Masks’, 1998), including a Golden Bear in Berlin and an award at Annecy. Then he went to Hollywood and worked for the big animation studios.

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Figure 3.22  Hieronim Neumann, Blok, 1982. Jakub Wronˊski (b. Warszawa, 12 September  1982) made the cut-out Amerykan´ski Sen (‘American Dream’, 2007), a satire of American advertising and its clichés. In her Dokumanimo (id., 2007), Małgorzata Bosek (b. Warsaw, 5 December  1968) presents a vivid tale of the life of a housewife who fights the monotony of her duties. For Jam Session (id., 2005), Izabela Plucinˊska (b. Koszalin, 6 October 1974) was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The film combines spatial techniques with clay animation. With his film Telewizor (‘TV-set’, 2005), Tomasz Siwinˊski (b. Koszalin, 4 November  1982) made a superb piece, connecting paint animation directly with film narrative (shot framing, panoramas). Siwinˊski makes a strong link between animated film and dreams, pursuing meanings hidden just under the surface. These films are not recognizably ‘Polish’. They belong to the new, globally minded generation growing up alongside more traditional directors. Interest in animation was boosted when the Cinematography Act of 30 June 2005 was passed, establishing the Polish Film Institute (PISF). Since its inception in 2006, one of its tasks has been to develop special operating programmes to help with the production and promotion of animation. A priority is to support directorial débuts.130

Piotr Dumała In Volume 2 we described the beginnings of Piotr Dumała’s career in the early 1980s, when his world was rooted in black humour. Over the years, he moved to embrace an almost grievous atmosphere of human compassion, creating such masterpieces as Łagodna (‘The Gentle Woman’, from Dostoevsky, 1985);131 s´ciany (‘Walls’, 1987, a study on claustrophobia); Wolno´sc´ nogi (‘Freedom of the Leg’, 1988, the story of a sleeping man whose body parts live their own lives at night); Franz Kafka (id., 1991); and Zbrodnia i kara (‘Crime and Punishment’, from Dostoevsky, 2000). These works, inspired by the writers he referenced and by the art of Edvard Munch and Odilon Redon (whose lithographs from the series ‘Haunted House’ were inspirational for some pictures in ‘The Gentle Woman’), offered images of rare beauty. Some frames of Franz Kafka or ‘Crime and Punishment’ would be worthy of a museum. Dumała developed his technique, engraving a plasterboard and erasing and changing the images frame after frame. The principle, a little like animated paintings on glass or animated charcoal drawings on paper, allows for extremely thin, defined lines and areas of mellow, opaque colour. Kafka and Dostoevsky call for chiaroscuro; Franz

Giannalberto Bendazzi thanks Wiola Sowa and Mariusz Frukacz for their help. Fedor Dostoevsky wrote the short story ‘Krotkaya’ in 1876. The title was variously translated into English as ‘The Gentle Woman’, ‘A Gentle Spirit’, ‘A Gentle Creature’, and ‘A Gentle Maiden’. 130 131

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Figure 3.23  Piotr Dumała. Kafka boasts a gorgeous black and white, while the Dostoevsky films revolve around brown. At first, ‘Crime and Punishment’132 didn’t fulfill its author’s – or critics’ – expectations, and it won few prizes

at international festivals. It was the acclaim of the common filmgoers that made them realize that, though the film might have its flaws, it was an inspired, slow, kammerspiel-like masterpiece, which conveyed much that

String Quartet No. 8 is a new version of the film, made by Dumała and editor Beata Walentowska using the music String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor by Dmitry Shostakovich. The author writes: ‘Formally the film does not exist. I have no rights for the music and the picture as well. So, it was only my private exercise. For me it was important because I was not happy with Crime and Punishment. The new version is another story coming from the music, sort of (an) abstract, experimental story. [. . .] Be inspired by music without any plan. It was pure film creation by editing. Recently I watched Au hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson and the director’s commentary. I totally agree with his vision of cinema as a rhythm, editing, texture, atmosphere. Pure film language without clear story and leading role of dialogues.’ (Piotr Dumała, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 6 August 2011.)

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Figure 3.24  Piotr Dumała, Franz Kafka, 1991. was true about human hatred, love, self-imprisonment, victory, and defeat.133 In 2014, Dumała released the controversial Hipopotamy (‘Hippos’), about killing and sexual violence. In the cold light of day, this writer holds it in high regard, especially for the uncommon visual approach (the action takes place in a black marsh that depicts the death river Styx).

Jerzy Kucia Jerzy Kucia (b. Soltysy, 14 January 1942) was educated as a painter and graphic artist at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. He later became a professor and head of the animation department, making his first animated film, Powrót (‘The Return’) in 1972.134 This outstanding director seldom received the appreciation he deserved, probably because he never focused on single works. Rather, he devoted his career to constructing a large, detailed, consistent poem made of short films scattered over almost thirty years, which few people could see in their entirety. Some visual elements constantly return: hunched men walking, faces shadowed by caps, train compartments, fluttering birds, insects, peasants’ tools, apples, a fiddle, small domestic objects, flashes, semiabstract shapes.135 We often see night before morning. Daylight never shines (it’s usually distorted by shade or chromatic stylization) and fragments are the rule. In this world of opaque images, the protagonists set out on journeys, either horizontal (Powrót, ‘The Return’, 1972;

Szlaban, ‘The Barrier’, 1976; Odpryski, ‘Chips’, 1984; Strojenie instrumentów, ‘Tuning the Instruments’, 2000) or vertical (Winda, ‘The Elevator’, 1974).136 However, they never reach a place that rewards – or explains – their undertaking. Everything on the screen may be hazy, but the spectator feels a strong connection with things. Those tired men are men. Those apples fell from an apple tree. The sounds may not match the actions, but they were produced by someone with something. Kucia’s inspiration is not abstract. His poem is an infinitesimal odyssey of negligible wanderers, through restricted horizons, where nothing is magnanimous. Just for that, it is majestic. One film, Refleksy (‘Reflections’, 1979) shows the birth and death of an insect. Like any odyssey, Kucia’s is basically a quest for knowledge (human feelings like solitude, tenderness, longing for time past) and consciousness (time lapsing, people skirting us, objects with or without souls). Like a true poem, it starts exploring the world and ends creating a world. It picks up bits of truth and builds a differently meaningful, ulterior truth with them. Kucia’s third film, and his first masterpiece, W cieniu (‘In the Shade’, 1975), starts as a delicate black and white film of a girl on a swing, coming in and out of the shade. Then there is an eruption of colour, human profiles, a door, a motorbike ride, landscapes, apples, a road accident – all interspersed with the swinging girl. There is no overstatement, not even a dramatic crescendo. Adolescence, joy, and sorrow, all together, make a ballad on the enigma and taste of life – or maybe something deeper to be found. Kucia says: ‘Making a film, I leave places for the viewer. I  send signals and give the viewer the opportunity to receive them in his/her own way. My aim is what I would call the developing of an individual film, taking advantage of the receiver’s internal experiences.’137 All of these works are characterized by an almost ascetic style (not by chance was he called ‘the Robert Bresson of animation’).138 ‘Tuning the Instruments’ takes place in early morning, when it is still pitch dark. The images are unclear. The protagonist (whom we will never see in detail) is still drowsy and wanders in search of the annoying alarm clock. After some gymnastics in his

To know more about this great artist, see More About It 1. This film looks very much like Daniel Szczechura’s 1970 Podróz˙ (‘Voyage’, 1970), but the poetics and style of the two filmmakers have little in common. 135 To know more about this great artist’s technique, see More About It 2. 136 The camera itself often wanders on travels – for instance, in the second part of W cieniu (‘In the Shade’, 1975). 137 From Jerzy Kucia’s typewritten pages, undated, provided to Giannalberto Bendazzi by the artist. 138 Marcin Gizycki, ‘Jerzy Kucia: Between Reality and Dream / Jerzy Kucia: entre le rêve et la réalité’, Animafilm 8 (1981). 133 134

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Figure 3.25  Jerzy Kucia, Strojenie instrumentów, ‘Tuning the Instruments’, 2000. parlour, the man takes a shower, puts on his tuxedo, and leaves. From his clothes we understand he’s an orchestra member, and possibly the conductor, since he doesn’t carry an instrument. His shape reminds us of the ‘film conductor’, Jerzy Kucia himself. There are shreds of piano music, a pizzicato violin, bits of domestic sounds and songs. Outdoors, the man starts his motorcycle. Colour replaces black and white,139 subjective shots replace the objective ones. The motor crackling is, at the same time, a sound belonging to the music.140 From this point on, there will be travel, through the country and through the man’s feelings, memories, and imagination. We hear the crackling, plus a piano; a violin and double bass join; eventually, there is a creaking. Except for some figures (a car, people going to the train station), the images are mostly indefinite until a row of trees appears. Now the sun has risen and for the first time we see warm colours, light green rows of trees that become rows of soldiers, a vision of disciplined trunks all the same, a memory of disciplined men all the same. There are flashes – beams of sunlight, explosions? Memories and imagination surface as we start to share the soul of the person with whom we are travelling.

Apples and pears take shape, the camera running over them; then a jumping cat, a wooden toy horse, apples again. These are memories of a country childhood. While the piano plays, a violin appears, a visual/acoustic oxymoron. Telephone wires dance, spreading out and drawing near. There are five of them, as in a pentagram; they look like strings, too. We hear some sounds of strings, but the main instrument is a trumpet – another oxymoron. Now we see birds, perched in the middle of the wires, looking like notes in the pentagram. They are silhouettes of swallows, which suddenly fly away in flocks. Almost unexpectedly, the camera pans right to reveal a flock of different birds, still silhouettes. There are green trees, a green meadow. The birds fly away, some leaves disappearing with them. The rest of the birds fly away again; all of the leaves disappear and the landscape becomes wintry. From this point on, the travel becomes a stream of consciousness. A duck walks. Some objects take shape. There are two toy wheelhorses, a grating or grille, a dog’s head. A little boy wearing a newspaper hat appears on the left and then disappears. His hat floats above a flock of fluttering birds that look like waves of water. The boy reappears on the right of the frame. The grating or grille is actually

Kucia is a master of black and white who sporadically chooses to make an original use of colours (as with the use of green in Wiosna, 1980). 140 The director had already used this beautiful stylistic process in Parada (‘Parade’, 1987). The sound of the rotating wheel triggers the music. 139

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a chair (a trompe l’oeil). In the white frame a bird flutters about. Apples break loose from the ground and go high. The frame turns black, and the last image is the newspaper hat, sliding like a newspaper boat over still water. ‘Tuning the Instruments’ is one of the best animated films ever made. One can view it a thousand times and still sink, amazed, into its depth, its secrets, its details. They combine with each other and produce more meanings. The images are stunningly beautiful and yet inseparable from their movement. This is cinema, not fine art; you couldn’t take a single frame away and hang it on a wall. At the same time, ‘Tuning the Instruments’ is the summa – and possibly the summit – of an art that has always combined sight and hearing. Viewing its images without soundtrack, or listening to its soundtrack without images, would be fruitless. It’s their blend that is extraordinarily poetic. Many filmmakers in history (both animation and live-action) have struggled with the relationship between sound and image, colour and music. Most were visual artists or former stage directors, for whom what happened in front of their eyes was most important. Kucia valued both the art of the eyes and the art of the ears. He worked closely with composer Wadim Chrapaczkow, accepted suggestions, and didn’t hesitate to subordinate some scenes to Chrapaczkow’s score (especially lengthening them when needed). ‘Tuning the Instruments’ is a synesthetic film par excellence. The viewer has the feeling that images purposely leave a space that sound must fill, and sound does the same in return. We get suggestions and stimuli through our two primary senses; that’s why the film is so full of secrets. The common man who gets up in the early morning and leaves to meet his day is a guiding thread in Kucia’s work. ‘Tuning the Instruments’ (2000) follows the template of ‘The Return’ (1972), only it is much more skilled, profound, and poetic. Kucia’s long quest finishes where it had started. All in this world of ordinary people, of ordinary other living beings, are trying to tune their instruments, all have unanswered questions. Is the conductor of the year 2000 the same person limping on the train platform in 1972? He probably is. ‘I’ve always displayed an emotional attitude toward problems, and I want to attract viewers emotionally,’ Kucia said. His viewers experience a doleful feeling of estrangement, an awareness of being no more than witnesses. An example can be found in Chips, a film dominated by

darkness from which images of simple household activities and memories emerge sporadically. ‘I am witness of my times,’ Kucia said on another occasion, ‘and some of my films can be my own personal notes on life, although they seem to refer to insignificant problems.’141 After a long silence, Fuga  na wiolonczele˛, tra˛bke˛ i pejzaz. (‘Fugue for Trumpet, Cello, and Landscape’, 2014) proved that Kucia’s inspiration was still powerful and still willing to amalgamate music and vision. It is a masterful semi-abstract fugue, a combination of travellings alongside and into landscapes which dialogues with its soundtrack. (According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a fugue is a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts).

Czech Republic142 During the last days of of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, wisdom guided men. In December  1989, the Communist president Gustáv Husák voluntarily resigned, and Václav Havel, a playwright and former victim of political persecution, was elected chief of state. There was no revenge, no political purge in what was called the ‘velvet revolution’. On 1 January 1993 the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia peacefully split and went their separate and democratic ways. There was nothing velvet about the way animation was treated. State-owned production companies were hurriedly sold to private citizens; old film prints, puppets, drawings, and documents were scattered or simply thrown away. Unable or unwilling to kneel to the rules of pure moneymaking, many of the best filmmakers were jobless. It took more than a decade to redress the production situation. Fimfárum Jana Wericha (‘Jan Werich’s Fimfárum’, 2002) was the most successful animated feature film in the 2000s in the Czech Republic. It was based on a book of the same name, using the author’s own recordings from the 1960s, when he narrated his stories. It was directed by Vlasta Pospíšilová and Aurel Klimt, with a screenplay by Jirˇí Kubícˇek and Aurel Klimt. In 2006, the sequel arrived, Fimfárum 2, adapting more of Werich’s stories. The Czech public acclaimed it no less.

Alina Terechowicz, ‘It Takes Quite a Bit of One’s Life to Make One Film / Chaque film demande un morceau de ma vie’, Animafilm no. 8 (1981). 142 By Giannalberto Bendazzi and Tommaso Iannini. 141

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Figure 3.26  Michaela Pavlátová, Rˇecˇi, ˇrecˇi, ˇrecˇi, ‘Words, Words, Words’, 1991. It was written by Jan Balej, Jirˇí Kubícˇek, Aurel Klimt, and Brˇetislav Pojar and was directed by Jan Balej, Vlasta Pospíšilová, Aurel Klimt, and Brˇetislav Pojar.

Michaela Pavlátová Among the new generation of animation creators, the most internationally famous was Michaela Pavlátová (b. Prague, 27 February  1961). Her short film ˇrecˇi, ˇrecˇi, ˇrecˇi (‘Words, Words, Words’, 1991) won many awards and received an Oscar nomination in 1993. In 1995 she made the even better Repete (‘Repeat’). From 1998–2002, she divided her time between Prague and San Francisco, where she worked as an art director with the animation company Wildbrain Inc. Back in Prague, she directed the live-action feature film Neveˇrné hry (‘Faithless Games’, 2003).143 In 2006 she finished, together with Vratislav Hlavatý, the animated short Karneval zvírˇat (‘The Carnival of Animals’) and in 2008 she returned to live-action with Deˇti noci (‘Night Owls’).144

Pavlátová is a versatile artist. In her words, ‘I often get bored with animation and then I take up something new. I  make illustrations, feature films, children’s books, and short stories.’145 Her finest animated films, ‘Words, Words, Words’ and ‘Repeat’, stand out for good drawing146 and timing, but especially for their dramaturgy. ‘Words, Words, Words’ is a visualization of what people think or want to say in a café, and every idea is original and biting. (‘I am interested in conflict,’ Pavlátová says. ‘You have to exaggerate, to be a little more direct. How can you exaggerate when everything is only nice? You can make it even nicer, but then it becomes sugary. I  like sarcasm. I  like being ironic.’) ‘Repeat’, written with Jirˇí Kubícˇek, is the story of various couples spinning in a vicious circle, eventually changing their behaviour and relationships. It is the best example of what Pavlátová finds interesting in animation: black humour and social reflection. Some of her films have erotic elements and ‘The Carnival of Animals’ is based on them. Pavlátová worried because ‘the line between what is erotic and what is vulgar is extremely narrow’.

A psychological film about partners’ mutual search for harmony, it tells the story of the pianist Eva. She follows her husband Peter, a musician and composer, to a small village on the Slovak and Hungarian border. 144 Ofka, age 25, works a nightshift at a 24-hour shop. She hides her uncertainty and unhappiness, living a lethargic life and experiencing a kinship with the other people who are awake while the rest of humanity sleeps. A bizarre robbery forces her to face the real world. 145 ‘Etiuda & Anima Festival Catalogue’, Krakow, 2008. The following quotations come from the same source. 146 Pavlátová’s still drawings are even better: lively, sensitive, and expressive. 143

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French composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote the suite Carnaval des animaux in 1886. The director picked seven movements from the original fourteen. Hens and Roosters is about puberty; Wild Donkeys is a geometric dance of genitals and breasts. Aquarium is original, slow, and sensuous with a nocturne track-forward of people in bed, from room to room, underwater. The eighth movement, Characters with Long Ears, is a collection of almost fixed, impressive images in suspended time, a little reminiscent of Gašparovic´’s Satiemania. The segment based on Aviary is a short on its own. It starts with a phallic fountain in a public park, continues with men and women offering their private body parts to apparently pleased birds, and ends with the fountain ceasing to spurt. The melodic Swan is illustrated with a motionless lady whose clothes go up and down, melancholically and derisively. The Finale is a merry orgy. ‘The Carnival of Animals’ is a good piece of erotic poetry/comedy. Not surprisingly, it received awards at many international festivals. Tram.avi (id., 2012) was no less successful at the festivals. It is a sort of a coda to the previous film (Saint-Saëns’s music returns in the soundtrack), about a female tramway driver who experiences arousing fantasies while carrying male passengers across town. Once more Pavlátová tells her carnal story with taste.

Jirˇí Barta Jirˇí Barta, the director of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1985), was the Czech animator hit hardest by the end of the state system. The most gifted director of his generation, he found it so hard to get funding that he had to give up his production of Golem, which had suited his inspiration and expressionistic style like nothing else. It’s an easy cliché to say that Barta is Trnka’s heir in puppet animation, and the statement has only a bit of truth. Since the beginning Barta has taken an eclectic approach and used several forms of staging, often combining them organically, using various animation techniques as well as live-action. Among his first films, Diskžokej (‘Disc Jockey’, 1980) is inspired by pop art – consumer brands and products are very much present – and by optical art, but also by the deformed realism of Francis Bacon. (Some passages seem obvious quotations from the painter.) Basically it is a music clip, in which one can identify elements that will define Barta’s style – or part of it – such as his rhythmic editing and the articulated interplay of geometric forms. Zaniklý sve˘t rukavic (‘The Lost World of Gloves’, 1982), alternating live-action and animated objects, has animated

gloves as protagonists. It harks back to the aesthetics of silent films, with an explicit quotation from the surrealist Un chien andalou by Luís Buñuel. The protagonists of Balada o zeleném drˇevu (‘A Ballad of the Green Wood’, 1983) are a raven and some pieces of wood, shot in a snowy forest. It is a simple, short film of great impact. We already have praised Barta’s feature-length The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which gives an apocalyptic meaning to the pied piper. In Poslední lup (‘The Last Theft’, 1987), the animation has a complementary role, in a ‘dark’ fantasy in which a thief enters a cemetery and falls victim to vampires. For Klub odložených (‘The Club of the Laid Off’, 1989), Barta animates some mannequins in a real environment. A group of houses in a poor urban area, crumbling and desolate, becomes the scene of a metaphor of Czech society on the eve of the velvet revolution. The mannequins occupy a place between actors and puppets; they are symbolic of the conformity of a closed system centred on mediocrity. The fall of the regime returned liberty of expression to Czechoslovakia (and hence to the Czech Republic and Slovakia). However, as we have seen, the problem of censorship was replaced by a problem of funds. For this reason, Barta was never able to complete Golem, a seven-minute trailer for which was shown in London in October 2002. It would have told the story of a student researching the Golem, unleashing mysterious forces, with actors and clay animation. After experimenting with computer animation in the short Domecˇku varˇ (‘Boil, Little House, Boil’), in 2009, Barta made Na pu˚de˘ aneb Kdo má dneska narozeniny? (‘In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today?’, called ‘Toys in the Attic’ in America). The protagonists are again puppets, animated in the traditional manner, but with inserts of animated drawings and live-action. The story takes place in an attic. Buttercup is a sweet little doll, kidnapped by the golden bust of an old Communist leader. Of course her friends save her. The imaginative film is aimed at children and is full of good touches, such as a teddy bear’s vanity when he shines his nose, or a clay character’s battle to stay intact during a rainstorm on the roof. Between fable, comedy, and horror, the film has surreal and metaphorical levels; its foundation is Barta’s formal ability and his use of a complex screen language in a fantastic and dynamic manner, not tied down by a particular genre or form, and exploiting the interplay between several ideas.

Jan Balej Jan Balej (b. Prague, 30 May  1958) graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (VŠUP) in

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Prague, specializing in graphics for film and television, in 1988. Later he worked as animator on a TV series based on Czech fables. In 1990 he founded Hafan Film Praha, with Miloslav Špála. A director, set designer, illustrator, and scriptwriter, Balej continued the Czech animated puppet tradition but also followed his own independent research. Between 1992 and 1994 he wrote and directed four films about Tom Palecˇek (‘Tom Thumb’), for which he received some prestigious awards. In 2000, he made the short Jedné noci v jednom me˘ste˘ (‘A Night in a City’), telling the intersecting night adventures of people in a city. The setting has a magic atmosphere, which can be morbid and mocking at times. The characters have Trnka-style immobile faces, but they are more caricatured. Though highly praised, the film was not profitable and became one of three episodes in a feature of the same name (67 minutes long), which Balej completed in 2007. The other episodes were Ulity (‘Seashells’) and Ve˘tvicˇka a Ploutvicˇka (‘Ve˘tvicˇka and Ploutvicˇka’), dated respectively 2004 and 2006. ‘Seashells’ (the first segment in the feature) shows inhabitants of a palace with bizarre habits: a person with a tiny theatre of dead insects, a funeral director for dogs, and a cocaine addict. Without the poetry of ‘A Night in a City’, ‘Seashells’ repeats its visual choices, its grotesque and paradoxical themes. Balej’s humour becomes more fanciful in Ve˘tvicˇka Ploutvicˇka, where the protagonists are an anthropomorphic tree and a fish, rendered ingeniously in appearance and sound. The story involves prolonged time ellipses, showing episodes in the tree’s life in the different seasons. The black humour mixes with dreams and fantasy. Balej’s puppets had lead structures, bodies in foam rubber and latex, and heads modelled in ModuLite and Araldite. They were traditionally animated (by Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly) without the use of a computer. The shooting was by Miloslav Špála, Balej’s associate and a longtime collaborator with Švankmajer. ‘Seashells’ utilizes large puppets (60–80  cm. tall), allowing the use of real objects on the sets. The characters’ buildup and presence is remarkable. In building the narratives and atmosphere, Balej was inspired by real life, and particularly by the images and ambience of Žižkov, Prague’s workers’ neighbourhood. The external urban landscape is mainly nocturnal, gloomy, and desolate. The indoor scenes are dusty and

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badly illuminated. There is an abundance of details, often very realistic (even in the tree and fish episode, the living matter has a realistic solidity), but also alienating and hallucinatory. Balej was also able to contribute to the collective feature Fimfárum 2 with the episode Morˇe, strýcˇku, procˇ je slané? (‘Uncle, Why Is the Sea Salty?’).

Pavel Koutský Pavel Koutský (b. Prague, 6 December 1957) was a scriptwriter, animator, designer, and director. Unlike some of his well-known countrymen, he focused on drawn animation instead of puppets. His favourite form was the brief, concentrated short film. Convinced that art’s purpose is not to change the world but to show it for what it is, he used animation for its very marginality, finding in it a greater artistic freedom than in other forms of expression. His social criticism is implicit and humorous. (‘If a film pleases, makes people laugh or reflect, it is OK.’)147 He represents the history of his country in Posledních 100 let marx-leninismu v ˇcechách (‘The Last 100 Years of MarxismLeninism in Bohemia’, 1990), and in Portrét (1988). In one of his first films, Navštivte Prahu (‘Welcome to Prague’, 1983), he presented tourists visiting the Czech capital, showing them moving around as automata from one place to another. In Curriculum vitae (id., 1986), he reviewed his own cultural route ironically, showing how animation was the last leg of a knowledge that begins with the letters of the alphabet, passing through mathematics, painting, and architecture. Koutský creates a happy combination of graphic elements in constant mutation and comic situations. At’žije myš (‘Long Live the Mouse’, 1993) is a cartoon that retells the adventures of Tom and Jerry (a mouse must escape a famished cat) as a film in the film (a live-action man watches the cartoon on a television set). Kavárna (‘Pub’, 1998) starts with a scene filmed with actors (three conversations in a coffee shop), then changes it through animated designs into three short satirical sketches, visually representing avarice, sexual desire, and gossip. In Duel (id., 1997) and Media (id., 1999), the author shows through metaphorical but very direct language how society conditions the individual through mass media from birth to adulthood. But the vision is never wholly pessimistic; Duel shows how one can respond through art.

Pavel Koutský, personal communication to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 2008.

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Again, drawings and objects create symbolic choreographies in ˇctyrˇi lásky (‘Four Loves’, 2003). It is a short parable on man’s life, illustrated by the ‘passions’ characteristic of each age: toys (infancy), sex (youth), food (adulthood), and medicines (old age). In Plastic People (id., 2007), colour is dominant in the design (many of Koutský’s other films have designs in black and white), as different women become clones of the same model through plastic surgery.

Vlasta Pospišílová Vlasta Pospišílová (b. Jurajdová, Prague, 18 February 1935) graduated in 1956 from the Higher School of Applied Arts in Prague and was immediately accepted as an assistant animator at the puppet film studio. Here, under the artistic direction of Jirˇí Trnka, who was preparing his feature A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she learned the basics of her profession. As Trnka’s pupil, she imparted movement and personality to the puppets in many of her mentor’s films.148 Later she did the same for Jan Švankmajer, contributing her unmistakable style; she was also indispensable in The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1958) by Jirˇí Barta. From the late 1970s, Vlasta Pospíšílová was intensively involved in directing puppet films for children. Standouts among her short films include the comic Paní Bída (‘Lady Poverty’, 1983), Lakomá Barka (‘Stingy Barka’, 1986), the brilliant Až opadá lístí z dubu (‘When the Leaves Have Fallen Down from the Oak’, 1991), and Splne˘ný sen (‘A Dream Fulfilled’, 2001). The latter triptych is part of the series Jan Werich’s Fimfárum (2002), which she codirected with Aurel Klimt. In the 1990s, she made some memorable TV series for children: Broucˇci (‘Beetles’, 1995), Dobrodružství na pasece (‘Adventures in the Meadow’, 1997), and Broucˇkova rodina (‘The Broucek Family’, 1999). The tales Pospišílová adapts into short films always carry a moral. The protagonists are symbols of humble work and popular wisdom and prevail against envy and greed. Her works stand out for her pictorial and photographic sensitivity, realism in lighting and colours, and good use of visual effects and camera movements.

Aurel Klimt Aurel Klimt was born in Žilina (Czechoslovakia, today Slovakia) on 6 August  1972. For many years he lived in Prague, where he also trained. Since 2000, he has lived in

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Malešov, 75 kilometres from the capital, where he founded his production studio ZVON. A student of Brˇetislav Pojar, Klimt worked for television, gaining experience on video art and puppet shows as well as dedicating his time and talent to animation. Klimt loved puppet film but always enjoyed combining different techniques and often experimented with digital technology. In 1996, when Klimt was 24, he created Maškin zabil Koškina (‘Mashkin Kills Koshkin’), a humorous puppet short. The film consists of a single scene, interspersed with explanatory captions and rhythmic insistence on a nursery rhyme. For Eastern – Krvavý Hugo (‘An Eastern – Bloody Hugo’, 1997), Klimt shot live actors through pixilation. It’s a spoof of ‘western’ films and early silent films. Klimt frequently uses acceleration and time-lapse cinematography to add a comic dimension, as well as ironic intertitles and sound effects. O kouzelném zvonu (‘The Magic Bell’, 1998) is a fairy tale integrating drawings, objects, and semi-relief puppets. Klimt plays with genre by having his puppets sing and perform musical-like scenes. Pád (‘The Fall’, 1998) is reminiscent of Barta’s and Balej’s best work, both for its visual choices and for its technique (particular angles, camera moves defining and enhancing the depth of space). Despite the film’s comic details, it stands out for its realistic setting and bleak connotations. Klimt codirected (and coordinated) the collective anthology-project Fimfárum Jana Wericha (2002), contributing its namesake episode and another segment called Franta Nebojsa (‘Fearless Frankie’). He also codirected Fimfárum 2 (2006), for which he directed the episode Hrbácˇi z Damašku (‘The Hunchback of Damascus’). These works show Klimt’s maturation technically and narratively, theatrically and cinematically. ‘Fearless Frankie’ and ‘The Hunchback of Damascus’ integrate drawings, objects, figures in relief, and animated puppets. They also add pictorial effects of light and colour worthy of the best of the Czech school.

Other Czech Artists Michal Žabka (b. Liberec, 20 December 1965) started out in 1993 with the cartoon Krávovina (‘Crazy Cow Story’). He progressed with Babalon (‘Baballoon’, 1997, a bittersweet story of a child whose head inflates and carries him to the sky) and further with Prasavci (‘Premammals’, 2001). The characters are not so imaginative, but Žabka’s inspiration is unique.

The most memorable being the bumptious, sinful lady in Archangel Gabriel and Mrs. Goose (1964).

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Born on 16 May  1974 in Piešt’any (Slovakia), Noro Držiak attended the Zlín film school – the animation studio in Ateliers, KZ, where he could work with various techniques and styles. He later used many techniques in his commercials, titles, and so on. His directorial debut was Velký Kýchacˇ (‘The Great Sneezer’, 2001), followed by his animation and visual effects supervision of the feature Alois Nebel (2011), directed by Tomáš Lunˇák.149 It is based on the graphic novel by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99, combining animation and live-action and using rotoscoping to stay true to the style of the original. David Súkup was born on 9 July  1974 in Prague. In 2001, his BA graduation film Sveˇtlo (‘The Light’) received awards at many international festivals. Although an ordinary film in many respects, it had the brilliant idea that light can be dealt with like a liquid. In 2010, Súkup directed the grotesque 40-minute Rozum a Šte˘stí (‘Reason and Luck’), the third and longest segment of an anthology of animated fairy tales based on the classic book Fimfárum by Jan Werich.150 Lucie Sunková (née Šimková) was born in Prague on 7 July 1974. She made a name for herself with three shorts, all painted with oil colours under the camera. Havran (‘The Raven’, 2000) and Podobizna (‘The Portrait’, 2002) are sincere and careful, but immature. The much better Pelargónie (‘Geranium’, 2005) tells, in a rather personal style, a young couple’s love story with a sad ending. Jan Tománek (b. Prague, 1978), the son of the already mentioned director Dagmar Doubková (see Vol. 2), made many internationally successful animated short films, from 1997 (Poslední vecˇerˇe Páneˇ, ‘The Last Dinner of Lord’) to 2003 (Probuzení, ‘Wake Up’). In 2008 he directed the first Czech 3D feature-length animation, Kozí prˇíbeˇh – poveˇsti staré Prahy (‘Goat Story – Old Prague Legends’).

Slovakia The hybrid country of the Czechs and the Slovaks was born on 18 October 1918. It survived a Nazi invasion,151 World War II, Communist rule, and eventually, when a steady peace returned, on 1 January 1993 it split. The new

state of Slovakia had an underdeveloped economy – and much hope. Even during the days of Trnka (Prague) and Zeman (Zlín), the grand national tradition of animation was based in Czech towns. Slovakia’s professionals found themselves penniless. Their leader, Viktor Kubal, died in 1997. Yet instead of wearing themselves down seeking nonexistent funding, the Slovaks embraced teaching and prepared a new generation for better times. In 1993, the Department of Animated Film was opened at the newly founded film and TV faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. It was the first university in the territory that focused on teaching classical and digital animation. The wisdom of this choice was clear in December  2009, when Štyri (‘Four)’, by Ivana Šebestová, won the Grand Prix at the Animateka festival in Ljubljana. Four stories take place one spring day in the late 1930s. A  popular singer’s fate intersects with the fates of three other women. The director was born in Poprad, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, on 9 February  1979. She finished ‘Four’ in 2007, following her first film, Lionardo mio (‘My Leonardo’, 2005). In 2010, Šebestová assisted Katarína Kerekesová (b. Žilina, 21 April 1974) in making the captivating Kamene (‘Stones’, 2010). It is a puppet animation musical running 26 minutes, set in an open quarry. Everything is grey and the miners mourn their dead comrades and sleep in rusty caravans. It is a vision of hard labour and roughness. A young lady with a pink (though muted pink) dress arrives, and eroticism, violence, death, spirituality, magic, and love all blossom subtly. ‘Four’ was produced by Ivana Laucˇíková Zajacová (b. Partizánske, 12 October  1977), a Jill-of-all-trades who worked on several films in various capacities. Her best film to date is Posledný Autobus (‘The Last Bus’, 2011), a powerful, derisive live-action/pixilation work. ‘The Last Bus’ was codirected by Martin Snopek (b. Bratislava, 13 November 1974), a director, graphic designer, and teacher who began his career in 1995 with the anthology film Kroky, skoky, roky . . . a posledný zhasne (‘Steps, Jumps, Years . . . and the Last One Turn Please off the Light’).

Tomáš Luˇnák was born on 30 August 1974 in Zlín. He graduated from the Film School in Zlín and from FAMU in Prague. His short film Akrobat (‘Acrobat’, 2000) was screened at international festivals. He also directed music videos and created spots for UP races, United Grand Design, and Dance Prague. 150 The title of the anthology film is Fimfárum – Do tˇretice všeho dobrého (‘Fimfárum – Third Time Lucky’). The other two segments are O klobouˇcku s pérkem sojˇcím (‘The Hat and the Little Jay Feather’), directed by Vlasta Pospíšilová, and Jak na Šumavˇe obˇri vyhynuli (‘How the Ogres Died Out in the Mountains’), directed by Kristina Dufková. 151 In 1939 the Nazis split the State and created the so-called First Slovak Republic, which lasted until 1945. After the Nazis were defeated, the country was united again. 149

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Vanda Raýmanová (b. Nová Banˇa, 27 March  1973) made her first film, Kto je tam? (‘Who’s There?’) in 2010. It is a story of courage and friendship for children. Veronika Obertová (b. Žilina, 18 June  1984) and Michaela Cˇopíková (b. Žiar, 27 August  1984) studied in various countries. Back home, they joined forces and in 2010 they created the production company Ové Pictures. Dust and Glitter (original title in English, 2011) is their first short animated film. In San Francisco, the lives and desires of a young, naive girl and an older homeless man overlap, mirror, and affect each other. Peter Budinský (b. Bratislava, 3 September 1983) made his best film so far with tWINs (id., 2011), the winner of several awards. Siamese twins fight each other inside the boxing ring, and outside too. They share professional and private lives, but each sees things from a different perspective. tWINs is a cutting, strong film, drawn in an appropriately murky style. Michal Struss’ graduation film V kocke (‘In the Box’, 1999) won two dozen international prizes and was nominated for a Student Academy Award. For undisclosed reasons, this golden boy (b. Handlová, 18 June 1976) spent the following years as a postproduction supervisor.

Hungary152 With the change of regime in 1989, the unique position of Pannónia as Hungary’s only animation company ended, and several smaller private studios were founded. They were primarily committed to international productions and had less capacity to produce their own artistic works. The Hungarian National Television halted its financial support to the film industry, and this was the main reason why the state-owned Pannónia went bankrupt. The central financial role of the Ministry of Culture was over. In 1991, the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary was established, distributing the subsidies granted by the parliament annually. It did so by means of tenders among the film producers until 2010. Meanwhile, the National Cultural Fund of Hungary started giving financial subsidies, mainly to initiate productions. In 2004, the Hungarian Act on Motion Pictures made it possible

to pay the tax on profit to an investment fund instead of the state. This increased the involvement of private capital and international film companies in Hungarian film productions. Since 2011, through newly established grant systems, Hungarian Public Television has reinitiated the production of animated content for television – mainly television shorts, pilots, and series. Poetic, sometimes aphoristic, visionary shorts – often inspired by the fine arts – which dealt with art and philosophy, creation and existence, had been prevalent in contemporary Hungarian animation since the 1970s. The younger generations preferred cartoons motivated by a gag or a twist. The wide accessibility of computer software and Flash animation programs made it easier – and cheaper – for them to make their own films. Pannónia headed slowly into bankruptcy, without any state purchase or privatization. Only the two branches in Pécs and Kecskemét were privatized. The Pécs studio, managed by Hernádi Tibor,153 changed its name to Funnyfilm and was best known for provocative commercials for Red Bull, the energy drink. The Kecskemétfilm Studio was managed by Mikulás Ferenc (see below). In 1995, Pannónia’s manager Matolcsy György was replaced by animation director Jankovics Marcell, who said: ‘They placed me as a captain on a wreck, to be the last one to sink with it [. . .] To me, privatization always meant it would be the end of Pannónia: in a private studio, there is only lease work which barely could be called art.’154 In the 1990s, the company mainly produced feature films for families, since the manager considered them profitable, and, hence, ‘the way out’155 from the studio’s woes. Such features were made in an American style and included A hetedik testvér (‘The Seventh Brother’, 1995), directed by Koltai Jeno˝ and Hernádi Tibor, and Vacak, az erdo˝ ho˝se (‘Tiny Heroes’, 1997) by Gémes József. Jankovics himself made Ének a csodaszarvasról (‘Song of the Miraculous Hind’, 2002), an encyclopedia-like film about an astromythological interpretation of Hungary’s ancient history. The manager-director’s other ambitious project was the adaptation of Az ember tragédiája (‘The Tragedy of Man’, a symbolic epic of the Hungarian drama-literature) by the nineteenth-century playwright Madách Imre. The series of episodes were produced, scene by scene, over

By Orosz Anna Ida. Surname first, given name second, according to the Hungarian custom. 154 Dizseri Eszter, Kockáról kockára – A magyar animáció krónikája 1948–1998 [Frame by Frame – The Chronicle of Hungarian Animation 1948–1998], Balassi Kiadó, Budapest, 1999, p. 113. 155 Dizseri Eszter, Kockáról kockára – A magyar animáció krónikája 1948–1998 [Frame by Frame – The Chronicle of Hungarian Animation 1948–1998], Balassi Kiadó, Budapest, 1999, p. 116. 152 153

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two decades (1990–2011). They were made in the art style of the respective historical periods covered by each scene (Egyptian, Athenian, Roman, etc.), with anachronisms. The series was finally released as a three-hour feature in cinemas in 2011. The last successful team within Pannónia was Grácia Workshop (managed by Mikle Judit). The group’s most prominent personality was Reisenbüchler Sándor, whose films in the 1990s expressed longing for a natural state of life. Allegro Vivace (1989) is a celebration of youth, hope, and spring, based on a Tchaikovsky theme. Later Reisenbüchler portrayed grotesque apocalypses and harsh critiques of civilization. Ecotopia (1995) commemorates Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, followed by Boldog világvége (‘Merry Apocalypse’, 1999). He consciously finished his oeuvre with A fény pillanata (‘The Advent of Light’, 2002), saying, ‘With this film I meant to say that today’s civilization has not much chance left [. . .] I had a conceptual oeuvre, all my works were planned and made very consciously. A fény pillanata was the last part in this conceptual series.’156 The other outstanding director of the group was Macskássy Kati, who continued mixing genres and visual styles, socio-films with children’s drawings. In Van itt jó is, rossz is (‘There Are Good Things and Bad Things Here’, 1997), children talk about their homeland, Hungary. Her last film, Sosemvolt Cigányország (‘Never Never Gypsyland,’

2004), contrasts stern and gloomy pictures with the colours of imagination. Many of the directors of Grácia were fine artists, and their films were influenced by their graphic art. The work of Gyulai Líviusz (b. Barót [Baraolt, Romania], 1937) is full of small, ironic gags. In Jónás (‘Jonah’, 1997), a little man gets into a giant whale during a huge storm and refurbishes it to his own fancy until its death. Az én kis városom (‘The Small Town of Mine’, 2002) invokes the nostalgic and ironic tone of Jirí Menzel, a Czech live-action director. In 1989, Orosz István made a ‘system-changing’ short (Vigyázat, lépcso˝!, ‘Mind the Steps!’). A paradoxical, no-wayout Budapest apartment building is shown from a boy’s perspective. Orosz’s next monochrome films, resembling etchings, were highly poetic without any political undertones. Kert (‘Garden’, 1993) is a melancholic coming-of-age story about a boy who wanders in the abandoned park of a villa and peeps at a mysterious lady in a wheelchair. Az ido˝ látképei (‘Time Sights’, 2004), compared by critics to Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, plays with time, space, and parallel worlds, visually and acoustically. Keresztes Dóra made the black-and-white De Profundis (2002, produced in Studio Exist), an original vision of Genesis. The film is based on the topos, ‘Out of the depths have I called to you’, showing a continuously forming and transforming world of humans and creatures, symbols of life and soul.

Figure 3.27  Orosz István, Vigyázat, lépcso˝!, ‘Mind the Steps!’, 1989.

Lendvai Erzsi, ‘És jött a sehonnan fújó szél . . .’ – Beszélgetés Reisenbüchler Sándorral (‘And there came the wind from nowhere . . .’ – Interview with Reisenbüchler Sándor). Filmkultúra, 2003.

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Several young animators started their careers at Grácia. Graphic designer M. Tóth Éva’s (b. Kaposvár, 1962) films were expressive works with tensely waving graphic lines. Jelenések (‘Revelations’, 2001) envisions M. C. Escher’s spiral dimension-traps. Péterffy Zsófia (b. Budapest, 1971) continued the rich tradition of Kovásznai György’s painted animation in her hot, dynamic oil painting-film Kalózok szereto˝je (‘The Lover of Pirates’, 2002). Based on François Villon’s ballad, the film was improvised under the camera. Finally, Rofusz Kinga’s (b. Budapest, 1970) Harlequin (2003) is a finely drawn short about an old circus artist’s memories as he prepares for his last show. Kecskemét Animation Film Studio had been founded in 1971 as a branch of Pannónia. It became independent in 1991 and was privatized in 1993 when the employees of the studio bought the state-owned assets – a unique event in the Hungarian film industry. From its foundation, the studio’s manager and producer was Mikulás Ferenc (b. Kaposvár, 1940). He also managed the Kecskemét Animation Film Festival (KAFF), which began as a triennial in 1985, and became a biennial event in 2005. One can say that Kecskemét became Hungary’s capital of animation. From the start, the studio produced children’s series (Vízipók a csodapók, ‘Water-Spider, Wonder-Spider I-III’, 1976–1985; Leo és Fred, ‘Leo and Fred I-II’, 1984–1985). The most popular internationally was Magyar Népmesék (‘Hungarian Folk Tales’), with one hundred episodes. Its production was started in the 1970s by Jankovics Marcell. From the 1990s, the episodes have been directed by Horváth Mária and Nagy Lajos (b. Marosvásárhely [Targu Mures, Romania], 1956). Artistic shorts, often pushing the boundaries of animation form, were made by several directors. Horváth Mária’s Zöldfa utca 66 (‘Greentree Street 66’, 1992) mixed live-action film with animation. There are animated graffiti-like drawings on the walls and paperboard figures on the roofs. Szilágyi V. Zoltán has already been mentioned (see Vol. 2) as a Romanian filmmaker. He was from the Hungarian minority in that country and left to become a Hungarian citizen. In Kecskemét he continued his outstanding production with exceptionally finely drawn short films. Éjszakai kultúrtörténeti hadgyakorlat (‘Culturehistorical Manoeuvre at Night’, 1991) is about the aggressive political misinterpretation of culture. Jegyzo˝könyv – Mansfeld Péter emlékére (‘Court Record – in Memoriam

157

Péter Mansfeld’, 2006) was made for the anniversary of the Revolution of 1956, showing the youngest victim’s visions before his execution. The memorable metaphor of the film depicts the characters as human beings versus wooden puppets. The graphic artist Ulrich Gábor (b. Budapest, 1967) made dark, dynamic hand-drawn films. They use a visionary dance of death movements and grotesque figures (Idegen test, ‘Foreign Body’, 2002; Hommage, 2004; Ssshottt, 2007; Panopticum, 2008). Mielo˝tt (‘Before’, 2005) shows the calm before the storm, seen from a swing under a tree. Pajafilm is Tóth Pál’s one-man studio in Szeged. He founded it in 1996 and made computer-animated shorts. In his interviews, he emphasized that to him computer animation was only a technique to build his minimalist worlds; he was not interested in creating bombastic effects. His slowly unfolding stories usually ‘originate from a feeling, a random drawing or a short melody’.157 Their values lay in a surreal, meditative, delicately existentialist humour through which conventional themes (identity-loss, creative crisis, the impossibility of communication, love conquering the world) can be freshly portrayed. Egy újabb nap (‘Another Day’, 1998), in which clothing takes on human body parts as accessories, illustrates the everyday role-plays of people who have lost themselves. A szentjánosbogarak nemi élete (‘The Sexual Life of Fireflies’, 2000), an animated lighting artwork, shows a young firefly with a crush on the moon. Rajzfilm (‘Cartoon’, 2004) shows the process of making a cartoon as an amusing brainstorming on a drafting table. It can be considered a self-reflection on Tóth Pál’s present and past creative course. The puppet and clay animator Cakó Ferenc (Studio C.A.K.O.) gained international popularity with his live show-tours of sand and painting animation, often accompanied by a grand orchestra (Hamu, ‘Ashes’, 1989; A homok dala, ‘The Song of the Sand’, 1996). He also continued making clay-animated dystopias, which dated back to the 1980s (Labirintus, ‘Labyrinth’, 1999; Pszichoparádé, ‘PsychoParade’, 2001; Arc, ‘Face’, 2007). Varga Studio was the first private studio in Hungary, founded in 1988 by the animation film director Varga Csaba and producer Erkel András (b. Budapest, 1962). Talented artists freelanced from neighbouring countries, including Slovenia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Russia. Varga grew to become one of the leading studios in Europe, producing series, music videos, commercials, and TV spots. It also made some artistic shorts.

Bodolai László, ‘Egy újabb nap’ – Beszélgetés Tóth Pállal [‘Another Day’ – Interview with Tóth Pál], Filmvilág, Budapest, 1999/08, p. 27.

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One of its best-known products was the cartoon series Mr  Bean (2002; with Tiger Aspect), based on the British live-action comedy of the same name. Its director was Alexey Alexeev (b. Moscow, 1965), who had come from Pilot Studio in Moscow. Varga Csaba, the studio’s art director, made the well-known Bestiák (‘Beasts’, 1993) with Igor Lazin (b. Novi Knezevac [Serbia], 1964). In it, avantgarde paintings by Lugossy László, Zámbó István, and Wahorn András come alive to Frank Zappa’s music. The Serbian fine artist Milorad Krstic´ (b. Dornberk, 1952) made the multi-award-winning My Baby Left Me (1995). His neo-primitive graphics are animated on the monotonous in-and-out rhythm of sex; the accompaniment is the minimalist synthesized music by Wahorn András. Ranbo13 (1999) is a Flash animated music clip by Pál Balázs (b. Budapest, 1970), a comics-influenced parody of the Cold War. A shining meteor, Varga Studio went bankrupt in 2005. In 2000, Kollár-Klemencz László (b. Budapest, 1966), Igor Lazin, and producer Vass Jeno˝ established MyFilm. In 2001, Igor Lazin created an anti-intellectual singing cult figure Kistehén (‘Little Cow’). In the dark and morbidly humorous Morb (2003), a lonely Adam-like clay figure with a disproportionately small head tries in vain to make his home on a strange planet and find the purpose of his existence. In 2005, Erkel András, the former producer of Varga Studio, bought the Swedish-owned Studio Baestarts and asked Alexey Alexeev to be the coproprietor and art director. The international award-winning Log Jam series (2008) by Alexeev was a Flash-animated collection of jokes. A jazz collective rehearses in the middle of the wood – a bear plunking a log, a rabbit drumming on a trunk, and a wolf singing out of tune. They are always interrupted – by heavy rain, the full moon, a hungry snake, or a dumb hunter. The multi-award-winning feature film Nyócker! (‘The District!’, 2004), written by Novák Erik and directed by Gauder Áron (b. Ko˝szeg, 1973), was a low-budget cartoon action comedy, a romance between a Romeo and Juliet of rival Gypsy and Hungarian families, set in contemporary Budapest. The film has a provocative tone similar to South Park, similarly taking the children’s perspectives. The twodimensional, digital cut-out characters are presented in the city’s CGI setting, making the movements especially clumsy. KEDD Animation Studio was established in 2002 by animation film director M. Tóth Géza (b. Veszprém, 1970).

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The composer was Pacsay Attila (b. Veszprém, 1970). By Igor Prassel.

His computer-animated short Maestro (2005) was nominated for an Oscar in 2007. Ergo (2008) was a philosophical parable about the destiny-changing meeting of two opposing, abstract figures, visualized and musicalized.158 The films of Bánóczki Tibor (b. Sárospatak, 1977) have an engaging visual style and scripts of high literary value (by Bánóczki himself). He made the expressive, sometimes brutally realistic, painting animation film, Holtágban (‘Dead Water’, 2001). It is the bizarre story of an ex-train driver’s breakdown, set in an abandoned village on a hot summer day. Tejfogak (‘Milk Teeth’, 2007) is a surreal, eerie digital paper cutout film about a girl’s night love affair in a cornfield, from her little brother’s perspective. Csáki László (b. Mosonmagyaróvár, 1977) made chalk animation shorts with simple and playful visual characters and humorous storytelling (A napok, melyeknek értelmet adott a félelem, ‘Days Filled with a Sense of Fear’, 2003; Darazsak, ludak, körtefa, ‘Wasps, Geese, Pear-tree’, 2004). In his latest animated piece, My Name Is Boffer Bings (id., 2012), he creatively combines analogue chalk animation with digital 3D effects. Magyarósi Éva (b. Veszprém, 1981) seeks to portray the inner state of human beings from the subjective point of view of a female protagonist. Her elliptic narratives are sensitively combined with a very poetic, sensual, and visual world based on her drawings and digital glass pictures. Her original art works are usually exhibited in galleries together with her films (Hanne, 2005; Lena, 2009; Láthatatlan rajzok, ‘Invisible Drawings’, 2012). In Hungary, university-level animation courses have been available at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) since 1980. (Before 1989, the training was provided by Pannónia, and courses were held by the studio’s filmmakers.) Some of the highlights of MOME graduation films were: Életvonal (‘Lifeline’, 2006) by PolishHungarian Ducki Tomek (b. Budapest, 1982), also nominated for a Cartoon d’Or in 2007; Simon vagyok (‘I Am Simon’, 2009) by Molnár Tünde; Orsolya (‘Ursula’, 2009) by Szederkényi Bella; Nyuszi és o˝z (‘Rabbit and Deer’) by Vácz Péter; and Symphony No. 42 (2013) by Bucsi Réka.

Slovenia159 The already mentioned Zvonko cˇoh (see Vol. 2), working with Milan Ericˇ (b. 1956), made the feature Socializacija

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bika? (‘Socialization of a Bull?’, 1998). For almost ten years, cˇoh and Ericˇ worked on a story ‘written by life, a story about enthusiasm, naivety, selfishness, vengefulness, lies, milk, stock cubes and last but not least love’.160 In 1999, they jointly received the Prešeren Fund Award. The film was a breakthrough in Slovenian animated film. Despite ongoing difficulties with production, the 2000s witnessed the rebirth of Slovenian auteur animation. The first to cause a stir was Dušan Kastelic (b. 1964), who showed command of computer animation in his short Perkmandeljc (‘Perk’, 2002). His ˇcikorja an’ kafe (‘Chicory ’n’ Coffee’, 2008), set a new standard for local computer animation. Puppet animation also had a breath of fresh air. Špela cˇadež (b. 1977) successfully toured the festival circuit with her films Zasukanec (‘Mate to Measure’, 2004) and Ljubezen je bolezen (‘Lovesick’, 2007). She collaborated with the Swiss Marina Rosset to make Last Minute (id., 2010), a combination of puppet animation, shadow animation, and chalk drawing. In 2006, Nejc Saje (b. 1976) made Dvorišcˇe (‘Courtyard’), a 25-minute puppet animation from an original story. It boasted beautifully detailed sets and props and outstanding puppet design. Its complex animation – involving up to fifteen characters at a time – is wanting at times, but it was a big success. Kolja Saksida (b. 1981) had his professional breakthrough with the 10-minute puppet film Mulc: Fracˇa (‘Kiddo – Slingshot’, 2009), completed with an unusually large team. In the course of his work, Saksida struck up many international contacts. The Polish studio Semafor, for instance, helped construct the puppets for Koyaa: Lajf je ˇcist odbit (‘Koyaa the Extraordinary’, 2011). Grega Mastnak (b. 1969) made Bizgeci: ˇcešnje (‘The Beezees – Cherries’, 2003) in traditional animation. It led to a series and became the greatest hit in the history of Slovenian animation. While groups of filmmakers have joined forces and set up local studios in recent years (among them Bugbrain, Zap! Strup produkcija, Zvviks Production, and Invida), these can hardly be considered cornerstones for a lasting professional production environment. There were no schools in Slovenia providing practical and theoretical education in animation until 2009. It is encouraging that growing numbers of fine and visual arts students complete

their studies with animated films, but most of them are not screened at international festivals. Without support at the state level and without much interest from the public broadcaster, the talents in Slovenian animation will gradually divert their energies to other creative areas.

Croatia The country was at war from 1991, when it declared its independence from the Yugoslav Federation, until 1995, when its borders were internationally recognized. Zagreb was the capital of the new state, but the Zagreb School of Animation had disappeared. Almost all the masters had retired or died. For the Croats of 1995, what had existed just four years before belonged to the distant past. ‘Why are you recalling that old filmic crap?’ the foreigner was repeatedly asked. Despite the bombings that almost hit the capital, and various shortages, the Zagreb Animation Festival was never interrupted.161 Animated entertainment and propaganda films were made. But, to quote from an article by Hrvoje Turkovic´: In the 1980s, the production situation in Zagreb Film started to fall apart. The administration section overgrew its function, became self-indulgent, treating its main authors as incidentals. The company got entangled in a succession of bad business moves (in feature film production, damaging international contracts etc.), absorbing most of the state film subsidies to cover its own salaries, company losses and expenditures – all at the expense of its authors. Feeling their position to be of second-rate hired hands, many of the main authors scattered abroad, or withdrew into their own home studios. Zagreb Film fell into deep debt, and by the beginning of the 1990s had virtually collapsed. [. . .] In spite of the continuous (though heavily reduced) state support, the animation production in Croatia almost stopped.162’ When peace returned, production was reestablished but it was not a school anymore. Everybody went his or her way, no one was interested in the ‘tradition’.

From the film’s press kit. Praise must be given to the strength and warmth of the managing director, Margit ‘Buba’ Antauer, an award-winning filmmaker who gave up directing for organizing. 162 Hrvoje Turkovic´, ‘Croatian Animation Today’, Cartoons – The International Journal of Animation 2, no. 2 (Winter 2006). 160 161

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Figure 3.28  Daniel Šuljic´, Kolacˇ, ‘The Cake’ 1997. Animator and musician Daniel Šuljic´ (b. Zagreb, 1968; we met him in Austria) played about 150 concerts in the main Croatian and Austrian venues. His first successful film, Kolacˇ (‘The Cake’, 1997), is about a group of people trying to swindle each other for the largest piece of a cake. His other films include Film s djevojcˇicom (‘A Film with a Girl’, 2000), Ich kann es mir sehr gut vorstellen (‘I Can Imagine It Very Well’, 2003), Kurzes Leben (‘Short Life’, 2007), and U Lancima (‘In Chains’, 2011). Nicole Hewitt’s In/dividu (1998) and In/Between (2002) are non-narrative exploits. Goran Trbuljak’s Svaki je dan za sebe, svi zajedno nikad (‘Every Day by Itself, Never Together’, 2002) is an anthology of short spots. Davor Med¯urecˇan and Marko Meštrovicˊ codirected Cjuganjska (‘Gipsy Song’, 2004) and Silentium (id., 2006), which had a lugubrious atmosphere.

Joško Marušic´ Born in 1952, Joško Marušicˊ was the youngest of the Zagreb School masters and the only one who was still full of energy. During the hardest years, he was the artistic director of the Zagreb film animation studio, from 1987 to 1990 and again from 1995 to 1998. From 1993 to 1998, he was the president of the Croatian Independent Artists’ Association; he was the artistic

director of the World Festival of Animated Film between 1992 and 1998; and he was head of the festival board from 2000 to 2006. In 1999, he founded the Department for Animated Film at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (today the Department for Animated Film and New Media), where he taught three courses. He also published several books, and his artwork was shown at many exhibitions. His U susjedstvu grada (‘In the Neighbourhood of the City’, 2006) was the best animated short film of its decade in Croatia, telling a love story between two homeless people. History flows round them without touching them; poverty becomes violence, violence becomes tragedy. The sea is a major character in the film. As in his early Fish Eye (1980), Marušicˊ shows his deep knowledge of its beauty and its menacing, lethal presence. Not surprisingly for a teacher of young people, he chose the generation gap as the subject of his first feature, a great film. Duga (‘Rainbow’, 2010) is the tragedy of a childhood, and of a person unable to communicate with the adult world. In the opening live-action sequence, a storm forces a father with children to stop his car in an isolated area. During this break he observes a landscape of ruins, a place that has witnessed historic events. Thus begins a memory that blends reality and legend. The gap between the two is underscored by different graphic styles and uses of colour. There are grey and ochre

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hues and figures inspired by antique prints for the historic happenings, which contrast with vivid colour and stylized images for the legend. Against the background of wars between generations, two legends interweave: a father and son consumed by the same passion, and a young girl who decides to swim through the lake at the foot of the rainbow to become a male.

Serbia As far as pure talent is concerned, few people have reached the level of Rastko C´iric´ (b. Belgrade, 24 May 1955). He was a director, writer, music composer-performer, illustrator, and graphic artist. He gained international fame with Lalilonska Kula (‘The Tower of Bababel’, 1988). This short, featuring an absurd neverending fall, followed many other successes for C´iric´, but it was his first film that was well distributed in the festival circuit. His début had been Odlazi Cirkus (‘The Circus Departs’, 1982, from a popular song by Djordje Balaševicˊ), followed by the anti-war Stop (id., 1983). Tango Ragtime (id., 1985) is a creative and colourful fantasy on music, composed by C´iric´ himself; it features the joking merriment of North American ragtime and the melancholy of South American tango. Ale I  Bauci (‘Ogres and Bogies’, 1989) is a lexicon of weird creatures from the Balkans (taken from the Serbian Mythological Dictionary). It is a one-of-a-kind trio, followed by Nevidljive I  Slabo Vidljive Zivotinjske Vrste (‘Invisible and Poorly Visible Animal Species’, 1998) and Metamorf (‘Metamorph’, 2005), both about imaginary creatures. Svetlost u A-duru (‘Light in A-Major’, 1995) has a stylized Don Quixote riding towards the light with the music of Laza Ristovski. On the centenary of animation, C´iric´ made Fantasmagorie 2008 (id.), a computer reworking of the eponymous film by Émile Cohl. It wasn’t completely satisfactory, but it connects two centuries very well, synthesizing traditional and computer animation. There was also a stereoscopic version. C´iric´’s artistic output can be compared to a series of fireworks, each amazing the spectators with intellectual freedom and the risk of a quick oblivion. To fully appreciate their intrinsic poetry, the films should be screened together. Rastko’s talented daughter, Iva C´iric´ (b. Belgrade, 7 July  1983), made the award-winning Princeza Na Zidu (‘Princess on the Wall’, 2006). Spomenici (‘Monuments’, 2010) animated woodcuts by Iva’s grandfather Miloš C´iric´ (1931–1999) from a namesake book (1961). The woodcuts

were inspired by the writings of Serbian poets about the sufferings during World War II. Veljko Bikicˊ (Novi Sad, 1951–Belgrade, 1998) started at the Dunav film studio. He made a series of funny films, including Sezam (‘The Sesame’, 1977), Atlas (‘The Atlas’, 1977), Knjiga (‘The Book’, 1978), Kisobran (‘The Umbrella’, 1978), and Njegovo visocanstvo (‘His Majesty’, 1980). For the last he won the first prize at the international film festival in Leipzig. He was also acclaimed for his brilliant commercials. For Bikicˊ, an animated film was not just an art product for the festival elite. About a hundred animators went through his workshops. In just under a decade, the Bikicˊ Studio worked on five series, all coproductions, and produced around forty short films. Although he led a big studio, made commissioned films and commercials, and worked on projects of wide importance, Bikicˊ never forgot to be a film author. His signature is on such award-winning films as 1993’s Krst, Kvadrat, Krug Kazimira Maljevica (‘The Cross, the Square, the Circle of Kazimir Malevich’), inspired by the great artist. The miniature Prica o . . . (‘A Story about . . .’, 1997) takes an ironic view of the world. Bikicˊ died before he could make the animated feature Kapetan Džon Piplfoks (‘Captain John Pipplefox’), of which only a trailer remains.

Bosnia and Herzegovina We have already met Midhat ‘Ajan’ Ajanovic´, a Bosnian short animated film director in the 1980s (see Vol. 2). The war chased him from Sarajevo to Göteborg, in Sweden, where he continued a prolific career as a novelist, screenwriter, caricaturist, teacher, and organizer. Above all, he studied and wrote essays on animation, and in a few years he was one of the best scholars in the world. His Point of Mouth (id., 2010) is a documentary about a man from Sarajevo; the animated drawings let us see images from his life subjectively. The film is about reminiscences, about growing up in Sarajevo, and about never being able to leave no matter how far one travels. The film extends the author’s studies on realism in animation as an aesthetic concept. Sometimes crude in the drawing style and the events depicted, Point of Mouth has the hidden, melancholic tenderness of a person who has lost his world. MI / US (id., 2011), in contrast, is a collection of bitter gags in the tradition of the old Zagreb School. Laughter blends with the ultimate pessimism, describing humanity’s eternal belligerence. A third generation of Bosnian animators has emerged after the war. The first to be internationally recognized

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is Ivan Ramadan (b. Zagreb, 1985), whose computeranimated film Tolerancija (‘Tolerance’, 2008) received awards at several significant festivals.

Bulgaria163 Due to its traditional ties with Russia, Bulgaria was a loyal satellite of Soviet politics. The fall of the system took many of the population by surprise, and the transition to democracy and capitalism was long and confused. The animated film studio Sofia, which had previously produced 20 or 30 films per year on average, now struggled to survive. It employed its previous staff as freelancers in a German-Bulgarian coproduction, Kisselo zele (‘Sour Cabbage’). The film’s producers later became owners of a private company, Pillion Films. Several other private companies emerged, initially working on outsourced foreign productions. Among them was a Ukrainian-Bulgarian company (in the mid-1990s), as well as the local branch of the American Sugarshack Animation, Studio Hill, Nagual Ltd, Venelin-Animation, Zographic Film, Chaos Group, Gekon, and Sokerov Studio. Some of these had a measure of success, considering the lack of tradition in commercial animation and computer games in Bulgaria in addition to the strong global competition. In 1995, Sofia merged with the larger Boyana Film Studios. It took part in several foreign productions but collapsed in 2006. (The state sold it to the American film production company New Image after a period of disputes and ineffective protest by the disunited filmmakers’ society.) Boyana’s successor, Nu Image Film Studios, produced a few pilots for animated series but limited its animation production to its large visual effects unit, Worldwide FX. The most significant step in the transition was the creation of a National Film Centre in 1991, following the French film financing scheme. At this point, the independent production companies, that were supposed to raise funds for the films with only partial state support, had yet to be created. Some of the new production companies began as structures involved with the outsourced foreign productions. Bulgarian National Television, itself in a crisis, made only random attempts to lend a hand to animation. It produced six pilots for animated series, but only continued to support three of them for a couple of years: Rekata (‘The

163

River’, 2005–2007) by Andrey Kulev (b. Sofia, 1973; his father is animator Anri Kulev), Liatoto na Gabelko (‘The Summer of Gabelko’, 2005–2007) by Daniel Kaluchev (b. Sofia, 1973), and Valkut i sedemte Kozleta (‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids’, 2005–2007) by Vlado Tomov (b. Sofia, 1973). The World Festival of Animated Film in Varna, which won prestige internationally in the 1980s, closed in the 1990s. The theatres did not keep up their tradition of showing animated shorts. In 2003, the Bulgarian Parliament passed the Film Industry Act, amended in 2008. It decreed that the annual national budget should allocate a subsidy to the agency (the National Film Centre). The annual amount should not be smaller than the sum of the average preceding year’s budgets, funding 160 minutes of animation. This sounded encouraging, but the animators’ enthusiasm withered as production shrank still further. The state had to secure the money but was not bound to put the funds to use. Even so, animation survived – mainly through the efforts of the professionals themselves. Bulgarian animation was strong in art films, mainly shorts, which were generally difficult to distribute. During the following years, most of the leading figures made great efforts to sustain the tradition, trying their hands at more commercial products. Many became independent producers or teachers of animation, passing on their experience and knowledge to new generations. Meanwhile, artists of great importance passed away: Todor Dinov (1919–2004), Proiko Proikov (1927–2000), Christo Topuzanov (1930–2006), and Donyo Donev (1929–2007). All of them were active till their last days – making films, exhibitions, and caricatures, and teaching animation at the National Academy of Drama and Film Arts. Perhaps the most active personality of the period was Anri Kulev (b. Shumen, 1949), an artist, filmmaker, producer, and professor at NBU. He tried many kinds of animation in his films Drakonat i momcheto (‘The Dragon and the Boy’, 1995) and Gorgonata (‘The Gorgone’, 1994), and in the mixed-media shorts Ochi Chornie (‘Black Eyes’, 1992, a tribute to Louis Armstrong’s music), Slameniat chovek (‘The Strawman’, 2001), and Partsalat (‘The Rag’, 2007). Slav Bakalov (b. Sofia, 1945) also tried different formats, directing several episodes of the series Malkiat Zmei (‘The Little Dragon’) and the CGI short Zero (id., 2007). He also wrote scripts, including A Biahme Krushi (‘And Pears We

By Pencho Kunchev, Giannalberto Bendazzi, and Tsvetomira Nikolova.

170  Chapter 3: Romania

Were’, 2007) for Krasimir Ivanov (b. Kiustendil, 1955), and Akvatoria (‘Aquatoria’, 2004) for Andrey Tsvetkov (b. Sofia, 1954). Vitko Boyanov (b. Sofia, 1947) made several very short children’s films, financed by a private sponsor. Nikolay Todorov (b. Sofia, 1952) worked for many years on German commissions and also directed several animated shorts. Andrey Tsvetkov was very active, making several acclaimed shorts, including Cherno Na bialo (‘Black on White’) and Felinichita (id., 2009). Pencho Kunchev (b. Sofia, 1951) directed several episodes of the Slovak-Bulgarian series The Baby’s Adventures, then the subtly erotic short Lunata sus sinite ochi (‘Blue-Eyed Moon’, 2001). Notably, there were several animated adaptations from foreign literature, perhaps trying to break the local boundaries. They include Dessetiat Krag (‘The Tenth Circle’, 1998, loosely based on Dante’s Inferno) by Anna Haralampieva (b. Sofia, 1961). She later made Zashto e vissoko nebeto (‘Why is Heaven So High’, 2003) and Papagalski zalugalki (‘Uncle Parrot’s Rhymes’, 2008, together with Tsvetomira Nikolova [b. Sofia, 1960]). Other adaptations include M kato Mikelangelo (‘M for Michelangelo’, 1999, from Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Bronze Boar’) by Emil Milchev; Boris Despodov (b. Sofia, 1973) and Andrey Paunov’s (b. Sofia, 1974) Tri sestri i Andrey (‘Three Sisters and Andrey’, 2009, a variation on A. P. Chekhov’s play), and Vessela Dancheva’s (b. Sofia, 1975) Anna Blume (2009), based on Kurt Schwitters’s dadaistic poem. Velislava Gospodinova’s (b. Sofia, 1986) graduation work for New Bulgarian University was Farut (‘The Lighthouse’, 2009), based on Jacques Prévert’s poem. Quite a few well-known and promising filmmakers and animators went abroad. Some returned home, joining the struggle to keep Bulgarian animation alive – working on foreign commissions, supervising productions, and making TV pilots or auteur films. Among the latter, the most successful at festivals were Vlado Shomov’s (b. Sofia, 1954) Kogato biahme greshnitsi (‘When We were Sinners’, 2011); Ivan Tsonov’s (b. Sofia, 1956) Kragovrat (‘The Circle’, 2006) and Ednopochno (‘One Way’, 2009); and Tsvetomira Nikolova’s Supofonia (‘Soup Symphony’, 1994) and A+E (2007). Vlado Shishkov (b. Plovdiv, 1964), Dido Nedelchev (b. Burgas, 1958), Iavor Kaluchev (b. Sofia, 1959), and Georgi Dimitrov (b. Silistra, 1964) were also active as authors of award-winning shorts, promos, ads, and headers. They

164

By Mihai Mitrica˘.

also produced and supervised commissioned work from abroad. Among the most discussed authors in the 1990s is Zlatin Radev (b. Sofia, 1960), mainly for his first film Conservfilm (1991). Its festival success led to Shock, made with Vladislav Budinov (b. Sofia, 1953). Radev’s project for the feature puppet film Boklutsite (‘The Junk’) was among the first animation projects to receive a development grant from MEDIA. The younger generation brought new hopes, ideas, writing patterns, graphic styles, animation technologies, and formats. Some of their most notable films are Andrey Kulev’s Liniata (‘The Line’) and Pianistut (‘The Pianist’); Dragomir Sholev’s (b. Russe, 1977) Habanera (2002); Svilen Dimitrov’s (b. Varna, 1980) Vazdushniat Ass (‘The Air Ace’, 2007) and Raw Day (2011); Radostina Neikova’s (b. Varna, 1974) Patuvane (‘Trip’, 2011); Assia Kovanova’s (b. Sofia, 1973) and Ivan Stoyanovich’s (b. Sofia, 1972) Ecstasy (2003); Kalina Vutova’s (b. Sofia, 1977) Nedelia Vecher (‘Sunday Evening’, 2002); Kalina Decheva’s (b. Sofia, 1979) Zaedno (‘Together’, 2008); and Simeon Sokerov’s (b. Lovech, 1977) Pet Pati (‘5 Times’, 2009). Coproductions included Ivan Bogdanov’s (b. Sofia, 1973) Bashta (‘Father’, 2011), a German-Bulgarian-Croatian animated documentary. The first Bulgarian animated Web series was Balgar (‘Bulgar’, 2008–2010) by Nedelcho Bogdanov (b. Nessebar, 1982). Another development was the revival of the Varna world festival of animated film in 2011, joining other new international short films and animation festivals in the country.

Romania164 In 1991, Animafilm Studio ceased to belong to the state and became a private company. It went bankrupt nineteen years later. In the interim, it produced about 140 short films, all broadcast in closed circuits (schools, museums, and similar institutions), for educational purposes and with almost no artistic value. In addition to the high production costs, Animafilm could no longer be competitive using decades-old equipment. After the fall of the Communist system, most of the best animators left the country. A  few new studios appeared, focusing on advertising. The only one that stood out was Dacodac (founded in 1992). It was basically a joint French venture, which aimed at making features for export. The

Chapter 3: Cyprus  171

studio had around sixty employees, including many former Animafilm animators, and it produced films for France, Australia, Ireland, India, Poland, and Ukraine. The company signed partnerships with important foreign studios such as Milimages France. In 2007, it released the animated feature Aventurile lui Piccolo ¸si Saxo (‘Piccolo, Saxo & Company,’ 2007),165 the first feature entirely produced in Romania after 1989. The studio closed in 2009. Truly Romanian animation after 1989 amounts to a few enthusiasts who made shorts using their computers and their own money. Boborul (2004) was a nine-minute short with classic animation, directed and written by Radu Igazság (b. Diosig, 21 November  1953), whom we mentioned in Volume 2. Povara umbrei (‘The Burden of the Shadow’, 2006) by Dragos¸ Iuga dealt with the human condition. The first anim’est, the only international animation film festival in the country, was held in 2006. Independent animators appeared including Matei Branea (a successful illustrator and animator); Raul Taciu (winner of the best Romanian short at anim’est 2007 for Acrofobia, a mixture of puppet animation and CGI); Alexei Gubenco (Marile sperant¸e, ‘Great Expectations’, 2008); and Marius Pandele (Zgomot alb, ‘White Noise’, 2009, and GOPO166 nominee in 2010). All of these films were low-cost productions, made with passion and savings. Romania had only one financing institution for cinema projects, the National Centre of Cinematography (CNC). Statistics show that three to four animation projects were submitted each year but usually none of them received funding. As of writing, only one approved and financed project has been finished: O zi din viat¸a lui Ionescu (‘A Day in Ionescu’s Life’, 2010) by the former Animafilm director, Mihai S¸urubaru. It features a character that could easily stand for all of us in everyday situations.

Cyprus A country with a rich cultural legacy stretching back to mythical times, Cyprus became an independent state in 1960. The history of its filmmaking began three years before that, with the creation of Cypriot public television (CYBC) in 1957. Animation first appeared in the late 1960s.

In 1968, painter and graphic artist Andis Ioannides (b. 1939) animated the first graphic title for Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation and later worked on many animated music clips. Writer, painter, TV and theatre producer, and director Kyros Rossides (b. 1944) graduated in 1973 from the London Royal College of Art with Ta paidia tou Piraia (‘The Piraeus Children’),167 hand drawn on celluloid film under camera. Painter Spyros Demitriadis (b. 1950) recalled the agricultural life of Cyprus and its folk traditions in his graduation film Cypriot Transfigurations at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1976. During the 1980s there were several animated commercials but no auteur works. In 1994 the first coordinated steps were taken to create a distinct national cinematography, with the establishment of the Cyprus Cinema Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Education and Culture. This body provided government grants for film productions. In 1997, video artist Yiannos Economou (b. 1959) produced 2000 Miles and Thirteen Years. This puppet film was the first animation commissioned by the Cyprus Cinema Advisory Committee. In 1999 Nicos Synnos (b. 1971) formed Toonachunks Animation Films. He produced a number of shorts, including Animal Behaviour (2005), the second animated film to be commissioned by the Cyprus Cinema Advisory Committee and the first to win awards at international festivals. Toonachunks established itself as the first specialized studio in Cyprus, producing hand drawn and puppet films, classic and avant-garde films, animated documentaries, art videos for gallery exhibitions and museums, television spots, and cartoon commercials. In the mid 2000s a new generation of mainly CGI animators emerged, basically working on a freelance basis and in small teams. Since 2007, the newly founded Cyprus University of Technology has educated students in animation by offering six classes through their multimedia and graphic arts courses. The same year marked another turning point with the inauguration of the Countryside Animafest Cyprus – Views of the World (originally established in 2002 as the first documentary festival in the country). The founding team was headed by artistic director Yiorgos Tsangaris (b. 1976), graphic artist, animator, and animation film curator. The festival screened independent authors’ films and included international and national competition sections.

Directed by André Clavel and Eric Gutierrez. It should not be mistaken for the namesake short film by the Dutch Joop Geesink (1960). The Romanian film industry awards. 167 Inspired by the song written by Manos Hadjidakis for Jules Dassin’s live-action movie Never on Sunday (1960). 165 166

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Among its founding principles was the cultivation and education of a wide audience on the art of independent auteur animated films. Animafest Cyprus and Cyprus University of Technology collaborated to organize annual international academic events. In the years 2011–2014 a new generation was active. Promising CGI filmmaker and animator Andreas Rossides (b. 1989) presented his graduation film Off the Hook (2014); Katerina Pantela (b. 1991) had Holly she*p, nominated best Cypriot animated film 2013–2014; Marinos Savva (b. 1990) created Mind War in 2013 and Dance of Mass in 2014; and George Tymvios (b. 1986) made a name for himself with Pasty Child (2013).168

Ukraine169 After the Declaration of Independence on 24 August 1991, the new social situation opened opportunities for creativity. Ukrainian animated filmmakers had accumulated great experience (the greatest in the area, after Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm). In the first half of the 1990s, the government still provided the necessary conditions for regular work. There was a blossoming of activity, especially among the new generation of animation directors who had started as layout men or animators. The many works of this time include: Krokodil (‘The Crocodile’, 1991) by Mikhail Titov (b. Kiev, Ukraine, 12 October  1948); Mamochka Rozochka i Minechka (‘Mummy Rosochka and Minechka’, 1993) by Natalia Chernysheva (b. Komsk, Russia, 12 February 1951); Bobe-Maices (‘Grandmother’s Stories’, 1993, based on Jewish folklore) by Elena Kasavina (b. Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine, 17 April 1952); Istoria odnogo porosionka (‘Story of a Little Pig’, 1994) by Ludmila Tkachikova (b. Kiev, Ukraine, 3 September  1959); and Koza-Dereza (‘Impudent She-Goat’, 1995) by Irina Smirnova (b. Khabarovsk, Russia, 24 March 1951, using an animated painting technique). These films were successful domestically and represented the Ukranimafilm studio at international animation festivals. They focused on expressing national culture, folklore, and literature. These had always been characteristics of Ukrainian animation, but now they helped in the search for a national identity. The films based on Ukrainian folktales and songs include: Kotyk i Petushok (‘Little Cat and Little Cock’,

1991) by Alla Gracheva (Zgurovka Poltavskaya, Ukraine, 16 October  1924–Zgurovka Poltavskaya, Ukraine, 14 July 2001); Khodyt Tykva Po Ogorodu (‘The Pumpkin Walks in the Vegetable Garden’, 1996) by Valentina Kostyleva (b. Belogorsk, Ukraine, 18 March  1946); Roukavichka (‘Small Mitten’, 1996) by Natalia Marchenkova; and Kak ou Nashego Omelechka (‘How Are Things for Our Melechko’, 1999) by Evgeny Sivokon (b. Kiev, Ukraine, 7 May 1937). The films based on Ukrainian literature include: Topolia (‘The Poplar’, 1996) by Valentina Kostyleva (b. Belogorsk, Ukraine, 18 March  1946), based on the poem by Taras Shevchenko;170 and Viy (‘Viy’, 1996) by Alla Gracheva, based on a horror story by the Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol. Audiences and critics were delighted to discover Oleg Pedan (b. Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, 2 February 1969) and his puppet film Svetlaya Lichnost (‘Light Personality’, 2002), which was followed by Nikogo net doma (‘There Was Nobody at Home’, 2004) and Samy malen’kiy (‘The Smallest One’, 2007). The films’ characters are created from old clock components, springs, lamps, and other surprising objects. The promising situation descended into a protracted crisis from the late 1990s, due to the reduction and then the almost complete cessation of government financing. The offices of Ukranimafilm studio were gradually deserted. The best and most experienced professionals left to work in the US, Russia, Poland, Hungary, France, and elsewhere. A Ukrainian/French production company, BorysfenLutes, opened its doors in 1994. It was the country’s first privately owned commercial studio. At the beginning, the Ukrainian employees of the company aimed not just to make money to please their partners, but they also made quite successful auteur films. These films included Klinika (‘The Clinic’, 1994) and Posledniaya Zhena Siney Borody (‘The Last Wife of BlueBeard’, 1996) by Alexandre Bubnov (b. Vladimir, Russia, 31 October  1959); Deviat s polovinoy (‘Nine and a Half ’, 1994) by Sergey Kouchnerov (b. Rogachev, Belarus, 22 June 1960); and E=MC? (id., 1999) by Alla Churikova (b. Kiev, Ukraine, 17 April  1962). These films represented Borysfen-Lutes studio at international animated film festivals. But the studio couldn’t keep up with the market’s demands, and Borysfen-Lutes closed in 2009. If Ukranimafilm experienced almost no development in the 2000s, it could boast some individual achievements.

We are grateful to Yiorgos Tsangaris, who provided the information on which this section is based. By Elena Shupik and Elena Kasavina. 170 A distinguished Ukrainian poet and painter, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) wrote ‘Topolia’ in 1839. 168 169

Chapter 3: Georgia  173

The most notable film of the period was Shel tramvay nomer deviat (‘The Tram Number 9 Goes’, clay animation, 2002) by Stepan Koval (b. Novomoskovsk, Ukraine, 18 July  1965). Funny and subtle, the film was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival and received more than ten awards at different animation festivals. In 2005, Koval founded the Novatorfilm studio and continued working with clay animation. Among its productions are 26 short films called My Ukraine. Ukranimafilm also produced two films by Evgeny Sivokon (b. 1937). Kompromiks (‘Compromise’, sand animation, 2002) won a prize at the KROK film festival in 2003. Zasyplet sneg dorogui (‘All the Routes Are Snowbound’, colour sand animation, 2005) won the prize for best animation film at Clermont-Ferrand in 2006. Sivokon was a shy, taciturn, benign artist. He already had a very long list of internationally successful films under his belt, including the masterful Len (‘Laziness’, 1979).171 He didn’t mind learning a new technique, such as sand animation, in order to continue creating – so long as it was inexpensive. Pyesa dlia triokh aktoriv (‘The Play for Three Actors’, 2005) by Alexander Shmygoon (b. Kiev, Ukraine, 25 September 1976) received the award for best children’s film at the international animation festival KROK. Later films created at Ukranimafilm included Spasi i sokhrani (‘Let’s Save and Keep’, 2008) by Evgeny Sivokon and O, Paris! (id., 2009) by Alexander Shmygoon. Natalya Skryabina (b. Kiev, 1984) directed Avtoportret (‘Self-Portrait’, 2008), a drawn film. In two minutes and 20 seconds, she shows her colourful inner world: a green dragon, a gymnast, and other creatures of children’s fantasies.

Georgia172 All too predictably, Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union led to economic collapse. Animation suffered for many years. Capitalism gradually turned stateowned cinema studios into private companies, the studios Orbi and Kvali. In 2005, a fire damaged the film archives of Georgian Film Studio. However, life went on. Merab Saralidze (see Vol.  2), made Tutiqhushi (‘A Parrot’) in 1989. A colt gallops into the

forest, surrounded by music. But cruel animals throw him in the air, where he turns into a parrot and can hardly hear the sound of freedom. Tutiqhushi was followed by Saprtkhobelebi (‘Bugbears’, 1992) and Qveqhnis Masheneblebi (‘Builders of the Country’, 1997), a musical screened in the year of the director’s death. Bondo Shoshitaiahvili (b. Tbilisi, 14 September 1939), another veteran, directed Motsme (‘Eyewitness’, 1991), Paradoqsi (‘The Paradox’, 1999), and Gankhetqilebis Vashlebi (‘The Apple of Discord,’ 2002). In 1997, Shadiman Chavchavadze, who had made the memorable Mebaghe (‘The Gardener’, 1975), directed Sazghvrebi (‘Borders’). In 2009, the Kartuli Filmi (Georgian Film) and Samta studios joined to make another Chavchavadze film, Tsinda Mela (‘Holy Fox’, 2009), based on Reineke Fuchs by Wolfgang Goethe. This short, with no positive characters, was a metaphor for contemporary society. In the same year, two other companies, MIFASI Film and MK Productions, financed Chavchavadze’s Ratom Ar Akvs Mtvares Kaba (‘Why the Moon Does Not Have a Dress’, 2009), based on a Serbian story. David (Teimuraz) Sikharulidze (b. Tbilisi, 24 November 1953) directed some good films in the 1980s: Ephemera (‘Ephemera’, 1982), Gulubrkvilo Bati Tasikos Tavgadasavali (‘Adventure of the Naive Duck Tasiko’, 1984), and Jan– Babajan (‘Jan-Babajan’, 1986). In 1995–1996, he took an internship in the US at Warner Brothers. On his return he directed Iakob Gogebashvili: cxovreba da mogvaceoba (‘Iakob Gogebashvili: Life and Statesmanship’, 2000) about some unknown episodes in the life of the Georgian classic writer Iakob Gogebashvili.173 He later directed Gharibebi Sul Tirian (‘The Poor Are Always Weepy’, 1999–2003) and Kvachis Tavgadasavali (‘Kvachis Adventures’, 2006–2007), produced by the TV company Mze (‘sun’). Between 2007 and 2009, the film studio Marao produced his next film, C’est la vie (‘That’s Life’, 2009), about life’s fast pace. Sikharulidze’s Art Romani (‘Art Novel’, 2009) was about a jealous wife, while Gavardnilebi (‘Outlaws’, 2008) was based on the facts surrounding the battle of Gurias, a small Georgian region, against the Russian empire. The production companies MIFASI Film and MK Productions also commissioned four works between 2007 and 2009 from the veteran Vladimer (Lado) Sulakvelidze (b. Tbilisi, 9 February  1957). They were Legenda Ghvinoze

It’s the story of a man so lazy that he becomes a fish. In five minutes, the film shows the difference between living and just surviving. By Mariam Kandelaki. 173 The importance of this writer and teacher (1840–1912) is enormous in Georgia. Mother Tongue, the manual that he created, has taught millions of Georgians their language since its first publication in 1880. 171 172

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(‘A Legend About Wine’, 2007), from a popular Georgian story; Rogor Gaxda Zghva Mariliani (‘How the Sea Became Salty’), a Philippine fairy tale; Chitbatona (‘Goldfinch’), a French legend about why the goldfinch has beautiful feathering; and Rogor Gachnda Mtvare (‘How The Moon Appeared’), an African story about the origin of the moon. Nodar Begiashvili (b. Tbilisi, 13 November 1958), the chairman of Studio Televeziri, was responsible for Ponto, Shavi, Shavi Zghva (‘Ponto, the Black, Black Sea’, 2001). The film is created from animated children’s drawings. The sea lies on its back, wondering what the sky is – it concludes it is the sea’s reflection. The sky thinks the opposite. Revaz Gvarliani (Mestia, Georgia, 5 January 1960–Tbilisi, 15 December 2008), another veteran, made the good Unicho Oboba (‘The Daft Spider’, 2005). Irakli Makharadze (b. Tbilisi, 4 March  1961) set his Sakhli Lkhinisa (‘Festive House’, 1998) in the Tbilisi of the early twentieth century, where the air ace Besarion Keburias performed in public. Mogzauroba Istoriashi (‘Travelling through History’, 2005) is a children’s animation series about Georgian history. Rati Naneishvili (b. Tbilisi, 17 July  1971) directed Mglis Aghsareba (‘Confession of the Wolf ’, 2005). Mariam Kandelaki (b. Tbilisi, 23 November  1969) worked for Studio Kvali and directed Sizmaria?! (‘Is This a Dream?!’, 1999); Tsutisopheli (‘Tsutisopheli’, 2001); Ambavi Aleksandre makedonelis cxenisa (‘The Story of Alexander the Great’s Horse’, 2010); and Vefxi da mokme (‘The Leopard and the Brave’, 2012). Paata Shengelia (b. Gulriphshi, Georgia, 28 March 1977) directed Ukanaskneli cerili (‘The Last Letter’, 2012). Amiran Isiani (b. Kutaisi, Georgia, 23 April  1959) was the director of Peristsvaleba (‘Transfiguration’, 1990); Mdzletamdzle (‘Insuperable’, 1991); Chamodi Chemi Ghrublidan (‘Get Down from My Cloud’, 1992); Nu Damtoveb (‘Don’t Leave Me Alone’, 1993); Zamtari (‘Winter’, 1993), commemorating the great Georgian folk singer Hamlet Gonashvili; Udzlieresni (‘The Strongest’, 1997), produced by Studio Orbi; and Tsklis Pirveli Shroshani (‘The First Water Lily’, 2009), in which Native Americans narrate a bucolic legend.

Armenia174 The country’s restored independence (on 21 September  1991) brought new challenges and hopes. Though

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there was no real national animation industry, Hayfilm continued its activity; other new studios were born; and Armenian masters continued working with Russian and French studios. The film’s subjects continued to be inspired by Armenian literature, but the social and political situation figured more often in animated film scripts. In 2009 an animated film festival, ReAnimania, was established in Yerevan. Robert Sahakyants’s works became sarcastic and ironic. Until his untimely death in 2009, many of his cartoons were coproduced with studios in Moscow and France. They included Katsin (‘The Axe’, 1994), Entrutyunner (‘Elections’, 1994), Tapan (‘The Ark’, 1997), Viktoria (‘Victoria’, 1997), and Banakan kyanqi nshannere (‘Signs of the Reasonable Life’, 2001). In his later years he became more and more politicized, feeling the responsibilities of an intellectual to speak out about social and political issues. When necessary, he worked by the light of candles and kerosene lamps. In 2009, the year of his death, his team began work on five projects with completely different styles and formats. One was the feature Anahit, directed by Robert’s wife Lyudmila Sahakyants and their son David, based on the fairy tale by the Armenian writer Ghazaros Aghayan (1840–1911). The Robert Sahakyants Production studio was registered in March  2010 by David Sahakyants and his siblings, Nana and Hayk Sahakyants. Since 1992, David Sahakyants (b. 1975) has worked in Armenfilm, now the National Cinema Centre of Armenia. In 2008 he became a member of the Union of Cinematographers of Armenia, and in 2010 he became the artistic director of cartoon production for the National Cinema Centre of Armenia. His films include Ayn Ore (‘That Day’, 2002), Khage (‘The Game’, 2002), Ugig Eter (‘Live Broadcast’, 2002), Hot Hot Dog (id., 2002), Kanghagudhakutyun (‘Foresight’, 2003), Ashkharagrutyun ereghaneri hamar (‘Geography for the Children’, 2005), Astghagitutyun Ereghaneri hamar (‘Astronomy for the Children’, 2006), Hin Ashghari patmuyun: Babelon (‘Ancient World History: Babel’, 2007), Chors Erg (‘Four Songs’, 2007), Erajshtakan Aybuben (‘Musical Alphabet’, 2007), Ergogh Tver (‘Singing Figures’, 2008), and Hayrenner (‘Hayrens’, 2009). Sergey Galstyan,175 film critic and writer, interviewed Robert Sahakyants while preparing his book The Magic Carpet. ‘[An animated film] expresses my thoughts’, said Sahakyants. ‘I have no desire to show purely the art of my

By Giannalberto Bendazzi and Marianna Aslanyan. Critic Sergey Galstyan should not be mistaken for the director Stepan Galstyan.

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drawings or of my directing; my wish is my word to reach the spectator. My cartoon films are close to journalism or literature. If I could write the way I draw, I would. [. . .] My films chronologically bound in one collection have become my biography, the history of my attitude towards life and people. And if I even try to feel sorry for my vain efforts in making political and publicity films, I blame not me but that situation, which was forcing us to react at every conflict.’176 The puppet specialist Gayane Martirosyan continued her career with Hin Jraghatsi Bari Voginere (‘Kind Ghosts of the Old Mill’, 1993), Bari Hogineri Nor Arkatznere (‘New Adventures of Kind Ghosts’, 1999), Paterazme (‘The War’, 2000), and Ereq Zangak (‘Three Bells’, 2004). Since 2003, Martirosyan has been teaching at the State Institute of Theatre and Cinema, where she supervises the animation directing course. In 2006 she released the first part of Vishapagorgi Gakhtniqe (‘The Mystery of the Dragon-Carpet’). Stepan Galstyan, perhaps content with the success and fame of his comic short Dzkahord Panose (‘Panos the Clumsy’, 1980), limited himself to directing Aylentrank (‘Alternative’, 1993). Ella Avagyan made Velikaya Bitva Slona S Kitom (‘The Great Fight of the Elephant and the Whale’, 1992) in Moscow with Soyuzmultfilm. She also made Ricarski Roman (‘The Knight’s Novel’, 2003), Pohititel Elok (‘The Fir Tree Robber’, 2005), Prekrasnaya Lyagushka (‘Wonderful Frog’, 2008) and mini-films for the series Veselaya Karusel (‘Merry-Go-Round’). Aida Sahakyan experimented with object animation in Labirintos (‘Labyrinth’, 1994). The live-action director Arman Manaryan made his second animated film, Tgete (‘Ignoramus’, 1995). Yubik Muradyan directed Hayots Grer (‘Armenian Letters’, 1992), about the Armenian alphabet,177 one of the first films made after independence. Later he made the remarkable Bitlis (id., based on William Saroyan’s short story, 2008).178 A project called John Silver was unfinished at his death in 2009. With Jik yev Jak (‘Jik and Jak’, 1993) Muradyan started collaborating with his wife Naira (b. Yerevan, 17 December 1961). Naira Muradyan was formerly an art director in the animation department at the Armenfilm studio and

had also worked with Lyudmila Sahakyants. Among her own best films are Naapet Quchak-Noch (‘Naapet QuchakNight’, 2002),179 Iz zhinzni trollei (‘From the Life of Trolls’, 2008), V etot den (‘On that Day’, 2010), and Balet (‘Ballet’, 2011). In 2002 she started her career as a TV director with the series The Flight of the Pierrots (a seven-episodes series), followed by the series Biblical Tales (2010).

Robert Sahakyants180 Robert Sahakyants was born in Baku (Soviet Azerbaijan) on 30 August 1950 and died in Yerevan, Armenia, on 24 September 2009. He burst into animation – provocative, irreverent, and eccentric. He challenged the clichés of sugary storytelling and the total censorship of the time. The Fox Book, made in 1975, was a shock both for Armenian and international animation. Spectators could not follow the metamorphoses of his characters; the sheer number of gags and transformations were beyond belief. A  whole range of interpretations of Armenian national tales followed. At first sight, they seemed to be brilliantly modern readings. At a deeper level, they were the original vision of a great artist responding to the spiritual heritage of his nation. Each new film became an event for his growing number of fans. Sahakyants enjoyed breaking stereotypes, debunking myths, and ignoring restrictions, bans, and dogmas. His films are undisguised attacks on stupidity, violence, and ignorance. They are also stunning, with national colour pattern techniques, original images, funny scripts, and cascading gags. Sergey Galstyan recalls:181 ‘Lesson by Robert Sahakyants was projected in 1987 at the Soviet Union film festival in Moscow. It received an award and got the appreciation of the professionals. The heroes of the film are spacemen who appear on another planet, and as soon as they try to destroy a living creature, they are transformed and become the same type of creature. Do not kill .  .  . The planet gives a cruel and wise lesson to the invaders.’ From The Fox Book until The Axe (1994), which depicted mankind marching to catastrophe, Sahakyants made a

Sergey Galstyan, Kakhardakan Gorg [The Magic Carpet], Armenian National Cinema Centre, Yerevan, 2008, p. 60. Followed a year later by Hayots Aybubene (‘The Armenian Alphabet’) by Hasmik Poshotyan. 178 Bitlis is the name of a city in western Armenia where Saroyan’s parents were born. 179 Naapet Quchak was an Armenian poet of the sixteenth century. 180 By Armen Vatyan and Giannalberto Bendazzi. 181 Galstyan, Kakhardakan Gorg, p. 62. 176 177

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string of witty films alongside his Armenian tales. Some examples are Kikos (id., 1979) and Who Will Tell a Fancy Story (1982). He demolished totalitarianism in Seghmakojak (‘Button’, 1989) and Everything is Fine (1991). Again, Sergey Galstyan writes:182 ‘In 1989 Robert Sahakyants, not yet forty years old, had already gained the title of master, and completed his political film-pamphlet Button. [. . .] Not only houses and towns are breaking, but the whole empire is breaking.’ Sahakyants himself said: ‘We finished the film at the time when the committee Kharabakh183 was in jail, and the army of the Soviet Union was in the city. We organized the first presentation in the Cinema House. I  was thinking that it was risky to do so, but on the other hand I was eager to give the situation a sharp shock. When the film ended the audience was cursing the government. Ten, fifteen minutes of people yelling. I would not change that wave for the ovation of any festival.’

Azerbaijan In April 1990 Azerbaijan animators experienced capitalism for the first time in the Soviet Union. The title of the animation film department was changed to the Azanfilm Creative-Production Union. The nation became officially independent in December 1991 but was shaken for some years by a war with Armenia for control of the NagornoKarabakh region. The conflict ended in 1994. In the 1990s, Azanfilm (whose art director was Elchin Hami Akhundov, a production designer and film director) made 19 animated films. They included Once Somewhere . . ., a political satire, for which its director Vakhid Talybov (b. 1949) received the prize for best animated film at the 1993 Baku II Festival-Contest of Azerbaijan films. The cel film Dedication by Shamil Najafzada (b. Baku, 13 November 1960) is dedicated to the victims of Stalin’s repression. In 1991 the film was awarded the diploma at the Oberhausen International Film Festival. Unfortunately Najafzada never made another animated film, instead devoting his talent to documentaries. Ode (directed by V. Talybov and R. Ismailov) reflects philosophical ideas about the meaning of life (the

soundtrack features Beethoven’s Ode to Joy). The celanimated Sohbatul-esmar is dedicated to the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the poet Mehmed Fuzuli;184 the same film was inspired by the works of the miniature artist Soltan Mahammad Tebrizi. Director Elchin Hami Akhundov won the prize for best animated film at the 1995 Baku III Festival-Contest of Azerbaijan films. The expert Aydin Kazimzada writes:185 Hafiz Akbarov has his own, unique style. He has worked at the Azarbayjanfilm studio for more than 40 years, on films including A Jackal, Son of a Jackal; Ring Out, My Saz, Ring Out; Stone; Baby Hedgehog and an Apple; A Human Comes to the Forest; The Magic Tree and The House in the Glade. Rauf Dadashov was born into the family of famous Azerbaijani actor Mammadagha Dadashov. He [. . .] worked on many animated films, including The Lion and Two Bulls [. . .] Firangiz Quliyeva worked at the Azanfilm studio for some 30 years. She animated My Chickens, Rooster and Tural and Zari. [Quliyeva] was the artist on The Astrologer’s Apprentice, Chase, Dreams .  .  . Dreams, and others. Oqtay Zulfuqarov is a famous Azerbaijani composer, who wrote music for the best Azerbaijani animated films. Kazimzada adds: Another of the key figures in Azerbaijan’s animated cinema is Arif Maharramov, a production designer, film director and scriptwriter. [.  .  .] In 1981–93, he worked as a production designer on live-action feature films, film director and scriptwriter at the Azarbayjanfilm studio. In 1988–91 he was the art director of the animated films association. [.  .  .] Arif Maharramov created Apprentice Astrologer, Time for Bed, Joke-1, Joke-2, A Chrysanthemum Leaf, Dada Qorqud, The Sarkar Epic, Molla Nasraddin, Basat and Tepegoz and others. In 2010, the output of the Azanfilm studio (which mostly made CGI animation) was three to four films a year.

Sergey Galstyan, Kakhardakan Gorg [The Magic Carpet], Armenian National Cinema Centre, Yerevan, 2008, p. 60, pp. 64 and 66. Some young intellectuals formed this committee in 1988, claiming that the Armenian-inhabited Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan, which had insurrected, had to return to Armenia. After a few months, they were arrested on specious grounds. 184 Mehmed bin Suleiman Fuzuli (1495–1556) composed poetry with equal facility and elegance in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. 185 http://www.visions.az/art,69/. Retrieved on 25 October 2010. 182 183

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Greece186 Around 1990, the Greek state became somewhat indifferent to ‘cartoons’. The cause was the death, in 1989, of the enlightened writer Pavlos Zannas (who was the president of the Hellenic Centre of Cinematography, and a strong supporter of animation). Around the same time, though, digital technology entered the field with a vengeance. Traditional animators, who were already sidelined and having to survive through commercials, found that advertising agencies were now turning to cheaper, less demanding solutions. In 1992, Nikos Koutsis (b. Athens, 1972) in Kyklo (‘The Cycle’) highlighted forced labour in a barracks. Natalia Kostopoulou and Sylvia Bringas made La grasse matinée (‘Lazing in Bed’), based on a poem by Jacques Prévert. It’s a frantic, surreal two-minute film that combines drawn animation, cutouts, and collage. In 1993, Kostopoulou made Vrite tin diaforá (‘Find the Difference’) by herself, a commentary on the different ways of living in Greece and in England, through the impressions of two girls. In 1997, Kostopoulou made Ti ta ghinis otan megalonis? (‘What Will You Become When You Grow Up?’). A young man is overwhelmed by apathy, fearing the transition to adulthood and responsibilities. Kostopoulou’s films are characterized by fast pacing, continuous camera movements, a combination of various two-dimensional animation techniques, and a light and personal tone. In 1996, the indefatigable Iordan Ananiadis made Mas oi ellines (‘We, the Greeks’). He observed his compatriots with a caustic, self-critical approach, which could also be funny. In 2005, he made Mis petaxis tipota (‘Do Not Throw Anything’). The same year Spyros Rasidakis made his debut with 35 x 50 (id.), in which a pencil, an eraser, and a sharpener dance to Chaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. In 1998, Spiros Siákas (b. Arta, 1967) made Kops’to (‘Stop It!’), a pilot for an anti-smoking campaign. The same year, Zachos Samoladás made Genesis (id.), based on chapters from the Bible’s first book. In 1999, two films were screened: Continuation of Genesis by Zachos Samoladás, and Dodecaimero (‘A Dozen Days’) by Cristóforos Sotirákos. The latter was the result of five years of preparation and effort, with rich and impressive classic drawings. In 2001, Panagiotis Rappas and Nassos Vakalis (b. Athens, 1966) opened the Greek branch of the Time Lapse Pictures studio in Athens. The company had been

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By Michela Morselli.

founded in 1999 in Los Angeles. The two branches successfully collaborated on the international production of animated films for cinema, television, and the Internet. Time Lapse Pictures became a meeting place for the best Greek animators, who found the opportunity to work on international projects. In 2002, Dimitris Vorris directed Sto simposio tu Arkeuli (‘The Symposium of Arkeuli’), a sharp satire on contemporary Greek people, appealing to the mentality of the ancient Greeks. Star system (id.) by Spiros Siákas had expressionistic drawings, rendered with detailed colouring; the film matched and combined various techniques. It was followed in more depth by The Mirror Stage (2005), which used puppet animation, pixilation, and drawing on paper. In O nomos tis varitatas (‘The Law of Gravity’) by Spyros Rasidakis, a lone pigeon tries to escape from smog and skyscrapers. In 2003, I fili mu ta diaskimakia (‘My Friend from Outer Space’) by Dimitri Patrikiu was the first Greek 3D computer animation: a girl befriends two extraterrestrials who show up in her room. Stelios Polychronakis (b. Athens, 1972) animated on The Mirror Stage and later worked in Greece and Great Britain, with considerable success. In 2005, again working with Siakas, he made the spot for the 2005 COJI Island games. Films from 2005 included The Little Fable of a Burning Nuisance by Nikolau Petropulea, an ecological tale about forest fires and the Greek giant Pari, who protects the wood. O kyklos tis exelixis (‘The Circle of Development’) by Konstantinos Katrakis (b. Athens, 1971) and Panos Kalsachnias (b. Athens, 1971) describes evolution on Earth. In 2006, Angeliki Salamaliki (b. Patras, 1983) made Metamfismenos Erotas (‘Love in Disguise’), a love encounter in disguise, with vibrant drawing. In the final dance the protagonists are just outlines floating in the music. My Doll Plays Alice (2007) was Akrivi Simeonidi’s first film, animated in collaboration with Vangelis Georgakopoulos. Made with cutouts, it reflects the absurd atmosphere of Lewis Carroll. Angelos Spartalis (b. 1973; he grew up in Crete, Greece and in Düsseldorf, Germany) made several films, including Erato, which was loosely based on Arthur Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer. His films often mix techniques, including live-action, drawn animation, and collage. Music videos in Greece often used animation. Examples include the work of Angeliki Vrettou with Iannis Papaionnou (a.k.a. Ion): Electric Poem 1 (2008), Stay with Me in Dreams Forever (2008), Toujours (2009), and The Girl with No Head (2009). Construction of Citizens by Moatsos Michalis (2008)

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is an animated version of the Manifesto that E. A. Rauter wrote during the rebellious era of the European Sixty-Eight. Stelios Polychronakis won the Best New Director Award at the Balkanima film festival with I Do Art (2007), which summarizes contemporary art in two minutes. Myriam Levis (b. Athens, 1981), Michael Toumazou (b. Limassol, Cyprus, 1980), and Iannis Bartzis (b. Athens, 1970) founded the Athens studio Myrmigi Design House in 2008. The studio mainly dealt with commercials and motion design. Its output included Metamorphosis (based on Offenbach’s Barcarolle) and shorts for Greenpeace Greece. More studios opened in Athens, most of whom made commercial work. Among the best known is Deep Green Sea, which offered quality services to ActionAid, Coca Cola, Honda, and Katerina Myrianthopoulou’s DesignerBlock.net.

Yiorgos Sifianos Yiorgos (George) Sifianos was born in Khanyá, on the island of Crete, on 14 August 1952, and has lived in Paris since 1980. In 1994, Sifianos made Odeur de ville (‘Scent of City’), about a woman who lives with her cat. The loneliness is palpable through the dark coloured drawings, through the flickering light, and through lines that vibrate as if they were the nerves of the woman. In 2001, he made the short film Tutu (id.) with Pascal Dalet. The film has saturated colours and wide-angle images. The young Tutu lives in a neighbourhood in Paris; the city and its inhabitants devour him in a whirlwind of violence. With no happy ending, Tutu condemns the psychological impact of society’s violence on children. C’est Môa (‘Ego’) was released in 2007. Sifiano says, ‘This film is an animated choreography.’187 Its structure is based on musical principles. There are two actors188 and two puppets on stage; the opposing pairs reflect the relationship between manipulated and manipulator. In his capacity as a scholar, Georges Sifianos has taught at the University of Paris VIII, at CFT Gobelins, at the ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs), the FEMIS, and abroad.

Albania189, 190 The Communist regime in Albania ended in March  1992. As usual, the sudden advent of capitalism produced a social crisis. Until 1991, the state had forced animation filmmakers to make a film a year (clearly under censorship – indeed, there was so much censorship that self-censorship191 was a common practice). This guaranteed them a job – a guarantee that ended with capitalism. The system had been guaranteed by the film studio Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re (‘New Albania’), founded in 1952. In 1991, it became Alba Film (divided into four sections: Albafilm-Studio; Albafilm-Animation; Albafilm-Distribution; and State Film Library). It finally closed in 1996. A period of stagnation followed, during which the system was reorganized with new private production companies. On 29 April 1996, the Albanian National Centre of Cinematography (Qendra Kombëtare and Kinematografisë, QKK)192 opened, giving additional funding to filmmakers and facilitating many coproductions (especially with France). Production increased and de-provincialized and equipment was updated. The main authors of post-Communist Albanian animation were born in the 1950s and 1960s and had studied in foreign film schools (Romania, Italy, and Greece). Later, however, there were more training opportunities for animators within the country. Gjin Varfi (b. Tirana, 14 May  1954) directed many films, including Ekstremistet (‘Extremist’, 1994), Ndodh edhe keshtu (‘It Happens Like This, Too’, 1996), and Dhe Nderroi lekure (‘And the Skin Was Changed’, 2001), produced by Studio 4+1. In 2003, he used animated Plasticine for Ndryshimi (‘The Change’), produced by Pegasus Animation Studio. A cockerel is deposed by a newcomer, but the usurper’s fate will be inevitably the same. The following year, Varfi made Bese ujku (‘The Wolf ’s Promise’), followed by 2005’s Kam nje kungulleshke (‘I Have a Pumpkin’). Bishtëprerat (‘Cut Tales’, also known as ‘The Tailless Fox’, 2007) was a puppet film, appreciated at festivals. The same year also saw Varfi’s Ditari i një maceje të zezë (‘Diary of a Black Cat’).

‘Ce film est une chorégraphie en animation’. See http://filmcestmoa.free.fr/pagefichetech.html. Ulrike Koennecke-Bennet and Robert W. Bennet. 189 By Michela Morselli. 190 Thanks to Bertrand Shijaku for his invaluable help with this chapter. 191 All phases of filmmaking were censored, from script to distribution. 192 The centre’s purpose was ‘promoting and supporting all genres’ and to ‘enhance the competitiveness of Albanian cinema abroad’. In ten years (1997–2007), the QKK allocated 700,000 euros for 35 animated projects, out of a total of 132 projects. 187 188

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Bertrand Shijaku (b. Tirana, 11 January  1968) was a director, writer, producer, and artist. In 1996 he was an animator-painter at Alba Film Animation Studio. His first important film was Koha e dashurisë së akrepave (‘The Love Time of Scorpions’, 2002), codirected with Ergys Faja and produced by Art Grishaj Studio. A love-fight between two scorpions is drawn with a black vibrant line on a white background. Love and hate coexist in a seductive dialectic. The film combines a simple construction with a complex rhythm. In 2003, Shijaku produced and animated Les fauves, animated by Stefan Taçi and Ergys Faja. In 2004, still with Faja, he made the 13-minute Princesha dhe hena (‘The Princess and the Moon’). The little princess Dea travels to the Moon, a parallel world where everyone finds a copy of him or herself. It is a cut-out, hyper-decorative film. In 2006 Shijaku directed the tender Bilbizi dhe nibreti (‘The Nightingale and the King’), based on The Emperor’s Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen. In 2007, together with Zhani Terpini, he directed and produced the avantgarde Dita e fundit (‘The Last Day’). In 2008 he made Tattoo with Adrian Çene, using frame-by-frame animation and black and white live-action. Ergys Faja graduated from the Academy of Art in 1992. In 1997, he collaborated with Rikarda Nova on Balada e druvarit (‘The Woodsman Ballad’);193 and again in 1999 on Loja e djallit (‘The Devilish Game’), which considers human ugliness through morphing. Nova later made Ishulli (‘The Island’, 2006) and Lakmia (‘Greed’, 2008). Artur Muharremi (b. Pogradec, 2 June  1958) made Ura (‘The Bridge’, 2004), a successful film produced by Pegasus Animation Studio. A live-action painter contemplates his blank canvas. We follow the thread of inspiration that leads him to paint a bridge, representing the path through life to death. Stefan Taçi, active from the 1980s, made 1992’s Kompozimi (‘Composition’). Its non-sequential narrative followed its author’s mood. Taçi’s 2006 film Les fauves (id.) won the award for best film (all categories) at the National Albanian Film Festival. It opens in black-and-white live-action, with a painter preparing to work in his Paris studio. Slowly, a colourful animation of Henri Matisse’s themes swarms over the screen, combined with footage of the Fauvist master. In 2007, Taçi made Flutura (‘The Butterfly’). Artan Maku (b. Tirana, 11 August  1954) was already active in the 1980s (Aventurat e reja te Pikut, ‘New Piku’s Adventures’, 1985; Portreti, 1988). In the 1990s, he created Dashuri ne kater stinet (‘Love in Four Seasons’, 1997) and

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Fotografitë (‘The Photos’, 1999). During the 1990s, he also collaborated with studios in Greece. In the 2000s, however, he built up his own studio, Maku Productions. In 2001 Maku directed Gurëgdhendësi (‘Stonecutter’), in which a stonemason creates a couple that come to life. The puppet animation Kërkoj (‘Seeking’, 2002) is about a rock dissatisfied with its immobility. Mirazh në shkretëtirë (‘Mirage in the Desert’, 2003) discusses alienation. In Koha moderne (‘Modern Times’, 2005), a TV set falls through Human Passion, Desire, Good, and Evil. In Divi dhe Gjahtari (‘The Giant and the Hunter’, 2007), man is unable to discern good and evil. In 2010 Artan Maku founded and directed the event AniFestRozafa, which is dedicated to animated films for children. Artur Dauti (b. Tirana, 13 November 1957) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana (picture and scenography branch). He became an eclectic animator and director at the AFA Studio and the 4+1 Studio. In 1995 he directed Marioneta (‘The Marionette’), followed by Konsensus (‘Consensus’, 1999). In the latter, everyone is busy in an old sailboat in the middle of the ocean, but it does not move. At the same time, however, a bottle advances confidently through the waves. In 2000, Dauti directed Tuneli (‘The Tunnel’), the story of a train ride. Nente vjet e nente dite (‘Nine Years and Nine Days’) followed in 2002, and Metamorfoza (‘Metamorphosis’) in 2004. In 2006 Dauti adapted a Grimm Brothers’ tale in Femija im, princ’i bukur (‘My Son, My Handsome Prince’). Shaquir Veseli directed Bibat e Mbreti i Bretkocave (‘Bida, the Frog King’, 1994) and Sipas kapeles koken (‘To Find One’s Match’, 1997). In 2008 he won many awards with Tsunami (id., codirected with Sirge Veseli and Gjergj Xuvani). Corruption destroys human conscience with a force like a tsunami. Ilir Kaso (b. Permet, 1982) enjoyed some fame in 2005 with Biramel (‘Snooper’), in which the protagonist tries vainly to stop time. It won the Special Diploma for the experimental graphic style in drawings award at the Balkanima festival. Kaso’s Kamioni (‘Truck’, 2008) takes us through a man’s memory.

Italy The indifference of the public and opinion makers, the mediocrity (to put it mildly) of TV executives and

Produced by Alba Film Animation Studio; Bertrand Shijaku was among the principal collaborators.

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producers, and the extinction in 1977 of the TV advertising format Carosello all were factors in the cessation of the development of Italian animation. As a result, two generations of artists gave up before getting started or migrated. Nonetheless, talent couldn’t be completely eradicated.

The Neo-Pictorial Current The 1990s and 2000s were characterized, in the fragile world of independents, by what critics called the ‘neopictorial current’, the only distinctive, original invention the country ever gave to animation. Among the outstanding neo-pictorials were Gianluigi Toccafondo (b. San Marino, 6 March  1965), Ursula Ferrara (b. Pisa, 28 May  1961), Roberto Catani (b. Jesi, 12 March 1965), Simone Massi (b. Pergola, 23 May  1970), Massimo Ottoni (b. Fano, 9 February 1975), Magda Guidi (b. Pesaro, 28 July 1979), Mara Cerri (b. Pesaro, 7 August 1978), Elena Chiesa (b. Genoa, 6 April 1963), and Andrea Pierri (b. Turin, 26 August 1968). The first common feature of these animators was that they created real ‘moving pictures’ with explicit reference to painting techniques, which were used as the basis for animation. The neo-pictorial style might be called the ‘incessant metamorphosis of forms’, characterized by lengthening shadows, the blurring of boundaries, and the expansion of the figures. In these works the authors create a true comparison between the art of movement and the movement of art. But a difference divides the movement. On one side are the directors who attended the State Institute of Art of Urbino (Toccafondo, Catani, Massi, Ottoni, and Guidi). On the other are the self-taught Ferrara, Pierri, and Chiesa. This neo-pictorial approach began with Toccafondo’s first films: La coda (‘The Tail’, 1989), Boxe (‘Boxing’, 1990), La pista (‘The Track’, 1991), and La pista del maiale (‘The Track of the Pig’, 1992). The approach reaches its maximum intensity and completeness in Toccafondo’s Le criminel (id., original title in French, 1993), Essere morti o essere vivi è la stessa cosa (‘Being Dead or Being Alive Is the Same Thing’, 2000), and La piccola Russia (‘Little Russia’, 2003). Roberto Catani contributed to the style with Il pesce rosso (‘The Goldfish’, 1995), La sagra (‘The Rite’, 1998), and La funambola (‘The Tightrope Walker’, 2002). Simone Massi also contributed to the style with Piccola mare (‘Little Sea’, 2003), as did Massimo Ottoni with 1998 (2001), Due di cuori (‘Two of Hearts’, 2001), and 3 sogni (‘3 Dreams’, 2001).

Magda Guidi did the same with Nuova identità (‘New Identity’, 2003) and Ecco, è ora (‘Here, It Is the Time’, 2004). Even more significantly, this approach is found in the aloof, unconformable work of Ursula Ferrara, especially in her colour films: Quasi Niente (‘Almost Nothing’, 1997), Cinque stanze (‘Five Bedrooms’, 1999), La partita (‘The Match’, 2002), and News (id., 2006).194 The style is also found in Andrea Pierri’s Moon (id., original title in English, 2003) – he declared openly that he was influenced by Toccafondo. Toccafondo basically used the technique of retouched photocopies. Starting with a preexisting realistic base, he distorted the image with the photocopier, stretching and deforming it, and then painted on it. Ursula Ferrara utilized her own oil paintings then animated them traditionally, frame-by-frame. Massi, Catani, Ottoni, and Guidi preferred to animate handmade drawings on paper, coloured with crayons, chalk, graphite, and charcoal. Elena Chiesa and Andrea Pierri used computer animation and digital colouring. In the neo-pictorial current, memory is understood both from a personal and a historical point of view, as a baggage of experiences from which to draw. Reflecting on the past allows the authors to escape from the certainty of the present, which stifles and restrains thinking. Tengo la posizione (‘I Hold My Position’, 2001) by Simone Massi is linked to the experience of anti-Nazi resistance and partisan warfare. Catani’s ‘The Goldfish’ and ‘The Rite’ reflect the centuries-old traditions of the rural world. In ‘The Tightrope Walker’ (Catani’s masterpiece), a woman takes refuge in her past, balancing on a thread of memories. Films about individual memory include Ottoni’s 1998, Guidi’s ‘Here, It Is the Time’, and Ferrara’s ‘Almost Nothing’, all made between 1997 and 2004. Another constant factor in the neo-pictorial narrative is escape, expressed most intensely by Toccafondo. In ‘The Track of the Pig’ or Pinocchio (1998) the escape is an existential and introspective journey. In Le criminel it is a getaway in real gangster movie style. The movement also uses words, written and spoken, inserted into the universe of images. Broken locutions and almost inevitably undecipherable sentences flashing over the screen show the inability to communicate conventionally. We see words, in fragments of sentences or in letters floating somewhere, but with the relentless movement we barely read them. This is especially true in Catani’s ‘The Tightrope Walker’, where piles of letters and papers rain from the sky

In 2011 Ursula Ferrara contributed three beautiful scenes to the live-action documentary Pivano Blues, sulla strada di Nanda (‘Pivano Blues, on Nanda’s Road’) directed by Teresa Marchesi. 194

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Figure 3.29  Roberto Catani, La funambola, ‘The Tightrope Walker’, 2002.

like white snowflakes. Toccafondo also plays with words in ‘Being Dead or Being Alive Is the Same Thing’, which is rich in quotations from the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In Pierri’s Moon, a voiceover by the jazzman Wayne Tooker reads a text, Moon, marking the rhythm of the film. The works of Elena Chiesa are projected in museums. Her Video Poetry freely interprets four contemporary poems and was shown in 2001 at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. Chiesa is also a poet, and she turns her poems into films. The technique that characterizes her work is the ‘dissolution of pictorial pixels’, which she invented in the early 1990s. Her formal maturity came with her association with the British poet Felix Dennis, in the series Videopoesie di/per Felix Dennis (2006–2008). Simone Massi’s work is outwardly simple but complicates realism with absurd travellings, an extraordinary sense of film language, nostalgia for peasant traditions, and political condemnations. The latter two are his dearest, most lyrical, subjects, and his complete works form a large poem in which every film performs the function of a single canto. An artist, intellectual, and man of total integrity, Massi devoted his life to pure creation, never accepting compromises. Eventually he became the most internationally known and most awarded Italian animator, making such classics as Io so chi sono (‘I Know Who I  Am’, 2004), La memoria dei cani (‘The Memories of the

Dogs’, 2006), Dell’ammazzare il maiale (‘About Killing the Pig’, 2011), and Lieve, dilaga (‘Softly Flows’, 2012). Neo-pictorial directors can be identified by their common stylistic basis, yet their work also reveals the solitary dimension of their experience. For them, animation is craftsmanship. They start from scratch and have full control over every step, sometimes creating the material itself to work on. Almost all the neo-pictorials are also artists, illustrators, or graphic designers. In 1996, the Turin-based company Lanterna Magica made the feature film La freccia azzurra195 (‘The Blue Arrow’). Director Enzo D’Alò (b. Naples, 7 September  1953) coordinated some outstanding collaborators196 with skill and a light touch. It was a critical and popular success. In 1998, an even more successful feature followed: La gabbianella e il gatto197 (‘Lucky and Zorba’, 1998). A  former jazz musician, D’Alò took great care with the soundtrack (probably the best achievement of the film). His experience of children’s workshops taught him how children communicate. He can be considered the best Italian director of animated feature films ever. During the making of Momo alla conquista del tempo (‘Momo’, based on Michael Ende’s book), a financial scandal hit the company and a fuming D’Alò left. Momo was completed by another producer but was released in 2001 to mixed reactions. Opopomoz (id., 2003), an original story set in Naples, was probably too intellectual for children’s tastes – and too specifically Neapolitan to be fully understood abroad. In the following years Enzo D’Alò devoted himself to TV series.198 Pinocchio went into production in 2008, to be completed four years later. The world premiere was in August 2012 at the Venice Film Festival. Captivating and sprightly, the film focuses on the father-son relationship between Pinocchio and Geppetto. Lanterna Magica kept going under the leadership of producer Maria Fares, but it lost its initial creative momentum. Maurizio Forestieri (whom we met in Volume 2 as the director of the brilliant short Orpheus, 1986) was the

195 From a short story by Gianni Rodari (1920–1980).The good witch Befana (a female Italian version of Santa Claus) is sick and cannot deliver the Christmas gifts. Her treacherous assistant Scarafoni is poisoning her, but the undelivered toys rebel, including a train called Blue Arrow. 196 They included the designer and background artist Paolo Cardoni, the musician Paolo Conte, and the voice actors Lella Costa and Dario Fo. 197 From Luis Sepúlveda’s novel The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly. A mother seagull is dying; a soft-hearted cat promises that he’ll take care of her egg until the chick hatches, and that he’ll teach the baby seagull to fly. All the cats at the port eventually adopt the chick, who of course thinks she is a kitten herself. 198 Pipì Pupù e Rosmarina, 52 episodes of seven minutes each (2009). Script by Vincenzo Cerami, drawings by Annalaura Cantone, music by Daniele Di Gregorio, narrated by Giancarlo Giannini.

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Figure 3.30  Simone Massi, La memoria dei cani, ‘The Memories of the Dogs’, 2006.

new creative hope, but his Totò Sapore, o la magica storia della pizza (‘Totò Sapore, or the Magic History of the Pizza’, 2003) was snubbed by critics and audiences. Forestieri’s frenetic drawings couldn’t save an uninvolving story and characters. Lanterna Magica turned to TV series, captivating their audience with Andrea Zingoni’s199 Gino il pollo perso nella rete (‘Gino the Chicken Lost in the Net’, 2006) and Le avventure di Neve  & Gliz (‘Neve and Gliz’s Adventures’, 2005, directed by Maurizio Nichetti [b. Milan, 1948]),200 as well as Matt & Manson (id., 2009, directed by Gregory Panaccione). In 2011, Enrico Carlesi (b. Alessandria, 1950) completed the feature Il Generale e i Fratellini d’Italia (‘The General and the Little Brothers of Italy’).201 Carlesi called back designer Paolo Cardoni from The Blue Arrow and made the most of a tiny budget with humour, imagination, and national history.

A multifaceted creator, Paolo Conte (b. Asti, 6 January  1937) was a successful songwriter and performer, a jazz singer and pianist, and a painter. In 2000 he made the ‘vaudeville’ film Razmataz.202 In this audiovisual production of 140 minutes, distributed on DVD only, the music dominates while the camera moves on the still paintings and drawings. The film has an atmosphere of energy mixed with nostalgia (the story is set in 1920s Paris). ‘It is a story’, wrote Paolo Conte,203 ‘about the meeting between old Europe and young black music. [. . .] We have to pretend that cinema hasn’t yet been invented. In other words, the work should be taken as an illustrated radio serial, or alternatively as a storyboard with soundtrack’.204 It is an enchanting, elitist musical kaleidoscope. It mixes Dada, Futurism, Jazz, Swing, the French songs of the 1920s, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Carlos Gardel, Italian opera and Neapolitan songs,

Born in Florence in 1955. A masterful slapstick-style comedian and a gifted director, Nichetti’s first love was animation. He had written for Bruno Bozzetto on the various adventures of Signor Rossi and Allegro non troppo, yet he had directed animated films. He repeated the experience in 2010 with Teen Days, about teenagers in a music school (for a preteen audience). This series (26 episodes of 26 minutes each), produced by Cartoon One, was also screened with great success on Disney Channel France. 201 In the film, a dog and mice go through battles, sea trips, ballooning, and the founding of the secret society Little Brothers of Italy (‘Brothers of Italy’ is Italy’s national anthem) to help General Giuseppe Garibaldi. 202 Razmataz is the nickname of the protagonist, an American black dancer who goes to Paris to perform. 203 Catalogue for the Razmataz paintings exhibition, Concerto, Bologna, 2000. 204 Italics in the original text. 199 200

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Edith Piaf, and Georges Brassens – not for the postmodern intellectual pleasure of quoting and assembling, but because of the love of a true poet. Andrea Martignoni (b. Bologna, 19 September  1961) worked as a promoter and organizer of events involving animation. He was an excellent musician for avant-garde animated films and performances, often collaborating with Canadian masters such as Pierre Hébert and Normand Roger. His Compagnia d’Arte Drummatica (Andrea Martignoni, Mario Martignoni, Diego De Vincenzi, Marco Venturi, Giovanni Oscar Urso) was an ensemble devoted to experimentation that created new soundtracks for classics such as Bertold Bartosch’s L’Idée (1931), Alexandre Alexeieff’s Le Nez (1963), and Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic (1959–1962).205 We have already mentioned Yusaki Fusako (see Vol. 2). She was born in 1937 and settled in Italy in the early 1960s. Educated as a sculptress, she was never happy with a still shape. The discovery of Plasticine animation gave her opportunities in metamorphosis, transformation, and

the uninterrupted flow of change over time. In short, the essence of her style is the same as that of Emile Cohl. From 1991 to 2006 she made various didactic shorts, but she achieved her best results in an unlikely field: the TV series.206 Her first miniseries was Talpy207 (id., 60 episodes of one minute each, 1991–1993), a merry metamorphic/nonsense game. Talpy’s twin was Peo, created in 1995 for a series of didactic films who then became the protagonist of the series Peo in Svizzera (‘Peo in Switzerland’, 26 episodes of two minutes each, 1997–1999 and 2000–2002) and Peo Gallery (id., 39 episodes of two minutes each, 2004–2005, 2006–2007, and 2008–2009).208 The first series is a tour through the 26 Helvetic Cantons. The second is a vivid exploration of masters of contemporary art, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Hokusai to Klee. The viewer gets inside each painter’s visual universe, without ever losing contact with Yusaki’s own visual style. Naccio  & Pomm is named after its protagonists, two aliens who visit our planet. The first series (26 episodes of

205 Andrea Martignoni and colleague Paola Bristot scouted young independent animation and then self-produced and financed the anthology DVDs Animazioni (2010) and Animazioni 2 (2012). They wrote the following lines for this book:

Michele Bernardi travelled from a classic animation style in his 1980s collaborations on the animated series La Pimpa by Altan and La Linea by Cavandoli. In his most recent works, Senza Testa (Without Head, 2010) and Djuma (2012), he developed a refined technique. Virginia Mori’s pencil drawings in Il gioco del silenzio (The Game of Silence, 2010) and Marco Capellacci’s debut Le fobie del guardrail (The Guardrail’s Phobias, 2011) have strong imaginative power. So does Alessia Travaglini’s Silenziosa-Mente (Silent Mind, 2011), a handdrawn rotoscoped film, where odd creatures and symbols distort reality. In Imago (id., 2008), Beatrice Pucci works with sophisticated animated puppets. Donato Sansone had already disclosed his sense of grotesque in Love Cube (2004). His Videogioco (Videogame, 2009) is a special labyrinthine flip-book with extraordinary narrative branches. Arithmétique (Arithmetic) is Giovanni Munari and Dalila Rovazzani’s excellent adaptation of Maurice Ravel’s Deux robinet coulent, a fragment from the opera L’enfant et les sortilèges. Lorenzo Latrofa and Sergio Basso’s Giallo a Milano (Police Mystery in Milan, 2009) is part of a film on Milanese Chinatown. The storyboard is based on an interview with Longxing, the film’s main character, who cooperates with the Italian police and gives an account of his journey from China to Italy. At the beginning of 2008, Ivan Manuppelli and Gianluca Lo Presti produced a TV pilot, Aztokitifk & Mario, wacky and ironic, for the unmade series Si danno al crimine. The outsider Blu produced two animated films based on his giant metropolitan mural paintings, Muto (Silent, 2008) and Big Bang Big Boom (2011). He moves along an oversized space, with amazing results. J (2009) by Virgilio Villoresi is based on filmed material printed on paper. The protagonists float around a black and white metaphysical dimension. Alvise Renzini, with his experimental contact prints – very close to rayographs – has established himself as a pivotal figure in visual arts. His Ci sono gli spiriti (Ghosts are here, 2009) shows his high quality. Cinema and photography intersect in Basmati’s Transit City02: Roma Astratta (2008), and Corpus No Body (2011) by Saul Saguatti and Audrey Coïaniz, for whom animation is merely one multimedia research field. In The Journey of the Birdboy (2007), Chiara Ambrosio imitates the style of Maya Deren and the 1920s avant-garde. Massimo Niba Barbini and Matteo Giacchella pay homage to Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers in Contrappassouno (2005). Alice and Stefano Tambellini prove themselves skilled animators in their short L’insalata del diavolo (The Devil’s Salad, 2010). Music clips, videogames and video art are closely linked in Igor Imhoff ’s Percorso0008–0209 (2009) and Percorso0009–0410 (2010). Nicola Console’s Dieci cadute (Ten Falls, 2012) uses drawings on plastic sheets, photographs, and collages in works based on his research on stage design. Marco (2005), by Ignazio Morello, links illustration with graphics in a soft, poetic way. Made for foreign companies. The protagonist is a dog, though its name in Italian sounds like ‘moley’. It was made to order for the Japanese TV company NHK. 208 Peo was made to order for TSI, the TV company of the Italian-speaking Canton (Swiss member state) of Ticino. 206 207

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five minutes each) was produced to order for the Japanese TV company NHK in 2003–2005. Mario Addis (b. Sassari, 11 December 1961) was probably the most gifted designer of his generation. His stroke is thin, strong, and sinuous. His film Pene (‘Penis’, 2007) is an elegantly mischievous series of variations on the theme of male genitalia; it eschews vulgarity thanks to the drawings’ excellent taste. Its 1914 remake, Pene e crudité (‘Penis and Crudité’), is well designed and has perfect timing and a fitting soundtrack. The world that it evokes is innovative and deep. It is a good film by a new Rabelais or a new Jarry, but it will probably outrage many viewers. No less versatile, but stylistically very different, was Gabriele Zucchelli (b. Pavia, 22 January 1972, but active in London since 1994). He could make the sensitive and elitist short For a Tango (2004) and also supervise the animation of the family feature The Tale of Desperaux (directed by Sam Fell and Rob Stevenhagen, 2008). Zucchelli even made a documentary, Quirino Cristiani – The Mystery of the First Animated Movies (2007), about the Argentine who made the first animated feature films. Leonardo Carrano (b. Rome, 23 July 1958) was a distinguished painter, ceramist, and engraver, who combined styles and techniques in a semiabstract way. In the 1990s he transposed his universe into films, winning acclaim for Pentesilea (id., 1994) and Il cerchio e la soglia (‘The Circle and the Threshold’, 1996). In 2006, he made three Mozart films: Sanctus (id.), Confutatis (id.), and Kyrie (id.) The subsequent film, Recordare (id., 2009), was created from tomographic images of two corpses (a man and a woman), donated to science. ‘Through continual metamorphosis, the sliced flesh becomes digital painting. The film is inspired by Mozart’s Requiem KV626, giving the images an intense poetic feeling.’209 All of these films were sections of an ambitious (and splendidly successful) feature project that took twelve years of the author’s life: Aeterna – Requiem Op. KV626 W.A. Mozart (2012). Composer Ennio Morricone wrote: ‘Leonardo Carrano’s Aeterna is an extraordinary, unique, exceptional work. Mozart’s Requiem is exalted by the invention of images where a world higher than ours appears. The suffering faces, the mangled and intertwined bodies – in images that are abstract but distinctly designed, and consistent (from white to black) – give extremely high emotions to the spectator who knows how to watch.’210 Jazz for a Massacre (2014)

is a filmic jam session in which the Noise of Trouble’s jazz improvisation combines well with the abstract forms created directly onto film. With remarkable humility, director Carrano lets the stereophonic soundtrack stand esthetically above the images he created as a painter. A filmmaker, painter, illustrator, and architect, Laura Federici (b. Rieti, 29 July 1964) made very few films, but those she made were semiabstract and very short. Her images have the dark colours of pain, or the bright ones of happy moments, or the light ones of dreamy soft moods. The continuous flow of memory is punctuated by written words that show the precise date, time, and title of the episode or reminiscence. Un amore (‘A Love’, 1999) is a jewel in auteur Italian animation. The technique (a collage of photos from the set, magazines, and newspapers, photocopied on polyester and

Figure 3.31  Leonardo Carrano, Aeterna – Requiem Op. KV 626 W.A. Mozart, 2012.

Vinny Scorsone, ‘Recordare, film di Leonardo Carrano e Alessandro Pierattini’, Ippocrene – Arti e Lettere, retrieved on 8 September 2011, http://www.ippocrene.com/2007_to_2010/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1063&Itemid=202. 210 Catalogue festival INVIDEO 2012 video e cinema oltre, Milan, 8/12 November 2012. 209

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painted with tempera colours) vaguely resembles Andy Warhol’s series on the stars. The images are intensely emotional. Blu (pseudonym of an artist born in 1981), devoted himself to a street art animation, even of colossal proportions. Muto (‘Mute’, 2008) and Big Bang Big Boom (id., 2010) are full of energy, and transform the everyday urban space in a fantastic universe. Cityscapes so ugly and trivial as to be removed from our minds become the material with which Blu tells his stories, making them memorable.211 An advocate of animation, Mario Verger (b. Rome, 22 September 1970) investigated its history and popularized it in countless articles. He was one of the very few animators who dealt with current events, with such shorts as Moanaland (1995, about a porn star whose adventures expose the political corruption of the country), Milingo the Spirit of Africa (1998, about a black Catholic bishop who pretends to be a quack doctor), Giulio Andreotti (2000, about a smart and controversial Italian politician), Wojtyla (2001, about the then Pope), Berluscomic (2004, about the controversial Italian leader), and the weightier Pasolini Requiem (2009), possibly his best film, on the assassination (on 2 November  1975) of the poet, novelist, and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. A painter, composer, and singer in the rock group Perturbazione, Tommaso Cerasuolo (b. Venice, 19 November 1972) made his first film in 1995, Eifù (‘He Was’). He then made animated video clips of his group’s songs: Ti ho visto in piazza (‘I Saw You in the Square’, 2005), Cerchi nell’acqua (‘Circles in the Water’, 2006), and Animalia (id., 2007). Most animated Italian TV series of this time are best forgotten. Veteran Giuseppe Laganà, though, showed professionalism and love of detail in Spaghetti Family (from an idea of Bruno Bozzetto, 2003), L’ultimo dei Mohicani (‘The Last of the Mohicans’, 2004), Farhat, il principe del deserto (‘Farhat, the Prince of the Desert’, 2005), and Kim (id., 2009). Two more veterans, Giorgio Valentini (b. Fano, 9 January 1948) and Silvio Pautasso (b. Nichelino, 9 January 1956), made Uffa, che pazienza! (‘Oh . . . Boy!’, 2007). The series is set in an imaginary jungle inhabited by animal characters with punning names. Aimed at children, the series is merrily educational.

The great veteran Bruno Bozzetto sometimes made theatrical shorts (Drop, 1993; Help, 1995; Loo, 2004).212 However, he also enjoyed Web animation, letting his love for stylization go wild with Flash (Europa&Italia, ‘Europe and Italy’, 1999; La libertà, ‘Freedom’, 2005; Viaggiatori e viaggiatori!, ‘Travellers and Travellers!’, 2006).

Spain213 After the crisis of the late 1970s and the early signs of renewal in the 1980s, the 1990s were one of the most vital times in Spanish animation.214 In the 1990s, Spain seemed only a provider of cheap manpower. Most designers had been trained at film studios such as Filman or Cruz Delgado, whose style looked very much like the standard American one. The arrival of digital technology brought new possibilities for national production, as well as considerable reductions in working times and costs. Producers and directors became aware of the savings of the new technologies and of the importance of international distribution. The 1990s saw the rise of many Spanish production companies that primarily made television series: Catalan Neptuno Films, Cromosoma, Dygra, Kinora, Cartoon Producción, Merlin Animación, Acción, Truca Films, Anima2, Dubilitoon, Lotura Films, Steps Productions, Animagic Studio, Animation, Tirannosaurus Productions, No Art, Animation Studio, and Full Animation. BRB International, founded in the 1970s by Claudio Biern Boyd, and D’Ocon Films, created by Antoni D’Ocon in the 1980s, were the most successful and longest lasting companies. After its heyday in the 1980s, BRB launched some successful series such as the second part of Willy Fog (id., 1993) and El nuevo mundo de los gnomos (‘The New World of Gnomes’, 1996). The studio’s attention to educational content is shown in Las mil y una Américas (‘The One Thousand and One Americas’, 1991), made to celebrate the fifth centenary of the discovery of America in 1992, and The Cobi Trouppe (1991), featuring the mascot designed by Javier Mariscal for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games. D’Ocon Films had more impact internationally. During the 1990s they created a large number of series, some of

Emailed message from Paola Bristot (26 June 2014). Titles originally in English. 213 By Francesca Guatteri. 214 Emilio de la Rosa and J. Hernández, Cine de animación español de los años noventa, Catalogue Animadrid 2000, Comunidad Madrid, Madrid 2000. 211 212

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which later turned into features. These included Delfy y sus amigos (‘Delfy and Friends’, 1992), Chip y Charly (‘Chip and Charlie’, 1992), Problem Child (1992), Basket Fever – Locos por el basket (‘Basket Fever – Crazy for Basketball’, 1993), Sylvan (1993), Enigma (1996), Los Herlufs (1996), Dad’x (1997), Pocket Dragon (1997), Fix y Foxi (1998–2001), La ultima reserva (‘The Last Reserve’, 1999), Mitos y leyendas (‘Myths and Legends’, 1999), and El capitán Fracasse (‘Captain Fracasse’, 1999). There was a major increase in production across formats: television series, feature films, short films, and commercials. Nevertheless, the companies struggled to get financial support and had to look for grants, taking continual risks on their projects. Some, such as Anima2 and Aragon Animados, had to close down. The creation of new television channels made it easier to sell animated series. The channels included animation in their schedule, though they often didn’t leave enough time for Spanish producers, thus allowing Asian, American, and other European cartoons to gain ground. Nonetheless, from the mid-1990s, Spanish animation was in its prime.

The New Era In the 2000s, the sector ceased to be the domain of designers and became part of a more complex, and perhaps more complicated, but more productive world. Films could reach large audiences and obtain international awards. New software cut times and costs. However, there were some problems. There was a lack of adequate regulation in the sector; the importance of marketing was underestimated; public support was insufficient; and TV series did not benefit from direct aid. In addition, Spanish television showed little interest in domestically made products, even as Spanish professionals emigrated to other countries. However, during these years many companies related to the audiovisual world were established. They included Bcn Connection and Lion Toons in Barcelona, the Andalusian M5 Audiovisual, and Icon Animation, Zinkia Entertainment, Ilion Animation Studios, Kandor Graphics, and Perro Verde Films. The big, established companies such as BRB International, D’Ocon Films, Neptuno Films, Motion Pictures, Cromosoma, Irusoin, and Pasozebra also continued to operate.

215

La Coruña, 12 June 1963.

The feature film became the new frontier. During the previous decade, fewer features had been produced than series because few producers wanted to risk working on such demanding projects, which generally involved at least three million euros each in addition to 18 to 24 months of work. However, at the start of the new millennium, the feature benefited from the state’s Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA). It led many companies to commit to features. Many companies produced only one film, some made two or three, but there was generally very little continuity of production. Some of the companies that did produce continually were located in the Basque Countries, reflecting the greater tradition and history that animation had there, though the subject matter and distribution of these companies’ films stayed in Basque territory. In less than ten years, 55 feature films, over seventy TV series, and about 130 short films were produced in Spain. The sources of funding were diverse. On one side, there were private investments from producers, in the form of cash or bank loans. On the other, there was public aid granted by municipalities, autonomous committees, or the state – through the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA). The sales in Spain and abroad generally only recouped expenses. (TV channels never advanced money until a finished project was delivered.) Financing also came from companies unrelated to the audiovisual world. Spain had a long and positive history of international film coproductions. These collaborations combined strengths and spread risks.

The Turning Point El Bosque animado (‘The Living Forest’, 2001, directed by Ángel de la Cruz215 and Manolo Gómez) is a feature film produced by Dygra Films. It is loosely based on the novel by the Galician journalist and writer Wenceslao Fernández Flórez. The film’s staff spent countless hours in local woods, in an attempt to recreate the light and shapes during different times of the day, in every season. ‘The Living Forest’ won two Goyas (the top Spanish film award) in 2001 for best animated film and best original song. It was a turning point for Spanish animation. ‘The Living Forest’ had record revenues, showed a new way to make animated features for international markets,

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and demonstrated that quality animation could be profitable. ‘The Living Forest’ was the first animated feature produced in Spain that could count on an excellent promotional campaign. The revenues, on Iberian territory alone, amounted to about two million euros. The film sold 160,000 VHS editions and about 40, 000 DVDs. Many people followed Dygra’s model and embarked on new projects. Professionals realized how important distribution was and how much attention should be paid to communication, marketing, and promotion. De Profundis, created from the colour palette of the Galician designer Miguelanxo Prado, stands out for its stylistic choices. It is a work of poetry and art rather than a narrative; its music is magical and relaxing. Gritos en el Pasillo (‘Screams in the Corridor’, 2007) by Juanjo Ramirez, an original horror film, had a starting budget of just 6,000 euros. El lince perdido (‘The Missing Lynx’), by Raúl García216 and Manuel Sicilia, won the Goya Award in February  2009. It was a coproduction between Perro Verde Films (whose executive producer, Manuel Cristóbal, had had the same position on ‘The Living Forest’), Kandor Graphics, and Green Moon España (Antonio Banderas’s producing company). Planet 51, by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad, and Marcos Martínez, was a science fiction film in which aliens encounter humans. It won the 2010 Goya Award for best animated film. Arrugas (‘Wrinkles’, 2011) is a very special achievement. Ignacio Ferreras was born in Argentina in 1972. After jobs

that took him all over the globe, in 2002 he completed How to Cope with Death, which won many awards. After more wanderings, in 2009 he started work on ‘Wrinkles’, his feature director début. Wrinkles was for me a unique chance to direct it in the way I  thought an animated film should be directed. Above all, directing means to me being able to personally draw the storyboard and edit the animatic. It is in this physical, hands-on process of drawing and editing each shot that the film really takes shape in my mind. With the help of my wife and collaborator Rosanna and thanks to the trust of the producer Manuel Cristóbal, I had the opportunity to put all this theory to the test. People often ask: why do you do as an animated film a story which could have easily been told in live-action? But animation brings something very different to such a story, the possibility of injecting meaning in every detail, of making every single element on the screen, every blink, every shadow, the speed at which something moves, contribute to the story and, at the same time, removing anything superfluous from the screen – with animation you can really distil the story in order to arrive at its most essential elements. For me, the great master of this kind of cinema is the Japanese director Isao Takahata. The concentration and depth of meaning that you find in a film like Only Yesterday could not be achieved in anything other than animation.217

Figure 3.32  Ignacio Ferreras, Arrugas, ‘Wrinkles’, 2011.

216 217

We have already met this gifted filmmaker (see Vol. 2) as the author of A Woman Waiting in a Hotel (1979) and The Tell-Tale Heart (2005). Ignacio Ferreras, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 15 August 2012.

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TV Series The introduction of the euro in Spain led to a rise in prices and a considerable decrease in sales of animated products, especially television series, since foreign producers began entrusting their animation services to Asian countries. Spanish television still was not interested in national products, but some autonomous, local television channels began to schedule more entertainment content within their own programming grids. The budgets were rather low, with each episode lasting a few minutes. (In the 1990s, episodes could last about half an hour; in the 2000s, they did not exceed five minutes.) BRB Internacional, Baleuko, Cromosoma, Neptuno Films, Motion Pictures, Imira Entertainment, Pausoka, D’Ocon, and Zinkia all followed this path. Between 2000 and 2001, BRB launched Nicolás. Nico, the protagonist, is a blind boy leading a normal life. BRB also produced Angus & Cheryl, Storm Hawks, El diablillo (‘The Little Devil’), Dibo, and Papawa. Berni, a well-known series in 2007, promoted fair play and participation in sports. During the same years, Imira Entertainment produced Lola & Virginia, Vitaminix, and Sandra, detective de cuentos (‘Sandra, Detective of Tales’). Motion Pictures screened Boom and Reds, Telmo and Tula – Los pequeños cocineros (‘Boom and Reds, Telmo and Tula – The Little Cooks’), LMN’S, Green Light, Zumbers, Telmo & Tula – Artes y Manualidades (‘Telmo and Tula – Arts and Dexterities’), and Alex. D’Ocon produced Laces, Lua, Frog, Kong, Conspiración Roswell, Ubos, Monster Rancher, Capitán Fracase, Fix and Foxy, and Mitos y Leyendas, to name a few. Pocoyó (id., 2005), produced by Zinkia, was a revolutionary series in CGI, characterized by original aesthetic choices. The design of the main characters is elementary and simple, but its bright colours and rounded forms were popular with both young and old. The series was broadcast in over a hundred countries. Local television stations in Spain ignored it, but funding came from a British channel. The series is about the world of childhood: relationships with friends, parents, nature, animals, first love, and early fears. Diverse animation techniques create magical worlds and unreal characters, closer to fantasy than reality.

to amateur screenings and festivals. There were about 130 short films made during the 2000s. Pollo (‘Chicken’), created by Manuel Sirgo at Estudio 12 Pinguinos Animados, won a Goya in 2002 for best animated short. Regaré con lagrimas tus pétalos (‘I Will Water with Tears Your Petals’, 2003, directed by Juan Carlos Marí), a romantic and delicate film, was made with 10,000 handpainted drawings on paper. Under a coproduction agreement between Eduardo Elosegi and Emilio Luján (and therefore between the Basque Countries and Madrid), Lluvia (‘Rain’) was made in 2002; it was a hyperrealistic short directed by Diego Agudo Pinilla. The short was coordinated by animation historian and critic Emilio de la Rosa. In the same year he helped create, together with Carlos Navarro and Gabriel Martínez Rodríguez, Noche de Ronda (‘Night of Rounds’, 2002), which was also produced by Luján and Elosegi. In 2003, Emilio de la Rosa and Gabriel Martínez Rodríguez directed Nuevas islas (‘New Islands’), about freedom as an illusion. La habitación inclinada (‘The Sloping Room’), by Pako Bagur Gomila, Frederic Cordoba Schwaneberg, and Iban José Pérez, projects the viewers into a grey world with a door to another universe. Vuela por mí (‘Fly for Me’) is a short directed by Carlos Navarro reflecting on a lonely woman who cannot stand the buildings around her. Los fusilados de Goya (‘The Shot Ones of Goya’), directed by Héctor Caño Diaz in 2007, recreates the Spanish War of Independence in five minutes, told through a painting by Francisco Goya and animated in 2D. La Flor más grande del mundo (‘The World’s Largest Flower’) combines 2D, 3D, and Plasticine animation. It is full of symbolism and meaning and is suitable for both children and adults. Isabel Herguera (b. San Sebastian, 1961) worked as an artist, filmmaker, cultural organizer, professor, and critic. In Safari (id., 1989) and Cante de ida y vuelta (‘Song of a Round Trip’, 1989), she blended animation with sculpture and video installation. Later, with her own Los Angelesbased company Loko Pictures, she produced both commercials for important clients and independent films, such as The Balloon (2003) and La gallina ciega (‘The Blind Hen’, 2005). In 2012, her Bajo la almohada (‘Under the Pillow’) received an award at the Bilbao festival of short films.

Shorts

Portugal218

Shorts, by nature, are rarely involved in the production, distribution, and marketing process, often being relegated

A new rise in Portuguese animation began with a sharp little film in 1993: Os Salteadores by Abi Feijó. It concerns the

218

By Alberto Rigoni.

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aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), when Spanish republicans fled to Portugal, only to be caught by the Portuguese dictator Salazar. It inspired a short story by the antisalazarian writer Jorge de Sena. Álvaro Graça de Castro ‘Abi’ Feijó (b. Braga, 18 June 1956) realized it was already written in a ‘very cinematographic language’, and in 1986 he started working on a storyboard. He had completed a six-month internship at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, during which he had produced his first animated film, Oh que calma (‘How Calm It Is’, 1985), using combined techniques. Feijó was one of the first representatives of the ‘Cinanima Generation’, and he established the studio Filmógrafo in Porto with half a dozen other young enthusiasts. Os Salteadores tells the story of three people on a car trip at night. One of them starts remembering a similar night, many years before, when police were hunting some fugitives. The three confront their memories; as they try to reconstruct the truth, they reveal how history can be forgotten or modified. The 14-minute black and white film is drawn on paper with no greyscale, a metaphor for the impossibility of compromise in the ‘long night’ of Portugal. It won the Special Award of the Jury at the Cinanima Festival (where Feijó and his friends had first encountered animation) as well as 13 other international prizes. Moreover, it brought more business to Filmógrafo, especially from RTP and from the children’s programmes Jardim da Celeste and Rua Sésamo (‘Sesame Street’).

Fado Lusitano (‘Lusitanian Fado’, 1995) was a cut-out film based on traditional Portuguese music, produced by John Halas as a segment of his international project, Know Your European. Clandestino (‘Stowaway’, 2000) can be considered Feijó’s masterpiece. Taken from a short story by José Rodrigues Miguéis, it tells of a stowaway on a ship, using sand animation on two layers for the background and characters respectively.219 In 2006, História Trágica com Final Feliz (‘Tragic Story with Happy Ending’, 2005) by Regina Pessoa won the Grand Prix at the 2006 Annecy Animated Film Festival. In a small town, people are annoyed by the loud heartbeat of a little girl; she says it’s because her body is not suited to her heart. As time goes by, wings grow on her back. When the metamorphosis is complete, she flies out of her window (and the people soon miss her heartbeat). Before making this film, Pessoa (b. Coimbra, 16 December 1969) had studied painting at the Fine Art Academy in Porto and had animated on Os Salteadores. Her first personal work was A Noite (‘The Night’, 1999), in which a girl alone at night in her room must confront her fears. Pessoa’s interest in unusual and suggestive techniques has been visible since A Noite, in which she engraved a plaster plate and photographed it, then slightly changed the image and photographed it again. The process is similar to that used by the Polish animator Piotr Dumała. Pedro Serrazina (b. Lisbon, 27 December 1968) started working with Filmógrafo in 1992, as a cinematographer

Figure 3.33  Abi Feijó, Clandestino, ‘Stowaway’, 2000. 219

Filmógrafo closed in May 2002. A couple of years later, Feijó and Pessoa established Ciclopefilmes, which coproduced História Trágica.

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Figure 3.34  Regina Pessoa, História Trágica com Final Feliz, ‘Tragic Story with Happy Ending’, 2005.

and as the voice of a character in Os Salteadores. He storyboarded Fado Lusitano and made his directorial debut in 1995 with Estória do Gato e da Lua (‘Tale about the Cat and the Moon’). In 2010, after a long gestation, Pedro Serrazina presented the fifteen-minute Os olhos do farol (‘The Eyes of the Lighthouse’), one of the best Portuguese animated films. On a rocky coast, a little girl plays alone, enjoying the objects washed up on the beach. Her father is the lighthouse keeper, surly and solitary, his face half-covered by a sweater. We discover that he couldn’t get over the death of his wife, the girl’s mother. Eventually a tempest reunites father and daughter. The film is a love story between a girl and her father, but it tells the even greater love story of humans and the sea, where the sea is at once mate, seducer, murderer, mother, past, and future. The film combines drawn animation, painting, and CGI, but Serrazina used live-action for the

sea. ‘We, in Portugal, are acquainted with the evocative power that the sea contains, and animation couldn’t convey its aleatory and organic side.’220 José Pedro ‘Zepe’ Cavalheiro (b. Porto, 25 April 1956) made Stuart (2006), a compelling exploration of the graphic world of Stuart de Carvalhais.221 It mirrors the artist’s style and crosses between his life in a bohemian Lisbon and his comic book characters. Candido (2007) is powerfully unsettling, with well-made animated camera movements, cleverly used point-of-view shots, and a contrasting dynamic of shots and style involving the two main characters (Candido and the woman he drives to suicide). His films are slow, subtle, and sincere, though sometimes Zepe appears to lose himself in virtuosity. In 2011 Zepe directed his own TV series, the absurdist Ginjas (‘Sour Black Cherries’). It features a characterless, oddly designed protagonist (three white tufts for moustaches and hair, a blue ball for a nose) and some chickens,

Ana Margarida de Carvalho, ‘Pedro Serrazina – Olhos de farol’, Visão, 22 April 2010. The father of comic strip art in Portugal, Stuart de Carvalhais (1887–1961) was also a painter, illustrator, costume designer, and background artist. 220 221

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by António Vitorino d’Almeida, the film was screened at many international festivals.

Russia223 History of the 1990s Figure 3.35  Pedro Serrazina, Os olhos do farol, ‘The Eyes of the Lighthouse’, 2010.

one of which is enormous and malevolent. The series is Zepe’s little theatre of the free imagination, joyous and unsettling at once. José Miguel Ribeiro (b. Amadora, 18 January 1966) was as an animator on Os Salteadores. Having studied at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, he specialized in drawn and puppet animation in Rennes, France. During his time in France, he codirected Ovos (‘Eggs’, 1994, with Pierre Bouchon and Yvon Guillon). An egg and a spatula duel in the arena of a frying pan, through Plasticine and object animation. Ribeiro’s talent became clear with O Banquete da Rainha (‘The Queen’s Banquet’, 1996) and peaked with A Suspeita (‘The Suspect’). In the latter film, a moody young man, a voracious fat lady, an elegant and haughty woman, and a clumsy petty-bourgeois (joined from time to time by the ticket collector) share a train compartment during a long journey. One of them must be a serial killer. Ribeiro animates very expressive Plasticine puppets with a Hitchcockian touch, guiding and misguiding the audience to the final coup de théâtre. In 2000, A Suspeita was the first Portuguese film to receive the European Oscar, the Cartoon d’Or. The first Portuguese animated feature was a joint production with Spain, O Sonho de uma Noite de São João – El Sueño de una Noche de San Juan (‘A Saint John’s Night Dream’, 2005).222 Made in CGI, it was directed by Ángel de la Cruz and Manolo Gómez and was based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An all-Portuguese feature was Até ao Tecto do Mundo (‘To the Top of the World’, a.k.a. João Sete Sete, ‘John Seven Seven’, 2008). Its directors were Carlos Silva, António Costa Valente, and Vítor Lopes, who used an experimental 2D computer technique. Scored

Two weeks after the failure of the 1991 Communist hardliners’ coup in Moscow, the first ‘floating festival’ KROK launched from Kiev on board a ship down the Dnieper River. It was publicized as an international festival, and though it was mainly attended by Soviet citizens it became international along the way – as the ship was en route it was announced that on 6 September the Soviet Union had officially recognized the Baltic republics’ independence. This news prompted a celebration (albeit a halfhearted one) onboard. In December of that year, the entire Union would be dissolved. Russia is the nation with an unpredictable past – so goes an old saying. The historical identity of post-Soviet Russia is still fluid and uncertain as these lines are being written (in 2015), and periods and developments are being repeatedly redefined and reevaluated. Lately, it has become more and more common to refer to the 1990s as ‘slashingrakish-wild’ years, but many would still hold quite the opposite view – that the decade was the most important breath of freedom in ages. A number of troubles marred the nation’s path to political and economic liberalization under Boris Yeltsin, first president of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999. A clash with vice-president Aleksandr Rutskoy and legislators in 1993 resulted in a constitutional crisis, armed rioting, and repression; a bloody lengthy war in the separatist province of Chechnya resulted in many civilian casualties. On the other hand, democratic institutions were being built, civil society was becoming active, and a robust free press was developing. From 1992, with an economy in disarray, a shock therapy was introduced and prices increased very quickly. Privatization was also underway, triggering the creation of a dramatic wealth divide in a society that had long been, supposedly, homogeneous. Many would be deprived of the customary humble but steady livelihood, while some would make tremendous fortunes virtually overnight. The term

‘Saint John’s Night’ (the summer solstice) is the shortest night of the year. Thousands of years ago, European superstition maintained that it condensed all the evil ghosts, sorcerers, demons, and monsters. This superstition gave inspiration to William Shakespeare for his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 223 By Giannalberto Bendazzi and Mikhail Gurevich. 222

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‘oligarch’ was used widely, and the new masters largely came from the ranks of former apparatchiks. After losing a good deal of GDP and industrial output, the economy was relatively stable by the middle of the decade – only to be severely hit again by the national default of 1998. The society seemed traumatized. The Cold War was lost, as well as superpower status, imperial grandeur, and the empire – not to mention the ideological project longembedded in the Russian mindset. Settling accounts with the past proved to be inconclusive at best; the distorted mix of all the different mythologies was boiling over the edge. In the interest of sheer survival, many from the educated class would change professions. Scientists became janitors or bankers, depending on their luck, or sought job opportunities abroad – as would numerous animation professionals. Intelligentsia seemed to be losing its footing as a trendsetter and nouveau-riche tastes largely shaped the cultural landscape. Cultural life managed to hectically flourish despite it all – but cinema, because of its heavy dependence on production capacities and resources, languished. The organizers of the first national animation festival in 1996 barely managed to find a handful of Russian films to show (without any selection). There were still high-quality and sincere works among them – not everything was lost in the new world.

History of the 2000s In a surprise announcement on New Year’s Eve, 1999, President Yeltsin resigned, leaving behind his recently appointed prime minister to serve as the acting president. That was the hour of Vladimir Putin, a KGB career officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel before moving into Saint Petersburg city administration at the dawn of new times and subsequently enjoying a rapid rise in Moscow. Putin won the presidential election in 2000 and was reelected in 2004. By the start of the new millennium, the mood in Russia was one of fatigue over the havoc and disappointment in the reforms. The very words ‘democrat’ and ‘liberal’ would become almost obscene for many, as the notions behind them had been distorted and devalued. The thirst for stability was in the air, even if that would mean a strong-handed order. So, within the first year or two of Putin’s presidency, most of the independent TV channels were put under governmental control. Other media

would experience increasing pressure in the years to come. Media tycoons became the first victims in settlements with oligarchs and from that point on were supposed to stay put and not challenge power. A new breed of business masters was arriving on the scene, many closely associated with the state. In time, the sprawling bureaucracy would come, once again, to stand for a ruling class of sorts. The country experienced impressive economic growth, due in large part to exporting oil and gas, with oil prices rising from below 20 US dollars per barrel in early 1990s to over 100 US dollars by the mid-2000s. Critics would say that Russia became a petro-state, with other sectors being put in second place, where they risked losing formerly solid positions (e.g. basic science, heavy industry, and education). In any event, living standards were improving substantially, especially in the capitals and big cities; certain small businesses and service industries were growing; and a middle-class that enjoyed cars and restaurants, travel and entertainment, was emerging. Sadly, this era of stability would be once again be marred by terrorist acts and corruption. In 2008, barred constitutionally from running for a third term, Putin backed close associate Dmitry Medvedev and assumed the post of prime minister himself. For the 2012 election cycle (announced in September 2011), the tandem team switched chairs again. This, in addition to controversial parliament elections, sparked mass street protests and the rise of vocal opposition. The so-called creative class (relatively young urban professionals, modern in lifestyle and mentality) was at the core of this opposition. Ideologically, the period was marked by contradictory trends and leanings. Rather early on, the old Soviet anthem was returned, slightly disguised, as were other similar traditions. Later, ‘patriotism’ would become more and more of a buzzword, as would manifestations of almost imperial pride in foreign policy actions or in domestic slogans like ‘Russia has risen from its knees’. Migrant workers, mainly from former Soviet Asia, flooded the cities, and xenophobic sentiments became apparent. The 1990s had seen a certain religious revival, perceived as a natural reaction to the end of official atheism, but in the 2000s the Russian Orthodox Church became a powerful state institution, attaining a status close to the one it had in tsarist Russia. In cultural life, nostalgic trends coexisted with the unabashed proliferation of Westernized pop-culture, as did ‘sovietisms’ – with religious zeal and modern experimentation – with nativist archaisms. Television was generally considered lowbrow entertainment and/or a propagandistic vehicle, though there were small marginal niches of quality cultural programming. In the realm of theatre and the

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performing arts, Moscow turned into one of the principal world focal points, thanks to a variety of international festivals and tours. Book publishing experienced economic hardships, but intellectual literary fairs were thriving. In live-action cinema, industrial revival was evident, although not-quite-sufficient distribution systems filled the screens with Hollywood blockbusters and left even possible hits of domestic production in the second row. Art films remained on the margins. Festivals and film societies made a good range of them anyway, and they were screened in the capitals. Being very much dependant on state financing, filmmaking was vulnerable to succumbing to servile mode. The film community was divided, with the old union leaning toward the power under the personal rule of Nikita Mikhalkov (a talented actor-director turned into a faithful functionary) and, on the other side, the new rebellious association, formed mainly by directors in this new wave. As often happens in turbulent times, a fresh focus on documentaries was evident. In 2004, the share of domestically produced films (of all genres) in the national box office was about 13 percent; in 2005 it increased to close to 30 percent; in 2006–2009 it was around 24–26 percent; and it decreased still further in 2010–2012 to only 14–15 percent. The unquestionable leaders were always American imports, but over several years a few Russian films were also among the top ten.

Economy224 In the 1990s, Russia would not fit into the business schemes of the developed world.225 Problems began with financial resources. The state did give money for animation, but not very much. All the money available for state animation could provide for one season of an American series or onequarter of what it cost to make a feature. Private investors were not much interested in the subject, since an animation project took years to be developed and years to make any profit. Russian businesspersons, due to the general economic instability in the country, preferred a quick turnover of their capital. Up to the mid-2000s, there was no precedent for self-sufficient animation projects. Smeshariki producer Ilya Popov’s objective was to dispel the myth that children’s animation in Russia could not be profitable.

The labour force resources in animation were also low. According to estimates, only between a thousand and five thousand people were working in the field. Producers and studio executives asserted that it would be impossible to launch ten feature projects simultaneously, since there would have not been a sufficient workforce to create them (even considering that Russian features employed not hundreds, but just dozens, of professionals). The financial problems and scarcity of professional labour were both part of the same vicious circle. Low production budgets did not allow fair wages,226 and even this minimum compensation was not guaranteed since studios that lived from one state handout to another were themselves on the hook. Teams were often assembled on a particular film (that is, for a year or a year and a half, usually) and then disassembled upon completion. As a result, studios did not have stable trained workers and professionals had to rush from one project to another, in addition to trying to turn a penny on the side in advertising. These sorts of prospects were not attractive to most people, so colleges that prepared students for professions in animation were not bursting with eager prospective students. This was so much the case that the competition was less than one person for each seat – so practically everyone was admitted, regardless of talent. There would always be some enthusiasts, however, so films were being made regardless. But these films faced total obscurity. They would be shown at some national festivals, and maybe also at some international gatherings, and then they would simply sit on the shelf. Why didn’t exhibitors and distributors show interest in Russian animation? Basically because there was too little volume. It was much easier to purchase big content packages through international agencies. Aleksandr Tatarsky agonized, for example, over putting together the national production of Gem Mountain. For a couple of years, if not longer, he camped on doorsteps to try to get Mountain shown on TV – even though TV channels were only paying about 300 dollars for an hour of content. DVD publishers and theatrical distributors were not interested either. Why would one want to mess around with some murky projects when it was so easy to buy an American feature and earn money on it? Obviously, there was no living to be made in animation in Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s.

By Maria Tereshchenko. This paragraph is based on the longer essay ‘Mult-economics’ [Anim-economy], by Maria Tereshchenko, 2 April 2013. http://kinote. info/articles/9506-mult-ekonomika, or http://www.kino-teatr.ru/blog/y2013/4–2/. 226 Even quite distinguished directors at noncommercial studios were paid only 10–15 thousand roubles (300–500 dollars) a month. 224 225

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In Soviet times, kids subsisted on 30–40 hours of new animation a year and were happy with that. Post-Soviet kids consumed much more and also wanted options so they could choose what they wanted to watch. The situation changed in the late 2000s. Several commercially successful projects, like Smeshariki, the pentalogy of features on bogatyrs, the series Luntik, later Masha i Medved (‘Masha and Bear’), and Fiksiki increased the interest of investors, distributors, and TV bureaucrats. Thanks to certain initiatives taken by the animation community, state financing increased and viewers, fed up with foreign cartoons, started to demand national products. Furthermore, a number of projects started without state money and TV channels became quite interested in domestic animation.

A Look Back, in Anger227 As a result of numerous and often criminal ‘final settlements’ with regard to ownership, the state studio Soyuzmultfilm ultimately faded out and numerous private studios emerged. They would take commissions from the West for cheap third-order work and look for private money, sometimes tying up with all but gangsters. By the middle of the decade a good few animators had switched to different occupations and many had left the country in search of work. Theatrical film distribution and exhibition had died out, and animation had disappeared from national television. In order to plan the broadcasting schedule for a year ahead, post-Soviet TV wanted to purchase films in packages that met their rigid requirements. They wanted films that were 26, 13, six, or three minutes long. The standard screening unit had been 10 minutes, and so the entire body of Russian animation could not correspond to this new format. Thus, in the 1990s and 2000s one saw only old American or Asian series on TV. There was a turning point in the early 2000s, although it was a backwards one: on the state level, it was decided to support cinema for children. Money came in, along with firm directions on how it should be spent. The most solid studios started to recover, switching from auteur animation to children’s productions. The Saint Petersburg studio Melnitsa (‘mill’) started doing features; Pilot took up the fairy-tale cycle Gem Mountain

in a format convenient for TV series (the first package of eleven 13-minute episodes was completed in 2004); Animos launched Russian Classics for Children; and the Petersburg studio was formed specifically for the project Smeshariki.228 Gradually the proportion (but not the quantity) was similar to that of former times: the overwhelming majority of production was for children, plus a few auteur films. By the late 2000s, Smeshariki, despite its simplified design and Flash technology, turned out to be the only definitely successful Russian animation series. This was mostly due to smart, witty scripts full of quotations and hints tailored for grown-ups in order to attract teenagers as well as adults, film buffs, and so on. Russian animation in the 2000s remained state funded in general, and the supposedly commercial projects did not bring in enough profit for production studios to become self-sufficient. On one hand, this situation was rooted in the underdevelopment of Russian production: the production capacity of all the studios together was not sufficient to provide a convincing package of animation for TV, either for foreign or domestic channels.229 On the other hand, the system of state funding was non-transparent and corrupt. As for good auteur films (that were nevertheless made), the public and even animation buffs hardly knew them. These films almost never turned up on TV, they were impossible to purchase, and animation festivals in the country were very few and far between. Eventually, there was also a technological weakness in Russian animation. In anything related to hi-tech, powerful machines, costly software, or advanced training, the Russian situation was very bleak. After some hectic activity, amid no less hectic changes in the higher echelons and in cinema authorities and funding agencies (which amounted mainly to power games and carving up the pie), the situation in 2013 was still fluid. Certain financing, however, did come through later in this period, and after the lion’s share of the spoils had been grabbed, the remains did go to finance some auteur prokects.

Tatarsky and Pilot, the Greatest Adventure Aleksandr (‘Sasha’) Tatarsky (Kiev, 11 December  1950– near Moscow, 22 July 2007) is an emblematic figure in the

By Dina Goder. They are stylized rounded animals, known as Kikoriki in Britain, GoGoRiki in America. The original name is derived from smeshnye, meaning ‘funny’, and shariki, meaning ‘little balls’. 229 There wasn’t a sufficient workforce to build up the necessary production capabilities at the lower and middle levels (renderers, inbetweeners, etc.). Those without much creative ambition were the first to leave when studios were on the brink of dissolving. 227 228

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post-Soviet period. He would enter the new era proper, however, with considerable baggage. As a child he was enchanted with the art of the circus and especially clowning. He was lucky to see some of the great master clowns at home, as his father was writing sketches for them. Then he discovered animated films and realized that this was another incarnation of the comic. So in 1968 he went to Kievnauchfilm studio, the home of Ukrainian animation. He worked on many mediocre conventional productions, but he also worked for talented directors like David Cherkassky and Evgeny Sivokon, whom he considered mentors. The bold young Tatarsky was viewed as an enfant terrible – and indeed he often behaved as such, with no respect for reputations or for the order of things. Kstaty o ptichkaks (‘By the Way, About the Birdies’, 1979) was made independently and half-amateurishly by Tatarsky and his friend Igor Kovalyov (who would be a coworker and coauthor for years to come). The pair brought the film to Moscow and applied to the newly opened animation division of higher courses for directors and screenwriters. The admission committee was impressed. Yuri Norstein later observed: ‘A fantastic and harmonious world emerged. Both graphic metaphor and character’s manner of behaviour – all was just special.’230 The backing of the Kiev studio officials was necessary to be accepted at the higher courses and only Kovalyov received it, but Multtelefilm invited Tatarsky to Moscow at the same time. In 1981, filling a gap in the studio’s production plan, he got a chance for his directorial debut – which turned out to be a hit. Plastilinovaya Vorona (‘Plasticine Crow’, essentially a paraphrase of the classic ‘The Fox and the Crow’ fable) was a rare exercise in clay animation and in the poetics of metamorphoses – things and creatures were constantly being transformed one into another. Shockingly fresh in the brave gags, clownish humour, and dialog, the film at first frightened the studio officials, but the intervention of many prominent live-action actors meant that it aired after all. Later it went on to gain international acclaim and immense popularity at home. Tatarsky had to engage in a number of ordinary stock commissions before making his next hit, Padal proshlogodniy sneg (‘The Last Year Snow Was Falling’, 1983).231 Again he barely made it through the approval process and was accused of ‘being hostile to Russian people’. In this film

Tatarsky revealed yet another dimension of his audacious humour, albeit with deeper bittersweet overtones, in a story of a hapless but likeable man lost in the snowy woods and trying to bring home a Christmas tree. Obratnaya storona luny (‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, 1984), with Kovalyov’s script, followed. It was perhaps more exquisitely artistic, in painterly gouache drawing, but its witty gags were no less sparkling. The very short Kubik-Rubik, Klounada (‘Rubik’s Cube, Clownade’ [‘farce’], 1985) fully lived up to its title. Krylya, Nogi i Khvosty (‘Wings, Legs and Tails’, 1986) – a laconic joke on ‘how a vulture teaches an ostrich to fly’ – was his most eccentrically auteur creation (both of these were codirected with Kovalyov). Sledstvie vedut kolobki (‘The Kolobki Investigate’, 1986– 1987, again directed with Kovalyov) followed. This was a larger project in several parts, a pungent parody on TV police crime series. The graphic design is stylishly sharp and it features a duo of buffoonish heroes and buffoonish gags. This work also turned out to be an immediate and enduring popular hit. An unlikely star in the stringent state-run TV environment, albeit still with an enfant terrible reputation and constant tensions with Multtelefilm bosses, Tatarsky managed to dig his own semi-autonomous hole where the socalled ‘Tatarsky gang’ had a chance to come together and work in an artistic workshop atmosphere. Sick and tired of the shaky status quo, he was dreaming of his own studio. By the advent of perestroika, he was quite well known and even exerted considerable aesthetic influence. He had an energetic nature and an entrepreneurial streak and was the first to organize, in late 1988, an independent animation outlet – Pilot studio. His cofounders were Igor Kovalyov, technical producer Igor Gelashvili, and creative producer Anatoly Prokhorov (yet another unique and important figure of the coming era). They produced an anthology of extra-short films called Lift (‘Elevator’, 1989) in which many young professionals directed side by side with the ‘founding fathers’. This modus operandi would become a regular practice and would remain a priority as the studio sought to attract and nurture new talent. The studio’s strategic plans were ambitious, if only a little vague: to become both an auteur’s heaven and a commercial outlet – or, rather, to remain both in one. There

Iskusstvo kino [Cinema Art], #12, 2007; cited as in: http://www.pilot-film.com/show_article.php?aid=96. Tatarsky and his artists treated clay not as a variety of puppetry but rather as a quasi cut-out technique, or a kind of flattened drawing in/with Plasticine. 230 231

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was a strong unspoken rationale behind that. Tatarsky’s identity was clearly of this two-fold nature – in his sharp exquisite style he was doing essentially people’s movies. What he was really interested in as an artist happened to be an open-for-everyone spectacle, however complex it might be in its inner structure (which is characteristic of the art of the circus, and of clowning in particular). Anatoly Prokhorov articulated the aesthetic credo more explicitly, within the tradition of pantomime and the early slapstick comedy. There were ambitions of different sorts as well. The entire enterprise was thought to be a multifaceted venture: production division proper, training programs, and also a ‘culturological’ centre. Prokhorov held seminars and symposia, inviting scholars and critics, and even managed to publish a few issues of the magazine Animatograph Study Notes. Animators were trained with respect to their individuality but within Pilot’s style. The stylistic effect on the entire professional environment was obvious and strong; by the mid- to late-1990s more and more artists and studios were mimicking, if only superficially, the Tatarsky style (for which Kovalyov, though strictly artistically, was largely responsible). Life was rough nevertheless, and biting. In the early 1990s, there was just not enough money around and people had to look for work themselves. The first to leave for Hollywood was Kovalyov, who was already known internationally. Others followed, veterans and youngsters alike. At Klasky-Csupo alone, at some point all but a dozen ‘brethren-Pilots’ worked. Others ended up in Hungary or elsewhere. Years later Tatarsky lamented: ‘A super-team was created, equal to none, which could have become the new wave of Russian animation. They work now on different studios, in key positions. But, essentially, they are just spread-out around the world.’232 He stood as almost a dramatic figure – as an example of a director sacrificed to become a producer in the larger cause of studio building. Prokhorov noted: ‘Tatarsky was the director of a meta-film named “Pilot”. His post-directorial stage started there.’233 Although he still directed, he did so mostly on a relatively light side, contributing to anthologies and similar projects. When receiving the national Nika award for

Brat’ya Piloty gotovyat na zavtrak makaronchiki (‘Brethren Pilots Cook Little Macaroni for Breakfast’, 1996) he looked somewhat embarrassed. His last personal short, Krasnye vorota Rasemon (‘The Red Gate of Rashomon’, 2002, codirected with Valentin Telegin), was based on fictitious history. After Russia’s World War II victory in alliance with Japan, a celebratory skating competition is held in Moscow between the athletes Fyodor Dostoevsky and Akira Kurosawa. It was in fact a nostalgic/ironic film with gags that were slowed down yet still smart, and toned-down yet still pointed humour. The major project of Tatarsky-the-director remained unfinished: the animated feature Pribytie poezda (‘The Arrival of a Train’), which he began back in the 1980s with Igor Kovalyov. According to Fedor Khitruk’s assessment: ‘[Tatarsky] showed me some rough footage. They were amazing scenes, absolutely apart from what he was doing in Kolobki or other films. Very subtle impressionistic plot line, magnificent expressive movement. [.  .  .] I  watched them as a professional and marvelled: what a magnificent, sharp sense of movement! What a grotesque!’234 For Tatarsky-the-producer, the major undertaking in the 2000s was Gora Samotsetov (‘Gem Mountain’), a proposed cycle of 52 folk tales from different ethnic cultures within the Russian Federation (launched in 2004; as of 2012, thirty 13-minute films have been released). The segments were made by different directors, seasoned and beginners alike, partially in-house, partially commissioned on the side. A similar leader introduced the regions and ethnicities at the beginning of each one. Obviously the quality is uneven, but many in Russia considered the project as a whole to be a breakthrough and a decisive push towards restoring the industry’s vitality and cultural significance.235 But, truth be told, there was also a practical impetus: to give the studio another breath of life on secured state financing and the status of a socially important commission. For Pilot as an institution, though, this arguably might have been a mixed blessing: the studio effectively turned into a single-product-line factory. After Tatarsky’s death it functioned under Nazarov’s creative supervision; at the beginning of 2013, Igor Gelashvili (one of the founding producers) took over.

In an interview with Larisa Malyukova, Platicine [Clay ?] Clown, Novaya Gazeta (New Gazette), Oct. 23, 2003; http://2003.novayaga zeta.ru/nomer/2003/79n/n79n-s35.shtml. 233 Larisa Malyukova, ‘The Entire World is Metamorphosis’, Iskusstvo kino 12 (2007), http://www.pilot-film.com/show_article.php?aid=94. For a more detailed account of the team formation and early studio history see Mikhail Gurevich, ‘The Independent Ones: Portrait of Pilot Animation Studio’, Iskusstvo Kino 11 (1992) (in Russian). 234 Fedor Khitruk, Professia – animator (‘Profession – Animator’), 2 vols, Live Book, Moscow, 2008, II, pp. 228–229. 235 Tatarsky himself directed two decent but ordinary episodes (again with Telegin): Kak pan konem byl (‘How the Gent Had to Be a Horse’, a Belarusian tale, 2004) and Tolkovanie snovideniy (‘Interpretation of Dreams’, a Tatar tale, 2004). 232

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Tatarsky died of a sudden heart attack in July 2007, at the age of 56, in his dacha near Moscow – the wonderhouse that he had been building for years and filling with old toys and other arty artifacts. This house was probably the last grand project of this restless imagination. His death was a shock to the community and to those beyond as well. Many expressed their sympathy over the loss of this true artist, charismatic leader, teacher, public figure, dreamer, and down-to-earth doer. As to the essence of his legacy, just two out of the many perspectives really are outstanding. First: ‘Tatarsky started creating post-Soviet animation cinema still in the era of Brezhnev-Chernenko. That was why Communist bosses were putting his films on the shelf. It was with his works that true perestroika (reconstruction) of the brain started. And it was with him – a decade later – that the Russian animation industry, of national scale and of world level, started.’236 Second: ‘In essence, he never pursued ideological objectives. He was longing for renewal. In addition, he enjoyed constantly playing a game with thrills and chills.’237

Producers: The New Class Closed, once and for all, the economic and ideological dissimilarities with the rest of the world, Russian animation (and Russian film-biz at large) became a story of studios and of producers. In the late 1980s, three young men started to turn up in the wings – in Filmmakers’ Union hallways, at seminars, and so on. One, Sergey Skulyabin, a seemingly entrepreneurial type, in just two or three years would be presented to Soyuzmultfilm, which was already in disarray, as their prospective saviour. He indeed would become the studio head – to embark on a long and dramatic saga of deceit and demise. He personally pushed through, scandal by scandal, the selling off of the film library,238 the privatization of

tangible assets, and the elimination of both the production process and the creative staff. He vanished into thin air in the early 2000s and left behind a desert in place of the bygone institution of national pride.239 The second one, Aleksandr Gerasimov (b. 1966), would, on the contrary, become a studio builder. In 1993, along with Khitruk, Khrzhanovsky, Norstein, and Nazarov, he built and then ran the School-Studio ShAR; later he established Master-Film, along with the noncommercial Guberniya Foundation. In addition, in 1996 he organized the annual national animation festival (held first in Tarusa, later in Suzdal) and effectively ran it for many years. He is credited in dozens of notable films of the 1990s and 2000s, including numerous debuts and art projects, and is broadly considered one of the most active, responsive, and successful animation producers in the country. The third, Sergey Seregin (b. 1967), participated as Gerasimov’s fellow associate in all the endeavours mentioned above. But at these same studios he also made a couple of quite informative and intelligent documentaries on animation: Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. Dynamic Graphics (1995) and Fedor Khitruk. Profession – Animator (1999). Without relinquishing his administrative duties, he then went into animation directing. He first made a couple of rather sincere short subjects like Lukomorye. Nanya (‘Lukomoye: The Nurse’, 2000) and Klyuchi ot vremeni (‘Keys from Time’, 2004), and then series and features of a more commercial and conventional nature. ShAR (an acronym that stands for Shkola Animatsionnoy Rezhissury – School of Animation Directing) was conceived as a ‘school-studio’, a kind of extension of the famous two-year higher courses for directors and screenwriters in the animation division. According to the charter of these higher courses, only applicants with prior higher education could be admitted – to receive, in essence, an additional professional degree. At ShAR, those restrictions would not apply. The function of producers-administrators at ShAR would then be to dig for financial resources. In post-Soviet years it was a challenge to find companies to

Anatoly Prokhorov, http://www.pilot-film.com/show_article.php?aid=94. Yuri Norstein, http://www.pilot-film.com/show_article.php?aid=96. 238 In 1992, the American company Films by Jove was granted the exclusive foreign distribution rights for the major part of principal studio titles; the ensuing controversy and numerous lawsuits lasted for years and ended in a collection buyout by a loyal Russian oligarch in 2007. 239 From early 1990s on, Soyuzmultfilm underwent multiple clinical deaths and attempts at resurrection in disguise. By 2004, two entities functioned under the same classic studio name: a film fund and a creative production unit. The president personally promised in 2011 to reunite them, and by 2013 the new strategy was launched under the artistic supervision of Mikhail Aldashin, who succeeded Stanislav Sokolov. 236 237

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support debut films, and so in this respect the new institution came to play a crucial role in launching many careers. It also was the base where Khrzhanovsky’s later projects, both small and large, were produced. Many significant films of the 1990s, and to a lesser extent those of the 2000s, were marked with the ShAR logo – including, among others, some works by Ivan Maksimov, Oksana Cherkasova, and Aleksandr Petrov.240 When the animation division of higher courses was closed in the early 2000s, ShAR filled the void. Gradually, training would become more and more fee-based here as well; by the early 2010s, the school-studio, under the artistic supervision of Khrzhanovsky, was struggling but still moving forward. Master-Film, founded initially in the mid-1990s as a convenient parallel to ShAR241 and not limited to animation alone, also served as an indispensable debut launch pad. (As Seregin comments: ‘Lately it’s like a fair or exchange: everyone from each side is on the look-out – who finds whom.’) It was also an art film outlet (being responsible for most of the films of Maksimov and several others auteurs) and the principal sponsor-organizer of the national festival. It also became more and more involved in commercial production. On both planes, it’s a rather serious player in the field, with the capacity to produce about two hours of animation per year (ShAR at the best of times was only capable of turning out about 90 minutes). Elizaveta Babakhina (1934–2012) was a longstanding top manager at Multtelefilm – and rather a force for the good there. She moved to Soyuzmultfilm at the very end of the 1980s. Considering the international contacts she had collected and the prospects for coproduction on the near horizon, she founded Christmas Films. At first it was under the auspices of Soyuzmultfilm but left a little later, taking with it a good number of leading directors. Christmas, under Babakhina’s leadership, started with a few films by Valentin Karavaev (Istoriya odnogo goroda, ‘History of a Town’, 1992, after a classic satire by Saltykov-Shchedrin), Galina Barinova, young Aleksei Kharitidi, and Aleksei Demin. Christmas then boldly embarked on a huge, probably unprecedented, coproduction adventure with British S4C and BBC Wales. Through the decade these films

included: Shakespeare – the Animated Tales (twelve 26-minute films, from Hamlet to Tempest), Operavox (six 30-minute films, from The Magic Flute to The Barber of Seville), and Old Testament – the Bible in Animation (six 26-minute films). Then followed the TV short Beowulf, the feature The Miracle Maker (The Jesus Story), Canterbury Tales in three films and, in the early 2000s, yet another cycle of Animated Tales of the World (six 13-minute films). The scripts and general decisions, as well as voice talents, came from the British side and were to be creatively implemented generally by Russian crews and directors – including the veterans Serebriakov and Gamburg; Ugarov, Sokolov, and Zyabliakova from the middle generation; and the younger Orlova, Dabizha, Mouat, Saakyants, and Karaev, among others. The results were impressive, albeit arguably uneven and somewhat contradictory at their core. Many films carried the traces of the Russian school and showed genuine artistic ambition along with masterful execution; at the same time they showed the restraints of commissioned work. They brought signs of professional recognition, from Emmy to Oscar nominations. Lately the studio has been working on a much smaller scale, engaged in domestic projects. Among other things, the Christmas studio tried to reincarnate the famed Nu Pogodi! (‘Just You Wait!’) series of the past decades; the nineteenth film was directed in 2005 by Aleksei Kotenochkin, son of the original creator Vyacheslav. After Babakhina’s death, Natalia Dabizha took over the leadership of the Christmas studio. Animos was mainly the domain of Natalia Orlova and a sort of safe harbour for traditional puppet films, in particular the later works of Maria Mouat (though she eventually went to lead the new outlet Pchela [‘The Bee’]). Studio Melnitsa (‘The Mill’) was founded in Saint Petersburg in 1999 with backing from Sergey Seliyanov. It was perhaps the first truly independent major producer of post-Soviet cinema and was led by Aleksandr Boyarsky. It’s the major features manufacturer of work that is far from flawless but of stable quality with a focus on the stories rather than style. The sheer capacity is impressive: about seven hours per year, between series and features. Konstantin Bronzit was one of

It should be noted that interinstitutional cooperation became almost a rule of the game in new times: many films carry multiple logos, initiated under one roof and finished under another, or with the support of third parties. Most importantly, financial backing, even and especially from state funds, should go through authorized or otherwise smartly arranged channels. Gerasimov insisted, however: ‘We never were in business of just purchasing essentially completed projects: we nurtured them in any case, if only distantly or partially.’ (This, and all further quotes from Gerasimov and Seregin, are from personal communication from Aleksandr Gerasimov to Mikhail Gurevich, December 2012.) 241 It was also Gerasimov’s fully independent enterprise, run together with Vyacheslav Mayasov (1954–2006), a documentary producer and film scholar. 240

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their distinguished directors, making few personal projects here besides commercial ones. Then, of course, A-Film in Yekaterinburg was the heir to the animation division of Sverdlovsk studio. It prospered under the management of another former administrator of Soviet times, Valentina Khizhnyakova, carrying the ‘Sverdlovsk school’ through the hurdles of the new era to younger generations, in frequent cooperation with other institutions. Studio MIR was founded and headed by the screenwriter Irina Margolina (in partnership with director Vladlen Barber) and dealt primarily with her projects, employing different directors, including Oksana Cherkasova. The Studio of Computer Animation Petersburg, under the creative supervision of Anatoly Prokhorov and the management of Ilya Popov, was established in 2003 specifically for the project Smeshariki (208 six-minute instalments). Subsequently the studio devoted attention to less interesting TVoriented projects and to theatrical features, producing up to 10 hours per year. In addition, it launched the nonprofit National Children’s Foundation in 2008, thus positioning itself on the plane of education and social responsibility as well. MetronomFilm, headed by producer Arsen Gotlib, was mostly engaged in a single, yet impressive, art project: Kolybelnye mira (‘Lullabies of the World’, a few dozen films of three minutes each), directed mainly by Elizaveta Skvortsova (b. 1978). Georgy Vasilyev’s Aeroplan studio made the series Fiksiki and participated in Gem Mountain. Producers Dmitry Gorbunov and Aleksandr Kuguchin, on the occasion of the 850th anniversary of Moscow in 1997, came up with the idea of a collective portrait of the city in extra-short subjects commissioned from all over the world. Mikhail Aldashin assumed the position of creative supervisor, using his own extensive professional connections to attract talent. In about six months, some 50 submissions were received – representing perhaps not everyone but everyone noteworthy on the Russian animation scene. It attracted a good number of foreign directors as well, from Plympton to Schwizgebel. The resulting collection showed original and bright mini-films. But the producers framed them in a quasi-documentary format, showing a cabby driving a provincial man around the place. Some individual entries were dropped altogether, others suffered cuts and reediting, with original soundtracks often obstructed by chatty voice-overs. Aldashin chose to leave the project at that stage. The result was named Optimus Mundus (‘The Best of the Worlds’, original title in Latin)

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and was released in 1998; it was shown at festivals two years later but has still never been released commercially. Many individual pieces deserve attention. In Underground (or Metro-Night), famous statues and decorative panels of the Moscow subway are let loose in wild play – staging a Walpurgis-like night; not accidentally, it was scripted by Aleksandr Tatarsky and directed by his understudy Vasiko Bedoshvili (b. 1960). In contrast, Andrey Zolotukhin (b. 1966, worked in Sverdlovsk-Yekaterinburg and in Switzerland) showed subtly stumped pastel angels soaring in midair and then a freakish little devil stealing the tiny bell tower (Two Angels). Vadim Medzhibovsky (b. 1956) pictured a couple’s stroll through the park in lightly ironic old-Soviet nostalgia (Gorky Park: Returning). Mikhail Aldashin, with Aleksei Demin as codirector, visualized the entire historiosophic survey in a multiscreen exercise with events developing simultaneously on different planes (History of the Moscow Tsars).

Prokhorov, from Science to Children’s Films Anatoly Prokhorov (b. Oslo, Norway, 1948), a career scientist with a PhD in physics, turned to the theory and practice of the performing arts in the late 1970s, appearing at animation guild events and being introduced as a discussant at production reviews, where his unconventional perspectives would receive the close attention of some and be adamantly rejected by others. Having been tasked by Aleksandr Tatarsky to help establish and run his new studio, he became the first, and the best, of a kind: a creative producer in a broader sense. At Pilot, he became part of practical creative efforts. In addition, he formulated the aesthetic programme, educating, if not indoctrinating, studio employees with a specific philosophy of the trade. For some time, Pilot was a centre of cultural research, with a hands-on focus. It was a playground for discussions, an umbrella for conferences, and a scholarly-educational publishing unit. Eventually, and maybe inevitably, Anatoly Prokhorov felt he had exhausted his mission at Pilot and he left in 2003 to found another studio. As we have seen, the Studio of Computer Animation Petersburg was established especially to produce the series Smeshariki, a family-oriented show that was smart and playful enough to attract different groups. It was not particularly groundbreaking in the art of animation, he admitted,242 but what was

Anatoly Prokhorov, personal communications to Mikhail Gurevich in February–April, 2013.

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really important for him was that it was a notable event in post-Soviet Russian life on the social and cultural plane. He considered Smeshariki to be edutainment. Prokhorov the scientist maintained a realistic perspective. Good, witty scripts and creative supervision notwithstanding, the series turned out to be feasible only when a fully developed market of goods-for-kids emerged in the country. It was the only commercially successful animation output, and it was built almost exclusively on merchandizing.

Directors Aleksandr Petrov Aleksandr Petrov243 (b. Prechistoe, district of Yaroslav, 17 July 1957) studied painting at the Yaroslav Art School and graduated at age nineteen. He then studied cinema at the VGIK (the world-famous Moscow school) under the guidance of Ivan Ivanov-Vano. After a period of time as a draughtsman at the Armenfilm in Yerevan, in 1984 he took the role of art director in Noch’ (‘The Night’, directed by Vladimir Pektevich) and the following year created Dobro Pozhalovat’! (‘Welcome!’) together with Alexei Karaev (all at Sverdlovsk studio). The first animated film Petrov directed alone was Korova (‘The Cow’, 1989). He painted successive frames with his fingertips, using slow-drying oil paint on glass plates; this technique, that would become his distinguishing mark, was, in his own words, ‘the fastest way from the soul to the animated work’.244 ‘The Cow’ brought international attention to his talent and in 1990 was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1992, he created Son smeshnogo cheloveka (‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’) and in the same year he opened his own company in Yaroslav, the Panorama Animation Film Studio. In 1996, he directed his third film, Rusalka (‘The Mermaid’). Petrov won an Oscar in 2000 for The Old Man and the Sea, an animated adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title. This film was made in Canada and produced by an international consortium led by Montreal-based Productions Pascal Blais. With the

help of Imagica Corporation, Dentsu Tec., and NHK Enterprises 21 of Japan and, obviously, the Panorama Animation Film Studio in Russia, Petrov created the film using the large-format IMAX, which was a successful choice. Once The Old Man and the Sea was finished, Petrov returned to Russia and in 2006 released Moya lyubov (‘My Love’), his longest work (26 minutes and 35 seconds). Special attention must be given to Petrov’s choice of subjects: generally he gives form and colour to literary works, emphasizing the topics that are important to him. In that way he adapted works by Andrei Platonov (‘The Cow’), Fyodor Dostoevsky (‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’), Ernest Hemingway (‘The Old Man and the Sea’), and Ivan Shmelev245 (‘My Love’), emphasizing fantasies, fears, reflections, and hopes in a romantic atmosphere that involves the public with his passion. ‘The Cow’ is the story of a young boy who faces the death of his first special love: a cow that has gone crazy after losing her calf. In ten minutes, Petrov shows his sensibility for the relationships between men and animals, reflecting Platonov’s respect for nature and destiny. Even though the film has a tragic ending, the director gives the film a kind acceptance of sufferance and a spiritual depth. In ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ Petrov confronts the philosophical topics that have always haunted human minds – basically, he explores the meaning of existence. Looking at the images that seem to come out of our worst nightmares, we empathize with the story of a man that wants to commit suicide. This man feels indifference for the world around him. One night he meets a young girl who asks him for help. After leaving her alone, he comes back home and falls asleep. He dreams about uncorrupted heaven, about a perfect world that he will turn into hell by destroying every form of beauty and purity. When he wakes up, he is a different person. The dream saved him, allowing him to understand that life needs to be emotionally felt and not only rationally known. In the first part of the story, the public recognizes Dostoevsky’s characteristic ‘Man from the Underground’, with his slothful retreat from life, his desire to harm himself, and his need for suffering and humiliation. From a story full of visions, Petrov creates a film in which every image becomes something else in just a few seconds. During the dream, a special role is given to an

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Petrov should not be mistaken for his colleague Anatoly Alekseyevich Petrov. Interview with Aleksandr Petrov recorded by Clarissa Filippini in Turin (Italy) on 5 December 2009, at the Sottodiciotto Filmfestival press conference. 245 Ivan Sergeyevich Shmelev (also transliterated Shmelyov, 1873–1950) died in exile in France, after having devoted his last decades to writings that idealized pre-Bolshevik Russia. 243 244

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important object: the mask. ‘When someone puts on a mask this person feels an interior change and takes up all the qualities of the creature he is representing (a god, a demon).’246 In this way, he who wears a mask loses his own identity to acquire the identity of someone else. But if all the people living in heaven lose their own identity, this means that they will lose their souls, too, and the corruption of heaven will begin. In ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ we often see the mask of the plague’s doctor, which is the symbol of death. ‘Death’ must be considered as a devil and as the greatest symbol of sin. If ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ leaves the public with a bitter taste, The Old Man and the Sea is about tenaciousness and respect for nature. Hemingway is the first and only non-Russian author that Petrov adapted. In this piece in which an old fisherman catches and then loses a large marlin, after a long period of bad luck, Petrov demonstrates a simple but strong poetry of images and sounds and a lively realism that touches the viewers, though it eschews sentimentalism. ‘My Love’ is based on Shmelev’s short novel. The story takes place in the late nineteenth century. During one summer, a teenager called Anton has to confront his first love. The film emphasizes the young man’s feelings, proving that Petrov is a careful explorer of the human mind. ‘The Mermaid’ is possibly not Petrov’s best film, but it’s the most emotional and, for non-Russian spectators, the most original and new. Written by the director himself and Marina Veshnevekaya, it’s inspired by Russian and German legends about the main character, the rusalka. The rusalka is a mermaid of lakes and rivers who wants to take revenge on the man whom she loved while she was in her human shape, and because of whom she decided to kill herself by drowning. The film tells the story of this betrayal between an old monk and a young woman. Though the story is told with very few spoken words, there are some interesting biblical references. In the monk’s dream, for example, we first see ‘Jacob’s stairway’ connecting Earth to heaven. Then we see the lamb’s blood that saves men from sin thanks to his purity (a lamb is totally innocent, just like Jesus Christ); and finally we see the vision of a female saint (who may be the Virgin Mary).

Using these references, Petrov gives a deeper understanding of these stories and a unique perspective. He prefers to reveal things slowly (with images and sounds that suggest important topics) rather than delivering them explicitly. It’s what distinguishes a work of art from a sermon.

Mikhail Aldashin Mikhail Vladimirovich ‘Misha’ Aldashin (b. Tuapse, on the Black Sea, 11 November  1958) developed his career most significantly from the 1990s on. He attended maritime vocational school and served as a draftee in the Navy before enrolling at the Moscow film institute VGIK. He graduated in 1987 as a life-action designer. Luckily, he had a chance to switch to a more appealing path and graduated in 1989 from higher courses for directors and screenwriters, animation division, where he studied under Yuri Norstein and other masters. He then worked at the Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow. Here, together with schoolmate Pehep Pedmanson, he directed his official debut, Kele (a.k.a. Keleh, id., 1988; black and white, animated drawings). It adapted a traditional fairy tale from the northeastern Siberian people of Chukchi and told the story of an evil spirit who captures two little girls but is scorned by their wittiness. With this debut, Aldashin showed his preference for a naïf look,247 with the combination of traditional styles, smart scripts, and knowledge of directional tricks that would distinguish his films. Kele brought Aldashin to the attention of other Russian animators, and in 1989 he joined the Pilot studio. His first film at Pilot was Pums (‘Poumse’, 1990), in which

Figure 3.36  Mikhail Aldashin.

Hans Biedermann, Enciclopedia dei Simboli, Garzanti, Milan, 2004, p. 294. On Aldashin’s ‘naiveté’, see Mikhail Gurevich, ‘Playful Sophistication of Naiveté. Notes on Works of Mikhail Aldashin’, Animac Magazine 6, 2007. 246 247

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comics-like characters are animated with a sharp sense of rhythm. An eager merchant reaches the shore of an island of primitive people and corrupts them with modern clothes and goods. The primitive people abandon their old things, made with animal skins, teeth, and feathers, and the native animals are happy to keep them. With ‘Poumse’, which received awards in Russia and France, Aldashin’s works started to be screened at international festivals. This film was the first of a series that never went further than the second one, Ohotnik (‘The Hunter’, 1991). In the same year, 1991, the coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that would lead the country to its dissolution was a theme for a short animation, Putsch (‘The Putsch’, 1991) made with Aleksandr Tatarsky in those days as Russian president Boris Yeltsin rose as the new political star opposing the tanks and Communist restoration. Drugaya Storona (‘The Other Side’, 1993) is about a worm that gets out of the soil with a friend but immediately has to face the harshness of the outside world. An ugly bird eats his friend and hunts him, so he decides to escape to the other side of the world, where he will discover that things can get even worse. This delicate, touching movie appears like a metaphor for the newly obtained freedom, which for the Russian people meant, for years, spiritual happiness combined with economic, political, and social difficulties.

From 1993 to 1995 Aldashin worked as a producer, scriptwriter, and film director at the Teko advertising company. Then he founded the Mishka animation studio, which coproduced with Pilot in 1997 what is still today considered his masterpiece, Rozhdestvo (‘Nativity’, 1997). The film tells the story of the birth of Jesus, taking episodes from the Gospels and mixing them together into a new narration with multiple lines. Everything begins with the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel and ends with a triumphal symphony. There are at least three different narrative lines: Gabriel urges characters (humans and animals) to act following the Scriptures; Mary and Joseph try to find a safe place for the birth; the Magi start their trip to the Holy Child. Gabriel in particular appears like a stage director, since all the lines start from his actions. But he is a very ‘human’ angel (he eats fruit, has to face landing problems, and so on). In fact, the sense of the divine supernatural is absent from every character – from Gabriel himself but also from Mary, Joseph, and the Child. They are all presented with realistic features that, by contrast, emphasize the holy nature of the people and of the happenings. It’s the author’s intentional choice, which finds its roots in Aldashin’s artistic background.248 The touch is gently ironic, and, while it is far from the usual dignified and high tone used to treat sacred matters, it never offends the

Figure 3.37  Mikhail Aldashin, Rozhdestvo, ‘Nativity’, 1997. ‘This kind of attention paid to convincing realism in small manifestations, this way to construct and to animate a character, this strive to catch true life in the net of actor’s observations turn into playfully serious devices of performing – if only through drawing – all this, of course, is a celebration of Russian school. And of one master in particular – Yuri Norstein. A teacher of Aldashin (and even an advisor of sorts on this project) and a mentor figure for the entire generation, Norstein more than anyone embodies this understanding of the very stuff of animation, and also, perhaps, the underlying spiritual thrust, which gives meaning to all the elaborate techniques.’ (Gurevich, ‘Playful Sophistication’.)

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sensibility of the believers.249 In the same way, Aldashin scored the film with pieces from Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig Van Beethoven, but their impact is everything but pompous. The visual look of Nativity recalls the world of Marc Chagall, but with the same colour unity that we find in old medieval manuscripts, in which brown and gold usually prevail. In the same period, Aldashin served as artistic supervisor to the so-called Moscow animation project (later arranged as the mixed-genre feature Optimus Mundus, without Aldashin’s participation), a collection of a few dozen extra-shorts from various directors to commemorate the 850th anniversary of the Russian capital. He also contributed to this project as director of two films, Muravey (‘Ant’, 1997) and Tsari (‘Csars’, a.k.a. ‘History of Moscow Czars’, 1997–1998, with Aleksei Demin).250 Together with Mikhail Shindel and Charles Swenson, by the end of the decade Aldashin had created and supervised an American TV series, Mike, Lu and Og (id., 1998– 1999, 53 episodes of 13 minutes each). Individual episodes were directed by Aleksandr Tatarsky and Pilot team members, among others. Mike, Lu and Og dealt with the adventures of the student Mike on a foreign island, where he meets the princess Lu and the native boy Og. Produced by Kinofilm, the series first ran on Cartoon Network between November 1999 and August 2000. In 1998–2002 Aldashin held the position of ‘(film) director-in-chief ’ at Pilot, supervising a number of works. Although engaged in long-running projects, Aldashin did not quit his authorial activity and in 2002 he released Bukashki (‘Bookashkis a.k.a. Bugs’, 2002), produced by Pilot. In a house, a colony of bugs tries to change its difficult conditions. The arrival of extra-terrestrial bugs will inspire a space escape, but the starship built with a bottle and some matches will only give them the illusion of being free. Again, as in the first movies, we find a bittersweet plot developed in a comics-like style conveying irony and a good rhythm that mixes the gags. Bugs received awards at the most important world animation festivals (Annecy, Zagreb, Espinho, and Hiroshima). In 2004, Pilot began Gora Samocvetov (‘Gem Mountain’), a large project of 52 animated films, each one taken from a traditional tale from the Russian Federation. Aldashin contributed as the director of Pro Ivana-Duraka (‘About Ivan the Fool’, 2004–2005, with Oleg Uzhinov) and Malchik S Palchik

(‘Pinkie Boy’, 2006, with Igor Volchek), and in both of them he once more explores the naïveté of folk stories by means of his typical rhythm, irony, and delicate touch. His third film for this series, Bessmertnyi (‘Immortal’, 2012), with slight stylistic references to his masterpiece ‘Nativity’, was highly praised and received the national film award Nika. In the spring of 2013 Aldashin assumed the responsibilities of artistic supervisor at Souzmultfilm, when new strategies of studio reincarnation and development were introduced. Besides his work in film, Aldashin remained active through these years as an artist, participating in numerous exhibits and never giving up this facet of his creative life.

Oksana Cherkasova The work of Oksana Cherkasova is essentially based on a deep love for her country’s culture and traditions, and especially the ones from the northeastern regions. Even at first sight, her arctic-blue eyes and soft snow-white hair seem to symbolize Siberia. Oksana Cherkasova was born on 20 August  1951 in Norilsk, a city in Northern Siberia founded in the 1930s as a detention and forced labour camp for Stalin’s opponents. In 1976, she graduated from the Sverdlovsk Architecture Institute, and in 1981 she finished a course in screenwriting and directing in Moscow. During that same year,

Figure 3.38  Oksana Cherkasova.

At the same time, the newly influential Orthodox clerics and ideologists wouldn’t exactly praise the film. ‘He experiments with multi-image split-screen, as if projected onto traditional narrative windows of Russian icon.’ (Gurevich, ‘Playful Sophistication’.) 249 250

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she began working at the Sverdlovsk film studio.251 In 1984 she collaborated in the making of Kot v kolpake (‘The Cat in the Cap’, by Aleksei Karaev), taken from a short story by Dr Seuss.252 This film is characterized by vivid colours and round figures, stylistic elements that are quite different from the subsequent works directed and animated by Cherkasova. At Sverdlovsk, she had her first and most important encounter with Chukchi culture, an indigenous population from the extreme northeast part of the Russian confederation. This culture aroused her curiosity and admiration.253 She began to study and research this people thoroughly, considering in particular the elements that characterized the Chukchi’s spiritual life, and how this spirituality intimately connected with other aspects of their life. As she has said, she transferred what she learned about that culture to many of the films she has worked on since then. The three Cherkasova films that are most inspired by the legends and mythology of these people are: Kutkh i myshi (‘Kutkh and the Mouse’, 1985), Beskrylyj gusyonok (‘The Wingless Gosling’, 1987), and Plemyannik kukushki (‘The Cuckoo’s Nephew’, 1992). ‘Kutkh and the Mouse’ explores the Chukchi cosmogony regarding the universe creation by Kutkh, a god with the appearance of a crow and a shaman’s power. The big crow Kutkh, tired of continually flying around the universe, brings the Earth up and lands on it, taking on the features of an old man. The first mice were born from Kutkh’s first footsteps on the ground. Curious, playful, and fearless, they get into Kutkh’s nostrils while the god is sleeping. The violent sneeze that follows shakes the Earth, creating mountains and valleys. Oceans were born from Kutkh’s attempts to squeeze the mice with his hands. The god’s anger inaugurates the eternal battle between fire and snow, creating the seasons. Therefore, the world was born from the interaction between the valiant Kutkh and the tiny mice. Cherkasova succeeds in telling the legend with a smooth style as well as with respect and consistency. She offers a pleasant portrait of the god (often depicted as a quick-tempered and unpredictable figure), as well as of the nice and likeable mice. The result is pleasant, thanks to a stylized

design, the use of a few, soft colours, and a soundtrack made with a narrative voice and traditional Chukchi music. All of these elements together make the short film evocative. The movie, made inside the Sverdlovsk film studio, was regarded as the best debut of Russian animation in 1985. ‘The Wingless Gosling’ is a folkloristic tale based again on Kutkh, and on a little duck without wings that gets lost and begins a journey into an afterlife world filled with strange creatures. What is really noticeable about this short is – as in her previous work – the evocative power of the whole, due to the soundtrack and the graphic technique inspired by the primitive Chukchi’s rock painting. This particular technique was created by the artist Valentin Olshvang, who succeeded in creating a special soft and luminous effect adding glycerine to the ink. ‘The Cuckoo’s Nephew’, for which Oksana Cherkasova worked in close contact with a real shaman, who transmitted the secrets of his charm and his work to her, was made in 1992. Andrey Zolotukhin made the drawings, using a wooden support to obtain the desired effect. Two other films by the Russian author, both based on legends and tradition, are outstanding: Delo proshloe (‘Let Bygones Be Bygones’, 1989) and Nyurkina banja (‘Nyra’s Bath’, 1995). Made at the Sverdlovsk film studio, ‘Let Bygones Be Bygones’ tells the story of a greedy man punished by two kikimores, feminine home spirits often characterized by a monstrous appearance and by a spiteful and evil-minded temperament. In this case, though, they are represented in an ironic way, without a disposition that might arouse fear. Nadya Kozhushanaya, friend and schoolmate of Cherkasova, wrote the script. In this case, too, the drawings, made by Valentin Olshvang, were executed on paper placed on a rough wooden table, so that the surface irregularities would be seen through. The result is a folkloristic and funny film that doesn’t lose any of the refinement and poetry that distinguish the Russian director’s work. ‘Nyra’s Bath’, the melancholic and metaphorical story of an about-to-be-married couple, and of the preparation of the young bride into the traditional steam bath (banja),

The studio was founded in 1943 by the Soviet state in Sverdlovsk, which today is Yekaterinburg. Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991), better known as Dr Seuss, was a famous American writer and illustrator of children’s books. 253 The majority of Chukchi people live in Chukotka, or Koryakia autonomous region(s) villages or in other small settlements; however many are used to a nomadic life. Their subsistence is based on stock farming, hunting, and fishing. They profess an animist religion that considers giving divine or supernatural qualities to things, places, and to the living as well. The shaman, a wise healer who devotes himself to mystic activities, is a fundamental figure. The Chukchi were hit hard by the October Revolution and its rationalistic ideology. Soviet officials undertook radical measures towards their habits and land, which led to some dramatic consequences. 251 252

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depicted in its traditional way,254 is quite different in style. There is a baennik, the traditional banja’s sprite, a little goddess who is not evil-minded but often mischievous and fond of sweets. The stroke, by Andrey Zolotukhin, is not finished on purpose and made mostly in black and white pencil. This aspect, together with the sound track, helps to give the short film a mystic and dreamlike character. The movie received several acknowledgements, including the Silver Dove at the Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animation Films and the first prize at the Zagreb film festival. Vash Pushkin (‘Yours Pushkin’, 1999) was also made with the collaboration of artist Andrey Zolotukhin, who wisely restores the Russian poet’s age through the representation of characters and places of the nineteenth century. The effect of the poet’s words scrolling on the screen is noteworthy. Finally, we have to mention Chelovek s Luny (‘The Man from the Moon’, 2002) and Skazki Starogo Pianino (‘Tales of an Old Piano’, 2006). The first is the story of a Russian scholar; the movie is in fact based on Mikluho-Maklai’s anthropological studies. The title refers to the man from the moon, symbolizing the extreme differences between the civilized world and the tribes studied by the anthropologist. ‘Tales of an Old Piano’ (which begins with a short introductory ‘real life’ section) was born as a series of ‘portraits’ of great composers, written by Irina Margolina and artdirected by Oksana Cherkasova and Vladimir Petkevich. Production stopped after only the first two episodes due to financial struggles. The first ‘portrait’ is dedicated to the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven and is directed with combined manual techniques by Belorussian Vladimir Petkevich. Cherkasova directed the second one, a much more refined film but also based on combined manual animation techniques, among them an eye-catching, fine line drawing. Oddly (or maybe not), the atmosphere is covertly disturbing and mysterious; in other words, it’s very Russian and less Vivaldian or Venetian. Behind each work by this director is a thorough study and a careful analysis, together with a great passion for

the technique and the subjects represented in the films. Her name is without a doubt linked to the Russian tradition. Her films, although quite different from one another from a stylistic point of view, have an exceptional innovative and emotional strength in common. Love for tradition makes nontraditional, poetic, ethereal film. In other words, Cherkasova has secured her place in the history of exceptional Russian talents.

Dmitry Geller255 At the Yekaterinburg studio A-Film, Dmitry Geller (b. Sverdlovsk, 1970) directed Privet iz Kislovodska (‘Regards from Kislovodsk’, 2000), which received the highest awards at national festivals. This graceful, elegiac love story shows two thin characters that live through their tango, to the music of Astor Piazzolla. Malenkaya nochnaya simfoninya (‘Little Night Symphony’, 2003) is an almost plotless film, built on feelings, associations, and citations. The main character is a cat who watches the city square life through the window. Beyondthe-window events resemble a stage play: flattened figurines draped in old-fashioned capes ceremoniously bow to each other, the passing of time is marked by set changes, and we hear some of Igor Stravinsky’s music from old recordings. ‘Little Night Symphony’ is full of hidden bows in direction of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Alfred Hitchcock, while the beautifully designed Priznaniye v lyubvi (‘Confession of Love’, 2006) is a direct homage to Buñuel. The little hero – either Buñuel in his childhood or Geller himself – lives a dull daily existence while his emotional life is saturated with frightening sensations that are, at the same time, wonderful. By the time he made this third film, Dmitry Geller was considered a very bright figure in the Russian animation landscape. His distinctive style of directing, his original treatment of sound, and the remarkable artwork of Anna Karpova (Geller’s wife and permanent coauthor) were recognized with numerous awards.

254 It’s not by chance that Cherkasova dedicated a short film to the banja. This practice is intimately connected with the Russian tradition that conceals meaningful spiritual elements in the unmistakablely practical idea of a place for relaxation and hygiene. Traditionally banja is a building separated from the houses and built with logs; inside there is a stove for producing the steam. Bathers, men and women together, alternate relaxing moments and massage with small branches of birch wood with swinging outside, where they sought thermal contrast through contact with the snow. The banja was also a place used for social purposes that were related to magic rituals of ancient beliefs and pagan traditions. In particular, as it’s represented in the short film, the banja had an important function in premarital rituals, mainly for the bride, who is described in the film as a young and shy girl. In some local traditions the groom also went to the banja together with his wife to take part in the ceremony. 255 By Maria Tereshchenko.

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In the slow and hermetic Malchik (‘The Boy’, 2008), he told the spiritual journey of a colt that eventually finds an adult to adopt him.256 In 2010, he made the children’s film Vorobey, kotoryi umel derzhat slovo (‘The Sparrow That Could Keep His Word’). In 2011 and 2012, while leading master classes with Chinese students at the Jilin Animation institute, he created the shorts Ya videl, kak myshi kota khoronili (‘I Saw Mice Burying a Cat’) and Malenky prud u podnozhiya velikoy steny (‘Little Pond by the Great Wall’; dedicated to the late Chinese animation director Te Wei). Geller aimed at making the latter film short, in the form of haiku. He cut off any excessive content and made a light and clear picture, having reached, like great Japanese poets, the point where language breaks off.

Konstantin Bronzit Born in Leningrad257 on 12 April 1965, Konstantin Eduardovich Bronzit worked as an animator at Lennauchfilm, where he made his first short Ochen malenkie tragedii (‘Very Tiny Tragedies’) for the almanac Karusel (‘The Merry-GoRound’, 1988), and then he worked for two years with the studio Panorama. In 1993, he joined the Pilot studio in Moscow, where he created Perezhevivay (‘Chew!’, 1993), Tuk-Tuk (‘Knock Knock’, 1993), and Pustyshka (‘Hollow Man’, 1994). Aleksandr Tatarsky’s influence enabled him to mature his great sense of comedy. In 1995, he graduated from the higher courses in scriptwriting and directing in Moscow, under the supervision of Fedor Khitruk. After Svichkraft (‘Switchcraft’, 1995), a brilliant comedy of the absurd that won the Grand Prize at the Annecy festival, Bronzit went to France in 1998 and worked with Folimage, where he completed his most important work: Na krayu zemli (‘At the Earth’s End’, 1999). This film explores the everyday life of an old couple who live on a mountain peak and are busy trying to find a balance for their house, which continually leans from left to right due to the weight distribution. In this film (which owes something to Charlie Chaplin and The Gold Rush), Bronzit created a set of original but naturally comic gags. ‘At the Earth’s End’ won more than 70 prizes over the course of two years and was nominated for the César, the most important annual prize in French cinema.

Bronzit’s films are the essence of the comedy. He used some recurrent elements to upset normal situations and provoke laughter. For instance in Bozhestvo (‘The God’, 2003), a fly, another recurrent element in his stories, is able to disturb the unlimited serenity of a divinity.258 This film was produced by Melnitsa animated studio, where Bronzit began to work in 2000. With this studio he also created Ubornaya Istoriya – Lyubovnaya istoriya (‘Lavatory Love Story’, 2006), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award in 2009. The director considered this film a new step: it is an emotional story told with simple black and white drawings. A lonely woman works as an attendant in a public bathroom and dreams about love. An unknown man secretly gives her some flowers, and from this point on the whole film is about the woman trying to understand who he is. The simplicity of the drawings counteract the colourful flowers, which stand out from the black and white world. In 2004 Konstantin Bronzit also directed a full-length film, called Alosha Popovich i Tugarin Zmey (‘Alosha Popovich and Tugarin Dragon’, 2004). It is a parody of Russian popular epic poems, with many comic characters like the speaking horse that helps Alosha to catch Tugarin. Totally imbued with Russian soul, it speaks about eternal values like love, bravery, and honour. In 2008, Bronzit made another parody, this time repainting a fairy tale well known everywhere: Provdivaya istorya o trech porosyatach (‘The True Story of the Three Little Pigs’, 2008).

Garri Bardin In 1991 Bardin left Soyuzmultfilm and created his own Stayer Studio, where he has worked ever since. The first film with his studio was Kot v sapogah (‘Puss in Boots’, 1995), again a tale that tells something about his country. Thanks to a careful analysis of the characters he manages to create an animated world in which a thankless man is still a thankless man even when he is dressed by wealth. In 1997, Bardin invented his best character ever: Chucha (‘Choo-Choo’), a magic nurse created by a little child on Christmas night, with old useless things, while his parents are organizing an elegant dinner. Choo-Choo comes

This film is inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s novella Kholstomer, the Story of a Horse. Now Saint Petersburg. 258 We try to avoid the excesses of political correctness, but in this case we feel obliged to point out that fun is poked at a Hindu-like divinity, thus offending about a billion people on Earth (Giannalberto Bendazzi). 256 257

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to life because of the child’s deep need to have someone who loves him, plays with him, and makes his life a special adventure – a universal childish hope.259 Another film that received a number of awards, Adazhio (‘Adagio’, 2000), was based on another special material: origami. It is a strong story. A white goose one day joins a group of grey geese. The different color is the reason why the white one ‘deserves’ to be killed. But the white goose starts living again and, in this way, becomes a god. When the crowd discovers a black goose, nothing changes: there is again a reason to kill the different one. The soundtrack is based on Albinoni’s Adagio, which gives a perfect musical comment to the painful and dramatic events in the story.260

Stanislav Sokolov The career of Stanislav Sokolov was not interrupted by the political happenings around him. In cooperation with S4C BBC Film, the Welsh branch of Channel 4, he directed the first two films of the series based on Shakespeare’s tales, Burya (‘The Tempest’) and Zimnyaya Skazka (‘The Winter Tale’), and received an Emmy Award. The most important work on the feature The Miracle Maker (2000) was equally distributed between the Welsh and the Russians: Stanislav Sokolov and Derek W. Hayes shared the director’s chair, Murray Watts wrote the script, and Elena Livanova managed the art direction. The story tells the life of Jesus Christ, from the first miracles to the resurrection, through the eyes of Tamara, a little ill girl, whose father, Jairo, mistrusts Jesus’ supernatural skills. ‘While in many animated films biblical characters are mostly depicted in their human dimension, in Hayes and

Sokolov’s film Jesus is clearly a divine character, speaking and acting different from the other ones, though living among them.’261 Sokolov continued dealing with religious topics, directing three shorts dedicated to the most popular prayers from Christians, Jews, and Muslims: Molitva ‘Otche Nash’ (‘Prayer “Our Father” ’, 2000), Al-Fatiha. Musulmanskaya Molitva (‘Alfatiha. The Muslim Prayer’, 2001), and Shma Israel. Iudejskaya Molitva (‘Shma Israel. Judaic Prayer’, 2003).

Ivan Maksimov Ivan Maksimov (b. Moscow, 19 November  1958) was a stand-alone figure in professional landscape and a colourful showy personality (one critic defined him as essentially an ‘animation character’).262 An artist-animator-director (often all in one, plus a scriptwriter) with pure aesthetic focus, he enjoyed a broad and almost cult following. He managed to develop and to persistently maintain an original graphic style and created an entire wholesome but alienated world263 inhabited by weirdly strange, but likable, species. Even the physical properties of this separate universe of his are different and self-sufficient. That might be rooted in the path he took to his profession, which was also unusual. Born to a family of academics highly-reputed in the field of physics, he couldn’t escape graduating from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and then working at the Russian Space Research Centre before studying animation directing. Officially,264 he debuted with Sleva napravo (‘From Left to Right’, 1989),265 based on a piece by Polish electronic music composer Marek Bilinˊski. The moon jumps into a mincer and splits into bizarre creatures walking, jumping,

During the following years, Bardin made Chucha 2 (‘Choo-Choo 2’, 2001) and Chucha 3 (‘Choo-Choo 3’, 2004), which are both extremely good and sensitive films too. 260 With the help of well-known music, the director often lends a humourous note to his works. In Break! the public recognizes Paco de Lucia’s Tico Tico, in Grey Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood there are Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife (the song of the anti-hero, readapted and sung by the Grey Wolf), and Edith Piaf ’s / Louis Guglielmi’s La vie en rose. Puss in Boots is a succession of famous classical music tunes: Boccherini’s Minuetto during an elegant dance (interrupted by Puss and Karabasov, who also maims the Venus de Milo), Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik during Karabasov’s false drowning, and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor when the terrible man eats people, and so on. 261 Francesco Filippi, ‘The Miracle Maker’, eMotion 4, (April–May 2003). 262 Larisa Malyukova, ‘Ivan Maksimov – An Animation Character’, Iskusstvo kino 3 (2002). 263 Or, maybe, a galaxy of multiple planets-films that he himself would call ‘small houses’, places we could glimpse into, as if through the window, to watch the life inside. 264 As a graduation work in 1987, he made Bolero, based on the classic Maurice Ravel piece. In 1992, he undertook a professional remake of it, which brought him the Gold Bear in Berlin. 265 Maksimov preferred to put credits to his films in both English and Russian, and we take the English translations of titles mostly from these credits. 259

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and crawling from left to right; at the end they mix all together and turn into a bone and . . . a dog is there waiting for his bone. His next film 5/4, based on the famous music by Brubeck and Desmond (1990, under the Pilot label), propelled him to inside-the-guild immediate and controversial fame. Full of strange half-zoomorphic creatures busy with their no less bizarre routine, on a platform-island hanging somewhere in dark space, it feels like as an exercise in pure movement and pantomime.266 This is not to say, however, that Maksimov is the poet of pure absurd. This estranged world is lively, and it does have logic, and thus a meaning, even if it is not that obvious and easygoing; not surprisingly, it provoked extreme interpretations – from Freudian to Zen Buddhist.267 Maksimov’s ‘monstrosity’ is soft-taken and gentle, and often quite funny. Characteristically, he does not need any dialog, even in gibberish; everything would be expressed through visuals, always accompanied with a precisely chosen soundtrack. After those early music etudes, he turned to Provintsial’­ naya shkola (‘The Provincial School’, 1992), a rough phantasmagoria of school-day routines and mores. Libido Bendzhamina (‘Benjamin’s Libido’, 1994) is a satire on psychoanalysis, albeit still in a trademark distilled and seemingly detached style. Niti (‘The Strings’, 1996) gives a hint of Miró imagery and presents almost a clear-cut romantic story, if only with ‘android’-like characters. Medlennoe bistro (‘Slow Bistro’, 2002) was another ‘realistic’ sketch – about the hurdles of waiting to being served, full of arrogantly funny gags. Among other films that followed, Tunnelirovanie (‘Tonnelage’, 2005), is important to note. It’s an extravagant yet transparent parable on incarceration, modes of behaviour, and ways to escape. A bright and fresh Maksimov appeared in the cycle that started with Veter vdol berega (‘Wind along the Coast’, 2003) and continued with Potop (‘The Spate’, 2004), Dozhd sverkhu vniz (‘Rain Down from Above’, 2007), and Prilivy tuda-syuda

(‘Tides To and From’, 2010). Here his ever-present and weird bestiary meets the elements: wind and water, sea and land. The design becomes more and more akin to Chinese or Japanese prints; micro-gags and funny details abound, but what dominates is the general tone of lyricism. Such lyricism returns, not without moral overtones, in Dlinnyi most v nuzhnuyu storonu (‘Long Bridge of Desired Direction’, 2012).

Aleksei Demin268 Aleksei Demin (b. Moscow, 20 March 1956) began his animation career working as an engineer. In fact, he studied at MADI269 and then worked at TsNIIMASh.270 During these years he met Irma Pavlova, a well-known designer, who helped him find work in the publishing field. From 1983 he worked at the Pushkin Institute271 as editor-in-chief and then as the computer lab’s designer. His first extrashort film, 5-ya noga (‘The 5th Leg’, 1992) was part of the series Chudaki (‘The Cranks’) at Christmas Films. In 1992 he graduated from the higher courses in scriptwriting and directing in Moscow, studying under Khitruk and Nazarov. Eventually, in 1995, he made a serious debut with Attraktsion (‘The Attraction’); in 1997 and in 2001 he worked at the Atelier for animated cinema in Annecy, France. Working in animation suited him much better than engineering, because Demin was one of the most poetic men in contemporary Russian animation. His last films were made with watercolour that gave them a distinctive handmade style. His drawings seem to live their own lives; they breathe and vibrate, giving the audience a feeling that is romantic and ironic at the same time. Koshka pod dozhdem (‘Cats Under the Rain’, 2001) was his most famous film; it is about a group of cats and a ducky fisherwoman. It was inspired by the children’s song by Sofya Abramova Milkina272 that was performed by her

266 Due to music copyright issues that no one bothered to clear until now, the film was not distributed in any commercial form though it was widely known through festival circles, professional screenings, and the like. 267 ‘He first made accessible for the screen the philosophy of the neutralism and reciprocity of all things, ataraxy and emotional reserve. [. . .] He introduced into national animation modern aesthetics of absurd and Freudianism, kinetism and philosophic parable, combining elitist exquisiteness and most wide democratism of visual form.’ (Aleksey Orlov, ‘Ivan Maksimov and “Maksimov Phenomenon” in national animation’. www.animator.ru/articles/article.phtml?id=313). See also the collection of essays and interviews by other authors in Aleksandra Vasilkova, World of Films of Ivan Maksimov, Moscow, State Institute of Art Studies Publication, 2011. 268 By Dina Goder. 269 MADI is the Moscow Institute of Automobiles and Roads State Technical University. 270 TsNIIMASh is the Central Research Institute of Machine Building. 271 The state Russian language institute in Moscow. 272 Violinist and later film director (1922–1997).

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husband, Mikhail Shveytser.273 Probably Demin defined his style once and for all during this film. He was mostly influenced by Shveytser’s stories about his dead wife. Indeed, he developed his tender mood at this time and used the same mood in his next works: Tikhaya Istoriya (‘A Calm Story’, 2003) and Buatel (‘Boitelle’, 2006). The former is a beautiful and touching film about the relationship between a bear cub and his mother. The young animal does not understand maternal advice because it craves to learn everything about the world around him. The latter is sadder. It was inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s short story of the same title. People thought that it would become a satirical story, but Demin’s film was about the soldier’s sad and thwarted love for a black woman he will never forget. Ochumelov (id., 2009), was another adaptation. It was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘The Chameleon’. In this occasion, Demin created a unique work of art composed of three elements. First, drawings were made with watercolour by the film’s director; second, the soundtrack came from Igor Ilinsky’s recordings; and finally the animation was unexpected – every character is like a press clipping and lives over his own piece of paper. The effect is strange but interesting because of its innovation and because it showed Demin’s continuous interest in doing something new.

A Trio In 1988, at Soyuzmultfilm, a trio of friends and coworkers made the joint film Medvezhut (‘Bear-Night-Mare’), in which three individually directed plotlines were intertwoven in freshly ironic, absurdist humour, with deliberately rough stylistics. This film had almost a cult following for years and put their names solidly on the map. One of them, Vasiliy Kafanov (b. 1952), made one more brave piece (Vitamin rosta, ‘Vitamin of Growth’, 1988, on the unconventional children’s poetry of Oleg Grigoryev), then in 1990 emigrated to the US where he continued working as an occasional music clip maker. The second, Aleksey Shelamnov (1955–2011), turned to the writings of Daniil Kharms, an avant-gardist of the 1920s and 1930s, in Puteshestviye (‘The Journey’, 1989), a dark yet deeply lyrical piece in exquisitely sketchy style. Before his premature death, he made the bright Pugovka

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(‘Little Button’, 2010), a variation on an old-time song about evil foreign spies and child heroes, with a unique air of sharp parody and gentle nostalgia. The third, Aleksey Turkus (b. 1955), undertook another Kharms adaptation: Sluchai (‘Incidents’, 1990) – an intelligent and rather radical exercise in collage exploration of Soviet symbols, grand-style architecture, and the spirit of time. Later he was involved in a number of quality conventional productions, but in 2004 he amazed festival audiences with Burevestnik (‘Stormy Petrel’), in which a classroom reading of Maksim Gorky’s classic poem ignites an extremely funny and brilliantly inventive ironic phantasmagoria. In 2012 he triumphed at the national festival in Suzdal with his Zasnezhennyj vsadnik (‘Snow-covered Horseman’, 2011), a sincere and gentle homage to his own father, a prominent architect and professor.

In Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg appeared to be the foremost playground for avant-garde animation, with video art and other outof-cinema forms and formats. Irina Yevteyeva (b. 1956) has a PhD in film studies. She is a professor, researcher, author of scholarly writings – and an independent animator/director. Her first film Loshad, skripka . . . i nemnogo nervno (‘Horse, Violin . . . and a Little Nervous’, 1991), on and about early Mayakovsky poetry, is an unabashed exercise in collage employing drastically different textures. For her next film, Eliksir (‘Elixir’, 1995), made in a more restrained mode with a variety of pixilation striving to transform live actors into a painterly imagery, Yevteyeva chose E. T. A. Hoffmann motifs. Another exercise in painterly transformation of live footage, Klown (‘The Clown’, 2002) is an elegant metaphoric ‘portrait’ of remarkable mime-actor Slava Polunin in performance. Yevteyeva received the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for this film. Then she undertook Petersburg (2003), exploring possibilities in the montage of archive materials representing the great city through its visual mythology. A study in the interbreeding of poetry and fine arts, Demon (2004) is based on a poem by Lermontov and paintings by Vrubel. In the director’s own words, ‘what is of essential importance for me, as an artistanimator, is to work with drawn cinema which is rooted in real image and in interpretation through painting.’274

Mikhail Shveytser (1920–2000) was an outstanding Soviet live-action film director. http://www.inoekino.ru/prod.php?id=6203.

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Wife-and-husband team Olga and Aleksandr Florensky (both born 1960), artists who belong to the punkish group Mitki (founded in 1985), undertook some influential animation projects. Rasskaz o chude iz chudes (‘Story of Miracle of Miracles’, 1994), was a highly, albeit gently, ironic take on the Left-Handed Man story. Trofeynye filmy (‘Trophy Films’, 2003), a collection of five two-minute subjects in mix media-technique, was openly sarcastic.

In Yekaterinburg At A Studio, Aleksei Karaev added to his works from the 1980s yet another touching and funny subject in painterly style, Ya vas slyshu (‘I Hear You’, 1992), and also Tarantella (id., 2008), an adaptation of Maksim Gorky’s Tales of Italy. In addition, Sergey Ainutdinov continued his grotesque exploration of the current condition (Autism, 1992; Ainutdism, 1995; and Zapiski animatora, ‘Animator’s Notes’, 2001). Designers-turned-directors also produced interesting work. Valentin Olshvang (b. 1961) debuted with Rozovaya Kukla (‘Pink Doll’, 1997). Built upon a little girl’s fears and jealousy towards her mother’s love life, the film presents an unusually hard eye on the realm of childhood. He contributed to the Optimus Mundus project with the gentle and elegant sketch Tea House (1998), and he later made two important personal pieces: Pro rakov (‘About Crawfish’, 2003), based on a local gothic-like legend of a fatal romance between a village girl and a dragon-serpent, and So vechora dozhdik (‘Spatter of Rain from the Evening On’, 2009), an unhappy relations story with folk roots about a little mermaid and an old man. Both films are marked by unfailing artistic taste and insightful narrative tone. Andrey Zolotukhin (b. 1966) directed Babushka (‘Grandma’, 1996), a pointed and loving etude alternating wistfulness and buffoonery in tone. He showed quite a different aesthetic tilt in the subtle painterly miniature Two Angels (1998), and yet another facet of his artistry in John Henry the Steel Driving Man (2001, made for Animated Tales of the World, distributed by HBO), a full-blown rotoscope painting, impressive in its sheer energy and rhythm. For the latter he received an Emmy award for outstanding animation.275

More About It 1 Dreams of Piotr Dumała276 ‘My film is a kind of dream. As if one had read Crime and Punishment and then dreamt about it,’ said Piotr Dumała in an interview.277 I think this statement holds the key to the whole work of this artist. In Dumała’s book, The Game of Razors,278 there is a striking number of stories that either have ‘dream’ in the title or relate to someone’s dreams: ‘From the Collection of Dreams’, ‘From the Portfolio of a Dream Salesman’, ‘Dreams. A Tale from Fernhead Road’. Even the texts that don’t refer to dreams explicitly are dreamlike. The surrealists also referenced the mechanisms governing the fantasy of dreams. But there is a fundamental difference between them and Dumała: the surrealists never referred to their works as dreams. For Dumała, however, cinema and literature are extensions of dreams, conscious dreaming. From Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's Narcotics: In a dream, when a glass falls off the table as a result of an inadvertent bump, it is inexplicably strange and mysterious, because it symbolizes an essence not readily apparent in the event itself. It suggests a wish of the dreamer to unwittingly kill someone, upon whose death he is counting on (and who is fragile like glass, perhaps in sickness or age). No one would consciously admit to such a wish, but when it appears in associated thoughts then it exists regardless of the stated intention.279 In Dumała’s world, glass breaking often seems to embody the same symbolic essence. In The Gentle Woman, a bursting wine glass is associated with a scene in which the heroine, in her imagination, pulls out a revolver to kill her husband. A  similar association appears in Crime and Punishment, in which a breaking glass of borsch precedes the murder of an usurer, a woman old and brittle. A dish breaking like a firework into many tiny, triangular fragments appears in the finale of Franz Kafka and is associated with the transformation of the protagonist into a dog. Dumała, with great virtuosity, exploits the inherent capacities of his medium to achieve the delirious atmosphere of the story being told. In dreams and animation, fantasy is natural, indisputable. On top of that, Dumała developed his own, exceptionally suggestive visual language. Transformations occur almost tangibly, realistically, and we have no reservations that they are only the projections of characters’ inner states.

Giannalberto Bendazzi is happy to acknowledge Irina Margolina, Natalya Lozinskaya, Alice Dugoni, Lara Ermacora, Clarissa Filippini, Alberto Rigoni, and Anna Catella for their contributions to this chapter. 276 By Marcin Gizycki, translated by Jack Lenk. 277 Katarzyna Bielas, W strone˛ Petersburga (‘Toward St. Petersburg’), Gazeta Wyborcza (29 August 1997), p. 22. 278 Piotr Dumała, Gra w z˙yletki (‘The Game of Razors’), Wydawnictwo Male, Warsaw, 2000. 279 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘Niemyte dusze’, in Dzieła wybrane, I, p. 792. 275

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Metamorphosis is the subject of Dumała’s first film, Lycan­ thropy, a tale of werewolves, or people who transform into beasts – or who, as it turns out, only don wolf skins. Hence another important motif shows up in the film: the exchanging of roles. In Little Black Riding Hood, the wolf predictably tries to be the grandmother; less predictably, Little Black Riding Hood is a sadist. In The Gentle Woman, almost everything transforms. A table changes shape numerous times, eventually becoming a bed, clock faces become a marketplace, and the heroine briefly takes on the form of the woman from Munch’s painting Scream. In Freedom of the Leg, a sleeping man’s body undergoes disintegration. His detached leg becomes a bird and flies off to the sky. In Franz Kafka, apart from the dog transformation, there is also an insect transformation, clearly drawn from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Finally, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s face transforms into the face of a rapacious cat, like Jekyll into Hyde. Dumała is also an innovator in the field of animation technique, more specifically an explorer of new materials: animation on plaster boards. In painting and repainting, scraping and wiping over the same painting, the artist achieves beautiful, soft transitions between sequences with a surprisingly rich texture, reminiscent of a painter’s canvas. Dumała came up with the technique thanks to experiments carried out as a student in the conservation department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he specialized in stone conservation. The first ‘plaster’ film was the third in Dumała’s body of work, Flying Hairs. It is a poetic and enigmatic tale about a ‘rain’ of real hair, which wreaks havoc but leaves a pair of lovers unscathed. Even in this first work, it was clear that this technique was seemingly crafted specifically for stories that unfold in dark tonalities (the film is black-and-white). It wasn’t until the two Dostoyevsky adaptations, The Gentle Woman and Crime and Punishment, that the full potential of plaster boards was exhibited. Today it’s hard to imagine these works realized by any other means. The density of drawing and texture, as well as the incredible fluidity of animation achieved by the continuous transformation of one initial image, instead of its replacement by successive images as in classical cartoons, can be equalled only by the effect achieved by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker in their use of the pinscreen. The technique proved especially suitable to the extraction, from the character’s souls, of giant spiders and other nightmares. That same type of dark, monochromatic vision of a Freudian descent can also be found in Walls. This film is – on the surface – a study of claustrophobia. A Tiny Man is locked in a small space, a box, observed through a peephole by a Giant Man. The behaviour of the captive changes, progressing from fear through revolt to a state of hallucination and apathy. Then the observer drops a coin into the box, as if into a piggybank. Dumała’s lighter films include Little Black Riding Hood, Nerwowe z˙ycie kosmosu, and a television miniseries. The artist reveals

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himself in these works as a talented satirist-cartoonist, although one can detect his predilection for unearthing dark layers of the human soul. Little Black Riding Hood combines a dark version of the fable with an extremely simple, almost childish, drawing style. That contrast constitutes the essence of the film and is its primary source of humour. ‘I don’t know what lies ahead, I don’t know what else I could do. Perhaps here ends my autotherapy. The opportunity is ending for me to exploit animated film as a medium’, said Dumała while working on Crime and Punishment.280 Does that mean also the end of his beautiful dreams?

Piotr Dumała’s Franz Kafka – The Realism of Animation281 From the darkness emerges the barely lit, grey face of a man. Actually it’s just a small, narrow rectangle of eyes drawn on a plaster board between the black and the white. Yet in this onedimensional drawing we instantly perceive a depth of gaze. The eyes come alive in an unusual way for animation, through a shimmering flicker of light on the pupils, reflected from some faint lamp nearby. The camera retreats and for a moment we are able to contemplate the silhouette of a head and torso held in the frame, reading in these shapes an impression of one of the most popular photographs of Franz Kafka – a portrait of a nearly forty-year-old man with dark hair, dark eyes, and an extremely slender and pale face. Before the first shot of Piotr Dumała’s film about Franz Kafka, the name of the director appears. Whether by chance or by design we register these separate elements as a whole. Dumała’s film about Kafka is indeed also (always? only?) about Dumała himself: the consciousness, sensitivity, and the whole microcosm of one artist contained in the vision of another. The film’s fabric is reminiscent, paradoxically, of photography – its material being equally difficult to grasp, and each detail referencing a very concrete reality. It is often said that black-and-white photography is in some sense more ‘realistic’. It concentrates our attention not on external colours but on the depth of the image, the contrast, and play of shadows. With its density and texture, it illuminates the raw subjects it reflects. The black-and-white animation of Dumała also focuses on the ‘pure’ matter of reality: on the sunlit, shimmering surface of a river, on the narrow cone of light from a streetlamp surrounded by a buzzing swarm of insects, on the strange efficiency of a millipede traversing a doorknob by the beam of a flashlight, on the clamour of a stairwell, and on a teacup slowly being filled with milk. Using mostly wide shots, Dumała brings forth the sensuality of things, showing objects in their obviousness and hyperreality. Surrounding the writer with these details from daily life, the

Katarzyna Bielas, ‘W strone˛ Petersburga’, p. 22. By Barbara Kosecka, translated by Jack Lenk. ‘Kwartalnik Filmowy’ 19–20/1997, Warsaw.

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filmmaker seeks to grasp his inner character through the fantastic absurdity of the outside world. Beginning with the first scene, we see the eyes of the protagonist very often throughout the film. Kafka looks at the teacup being filled by his mother, he observes an insect, glances through a window, looks at a clock and paintings on the wall, and he examines himself in a mirror. The world shown in the film is Kafka’s world, as seen by him. His perspective is the central guide through the film; it is through his eyes that we observe the strange reality, suspended in its functionality, imploring with its most enigmatic details. It is difficult to ‘bring forth the sensuality of things’ only through drawing. Franz Kafka tries to shatter the barriers of twodimensionality and conventionality, breaking the ties that bind the tradition of animation. The striking depth-of-field effect is still revolutionary in animation, giving this film a deceptively strong sense of perspective. Similar to optics in the human eye (and camera lenses), the degree of focus changes with the distance of the subject from the camera (both ‘subject’ and ‘distance’ from other objects are effects of the illusion of perspective). Obstructing the frame are wind-swayed tree limbs, completely blurred, then further we see, though not yet clearly, arches of a bridge over the Vltava, until finally the sunlit waves of the river achieve clarity of lens focus. The scenery of apartments, rooms, and stairwells is also built out in space. In accordance with camera movements, the spatial layers change focus and relative position. In order to add to the subtlety of the rendered world, the director varies the density of blacks and introduces the play of blots (especially in ‘urban’ scenes). This is also a move that brings Dumała’s technique a step closer to photography. It is his drawing and animation that are most awe-inspiring. The characters move with an elastic fluidity that is hard to describe; their mimicry has a melancholy peacefulness quite different from a Disneyesque choreography of movement. The moving images are so evocative that even in a still face we can feel a pulsating life force. This expressiveness is enhanced by the assertive sound. The soundtrack of animated films, corresponding to the inventiveness of the visuals, will often utilize transformed and distorted sounds. Here, all of the sounds are particularly realistic, although rather than registering them subconsciously as a natural part of the world we perceive them as a strong counterpoint which expands the dimensionality of the film. Mostly, it is difficult to ascribe to the film scenes a concrete literary match (save for the brief images of the insect in bed, referencing Metamorphosis, but its context in the film comes from the director). They are the sum of certain ideas about Kafka, a function of literary fantasy and the concreteness of film. The artist’s effort is not only directed toward the expression of inner space, where the sensibilities of the writer and filmmaker overlap. The deepest structure of the film reveals a need for the ‘grasp of a deeper, more essential reality contained in things or people’, in this case through the laden physicality of the world – the reality of a certain concrete human loss.

It is difficult to discern a logical relation among the sequence of scenes. Seemingly random images emerge from the darkness that don’t relate in their ‘external resonance’ to previous ones, nor do they signal any connection to the following ones. From these images comes a tale, all the clearer to viewers familiar with the phenomenon of Franz Kafka. This drama is, among other things, the drama of responsibility, of growing up, and of avoiding maturity – which also means avoiding routine life. Kafka, while entrenched in the rhythms of family, home, and city, is also completely detached. We see him at dinner, sitting across the table from his father, but his attention and his actions are focused neither on eating nor on interaction with any other person. Kafka peers under the table to observe his father’s legs, then with a strange satisfaction he contemplates a fly running around the table, and so on. Not participating in daily events, resigned to a faulty routine of estrangement from life, Kafka loses himself in his observations. Thus the chronology of ongoing life holds no meaning for him – reality exists in individual, passing glimpses, somewhere between the common and the unreal. In his isolation the protagonist is both sensitive and defenceless. The whole empire of his mind, poured into a dishevelled stack of papers, could blow into dust if only the father forcefully opens the door. Kafka’s reactions are often an escape into fantasies that transfigure him into animals. In an amazing moment, we see the young hero exploring his house with a flashlight. The beam of light falls on an insect, defenceless and naked like the subject of an observation but also fascinating and mysterious in its countless movements and and in the flow of its fast legs. Suddenly, in a visually surprising image, we see Kafka himself in the aura of light in a peculiar exchange of perspectives. The thread weaving the scenes in the film together is flimsy and hard to grasp, and the substance of the images is often mysterious. The film’s grey darkness, from which people, buildings, and objects barely emerge to catch a glint of pale light, emphasizes the imagery’s ambiguity. The light source is a bit too weak and muted to fully illuminate the scenery. It is mostly diffused and undecided. On the evening streets of Prague, where the moon’s light shines brighter than the dim lanterns, and more so in the gas-lit apartments, there is enough darkness to hide the entire cosmos of one’s fantasies, dreams, and fears. Their ultimate sense will always be difficult to grasp, escaping our imagination like the hero of the film ‘escaping’ from humanity and from the ‘questions’ posed for him. He cleverly upends the obviousness of the situation to which he is ascribed by the dining table, the progression of dishes, clanking of utensils, ceaselessly ticking clock, and unexpected guests. He aimlessly tosses a plate in the air so he can spin it on his finger, then puts it away and floats away from the table, transfiguring himself as a dog. When he exits the frame, we see the plate he disturbed, falling for an exceptionally long time like the infinity of human life, and at the end we finally hear the disturbing sound of the dish breaking, multiplied by its echo. Kafka, whose attentive eyes follow, along with the viewer, the subsequent metamorphoses

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of his surrounding reality, and who was the guide to this tale, hands over its meaning to us. Any person who collapses into the centre of their own existence cannot objectively describe it from their position – they can only show us what they see. In this ‘helplessness’ the director identifies with the protagonist. Dumała’s film seems to have been ‘written’ by Kafka’s hand, unsure of the absolute shape of things, rather than the author participating with him in endless metamorphoses of the world. It is difficult to distinguish artistic interpretation from that which belongs strictly to the writer’s imagination. Thus understanding this film cannot be limited to biographical or literary references. It is a story about Kafka, as well as Kafka’s own story about the world.

More About It 2 About his technique, Jerzy Kucia writes: ‘I use a somewhat different technique for every film. I  fit it to the film’s needs, be it drama, language, movement, etc. I also always try to find the simplest technical solution available, but my films often end up being difficult and time-consuming. The effects on the screen are what are important to me, and not how they come about. ‘The dramaturgy of my films requires believable situations; they cannot have a drawing, painting or sculpture in the foreground. Awareness of technique disrupts the viewer’s engagement in the action, and stifles the emotional response. For this reason, I try to make the technique used in the creation of the film unrecognisable to the viewer, and subordinate it to the narrative.

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‘In my animation I have used painting and drawing on paper, celluloid and glass. I have used various cut-out techniques, light animation, and even lasers for creating special visual effects. I have used computer animation very little, though the computer is very helpful in the realisation process, e.g. during editing, animation tests, etc. The computer interests me more as a medium than as a technique. ‘Some of my films use very simple techniques. Reflections was drawn on paper and celluloid. The camera was hung in a single position while the photos were taken. The various decorations and elements were lit with a constant upper and back (lower) light. In most of my films, however, I  have applied mixed and often difficult techniques. For Parade I mixed drawing on celluloid with documentary film material. I  selected certain frames from that material, setting them in loops and cycles, submitting them to repeated photographing with the use of laser light. Colour was introduced in forthcoming exposures in masks and reverse-masks. ‘The photographing stage plays a vital role in the creation process. I often apply multiple-depth or multiple exposures. In Tuning the Instruments, some fragments had over a dozen exposures on a single frame of film. All the visual material was manually done on celluloid and paper (around 15,000 drawings and many decorations), but the final visual effect was achieved in bringing them together via photography. The photographing stage was precisely mapped out, and not improvised. ‘I usually start the work on the audio layer at the film’s concept stage. The dramaturgical, narrative function of the sound is worked out in the script and the screenplay. Then I begin working with the composer. Often, some fragments of music are recorded before the realisation of the animation and photography.’282

From Jerzy Kucia’s typewritten pages, undated, provided to Giannalberto Bendazzi by the artist.

4

ASIA

Japan, Asiatic Giant1 From the 1990s on, Japanese animation gave a greater role to the computer. In 1993, the software RETAS (Revolutionary Total Animation System) was introduced by the Japanese company Celsys. It would become one of the most used programmes in TV series. The programme led to cost reductions, for instance by sending cels digitally from a central house to associated studios. From the second half of the 1990s, RETAS was used increasingly to add new effects, integrated with traditional animation. On 20 March 1995, members of the religious sect Aum Shinrikyo (‘Supreme Truth’) sprayed sarin nerve gas in various points in the Tokyo underground, killing thirteen people and injuring hundreds. A  part of Aum had produced animation and manga, focusing on its founder Asahara Shoko, for the children of the members. An example was Choetsu sekai (‘Transcendental World’), which imitated the style of mainstream anime. The sect also incorporated story elements from popular anime series into Aum’s practices and themes, particularly apocalyptic elements. (Aum was often referred to, especially by the media, as ‘the sect of the otaku’.) These events struck the collective imagination of the Japanese, who almost had the impression that the

nightmares often shown in animation had come to pass. They were re-elaborated in the following years, even in animation itself.

A Lost Decade? What in the economic world was soon dubbed Japan’s ‘lost decade’ was not so in the field of animation. True, animation was affected by the economic crisis, which strongly hit advertising, so vital for TV anime. The studios adopted different strategies during the recession. Tôei focused on anime taken from successful manga. Tatsunoko produced short TV series. Cross-media synergies were pursued more intensely: while a project was being developed, all possible secondary ways in which it could be exploited were planned. In particular, there were new alliances between animation studios and groups making video games.2 Tokyo Movie Shinsha collaborated with Sega Entertainment, while Sunrise was acquired by Bandai in 1994. This led to ‘media-mix’3 projects. An idea that originated as a manga was quickly adapted to other media, developing into a complex multimedia project. Alternatively, characters and plots that originated in video games could be transposed into animated series or films. Street

By Marco Pellitteri and Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato. In 1983 Nintendo introduced the Famicom console. In the new decade, the number of domestic consoles rose, using graphics reminiscent of manga. 3 Cultural anthropologist Ito Mizuko wrote: ‘Electronic gaming in Japan needs to be understood as one component of a broader media ecology that includes anime, manga, trading card games, toys and character merchandise. I borrow the native industry term “media mix” to describe this linked character-based media. Although each media platform has particular emphases, Japan has a more integrated and synergistic relationship between different media types than you tend to see in the case of U.S. children’s culture. [. . .] The close ties between manga, animation, and gaming are one distinctive element of the Japanese media mix.’ (Ito Mizuko, ‘The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix’, paper prepared for the workshop and conference on Girls ’n’ Games, 8–9 May 2006, University of California, Los Angeles, Itofisher.com/mito/ito.girlsgames.pdf.) 1 2

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Fighter II, which began as an arcade game in 1991, was turned into an anime film in 1994 (Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie) and a TV series in 1995, both directed by Sugii Gisaburo. An example of a TV series based on a popular manga was the comedy Ranma nibun no ichi (Ranma ½), based on the manga by Takahashi Rumiko. Beginning in 1989, the series features a strange group of characters, many of whom – thanks to falling in a magic pond – have the unasked-for power to transform. Ranma ½ mixes humour, martial fighting, everyday life and school, and the relationship between the male protagonist Ranma, the girl Akane (an arranged couple), and their chaotic families. (Ranma himself transforms into a girl when he’s splashed with water.) The anime was produced by Studio Deen and Kitty Film.4 But the phenomenon of these years was Bishojo senshi Sailor Moon (‘Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon’) by Tôei Animation, whose first series was made in 1992. A group of girls discover they are gifted with magical powers. This was already an established anime plot (underpinning the so-called ‘magic girl’, or maho shojo, sub-genre).5 However, Sailor Moon made deft use of comedy, mysticism, and sentimentality, based on a manga by Takeuchi Naoko. The project was a great success in merchandising and the girl-warrior heroine Tsukino Usagi became a veritable Japanese pop icon. Sailor Moon boosted anime production, particularly titles aimed at females. (Around this time, women came to the forefront in Japanese society and politics.)6 In general, few anime TV series could be said to be quality productions. The video market was better, offering several interesting titles. Macross Plus was one example, a sci-fi story that mixed action adventure with romantic drama, set in the universe of the 1982 series Superdimensional

Fortress Macross. Directed by Kawamori Shoji and Watanabe Shinichiro, Macross Plus boasted cinematic techniques and allure.

Studio Ghibli In 1984 Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao shared a desire to make quality feature films for people of all ages. They first formed a partnership to run their works and copyrights, calling it Nibariki (‘two-horse power’). Then, because they needed a production company, they founded Studio Ghibli.7 Since 1985 the studio has produced all of Miyazaki and Takahata’s works as directors, starting with Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Eventually, Ghibli became a trademark for quality animation. Suzuki Toshio (b. Nagoya, 19 August  1948), former editor of the animation magazine Animage, became Studio Ghibli’s president. Tokuma Shoten, the publisher of Animage, provided financial support; Tokuma Yasuyoshi became chairman of both companies. The studio was initially based in a rented flat in Kijiojii, a suburb of Tokyo. In 1988 it released two features as a double bill: Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro. The latter became one of the greatest merchandising successes in Japanese cinema (although the stuffed toys were produced two years after the film). By the time of their first really big hit, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Miyazaki, Takahata, and Studio Ghibli had adopted a policy that set it apart from other companies. Suzuki (who also acted as the chief producer at Ghibli), Miyazaki, and Takahata started to hire staff members on a permanent basis, offering them good salaries and opportunities to build in-house careers.

Studio Deen was founded in 1975 by some colourists from Sunrise. The two studios maintained work connections. The name is a reference to their first work with Sunrise, Yusha Raidiin (‘Brave Raideen’, 1975). Kitty Films was a subsidiary of Polydor and Universal Music, established in 1972 as Kitty Music Corporation. It is famous for its involvement in turning Takahashi’s manga into anime: Urusei yatsura (1981–1986), Maison Ikkoku (1986–1988), and Ranma ½ (1989–1992). 5 Much later, the ‘magic girl’ template was thoroughly subverted in an exceptional 2011 anime TV serial called Maho shojo Madoka Magica, known abroad as Puella Magi Madoka Magica. A dark fantasy aimed at older viewers, the story has magically-powered girls realizing they have signed a ghastly Faustian pact. As well as a heart-rending plot, the series features fabulously surreal scenery and handmade meanies reminiscent of Yellow Submarine and East European animation. It was made by the SHAFT studio. 6 In 1989 Doi Takako, then secretary of the Socialist party, was able to mobilize the female electorate, thus doubling the Socialist results at the July election for the renewal of half of the House of Councillors, and succeeding in having 22 women elected. There were also more women than men enrolled in universities in 1989. 7 Ghibli is an Italian word, the name of a hot Sahara wind. The airplane Caproni Ca.309 ‘Ghibli’ (one of Miyazaki’s favourites) was developed by the Italian Caproni Aeronautica Bergamasca in the second half of the 1930s. As the Japanese didn’t know what the correct pronunciation was, they used characters that sound ‘Zhee-blee’ instead of ‘Ghee-blee’. Studio Ghibli was meant to blow as a warm wind over Japanese animation and take it into a new era. 4

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The revenues from Takahata’s 1991 feature Only Yesterday helped achieve another goal: to provide a new, suitable, and comfortable working environment. The new headquarters were built in Koganei, a western suburb of Tokyo. Staff moved there just after the release of another film, Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992). Miyazaki developed the blueprint and chose the materials for the building, which contained areas for work, meeting places, and relaxation areas. (The roof garden was designed by Miyazaki’s son Goro, a landscape architect.) The first project not directed by either of Ghibli’s founders was the 1993 TV film Umi ga kikoeru (‘I Can Hear the Ocean’) by Mochizuki Tomomi (b. Hokkaido, 31 December 1958).8 Studio Ghibli also produced television commercials and music videos, most famously On Your Mark, directed in 1995 by Miyazaki to a song by the duo Chage and Aska. Kondo Yoshifumi’s Mimi o sumaseba (‘Whisper of the Heart’, 1995) was outstanding. Kondo (Gosen, Niigata prefecture, 31 March 1950–Tokyo, 21 January 1998) was a longtime collaborator with Miyazaki and Takahata in the roles of key animator, character designer, and director of animation. He was the most likely heir of the two giants, but he died in 1998 aged 57. Inspired by a manga by Hirragi Aoi, Whisper of the Heart is a sensitive portrayal of suburban youth. Gently portraying a young girl’s life, it has Ghibli’s typical blend of realism, emotional transfiguration, and fantasy in art and storytelling. Neko no ongaeshi (‘The Cat Returns’, 2002), directed by Morita Hiroyuki (b. Fukuoka, 26 June 1964), was a more fantastical story with links to Whisper of the Heart. The first feature by Miyazaki Goro (b. Tokyo, 21 January  1967), Gedo senki (‘Tales from Earthsea’), came out in 2006. Studio Ghibli’s films were distributed in Japan by major companies such as Toho and Tôei. In 1996 the publishing company Tokuma Shoten signed a deal with the Walt Disney Company9 for worldwide distribution. Disney also got the rights to release the studio’s back catalogue on home video. After the agreement was signed, Ghibli pursued a severe ‘no cuts’ policy to protect its works from any changes that might make them more marketable in the West. In October 2001, the Ghibli Museum opened in a park in Mitaka, a Tokyo suburb. It was built with respect to the environment and designed as if it were a Ghibli film, with

the same choice of colours and décor. The museum shows visitors, step-by-step, the work of an animator – illustrating the process of filmmaking through drawings, watercolour sketches, installations, and objects. A screening room shaped like a subway car projects short films produced expressly for the museum. On 1 February 2008, Suzuki Toshio stepped down from the position of Studio Ghibli president and was replaced by Hoshino Koji, former president of Walt Disney Japan.

Takahata Isao Takahata Isao was always a director and never a draughtsman and animator like Miyazaki. His approach to filmmaking resembles that of a live-action director, leading and catalyzing a talented crew. He writes a screenplay, draws preliminary sketches for the storyboard, and develops the mise-en-scène and direction. In other words, he organizes rhythms, pauses, music, and pictures. Even if his works appear unlike each other visually, their form and content make his aesthetics clear. Takahata’s project to recreate reality through animation goes together with Miyazaki’s fantastical realism. (He and Miyazaki often split their roles on each other’s films, one producing and the other directing.) Moving close to live-action techniques, Takahata highlights the fact that animation has more virtues than photography. Animated pictures not only capture actual things but also reflect a more solid reality. Only drawings can show how beautiful the things around us can be. A cultivated man, Takahata has maintained a strong Japanese identity in expressing universal values. His films contain a deep analysis of human nature, exploring emotional and psychological issues within individual and social relationships. He has focused on the tragedy of war, on the worries of self-realization, on men damaging the ecosystem, and on the daily misadventures of family life. The psychologist and animation scholar Yokota Masao describes the psychological and pedagogical aspects within Takahata’s work. From the beginning, Takahata has directed animations that include representation of mental problems.

His Ranma ½ anime (season 1, 1989) made him famous. Prior to Disney’s deal with Ghibli, there was an unsatisfactory American version of Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (retitled Warriors of the Wind with various cuts and changes). 8 9

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After directing TV series and feature animations for children, he began to worry about young people who devoted themselves to TV animations and video games. Takahata concluded that young persons were autistic because they were afraid of, and avoided, situations involving personal relations.10 These worries explain the director’s concerns with social ethics as well as his focus on inner life and relationships. In his films, human beings have more importance than entertainment and adventures. The director has a preference for stories built on moods and emotions inspired by actual life. Takahata Isao was born on 29 October 1935 in Ujiyamada (now Ise), in Mie department, and spent his youth in the Okayama district attending Tokyo University, taking a degree in French literature. At university he studied the poet Jacques Prévert – he would later translate some of Prévert’s works – and became interested in cinema, writing reviews for a student magazine. His viewing of the French animated feature La bergère et le ramoneur, written by Prévert and directed by Paul Grimault, influenced Takahata deeply.11 It married animation and literature, it showed an alternative model to Disney’s animation, and it was a culturally and politically committed work of art. Takahata began his career in 1959 as an apprentice director at Tôei. The company was in a period of great activity due to the success of Hakujaden. The early 1960s were years of intense work and great changes for the industry. While Japanese theatrical animation remained tied to Disney’s aesthetics, the international success of Tetsuwan Atom and other TV anime series set a new trend toward mass appeal and low-budget products. Taiyo no oji: Horusu no daiboken (‘Prince of the Sun: The Great Adventure of Horus’, 1968, see Volume 2) was very different. It was the first feature directed by Takahata and required 58,000 drawings and three years of work. Its crew included animation director Otsuka Yasuo and a young Miyazaki Hayao. An epic fairy tale inspired by an Ainu legend, Prince of the Sun had an illustrative and cinematic richness and differed in style and content from commercial Tôei studio productions (which were tied to children’s entertainment clichés), and from the stylization of TV series. The film was managed independently by

artists who worked on it, not by studio producers. Though it failed commercially, it opened a new era in Japanese feature animation. The early 1970s saw Takahata – who had debuted on TV directing some episodes of Okami shonen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken, 1963) – working on his most successful series, Arupasu no shojo Haidi (‘Heidi, Girl of the Alps’, 1974), and developing other adaptations of classic Western children’s novels. These included Haha o tazunete sanzenri (3,000 Miles in Search of Mother, 1976, taken from the Edmondo De Amicis short story ‘Dagli Appennini alle Ande’, in his book Cuore) and Akage no Ann (‘Redhead Anne’, 1979, taken from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables). Takahata also worked for O Production on his second feature, Jarinko Chie (‘Chie the Brat’, 1982), based on a manga by Haruki Etsumi (b. Nishinariku, Osaka, 1947). Kotabe Yoichi’s animation respected the original creator’s style, yet Chie the Brat also reflects Takahata’s search for realism. In his view, realism in an animated context is not just a formal concept but depends on situations and characters that are based on real life. So are the surroundings of the film’s title character, the Osaka suburbs where the little girl Chie looks after her father – a bum who spends all his time in gambling houses – and takes care of the family tavern. Sero hiki no Goshu (‘Goshu the Cellist’, 1982) is adapted from a tale by Miyazawa Kenji.12 The young and shy cellist Goshu discovers that his music has the power to cure animals. The film focuses on Goshu’s interior growth. The animation by Saida Toshitsugu is realistic in its depiction of characters, and a dreamlike atmosphere suffuses the backgrounds. Double exposures and fade-ins and fade-outs, as well as camera movements well-modulated for descriptive and psychological purposes, are all borrowed from live-action cinema. Goshu the Cellist won the Ofuji award, the most important prize for animation films in Japan. Music is very important in the film. As Nguyen Ilan writes: [Music] was, chronologically, the first dramaturgic motif chosen by Takahata to explore a more personal artistic vein. The director was an informed music buff, a fine connoisseur of Japanese traditional repertoire as well as

10 Yokota Masao, ‘Isao Takahata: The Animation Director Who Worries About the Mental Health of the Young Generation’, The Japanese Journal of Animation Studies, Volume 2, no. 1A (July 2000): 18. 11 In fact, the version of the film that Takahata saw was the one disowned by Grimault and Prévert. 12 Poet, writer for children, and social activist, 1896–1933.

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of Western classical music, and contemporary forms of folk music of all kinds, and was keenly interested in the relationship between music and image. From one film to another, the music, whether it was original or not, was never given the same status. It was the structure itself that dictated how music was used. The musical dramaturgy developed as it was being made. Shot after shot, the music was the mise-en-scène. In this regard, the experience conducted in Goshu the Cellist with the Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven and the original compositions by Mamiya Michiyo both paved the way.13 After the founding of Studio Ghibli, Takahata devoted himself to a live-action documentary, Yanagawa horiwari monogatari (‘The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals’, 1987). It was a social protest, showing the people of Yanagawa prefecture struggling against pollution and the cementing-over of the canals that had always been the main source of their livelihoods. In 1988 Takahata Isao directed Hotaru no haka (‘Grave of the Fireflies’, 1988). Based on a novel by Nosaka Akiyuki,14 it was made to challenge boundaries and discover new horizons in animation. The film shows two Japanese children during the final months of World War II. They lose their mother in a bombing raid; their father is fighting in the navy. Consequently, fourteen-year-old Seita lives by his wits to sustain himself and his sister, four-year-old Setsuko. Estranged from a decaying social context – where no one shows them sympathy, not even an aunt who unwillingly hosts them after their mother’s death – they finally die of starvation. Grave of the Fireflies is full of indelible images, some upsetting and shocking, others striking with their tenderness and lyricism. We see truthful representations of death, destruction, and starvation and the heartfelt designs of characters who are utterly credible in rendering grief, exhaustion, and hopelessness. Takahata places the plot inside a visionary narrative frame – coloured only with tones of red and black, accompanied by Seita’s voice-over – in which the ghosts of the two children watch their own story, giving the film a sense of detachment despite its high emotional impact. Next came the psychological introspection and figurative hyperrealism of Omoide poroporo (‘Drops of Memories’,

called Only Yesterday, in English, 1991). In 1982, Taeko is a 27-year-old single woman journeying to the countryside and recalling events that happened in 1966, when she was eleven. (The original manga by Okamoto Hotaru and Tone Yuko only illustrated moments in the life of the eleven-year-old; the adult Taeko is Takahata’s invention.) The film’s themes are the search for harmony (between cities and countryside, present and past, childhood and maturity) and changes and identity in Japanese society. In Only Yesterday, Takahata uses a structural counterpoint, juxtaposing the glowing tones and realist design of 1982 with the softer palette and stylized graphics of 1966. In addition to the truthfulness of the characters and environment, there are documentary-style sequences describing country life and farming. The plastic anatomy of the faces stands as the clearest distinctive feature in Kondo Yoshifumi’s animation. To capture all the passing nuances on young adults’ faces, Takahata and his crew studied how to reproduce the facial muscles’ creases, lifts, and movements in the course of a conversation between real people. Animators observed actors on videos shot at pre-voice recordings. The artists achieved a striking precision in reproducing the dynamics of the human face. The rural landscape is epically accurate. Takahata and his staff observed a real safflower farm in Japan’s Yamagata prefecture, and the flowers were painted one by one, paying attention to shades and light reflections. The use of different chromatic tones for objects placed in front of the characters and behind them added depth to images and breadth to backgrounds. The airbrush was used to paint morning fog, while subtle handicraft lets us appreciate the light changes between different moments of the day. The drawings in Only Yesterday seem more real than reality, fulfilling Takahata’s goal to recreate real life with the instruments and techniques of anime. Heisei tanuki gassen Ponpoko (‘Pom Poko’, 1994) was awarded best feature film at the Annecy festival. In this work, based on an original screenplay by Takahata, social commentary is mixed with ecology and folklore – in particular, Japanese stories in which wild animals, called tanuki (or racoon dogs), have magic powers and shapeshift. The story fantastically depicts a group of tanuki, living in their Tama hills, near Tokyo, as they revolt against the destruction of their forests. The story is a seriocomic saga, borrowing from the mukashibanashi,15 a traditional kind of

Ilan Nguyen and Xavier Kawa Topor, Nouvelles images du Japon, Festival Forum des Images, Paris, 1999. Novelist, lyricist, and singer, born in Kamakura, Nakagawa, in 1930. He published Grave of Fireflies in 1967. 15 Mukashibanashi might almost literally be translated as ‘Once upon a time’, that is, fairy tales. 13 14

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Japanese children’s tale. The tanuki are portrayed in three different ways: as realistic animals, as anthropomorphic characters (to develop the plots and characters), and as more stylized cartoon figures, in tribute to the manga master Sugiura Shigeru (1908–2002). Again, the film reflects upon human nature through the triumphs and failures of the tanuki’s sometimes mischievous, sometimes violent, campaign. Adapted from Ishii Isaichi’s manga, Hohokekyo tonari no Yamadakun (‘My Neighbours the Yamadas’, 1999) makes gentle fun of a typical Japanese middle-class family. The life of the Yamadas is sketched in brief cartoons punctuated by haikus. Takahata sought to restore the feeling of pencil on paper via computer. He digitally obtained elliptical sketches that only suggest shapes and volumes and are coloured with deliberate smears and skips. The result was raw, but alive and dynamic, and it avoided having to transfer images from paper to celluloid. Takahata told the French magazine Animeland in 2001: Celluloid painting needs a uniform outline; but this kills the dynamic and the verve of the outline itself, that, once the colour is added, becomes merely the delimitation of a surface and a volume. In Japan we have an age-old tradition based on the dynamics and the changes of thickness of the outline. I wanted to make an animation feature that would do justice to that tradition.16 Leaving the hyperrealism of former works for an elliptical, stylized, and satirical figuration, with pastel hues and pictures resembling delicate watercolours, meant a different inflexion of realism. Takahata added: Backgrounds are not drawn, but summarized on a symbolic level by a few accessories like a desk or a cupboard, and even characters are not drawn in a realist manner, but for viewers to think: Here we are. They have big heads, minuscule eyes, a non-existent neck and extremely short legs. Anyway, these elements are not perceived as something unpleasant, but as a faithful representation of ourselves.17 The camera is often static, but there are whirling movements in the first and last sequences that transfigure ordinary life in a fantastic way. The figurative repertoire refers

to Japanese ukiyoe painters such as Hiroshige and Hokusai (whose Wave is animated). In this work, Takahata achieved probably the best synthesis of his career. Deceptively minimalist, My Neighbours the Yamadas is rich and complex, witty and funny. It reflects Japanese culture deeply but appeals to Western audiences as well.

Miyazaki Hayao An anime artist from his youth, Miyazaki Hayao devoted himself to the renewal of animated feature films, combining high art and commercial success. Along with his colleague and lifelong friend Takahata Isao, he founded and ran Studio Ghibli, a unique structure and brand that balances art, craftsmanship, and marketing. In Japan, Miyazaki’s works enjoy the popularity of Hollywood live-action blockbusters, and they are acclaimed worldwide for their artistic value and their very fresh ideas in visual storytelling. Miyazaki was one of the few animators to conquer the traditional sanctuaries of live-action cinema. His Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (‘The Mysterious Disappearance of Chihiro and Sen’, called Spirited Away in English) shared a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2002. Three years later, the Venice Film Festival honoured Miyazaki with a life-achievement Golden Lion Award.18 Miyazaki is a gifted draughtsman and a versatile, complete filmmaker, with a multilayered style and a poetic sensitivity. His technical mastery and eclectic, rich, and dynamic imagery help build a complex and, at the same time, harmonious universe of forms and signs. Such a universe is strongly ethical, conveying its creator’s worldview, his values and beliefs. At the same time, it is not a vehicle for moral or political messages. A former Marxist, reluctant to accept easy sociopolitical schemes, Miyazaki wavers between utopia and pessimism. He relies upon the power of imagination to avoid platitudes and to propose a unique experience, ecstatic yet challenging. His films, conceived to entertain and charm – with dazzling aerial sequences, breathtaking action, and otherworldly experiences and romance – focus on such topics as personal development, social conditions, and ecological issues. Miyazaki’s stories deal with the need for peace and the refusal of war; freedom from oppressive political

16 Olivier Fallaix, Yannick Dupon-Hirao, and Stéphane Ferrand, ‘Takahata Isao à propos des Yamada . . .’ (‘Takahata Isao about the Yamada . . .’), Animeland 77 (May 2001): 30. 17 Alexandre Pilot, Ilan Nguyen, ‘À propos de Tonari no Yamada-kun’ (‘About My Neighbors the Yamadas’), Animeland 55 (October 1999): 30. 18 To learn more about this epochal film, see More About It 3.

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powers; all-human values; respect for animals and nature; and mankind as a part of an ecosystem. They contain historical, mythological, religious, and philosophical references, all interwoven with classical fiction schemes – spectacular adventures and a journey of interior growth, in the tradition of Bildungsroman. The density and complexity of meanings are reflected in the structure of plots and characters. Miyazaki’s world is dialectic. Characters rarely embody absolute Good or absolute Evil, but they express the contrasts within human nature. While the process of growing up and taking responsibility towards life is constant, Miyazaki worships childhood as privileged, capable of supplying the purest basis of experience that is the most intuitive and closest to the truth. Miyazaki paints vivid females. His heroines are little or young girls, discovering their inner strength and emotional intelligence, maturing their abilities, taking hold of their lives, and making them their own. Miyazaki’s art is a personal combination of Eastern and Western cultures. It is framed within a ‘Pop’ look, integrated in mass culture, but it shuns stereotypes. This ‘crossover’ is the core of an iconic language, whose influences are spread through manga, Western comics, and world literature and cinema. Miyazaki amalgamates classic Japanese art and European suggestions – figures, architectures, landscapes from historical ages – and takes inspiration from Japanese folktales and British and American children’s literature. Miyazaki is at once very Japanese and very open to the rest of the world. Miyazaki’s film editing and direction style is mostly typical of anime, including a range of camera angles and movements from long shots to extreme close-ups. Be it a landscape of the future, some odd machine, or a fanciful animal like Totoro, any imaginary creation of Miyazaki communicates a feeling of actual fact. There is a care in Miyazaki’s design and details. Background elements blend styles and ages, melting into a consistent opus. Miyazaki was born on 5 January 1941, in Akebono-chô, in the Tokyo Bunkyô-ho district. He spent the first years of his life in a small country town, 60 kilometres from Tokyo, where his family sheltered during World War II. Miyazaki’s father managed the factory owned by his brother,

which produced parts for Japanese fighter planes. The artist inherited a love of airplanes and flying machines, which he drew with passion and accuracy, but also a sense of guilt reflected in films like Porco Rosso. Miyazaki is a leftist and pacifist, aware of his own contradictions, and his films show his loathing for war and social injustice. He was a Japanese man in a postwar country caught between the removal of the controversial parts of its past and the invasion of Western culture. He took inspiration from the strong personality of his mother. For many years she suffered from spinal tuberculosis and was forced to stay in a hospital. He was impressed by her unshaken optimism and learned to be autonomous and to perform household duties. (Working at Ghibli decades later, Miyazaki would often cook meals for his crew.) As a youngster, Miyazaki devoted his free time to drawing. Stirred by the manga of Tezuka Osamu and by the animated features of Yabushita Taiji (The White Serpent) and Russia’s Lev Atamanov (The Snow Queen), Miyazaki entered Tôei Dôga studio in 1963 as an apprentice. He joined trade unions and devoted a large share of his free time to these organizations, where he met Takahata Isao, his friend and teammate in the years to come. Starting as an inbetweener, Miyazaki soon became a key animator. He drew characters and scenes for Takahata’s first feature film, Taiyo no oji Horusu no daibôken (in English, ‘The Little Norse Prince’, 1968), and contributed to the very successful Tôei feature Nagagutsu o haita neko (Puss in Boots, directed by Yabuki Kimio, 1969). In the early 1970s, Miyazaki worked on the TV series Rupan sansei (‘Lupin III’, 1971), imbuing it with his personality. Monkey Punch’s19 original manga was violent and erotic, but Miyazaki got closer to the spirit of novelist Maurice Leblanc, one of the series’ inspirations.20 Miyazaki also directed the Lupin feature Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro (‘Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro’, 1979), which won the award for best animated feature at the Cannes Film Festival. It has a better psychological depiction of the main character, a master criminal, and the peculiar blend of creative invention and subtle precision that would be a Miyazaki motif.21

Pen name of manga artist Kato Kazuhiko (b. Hamanaka-cho, 1937). A French pulp fiction writer (1864–1941), Maurice Leblanc invented the sophisticated thief Arsène Lupin in 1905. 21 The first Lupin III TV series was broadcast for 23 episodes from October 1971, with some episodes directed by Miyazaki and Takahata. Miyazaki also directed two episodes for the long-running second series, which ran from October 1977 for 155 episodes. He was not involved in Lupin III Part III (50 episodes, March 1984 to December 1985), or in the later Lupin animated features, video films, further TV series, or specials. 19 20

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Miyazaki also worked on the short films Panda kopanda (‘Panda! Go, Panda!’, 1972) and Panda kopanda Amefuri Circus no maki (Panda Kopanda Rainy Day Circus, 1973), which he wrote and designed under Takahata’s direction. Miyazaki also helped draw three TV series directed by Takahata: Arupusu no shojo Haidi (‘Heidi, Girl of the Alps’, 1974), Haha o tazunete sanzenri (‘Three Thousand Miles in Search of Mother’, 1976), and Akage no An (‘Redhead Anne’, 1979, from the novel Anne of Green Gables). The first work to merge the style and the spirit of the mature Miyazaki was the TV series Mirai shonen Conan (‘Future Boy Conan’, 1978), produced at Nippon Animation. It is set in a future after World War III. A young girl, Lana, is chased by adults acting for the malign nation of Industria, and Conan, a heroic boy, helps her. Many typical Miyazaki elements are present, from air battle scenes to the revival of nature after devastation. The drawings show a love for landscapes and machines, the latter resembling organic forms and depicted as if they were characters. In 1981 Miyazaki worked on his last TV series, directing some episodes of Meitantei Homuzu (‘Detective Holmes’, 1984, called Sherlock Hound in English), an Italian-Japanese coproduction. During the production, he met Italian animators Marco and Gi (Gina) Pagot, whose names were borrowed for two major characters in Porco Rosso. The turning point for Miyazaki’s career is the feature Kaze no tani no Naushika (‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds’, 1984). Adapted from Miyazaki’s own manga, it was set in a post-nuclear world where poisonous plants cover much of the Earth. Its main themes are peace and respect for nature. Nausicaä, a young princess who flies on a glider and loves all living things, represents the author’s yearning for a peaceful life in keeping with nature’s principles. Nausicaä was the first of Miyazaki’s heroines to combine pathos and sweetness with virtuous resolution. Sensitive, vulnerable, yet wilful and courageous, ‘she epitomizes the traditional feminine ideal, which the Japanese language describes as yasashi (“meek”, “sensitive”, “warmhearted”, “kind”) and the masculine model designated by the term bushidô (“the way of the warrior”).’22 As with other Miyazaki characters, Nausicaä’s flying symbolizes the imaginative power of childhood and youth. In 1985, Miyazaki, Takahata, and producer Suzuki Toshio created Studio Ghibli. Its first film was Miyazaki’s Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky’, 1986), inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and by late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century technological visions. It is

22

about a hunt for the flying city of Laputa, which resembles ancient Babylon’s ziggurats. Much of the film takes place on high pinnacles or in the sky. Miyazaki and his crew used extreme perspectives to emphasize field depth, animating clouds – one of the film’s most appealing elements – with sophisticated handicraft techniques. There are airplanes that look like insects, bizarre trains, and dirigibles, mixing fantasy with real engineering documents and historical models. Tonari no Totoro (‘My Neighbour Totoro’, 1988) is a more delicate melody. Going back to Miyazaki’s childhood memories, it is intimate and slow-paced, capturing Japan’s countryside in all its beauty. Positive, cheerful, and warm-hearted, the film is a reverie of everyday life. Two young sisters meet the good creature (and nature spirit) Totoro, who resembles a cuddly bear; they also ride on the wondrous ‘catbus’, a cat combined with a bus. The film is a tribute to rural Japan and its culture, which suffered a forced modernization after World War II. Majo no takkyubin (‘Witch’s Delivery Service’, called ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ in English, 1989) was based on a book by the Japanese writer Kadono Eiko (b. Tokyo, 1935) and is mostly set in an imaginary ideal European city inspired by the likes of Stockholm. A  thirteen-yearold witch leaves her family to find employment in the city, flying there on a broomstick with her black cat. Kiki was inspired by the young artists at Ghibli; not by chance, a girl painter befriends the character, opening up themes of art and creativity. Miyazaki’s goal was to encourage boys and girls to enter adulthood with awareness and self-confidence. In Kurenai no buta (‘Porco Rosso’, 1992), the director chose a specific geographical, historical, and political context – the Adriatic Sea during the 1920s – and an autobiographical character. The protagonist is an ace-pilot who became a pig after losing his comrades in battle. Marco Pagot, now a bounty hunter called Porco Rosso (‘Red Pig’), refuses to rejoin the military. As he tells his old friend Ferrarin (a character inspired by a real Italian air ace, Arturo Ferrarin, 1895–1941), he’d rather be a pig than a fascist. Miyazaki claimed the film was addressed to disillusioned middle-aged men whose brains were turning into tofu from overwork, but it is also his most personal story. His fondness for airplanes, especially the ones from a ‘heroic era’, reached a romantic peak in this film. Miyazaki also inserts a nostalgic respect for lonely and honourable men in addition to adding a sentimental triangle formed by Marco and two female characters. The film’s success in Japan and

Dani Cavallaro, The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki, McFarland & Co., London, 2006, pp. 50–51.

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abroad (it had an exceptionally good French dub) enabled Miyazaki to employ his staff on a regular basis. Now the studio had the economic and technical means to back Mononoke Hime (‘Princess Mononoke’, 1997). The production took three years of intense work. It focuses on the conflict between men, animals, gods, and spirits, all put on the same level, from a non-anthropocentric perspective. The story is set in the troubled Muromachi era (1338–1573). Myth, legends, and folklore are transfigured. Miyazaki takes many licenses – some of the divinities represented in the film had not previously existed as images – but he pays his usual attention to making designs plausible. Mononoke hime makes use of computer technology but it is always integrated with traditional techniques. Studio Ghibli and Microsoft developed and customized a particular piece of software called Toonshader in order to create animated images that retained the features and feeling of cel animation. Despite being the most difficult and dark of Miyazaki’s features, with many violent scenes, the film was a record-breaking commercial success in Japan. Even greater was the success of Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (‘Spirited Away, 2001) the most visionary of Miyazaki’s films.23 It won Miyazaki the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. It tells of ten-year-old Chihiro and her adventure inside a parallel, fantastical world inhabited by deities that while away the time in the bathhouse run by an old witch, Yubaba. A spoiled, complaining little girl before her spiriting away, Chihiro must work hard and prove herself in many ways to become a quintessential Miyazaki heroine, tenacious and soulful. The fantasy world (that Yubaba rules as a modern entrepreneur rather than as a queen) is a satire of contemporary society, but it is also an allegory of a large modern corporation.24 Chihiro’s apprenticeship can be easily compared to Kiki’s; the two girls both experience hardships on their own in order to express their talent and gain a new independence. Spirited Away completed the shift to computer, with hand drawing processed through digital techniques. Hauru no ugoku shiro (‘Howl’s Moving Castle’, 2004) is a Victorian-style fable, full of grandeur. The moving castle mentioned in the title blends the mechanical and organic, like Miyazaki’s earlier aircraft designs (its animation

combines hand drawing and CGI). It is probably Miyazaki’s most spectacular film, with splendid landscapes and dreamlike actions. As the plot is itself surreal, Howl’s Moving Castle’s main pleasure is as a mesmerizing experience, a bursting display of artistic skill. The heroine is Sophie, a girl spellbound as a ninety-year-old who shows both natures in one character. Miyazaki came back in 2008 with Gake no ue no Ponyo (‘Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea’, called Ponyo in English), an apparently more optimistic fable for children, closer to the intimate and familiar setting of Totoro. Still, the film reveals the usual concern about nature, this time concentrating on the sea, which rises in powerfully animated sequences. The friendship between Sosuke, a five-year-old human boy, and Ponyo, a little fish girl who desires to be human, is touching, but a magician who estranged himself from the world to live underwater can be easily related to Miyazaki’s distrust in mankind. Yet Ponyo is by an author who, disillusioned as he is, keeps believing in children and dedicating his art to people of all ages.

More Animation Studios There are two routes taken by studios in order to emerge and survive. First, they must adopt a recognizable style, perhaps relying on the help of a well-known director. Second, they must please the general public by adapting a popular manga or other work,25 reinforcing the plot with the techniques of anime and creating media-mix projects.

Tôei Animation In 1972, as we have seen in Volume 2, Tôei went through labour disputes that caused it to lose several employees. Later it regained strength and produced successful TV series for girls (Candy Candy, 1976) and boys (Dragon Ball, Hokuto no Ken, 1984). Its other children’s productions included the delightful Tongari bôshi no Memoru (‘Memoru in the Pointed Hat’, also known also as ‘Wee Wendy’ or ‘Little Memole’, 1984), directed by Kasai Osamu. In 1998, the studio changed its name to Tôei Animation. Its successes at that time included the basketball series Slam Dunk (1993), from a manga by Inoue Takehiko, and Digimon and Ojamajo Doremi (‘Magical Doremi’), both 1999.

About this important film, see More About It 3. The story even goes that it’s a caricature of Studio Ghibli itself. On this interpretation, Yubaba stands for the producer Suzuki Toshio, while Miyazaki is the creature in the bathhouse, the spider-armed Kamaji. 25 Other sources for anime included video games and ‘light novels’ (short books aimed at the teenage market). 23 24

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Two long-lasting public favourites were the hugely popular One Piece (1999), centred on a funny group of pirates who go through both comic and dramatic adventures, from the manga by Oda Eiichiro; and Futari wa Pretty Cure (‘We Are Pretty Cure’, also known as ‘Pretty Cure’, 2004), about magically-powered girls.

Studio 4°C The productions of Studio 4°C differ from both mainstream and independent animation. The studio was a bridge to connect people, artists, animators, and projects with the realities of Japan’s visual culture. In 1986, the animators Morimoto Koji and Sato Yoshiharu decided to realize their dream of creating a place to develop personal projects. The two got in touch with Tanaka Eiko, at the time a young producer with Studio Ghibli and one of the very few women in the business. Together the trio established Studio 4°C. ‘Taken from the fact that water was at its densest at that temperature, 4°C represented Studio 4°C’s manifesto “to create only works that were dense with substance and extreme quality.” ’26 After a few years during which the partners continued to work as freelancers,27 the studio became fully active. In 1995 Morimoto convinced his friend Otomo Katsuhiro to join the feature Memories,28 codirected by Otomo, Morimoto, and Okamura. Morimoto’s opening segment, ‘Kanojo no omoide’ (‘The Remembering of the Old Lady’, called ‘Magnetic Rose’ in English), was the most powerful. Graced by the elegant direction of Morimoto, and the sophisticated screenplay of Kon Satoshi, it

combined philosophical sci-fi with action and deep characterization. Okamura’s Saishu heiki (‘Stink Bomb’) was a surreal comedy, while Otomo’s Taiho no machi (‘Cannon Fodder’) was technically challenging, made to resemble a single (fantastically extended) live-action camera take, with giant-sized cel backgrounds. It depicts a city whose whole life revolves around war. The studio was characterized by its original short films.29 These included Tobita o akete (‘Open the Door’, 1996) by Morimoto, which stands out for its visual wealth, and his imaginative masterpiece Onkyo seimeitai Noiseman (‘Noiseman Sound Insect’, 1997). Among his most successful productions was Eikyu kazoku (‘Eternal Family’, 1998), consisting of 53 thirty-second episodes. Such collections were ideal to develop the personal projects of the studio’s young authors.30 Digital Juice consisted of six short works by different people. Amazing Nuts (2006), was a collection of four short films, running fifteen minutes in total.31 There was also the omnibus Deep Imagination.32 Their advertising animations also had a high level of quality – for example, the fascinating La Saunda (2000) by Morimoto. There were feature films such as Arite Hime (‘Princess Arete’, 2001) by Katabuchi Sunao, adapted from The Clever Princess, a novel by Diana Calls about medieval times. In 2003, the company made five of the nine segments of Animatrix, based on the live-action The Matrix (1999). The critically acclaimed Mind Game (2004) was a psychedelic feature directed by Yuasa Masaaki; based on a manga by Nishi Robin, it won the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Ôfuji Noburo awards.

From the official website of Studio 4°C: Studio4c.co.jp/english. Tanaka continued her working relationship with Miyazaki, executive producing My Neighbour Totoro and, immediately afterwards, Kiki’s Delivery Service. Satô was supervising animator on My Neighbour Totoro and key animator on Kiki’s Delivery Service. 28 Coproduced with Madhouse. 29 From the second half of the 1990s, the studio explicitly aimed at making commissioned works, from advertising spots to music videos, from opening sequences for special events to graphic applications for wireless phones. Thus we have musical videos such as Extra (1996), directed by Morimoto for the pioneer of Japan’s techno-music, Ishii Ken. 30 Tanaka Eiko explains: ‘First, for those who have the ability and even the talent to make something new and different, they don’t really have many opportunities to do something. By making a number of smaller works, it was possible to discover and develop many new talents without breaking the bank, as opposed to making one big film with one talent. By making small films we can get a good idea of what this new talent was capable of, what kind of work they can make, and we can also use it as a kind of mini-promotion during our presentations. That’s really why we make these micro-shorts.’ (Nicholas Rucka, ‘Interview: Eiko Tanaka’, Midnight Eye. The Latest and Best Japanese Cinema, Midnighteye.com/interviews/eiko_tanakashtml.) 31 The collection includes: Global Astroliner Number by Nakayama Daisuke; Glass Eyes by Yamashita Takashi and Morimoto Koji; Kung-Fu Love by Aoki Yasuhiro; and Joe and Marilyn by Ishida Nobuya and Kawamura Akihiro. 32 Among the directors are: Ito Nobutake (A Wake in Garakuta Town), Ohara Hidekazu (Professor Dan Petory’s Blues), Kobayashi Osamu (End of the World), Nakazawa Kazuto (Comedy), and Muraki Yasushi (Higan). 26 27

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It was followed by the feature film Tekkonkinkreet (id., 2006), directed by Michael Arias33 from Matsumoto Taiyo’s34 manga. Kuro and Shiro are two orphan boys from Takaramachi (‘Treasure Town’) who carry out little acts of vandalism. The film interweaves the characters who live in this gloomy urban world. The true protagonist is actually Treasure Town itself, thanks to art director Kimura Shinji. Like Mind Game, Tekkonkinkreet won the Ôfuji Noburo Award. Still more ambitious were the anthology features Genius Party (2007)35 and Genius Party Beyond (2008),36 both for cinemas. The idea was an ‘explosion of creative energy’; the segments ranged from the romantic comedy of Watanabe’s Baby Blue to the surrealism of Fukushima Atsuko’s eponymous ‘Genius Party’. Among the directors and animators were Yuasa and Fukushima, as well as mangaka Fukuyama Yoji and art director Kimura Shinji. Studio 4°C ‘rotates’ roles among its staff, giving more opportunities to young authors and allowing established authors to experiment in new areas. The studio also seeks new distribution avenues for its works.37 One example of this was the musical event Genius Party Extra in July 2007 at a dance hall in Tokyo, where the videos were remixed to techno, electro, and house music. Tanaka explained: To deliver Genius Party to this type of audience can be different from showing it at the ordinary theatres. It might be accepted better if it is viewed as part of the contents of certain events. For example, a young guy who is very keen on the latest trends would not go to see an animation film at a regular theatre, but might go to a live concert with animation film with friends at

a club. The younger generation prefers events and live performances. [. . .] We would like to introduce a new lifestyle of playing with pictures using the characteristics of short films.38 While the studio’s artistic symbol is Morimoto Koji, Tanaka is its official front and organizing force. She has a unique profile as a producer; she understands the artists’ problems and does not allow financial interests to supplant creativity. She constantly follows a work’s development and was even credited as story editor on Tekkonkinkreet.

Gainax Studio Gainax was founded on 24 December 1984, with Okada Toshio as its president. The commercial failure of its feature Oritsu uchugun: Oneamisu no tsubasa (‘Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise’, 1987, written and directed by Yamaga Hiroyuki) brought it near bankruptcy. It survived thanks to its production of musical video clips and TV advertising spots. Next, Gainax made a six-part video series, Top o nerae! Gunbuster (‘Aim for the Top! Gunbuster’, 1988). Directed by Anno Hideaki, with character design by Mikimoto Haruhiko, the sci-fi story is humorous and dramatic by turns. It lays great emphasis on the personal journey of its heroine, a girl involved in a space war. Gainax’s first TV series, also by Anno, was Fushigi no umi no Nadia (‘Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water’, 1990), inspired by a storyline by Miyazaki Hayao, with fresh-looking protagonists. (Sadamoto Yoshiyuki contributed to the character design.) Okada left the studio in 1991, and Yamaga

California’s Michael Arias (b. 1968) has an eclectic cinema career, including working in visual effects and computer graphics. He began in Los Angeles at Dream Quest Images then moved to Tokyo to work in companies in the same line, such as Imagica and Sega. He worked on integration between traditional animation and computer graphics and collaborated with Studio Ghibli. Tekkonkinkreet was his debut in direction, making him the first non-Japanese director of a Japanese-produced animated film. 34 The artistic staff revolved around Arias; Kimura Shinji as the art director; Nishimi Shojiro as the animation supervisor; and Anthony Weintraub – former college classmate of Arias – as the scriptwriter. 35 The short animations are Genius Party by Fukushima Atsuko; Shanghai Dragon by Kawamori Shôji; Dethtic4 by Kimura Shinji; Doorbell by Yamamoto Yoji; Limit Cycle by Futamura Hideki; Happy Machine by Yuasa Masaaki; and Baby Blue by Watanabe Shinichiro. 36 The short animations are Gala by Maeda Mahiro; Moondrive by Nakazawa Kazuto; Wanwa the Puppy by Ohira Shinya; Tojin Kit by Tanaka Tatsuyuki; and Dimension Bomb by Morimoto Koji. The general quality of these films was very high, especially Wanwa the Puppy, a child’s dream about his mother’s pregnancy. Ohira created the backgrounds using a texture made from origami paper and other materials. 37 The studio does not distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘low’ productions and tries to put the style of its artists into every product. For this reason, its work is often likened to the ‘Superflat’ artistic movement by Murakami Takashi. In fact, there were connections; for example, Morimoto had exhibited in the Superflat exposition. 38 Ishimaru Kenji, ‘Interview: Eiko Tanaka’, Frames per Second, Fpsmagazine.com, last modified 2 July  2007, Fpsmagazine.com/ feature/070702tanaka.php. 33

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Hiroyuki became president. In 1995, Gainax produced its most famous series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, followed by two cinema features, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth (largely reedited from the TV series) and The End of Evangelion. Both were shown in cinemas in 1997. Kareshi kanojo no jijo (‘His and Her Circumstances’, also shortened to Kare kano, 1998) was Anno and Gainax’s first entry into shojo (girls’) anime, with some interesting experimentation. The same was true of FLCL (Furi Kuri, 2000), directed by Tsurumaki Kazuya and coproduced by Production I.G. The technically excellent Abenobashi maho shotengai (‘Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi’, 2002), directed by Kojima Masayuki, has a wild comic spirit and many in-jokes for otaku (roughly, ‘geeks’).39

TMS Entertainment Tokyo Movie Shinsha became TMS Entertainment in 2000. Planning and production, licensing and merchandising, were all under one roof. The studio’s partnership with Sega reinforced the relationship between animation and video games. Several game-based TV series were made, including Kochu oja Mushiking – Mori no tami no densetsu (‘Mushiking, the Guardians of the Forest’, 2005). However, the studio dealt with all genres, from adventure to comedy, and aimed at several age groups. Among the better-known series are the sweet and melancholic Ohayo! Spank (‘Hello Spank!’, 1981), centred on a funny white dog with black ears; the fantasy Maho kishi Rayearth (‘Magic Knight Rayearth’, 1994), well adapted from the manga by the CLAMP group; and the cute children’s anime Tottoko Hamtaro (‘Hamtaro, Little Hamsters’ Big Adventures’), begun in 2000. There was also the very popular mystery series Meitantei Konan (‘Detective Conan, Also Known as Case Closed’), from Aoyama Goshô’s manga and centred on Conan, a detective who is transformed into a little boy.

Sunrise Born in 1972 as Sunrise Studio, it was renamed Nippon Studio in 1977. In 1994 it merged with Bandai Group (a large toy-producing company with affiliates the world over) and became Sunrise Inc. Production was allocated

among its numerous studio divisions. The large studio is especially famous for the massive Gundam franchise, which grew out of the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam series. Its other successes include Cowboy Bebop (1998); Code Geass (2006), in which a masked schoolboy fights back against a superpower that has conquered Japan (giant robot suits figure prominently); and Tiger & Bunny (2011), a lavish reworking of US superhero strips, featuring an odd hero couple made up of an irascible middle-aged man (‘Tiger’) and a revenge-obsessed youth (‘Bunny’).

Madhouse Madhouse was established in 1972 by a group of animators including Maruyama Masao (b. prefecture of Miyagi, 1941), Dezaki Osamu, and Kawajiri Yoshiaki. In the beginning, Madhouse made commissioned work in collaboration with other studios, such as Aim for the Ace! (1973). In the 1980s, the studio became known especially for feature films and OAVs (video animation). In 1983, in coproduction with Kadokawa Shoten, it made Harmageddon, a feature directed by Rintarô, with character design by Otomo Katsuhro, creator of Akira. There followed Dagger of Kamui (1985) by Rintarô, Wicked City (1987) by Kawajiri Yoshiaki, and the omnibus Manie Manie Labyrinth Tales (1989). Rintarô and Kawajiri became the top directors, continuing their relationship with the studio. In the 1990s, Madhouse turned to TV series, collaborating with famous manga creators such as CLAMP, Yazawa Ai, and Urasawa Naoki. Death Note (2006) was a successful adaptation of the supernatural thriller manga by Oba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi, in which the boy antihero kills people by writing their names in a magic notebook. Innovative and experimental TV series included Denno Coil (‘Coil – A Circle of Children’, 2007), created and directed by Iso Mitsuo, Paranoia Agent by Kon Satoshi; and three Yuasa Masaaki works, Kemonozume (‘Beast Claw’, 2006), Kaiba (2008) and Yojohan shinwa taikei (‘The Tatami Galaxy’, 2010). Another quality film production is the medium-length feature film Nasu: Andalusia no natsu (‘Nasu: Summer in Andalusia’, 2003). It is a memory journey of a bicycle racer during his most important race, directed by Kosaka Kitaro (b. prefecture of Kanagawa, 28 February  1962), who is both a director and an animator.

Such jokes are characteristic of this studio, nicknamed ‘the otaku studio’ – a name that reflects the otaku backgrounds of Gainax’s founders. 39

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Madhouse also released the feature films by Kon and Hosoda Mamoru and the visually very brash Redline (2009), about a crazy auto race on an alien planet, by Koike Takeshi (b. Kaminoyama, 26 January 1968).

Production I.G Production I.G was established on 15 December 1987 as I.G. Tatsunoko by production manager Ishikawa Mitsuhisa and character designer Goto Takayuki. Renamed in 1993, the studio became famous for its daring projects, such as the feature films by Oshii Mamoru, especially Ghost in the Shell. Another feature, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999), was directed by Okiura Hiroyuki (b. Osaka, 13 October  1966), from a screenplay by Oshii. It envisions an alternate-history Japan (resembling Europe) where a tragic love story between a man and woman plays out between a special police force and terrorist groups. Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), directed by Kitakubo Hiroyuki, also has fantasy-political themes. At an American air base in Japan, just before Vietnam, a battle breaks out between demonic monsters. The studio also undertook important international coproductions, such as the animated segment of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol.  1 (the segment, individually titled ‘The Origin of O-Ren’, was directed by Nakazawa Kazuto). There was also the television series IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix (2005), directed by Hongo Mitsuru. Later, the director Kamiyama Kenji (b. Saitama prefecture, 20 March  1966) rose to prominence at the studio, directing a television version of Ghost in the Shell called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002). Kamiyama also directed Eden of the East (2009), a combination of present-day political thriller and romantic comedy. It features an amnesiac hero in the middle of a game to decide Japan’s destiny.

Studio Gonzo Studio Gonzo (Kabushiki Kaika Gonzo, later called Gonzo K.K.) was established in September  1992 by Maeda Mahiro, Yamaguchi Hiroshi, Higuchi Shinji, and Murahama Shoji. It is famous for its frequent use of computer graphics, which it combines with traditional animation.

Ao no rokugo (‘Blue Submarine No. 6’) is a four-part miniseries made from 1998 to 2000, set in a world where sea levels have risen and new species have appeared. Visually fascinating, mainly for its water scenes, Blue Submarine No. 6 was directed by Maeda Mahiro (b. Tottori, 1963), creator of some of the more successful and ambitious projects at Gonzo. He also directed Gankutsuo (‘Gankutsuo: The Count of Montecristo’, 2004), a sci-fi reworking of Alexandre Dumas’ novel. It is remarkable for its very distinctive visual choices. The neatly defined colour fields typical of anime are replaced by textures created by computer, with brilliant and geometrical patterns that stay fixed while the characters move.40 Other Gonzo series included Fullmetal Panic! (2002), Last Exile (2003), and the paranoid black comedy Welcome to the N.H.K. (2006). One of the studio’s most notable productions is Afro Samurai (2007), an animated series by Kizaki Fuminori, set in an anachronistic fantasy Japan. It was aimed specifically at the Western market, with the hero voiced by the Hollywood star Samuel L. Jackson, and its only release in Japan was in a subtitled form. Gonzo Feature also produced feature films such as Gin iro no kami no Agito (‘Origin – Spirits of the Past’) by Sugiyama Keiichi. In 2000, the GDH (Gonzo Digimation Holdings) was established, a corporation comprising affiliates of the Gonzo brand (including a recording house for soundtracks and a studio for children’s animation). In 2009, however, an internal financial crisis caused the crash of these affiliates, leaving just the animation studio. The company was renamed simply Gonzo.

Studio Bones Studio Bones was established in October  1998 by producer Minami Masahiko, animator Osaka Hiroshi (Osaka, 1963–2007), and character designer Kawamoto Toshihiro. Despite its small size, Bones was able to deal with complex projects. The studio’s original series include RahXephon by Izubuchi Yutaka (2002) and Wolf ’s Rain by Okamura Tensai (2003). The studio’s adaptations of manga included Hogane no renkinjutsushi (‘Fullmetal Alchemist’, 2003), based on a strip by Arakawa Himoru, a woman. It focused on Edward and Alphonse Elric, two brothers in a fantasy world combining old-fashioned technology and alchemist magic. The

Later, Maeda participated in the omnibus Genius Party Beyond and in the NHK project Ani Kuri 15. In addition to directing, he played the roles of character designer, animator, and mecha designer. 40

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saga was popular both in Japan and in the West, thanks to a good plot and real attention to the characters’ psychology. In 2009, it was rebooted as Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which began the story all over again but followed the manga more faithfully. Studio Bones also made video games and features, including the samurai action-adventure Sutorenjia mukô hadan (‘Sword of the Stranger’, 2007) by Ando Masahiro.

Manglobe Manglobe Inc. was established in February 2002 by Kobayashi Shinchiro (president) and Kochiyama Takashi (managing director). It earned a good reputation with Samurai Champloo (2004), directed by Watanabe Shinichiro. Ergo Proxy (2006) was an interesting fantasy sci-fi series with cyberpunk tones, directed by Murase Shuko. Another significant production was Michiko to Hatchin (‘Michiko and Hatchin’, 2008),41 an on-the-road anime set in Brazil that relies heavily on its characters. It was directed by Yamamoto Sayo, with Watanabe as musical producer. The studio’s nostalgic and elegant adaptation of Ono Natsume’s historical manga Saraiya goyo (‘House of Five Leaves’) was directed by Mochizuki Tomomi in 2010.

Kawaii Kawaii (‘cute’) is one of the key words running through Japanese Pop culture. ‘Essentially it means childlike; it celebrates sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple, genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak, and inexperienced social behaviour and physical appearances.’42 Kawaii is also a marked commercial trend, pervading Japanese merchandizing, comics, and animation.

In 1971, the firm Sanrio launched into the cute stationery market. Sanrio’s Hello Kitty, created by Shimizu Yûko, was introduced three years later. She was all white and her head was disproportionately larger than her body; she had a red bow on her ear and no mouth. Hello Kitty became the uncontested queen of Japanese merchandising. The character, soon surrounded by friends with similar traits, was represented on a huge range of products and also in animated films (Hello Kitty no Cinderella, ‘Hello Kitty’s Cinderella’, 1989) and TV series (Ringo no mori no fantasy, ‘The Fantasy of the Apple Forest’, 2006).43 In the kawaii market, the ideal target was the teenage girl. During the 1970s, ‘The girl became the central target of a new consumer culture, and a variety of character goods and other items were produced. A girl’s private room became her sanctuary, separating her from the rest of the world, encouraging her identification with cute objects, and impelling her to project the self-image of the cute, innocent I.’44 Kawaii in manga and anime began with Tezuka Osamu’s graphic style, influenced by Disney and Fleischer. It produced characters loved by young children, such as the ghosts of Obake no Qtaro and the Doraemon cat. From the mid-1970s, the super-deformed (SD) style made its anime appearance, reducing characters to childish forms in a caricatured style. Later representatives of the kawaii world include the electronic game Tamagotchi, invented in 1996 by the firm Bandai; the characters of the Pokemon universe (Pocket Monsters), one of the most brilliant examples of Japanese media-mix; and Miyazaki Hayao’s Totoro. From the 1990s, a generation of artists emerged using the kawaii style. Matsui Midori says, ‘Japanese

The official Western title is Michiko e Hatchin, in order to recall the Portuguese language. Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan,’ in Brian Moeran and Lise Scov, eds, Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, Hawaii University Press, Honolulu, 1995, p. 220. 43 Sanrio also was involved in full-length feature films, with the support of American studios: Oyako nezumi no fushigi na tabi (‘The Mouse and His Child’, 1977) by Tsuji Shintaro; Hoshi no Orpheus (‘Orpheus of the Stars, a.k.a. Metamorphoses/Winds of Change’, 1979) by Yanase Takashi, a version of Greek myths with Pop music; and Syrius no densetsu (‘Legend of Syrius, a.k.a. Sea Prince and The Fire Child’, 1981) by Hata Masami. However, the films were economic failures. The last production was the musical Yôsei Florence (‘Fairy Florence, a.k.a. A Journey Through Fairyland’, 1985) by Hata Masami. 44 Matsui Midori, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Room to a Chaotic Street: Transformations of Cute Subculture in the Art of the Japanese Nineties’, in Murakami Takashi, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005, p. 210. 41 42

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art in the 1990s made creative use of cute images and subcultures instead of succumbing to their soft seduction, turning their marginality, infantilism, and incongruity into the resources of a new artistic production.’45 These works are characterized by pastel and saturated colours, soft forms, and disproportionate eyes and heads. The underlying content, however, is not reassuring. For example, DOB, a hybrid and disturbing character created by Murakami Takashi in 1993, mixes elements of beloved characters from Mickey Mouse to Doraemon.

Dezaki Young Dezaki Osamu (Tokyo, 18 November  1943–17 April 2011) began his animation career in 1963 as a key animator on Astro Boy. He also worked on other television series: Kimba the White Lion and Dororo to Hyakkimaru (best known as Dororo, 1969). During these years he met Sugino Akio (b. 19 September 1944), an animator and animation director with whom he established a long artistic collaboration. In 1970, Dezaki directed the television series Ashita no Jo (‘Tomorrow’s Joe’) with character designers Sugino Akio and Araki Shingo (1 January  1939–1 December  2011), and with Kanayama Akihiro as animation director. Dezaki’s style began to become personal as he dealt with the dramatic story of the troubled boxer Yabuki Jo, from the manga by Kajiwara Ikki and Chiba Tetsuya. The theme was perfect for Dezaki, and the series anticipates his future style. Ace o nerae! (‘Aim for the Ace!’, 1973) was a standout. Hiromi is a tennis player in her high school club; thanks to her coach and her hard work, she becomes a great world player. The series was coproduced with Madhouse, with Sugino Akio as character designer, based on a girls’ manga by Yamamoto Sumika. Hiromi’s physical and psychological development was compelling for the target audience. Through the series, the ‘Dezaki style’ became more mature, the cutting and composition expressing strong emotions. In the late 1970s, Dezaki and Sugino worked on outstanding renderings of Western settings inspired by

45

Midori, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Room’.

European literature. One example is the Tokyo Movie Shinsha TV series Rittai anime–Ie naki ko, known in English as Nobody’s Boy–Remy, 1977. It is a tearjerker about an orphan in nineteenth-century France, based on a book by Héctor Malot. Dezaki and Sugino worked with Takahashi Hirokata, a director of photography and an important future collaborator. Like other Dezaki works, the series makes sophisticated use of moving backgrounds to give a sense of depth. Takarajima (‘Treasure Island’, 1978), from Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, has great direction and design. In 1979 Dezaki replaced Nagahama Tadao (26 September 1932–14 January 1980) as director from the nineteenth episode of Versailles no Bara (‘The Rose of Versailles’). He collaborated with three talented animators and character designers: Araki Shingô, Sugino Akio, and Himeno Michi. Based on the historical manga by Ikeda Riyoko, this elaborate, passionate saga was particularly suited to Dezaki, who modified the visual style and increased the drama. His touch helped make The Rose of Versailles become a success in Japan from its second broadcast in 1987, and internationally as well. The story of Oscar, a girl raised as a man to become the leader of the palace guards, is interwoven with the French Revolution, gender identity, duty, and justice. Dezaki’s use of oblique shots and still images that ‘freeze’ scenes is perfectly suited to the drama. In the following years Dezaki’s collaboration with Sugino established the Annapuru Studio, through which the pair worked with bigger studios, primarily Tokyo Movie Shinsha. In 1982 Dezaki directed the sci-fi TV series Space Adventure Cobra (‘Cobra’), a space opera from a manga by Terasawa Buichi. The subsequent Golgo 13 (‘Golgo 13: The Professional’, 1983) was a violent cinema feature. Based on Saito Takao’s manga about a hitman, the film was one of the first to use (crude) CGI effects. Both films are technically good but less inspired than the previous television series. Dezaki’s work on the Lupin III television specials, including Rupan Sansei – Bai Bai Ribatii – Kiki ippatsu! (‘Lupin III: Bye Bye Liberty Crisis – Goodbye Lady Liberty’, 1989) was also important. In the 1980s, Dezaki and Sugino went to the United States to collaborate on some international coproductions such as Mighty Orbots (1984) and Bionic Six (1987). Back in Japan, they made Oniisama e .  .  . (known in English as Brother, Dear Brother, 1991), from another of Ikeda’s girls’ manga. It is a morbid story set in a European girls’ high school, where Dezaki and Sugino created an

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atmosphere close to that in Aim for the Ace! and The Rose of Versailles. Later Dezaki made the Black Jack OAV series (1993–2000) and Black Jack: The Movie (1996), both interpreting a surgeon character created by Tezuka Osamu in a dark and violent manner. He also worked on Tottoko Hamtaro (literally, ‘Trotting Hamtarô’), a cartoon about a hamster; the dark Ultraviolet: Code 044 (2008); and the series Genji monogatari sennenki (‘The Tale of Genji’, 2009). Dezaki died in 2011, leaving an important heritage for Japanese animation. He had a predilection for filming from below and from an angle; harsh and dramatic stories; a communicative use of light, shadow, backlight, and split-screen; animated images that turn into still painted images (which Dezaki called ‘postcards’); and tricks to emphasize the melodramatic atmosphere. He was mainly a serial director, a narrative structure that he realized at its best. He often adapted books and manga with values of sacrifice, struggle, death, and strong passion, with a melodramatic touch.

Rintarô Hayashi Shigeyuki, better known by the pseudonym Rintarô (b. Tokyo, 22 January 1941), joined Tôei in 1958 with the intention of working in the live-action film sector. However, he ended up as a colourist for The White Serpent and later became an animator. His first film as director was Ginga tetsudô 999 (1979), followed by Sayonara ginga tetsudo 999: Andromeda shuchakueki (‘So Long, Galaxy Express 999: Andromeda Terminal’, 1981). After Genma taisen (‘The Genma Wars’, known in English as Harmageddon, 1993), where he collaborated with Otomo Katsuhiro, Rintarô directed Kamui no ken (‘The Sword of Kamui’), a fascinating and ambitious film set in Japan’s Tokugawa era. Neo Tokyo (1987) is an omnibus film comprising three episodes directed by Rintarô, Otomo, and Kawajiri Yoshiaki. Rintarô directed the outstanding segment Labyrinth, in which a girl and her cat find a labyrinthine world, through a mirror, which is populated by circus people and is rich with the kind of post-urban imagery that pervades later

Japanese animation. The segment was enhanced by the elegant character designs of Fukushima Atsuko. X (1996) is an outstanding apocalyptic feature film, inspired by a manga created by the CLAMP women artists. Rintarô’s staging is remarkable: he is a master at producing lavish visual representations, as in his feature Metropolis (2001), homage to Tezuka’s manga. His Christmas-themed feature film Yona Yona Penguin (2009) was made completely in CGI.

Oshii Mamoru In the middle of the 1990s, Oshii Mamoru’s cinema feature Kokaku Kidotai (‘Mobile Armoured Riot Police’, 1995, called Ghost in the Shell internationally) helped start a new wave in science fiction. Based on Shirow Masamune’s46 manga, the film is philosophically and aesthetically complex. It made Oshii famous and popularized anime to Western viewers. In the cyberpunk story, Major Kusanagi Motoko, a cyborg woman whose body is artificial, pursues a mysterious hacker criminal called the Puppet Master. The revelation that the Puppet Master is a self-generated artificial intelligence makes Kusanagi question her own nature. The plot created a solid base for philosophical inquiries on the essence of the ego and its limitations. These themes were dear to the director, who suggests ‘that a union of technology and the spirit can ultimately succeed’.47 Oshii Mamoru (b. Ôta-ku, Tokyo, 8 August  1951) was particularly impressed by the live-action directors Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, Andrzej Wajda, and Ingmar Bergman. In 1977 he began working at Tatsunoko Productions in several roles. In 1980 he joined Studio Pierrot, where he collaborated with Toriumi Hisayuki (9 July 1941–9 February 2009) on the TV series Nils no fushigi na tabi (‘The Wonderful Adventures of Nils’, 1980). In 1981 he became a director of the series Urusei yatsura, taken from the popular and unusual comedy manga by Takahashi Rumiko about an alien girl called Lum who falls in love with a reprobate Japanese student. At this time, Oshii met the scriptwriter Ito Kazunori, with whom he would collaborate on much more personal projects. He

46 Shirow, or Shiro, Masamune (b. Kobe, 23 November 1961) is a pseudonym for Ota Masanori, an artist well known in Japan for his science-fiction works, which focus on the social and political aspects of the worlds he creates. His works include Appleseed (1985), Dominion (1985), and Ghost in the Shell (1989). 47 Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005, p. 114.

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also directed two film spinoffs from Urusei yatsura. The second, Urusei yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984), explored dream and reality and had melancholic touches despite the comedy. Preparing for a school festival, the characters realize that their days seem to be repeating. The mystery becomes claustrophobic, with dreamlike end-of-the-world scenery. The film’s play with dreams and mazes, and its philosophical disquisitions, anticipate many of Oshii’s later films. For the Deen Studio, Oshii directed Tenshi no tamago (‘Angel’s Egg’, 1985), one of his most intense works, with character designs by Amano Yoshitaka (b. Shizuoka, 28 July 1952). The art nouveau style of Amano’s illustrations – set against detailed backgrounds – helps to elegantly outline a bleak, gothic world, reminiscent of European art. The dark meaning, woven with biblical references, was never fully revealed – not even by Oshii himself. Each framing was perfectly organized, with long takes and fixed settings. In 1987, Oshii directed his first live-action film, Akai megane (‘The Red Spectacles’), followed by Jigoku no banken: Kerubersu (‘Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops’, 1991) and Talking Head (1992, which included animated sequences). He also directed 1987’s Twilight Q 2: Meikyû Bukken File 538 (‘Twilight Q 2: Labyrinth Objects File 538’), an episode of a sci-fi video series. Kido keisatsu Patlabor (‘Mobile Police Patlabor’, from 1988) was produced by the Headgear group.48 The anime franchise is distinguished by its sociopolitical realism, mixing everyday life with humour and contemporary themes (terrorism figures in the second episode). Oshii was heavily involved in the franchise (which included both TV and video series). In particular, he directed the first two feature films, Patlabor: The Movie (1989) and Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993). Both were philosophically and politically weighty, with the second film openly questioning Japan’s postwar relationship with America. In 1995, Oshii directed Ghost in the Shell,49 a reinterpretation of Shirow Masamune’s manga with visionary sequences (Ito wrote the screenplay). The concept of the ‘spirit within the shell’ pervades the film’s dialogues, images, and direction, and also the exceptional music of

Kawai Kenji. Internationally coproduced between Bandai and the British distributor Manga Entertainment, the film had a considerable impact in the West. Many directors acknowledged its influence, including the brothers Wachowski, the creators of The Matrix. In 2004, Oshii went back to Shirow’s manga to create Kokaku Kidotai 2: Inosensu (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence), which successfully recreated the atmosphere of the original, though with far more elaborate CGI. In the 2000s, Oshii took a more experimental approach, technically and stylistically. For the World’s Fair Japan Expo 2005 he produced Mezame no hakobune (‘Open Your Mind’, 2005), perhaps his most radical work. It was projected on the world’s first in-floor plasma multidisplay system and consists of evocative images inspired by living people and natural forms. Tachigushi retsuden (‘Tachigui: The Amazing Loves of the Fast Food Grifters’, 2006), based on Oshii’s own novel, used a technique called superlivemation. Actors and places were photographed, digitally elaborated, and animated as if in a paper puppet theatre. The film is a mockumentary with grotesque hues about the spread of fast food in Japan. In 2009, Oshii also directed the live-action film Assault Girls. His later animated work, made for Production I.G, includes the features Miyamoto Musashi: Soken ni haseru yuma (called Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai in English, 2009); the episode The Duel from the collection Halo Legends (2010); and the feature Sky Crawlers (2008). The latter uses more simplified character designs than is usual for Oshii, a choice that fits with the film’s plot, in which eternally childish soldiers without memories fight a war contracted with private companies.

Kon Satoshi Kon Satoshi (Hokkaido, 12 October  1963–24 August 2010) came into Japanese animation as a complete artist: a designer, director, and scriptwriter. He debuted as a manga creator in 1985; his work includes the 1990 graphic novel Kaikisen (‘Kaikisen – Return to the Sea’). During these years, he impressed Otomo Katsuhiro, one of his

The Headgear group comprises Yuki Masami (b. Hokkaido, 19 December 1957), the creator of the project and author of the manga version; Ito Kazunori (b. Yamagata, 24 December 1954), scriptwriter; Izubuchi Yutaka (b. Tokyo, 8 December 1958), mecha designer; and Takada Akemi (b. Tokyo, 31 March 1952), character designer. Oshii was contacted when the project was at an advanced stage. There was also composer Kawai Kenji (b. 23 April 1957). The use of a collective name seems to have been primarily a way of keeping the rights connected with the series. 49 The film was reedited in 2008, using updated computer images and a new audio mix, under the title Ghost in the Shell 2.0. 48

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heroes, who introduced him to animation. Otomo invited Kon to work as set designer for Rojin-Z (1991), a feature for which Otomo had written the screenplay. Their collaboration continued with World Apartment Horror (1991), a live-action film directed by Otomo, which Kon adapted as a manga the same year. Kon rose to world fame directing the feature Perfect Blue (1998) for Madhouse Studio. It was initially conceived for the video market, from a book by Takeuchi Yoshikazu. Mima, a young woman, leaves her career as a singer to become a TV actress. Several members of the production team are brutally murdered, and Mima begins to question whether she herself is the killer. It’s a sophisticated psychological thriller, elegantly directed; the film depicts Mima’s mental breakdown, her obsessive fans, and the confusion between reality, fiction, and dream. The positive reception to Perfect Blue allowed Kon to proceed with the stirring Sennen joyu (‘Millennium Actress’, 2002). The title character is Chiyoko, a retired actress interviewed by a fan, Tachibana. What follows is a wave of Chiyoko’s memories, relived not just by the woman but also by the fan. The memories fuse together, jumping from history to Chiyoko’s films, with Tachibana becoming active in reconstructing her life. Tokyo Godfathers (2003) is a comedy, despite its delicate subject – its protagonists are the homeless. It is a ‘Christmas story’ about Miyuki, a girl runaway, Gin, a drunkard who has lost his family, and Hana, a drag queen. Discovering an abandoned baby, the trio sets out to find her mother, taking the viewer through the snowbound metropolis. The film – permeated with a Capraesque atmosphere – is one of Kon’s best, presenting outrageous coincidences in a realistic (and fantastic) Tokyo. In 2004, Kon made the 13-part TV series Moso dairinin (‘Paranoia Agent’), for the cable network Wowow. A mythical young boy haunts Tokyo on roller skates, attacking people with a baseball bat and panicking the city. The series alternates thrills with psychological depth, moving from realism into fantasy, until it reaches an apocalyptic ending. Kon targets modern Japan, from the harsh office world to school bullying, simpering anime icons (a soft toy cartoon dog plays a key role), and suicide clubs. The feature Paprika (2006) deals with the DC-Mini, a fantastical therapeutic device that allows the eponymous heroine, a ‘dream detective’, to enter another person’s dreams. The film is Kon’s richest in visual invention, wildly exaggerated in the dream scenes yet contained in a mature frame. In 2007, Kon reinterpreted dreams in his short Ohayo. Part of a series, Ani Kuri, for the public broadcaster NHK, it presents a woman’s gradual waking one morning.

In summer 2010, Kon Satoshi succumbed to pancreatic cancer. In his moving farewell on his blog – published online a few days after his death – he worried about the completion of Yume miru kikai (‘The Dream Machine’), his final feature film. As of this writing, it is still unfinished.

Otomo Katsuhiro Otomo Katsuhiro (b. Miyagi prefecture, 14 April  1954) grew up with the manga works of Tezuka Osamu and Ishinomori Shotaro. Japanese and American cinema were also very important to him. His epic sci-fi manga masterpiece, Akira, began to be serialized in 1982. It revolutionized the medium with the impact of its page construction, kinetic lines, and distorted perspectives. His animation career started in the 1980s. His directorial debut was Koji chushi meirei (‘The Order to Stop Construction’, 1987), an episode of the omnibus Manie Manie – Labyrinth Tales. In 1988, he directed the colossal film version of Akira. In 1991, he moved to live-action with World Apartment Horror, scripted by Kon Satoshi and Nobumoto Keiko. The anthology film Memories (1995) adapts his short manga, with the three segments directed by Otomo (responsible for ‘Cannon Fodder’), Morimoto Koji, and Tensai Okamura. It was followed by Steamboy (2004), which Otomo directed and wrote and for which he created the character design. Ray is a young inventor in an alternative nineteenth century. The adventure – which involves a battle for a potent new source of energy, climaxing in Victorian London – is a steampunk yarn, a sci-fi sub-genre involving nineteenth-century settings and fantastic retro-styled technologies. Steamboy is an epic, but like Akira it has some failings, especially in its screenplay.

Kawamori Shoji Kawamori Shoji (b. Toyama, 20 February 1960), is a multifaceted artist, famous for his role as a mecha designer and also for his scriptwriting and directing. He became known for his work on the TV series Chojiku yosai Macross (‘The Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross’, 1982), on which he was a mecha designer. Later he became closely involved with the subsequent Macross franchise and was especially famous for directing Macross Plus (1994). Also notable is Kawamori’s feature Ihatov no Kenso: Kenji no haru (‘The Vision of Ihatov: Kenji’s Spring’, 1996, called Spring and Chaos in the West), inspired by the life of the writer Miyazawa Kenji. His TV series also deal with

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science fiction (Chikyu shojo Arjuna, ‘Earth Girl Arjuna’, 2001) and fantasy (Tenku no Escaflowne, ‘The Skies of Escaflowne’, 1996). Kawamori took part in the film anthology Genius Party, for which he made the episode ‘Shanghai Dragon’. Since 2003 Kawamori has been an executive director of Satelight Inc., an animation studio founded in 1995.

Kawajiri Yoshiaki Kawajiri Yoshiaki (b. Yokohama, 18 November  1950) began working at Mushi Production as an animator, supervisor of animation, character designer, and art director. In 1972, he was among the cofounders of the Madhouse studio. His directorial debut was the feature film SF Shinseiki Lensman (‘Science Fiction New Century Lensman’, 1984), but his first famous work was Yoju toshi (known in English as Wicked City, 1987). Another feature film, it was ‘characterized by gloomy tones, and scenes of sex and violence. With artful fog effects and moody shadows [. . .] Kawajiri reveals a marvellously gothic sense.’50 In 1987, Kawajiri participated in the omnibus Manie Manie Meikyu monogatari (‘Labyrinth Tales’, also known as Neo Tokyo), directing the episode ‘The Running Man’. In 1993, he directed Jubei ninpocho (‘Ninja Scroll’), probably his best work, which became a veritable cult film. It is an action film, with many stupendous fights, set in an imaginary ancient Japan (inspired by the writings of Yamada Futaro). Kawajiri was responsible for the direction, screenplay, and character design. His other works include Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000), where he created a new gothic atmosphere, and the short ‘Program’ for the Animatrix (2003) anthology. In 2007, he made the feature Highlander: The Search for Vengeance (2007), based on the US live-action film series.

Morimoto Koji Morimoto Koji51 (b. Wakayama, Kansai, 26 December 1959) surrounded himself with trusted artists and professionals. For him, directing is orchestrating. He began as an

animator at Madhouse. During the 1980s, he met many of his future work (and life) associates: Kon Satoshi and two women, producer Tanaka Eiko and director-animator Fukushima Atsuko. The latter became Koji’s wife. In 1991 he directed his first feature film: Tobe! Kujira no Peek52 (‘Fly! Peek the Whale’, also known as Fly Peek!), an 80-minute film cowritten with Nobumoto Keiko. The work, about two little brothers and a baby white whale, was a little masterpiece for children. Koji’s participation on Memories (1995) began a new artistic phase, marked by a closer relationship between music and image and a greater desire for experimentation. His subsequent short films, Open the Door and Noiseman Sound Insect, were explosions of colour and forms. Koji also produced a series of music videos in the second half of the 1990s, marked by a more reserved use of the chromatic scale in order to conform to the industrial landscapes of the environment. Morimoto chose the soundtrack to convey the specific atmosphere of each sequence and to reflect emotional changes in the characters. He moved into electronic and techno music, beginning with the music video Extra (1996). In his free time he embarked on a career as a DJ. By the end of the 1990s, Morimoto began to experiment with computer animation. The short film Hustle!! Tokitama-kun (1998)53 was a visually fresh mix of traditional animation and computer graphics. It is the story of a little boy who abandons his robot parents for 300 years. Morimoto’s interest in computer animation was sparked by animators such as Michael Arias, who directed the computer graphics in Tekkonkinkreet (id., 1999); this was Morimoto’s short pilot for the subsequent feature film by Arias (see above). Morimoto continued experimenting with the miniseries Uraroji Diamond (2000, 24 one-minute episodes) and the short Kuchu izakaya – The Saloon in the Air (a segment of Digital Juice). Uraroji Diamond was produced with fixed images and tight dialogue, portraying characters in a rundown urban area. ‘Beyond’ was a segment of Animatrix written and directed by Morimoto himself, inspired by the Japanese metropolitan landscape. A group of children find an old and crumbling mansion where strange events happen, mixing action with poetry.

Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 2001, p. 444. 51 Mainly during his early animation career, Morimoto’s name was often transcribed as Kouji rather than Koji. During the later years, however, the name Koji was used for all his projects. 52 The film was produced by Toho Company. 53 This film and the subsequent pilot version of Tekkonkinkreet, which used the same technique, were produced by Studio 4°C. 50

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Morimoto also produced Mix Juice Jigen Loop–SOS Rescue Version (‘Dimension Loop’, 2002) and Jigen bakudan (‘Dimension Bomb’, 2007). The latter was included in the omnibus Genius Party Beyond. Masterpieces of his poetry, the shorts take opposite directions: Dimension Loop is rather static, while Dimension Bomb has a frenetic pace.

A New Kind of Serial In 1995, the anime Shinseiki Evangelion (‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’) began on Japanese television. Produced by the Gainax studio, the series was scripted and directed by Anno Hideaki. In 2015, ten years after the Second Impact – a worldwide cataclysm – giant cyborg warriors called Evangelions, piloted by troubled teenagers, struggle against monsters called Angels. Into the science fiction, Anno inserted psychoanalytic elements and religious symbolism. He built up complex personalities, especially the boy protagonist Shinji, who exemplifies the difficulties Japanese teenagers have forming relationships. The series can be interpreted at several different levels, one of which is an autobiographical one, according to which Shinji represents Anno, an otaku (geek) striving to transcend otaku material.54 The last episodes simply halt the adventure to analyze Shinji’s mind through still images and video footage. Anno’s direction is similar to live-action, deploying fixed angles and sequence shots. The visual impact was also thanks to character designer Sadamoto Yoshiyuki (b. Yamaguchi, 29 January 1962) and the innovative mecha design by Yamashita Ikuto, with Anno. The angular shapes of the Evas accentuate their muscles and bone structures, increasing the sense of their agility.

Following Evangelion, a new type of Japanese animation series emerged, soon nicknamed ‘new serial animation’, or NSA. Developed in a limited number of episodes (typically 26 or only 13), these series foregrounded complex themes that previous shows had left implicit. The new series were often coordinated by directors with live-action experience and typified by striking endings. Great attention was paid to every aspect: staging, soundtrack, character design (frequently realistic), animation, and the screenplay. In the latter field, many professional artists rose to prominence, such as Nobumoto Keiko. The series were generated within the industry, sometimes by young, small companies, but they were more usually born in larger studios. The creative staff had some freedom, blurring traditional genres and breaking or modifying conventions of serial animation.55 There were fewer straight manga adaptations and, in some cases, a strong reduction in spinoff merchandising. Among the most outstanding anime in the early years are Cowboy Bebop (1998) by Watanabe Shinichiro and Serial Experiment Lain (1998) by Nakamura Ryutaro. However, there were still productions for children or preteen audiences, based on strong merchandising. In the 1990s, a symbol of this type was Pokemon – Pocket Monsters (called Pokémon in the West, 1997),56 directed by Hidaka Masamitsu. It originated as a video game for the portable Nintendo Game Boy in 199657 and soon developed in various directions. It became the most commercially important anime of the 1990s, in terms of brand recognition and the investment it attracted to the medium.58 The plot of the anime centres on young Satoshi (Ash in the international version), who searches for the Pokémon, animals with special powers. The true icon of the series was Pikachu, a yellow pokémon similar to a mouse.

‘Evangelion is the end point of the postwar lineage of otaku favourites [. . .]. Shinji’s identity crisis, apparently a reflection of the director Anno’s own psychological dilemmas, epitomized the difficult obstacles faced by postwar Japan, a nation that had recovered from the trauma of war only to find itself incapable of forging its own future.’ Matsui Midori, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Room to a Chaotic Street: Transformations of Cute Subculture in the Art of the Japanese Nineties’, in Murakami Takashi, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005, p. 88. 55 The opening and closing credits (normally used to present the protagonists and their environs) were often used to experiment, visually and musically. 56 Marco Pellitteri reports that the accented ‘é’ is a US addition. Nintendo of America (NOA), title holder of the Western rights for Pokemon, introduced it in order to facilitate the correct pronunciation. Hence Pokémon also appears in the international logo of the brand name. (Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination – A European Perspective, Tunué with the Japan Foundation, Latina, Italy, 2010.) 57 The video game creator Tajiri Satoshi (b. Tokyo, 1965) combined his childhood passion for insects with the new interactive communication possibilities of video games. 58 Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 2001, p. 303. 54

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Pikachu’s soft characteristics – outlined by character designer Sugimori Ken – and its sounds (‘pikapika’) made the Pokémon exponents of the Japanese concept of cuteness, kawaii. Meanwhile, quality productions – anime such as Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiment Lain, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the films of Oshii Mamoru, Kon Satoshi, and Miyazaki Hayao – brought Japanese animation to the attention of the international film world. Jasper Sharp comments: Anime quickly became associated with a number of features that distinguished it from its Western counterparts: dystopian visions of future societies in which spectacular explosive finales of biblical proportions offer the possibility of regeneration and rebirth; content that could be considered adult, either for reasons of violence, sexuality, or the intellectual demands it places upon its viewers; the blurring of distinctions between different levels of objective and subjective reality, and a preoccupation with the philosophical issues these raised.59

Examples Cowboy Bebop (1998) is a science-fiction series produced by Sunrise Studio and directed by Watanabe Shinichiro. Its other credits include composer Kanno Yoko, mecha designer Yamane Kimitoshi (b. Shimane prefecture, 30 January  1966), character designer Kawamoto Toshihiro (b. 15 July  1963), and scriptwriter Nobumoto Keiko (b. Hokkaidô, 13 March 1964). The plot revolves around the adventures of a group of space bounty hunters, led by hero Spike Spiegel, aboard the spaceship Bebop. The anime’s 26 episodes are treated by Watanabe as if they were individual short films,60 with complex characters and compelling stories. The excellent soundtrack ranges from jazz to blues, from rock to lyrical music – building up the show’s universe, a postmodern future constructed through references from the present. Cowboy Bebop pays respect to cinema genres (science fiction, action, detective

stories, westerns), and to directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah, without these references becoming an end in themselves. The sophisticated opening titles are played on the characters’ silhouettes, the visuals paying homage to Pop art and optical art.61 Serial Experiment Lain (1998, by Triangle Staff) was even more revolutionary as a TV production. The 13-part series opens with a girl’s suicide. Later her schoolmates receive e-mail messages saying she is still alive in ‘Wired’ – Lain’s equivalent of the Internet – and has met God. The protagonist Lain gets ever closer to the computer world, encountering strange phenomena in both Wired and ‘reality’ – including a doppelganger Lain – undermining her world and identity. The setting is nonsensical and disquieting, and Lain’s confusion is excellently portrayed. The blurring between reality and virtuality is particularly interesting, ahead of its time in many ways. The staff consisted of director Nakamura Ryûtarô (b. 15 April 1955), character designer Abe Yoshitoshi62 (b. Tokyo, 3 August  1971), and scriptwriter Konaka Chiaki63 (b. Tokyo, 4 April 1961).

Satellite Channels The development of new series productions was helped by new spaces for animation, including satellite TV. In 1991, the first private pay-per-view satellite channel appeared, WOWOW (World-Wide Watching), owned by Japan Satellite Broadcasting. Since 1995, there have been TV series directly aimed at late-night broadcasting. They could have content more suited to adult viewers; in addition, the rights of transmission could be bought at lower cost. The first series made for this time band was the erotic/ comic Ike! Inachu Takkyubu (‘Let’s Go! Inachu Ping Pong Club’, 1995). However, it was soon followed by more innovative series such as Cowboy Bebop, Paranoia Agent, and Kemonozume. From April 2005, the role of noitaminA (the word ‘animation’ spelled backwards) became central. It was a programming strand consisting of short TV series aimed at adults, beginning with the delicate Hachimitsu to Clover (‘Honey  & Clover’, directed by Kasai Kenichi, from the

59 Jasper Sharp, ‘Between Dimensions – 3D Computer Generated Animation in Anime’, in Deutsches Filminstitut / Deutsches Filmmuseum / Museum für Angewandte Kunst, ed., Ga-Netchû! The Manga Anime Syndrome, Henschel, Berlin, 2008, pp. 122–123. 60 In 2001, a feature film also was released, Cowboy Bebop: Tengoku no tobira (literally ‘Cowboy Bebop: The Gate of Tengoku’, international title Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, also known as Cowboy Bebop: The Movie). It has the same technical cast as the TV series. 61 Cowboy Bebop was among the first Japanese animated productions that used computer graphics well integrated with two-dimensional drawings, particularly for the scenes set in space. 62 In the translation of his last name in romaji, the same Abe signs himself with the capital letter A and the capital letter B. 63 Konaka signs himself as Chaki J. Konaka when writing his name in romaji.

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manga by Umino Chika). The show noitaminA was broadcast every Thursday from 11:45 p.m. to 1:15 a.m.

In May 2006 Anno established Khara Inc., a company that made new cinema films based on Evangelion, reworking the original series. The first was Evangelion shin gekijoban: jô (internationally known as 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, 2007).

The Main Directors of New Serial Animation Anno Hideaki

Watanabe Shinichiro

Anno Hideaki (b. Ube City, Yamaguchi prefecture, 22 May  1960), the director of Evangelion, was inspired by the TV series Space Battleship Yamato in the 1970s. When Gainax was established, Anno directed the video space adventure series Top o nerae! Gunbuster (‘Aim for the Top! Gunbuster’). In 1990, Fushigi no umi no Nadia (‘Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water’) was broadcast on NHK television. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nadia, a beautiful black girl with a strange blue jewelled pendant, seeks her origin. She encounters a French boy, Jean, as well as Jules Verne’s hero Captain Nemo, who is battling the malign forces of Neo-Atlantis. Anno was unhappy because of the control exerted by NHK television, but he showed his flair with parody, comedy, drama, and mecha. With Sadamoto Yoshiyuki as character designer, Anno brought vivid characters to life with moments of epic drama. In the mid-1990s, Neon Genesis Evangelion appeared. The last two episodes – which lacked what many viewers considered to be a real ending – caused protests among otaku. Anno directed an alternative, very shocking, ending for the cinema: Shinseiki Evangelion Gekijoban: The End of Evangelion – Air/ Magokoro o, kimi ni (known as The End of Evangelion, 1997). He then made a live-action film, Love & Pop (1998). Anno returned to animation at Gainax, directing and writing Kareshi kanojo no jijo (‘His and Her Circumstances’, also known under the abbreviated title Kare Kano, 1998), from the shojo (girls’) manga by Tsuda Masami. He successfully inserted elements of manga language into anime, in a new, innovative style for television.64 Anno tells the boy-girl love story delicately. In 2004 Anno directed the OAV Re: Cutie Honey, in bright colours with a Pop appeal, and the live-action film Cutie Honey.

Watanabe Shinichiro (b. Kyoto, 24 May  1965) became famous for his versatility in direction and in musical production on Cowboy Bebop. He is at ease with both personal and popular cinema; his style is characterized by its simulation of handheld shots and strong subjective shots. The director said in an interview, ‘I never do really set distinctions between live cinema and animation; each of them offers a part of pleasure.’65 In 2003, Watanabe collaborated in the Studio 4°C project Animatrix, working on two shorts, ‘Kids’ Story’ and ‘A Detective Story’. In Kids’ Story a teenage boy is contacted by Neo, the hero of the Matrix films, who invites the boy to wake up in the real world. The cartoon’s setting is hyperrealist (Watanabe went to a real San Francisco high school for research), but the characters are drawn in a sketchy manner with distorted shots. The hard-boiled A Detective Story, featuring a private detective, is very polished, close to the Cowboy Bebop esprit. The second series directed (and created) by Watanabe was Samurai Champloo (2004).66 Whereas Cowboy Bebop combined jazz with sci-fi, Samurai Champloo merges hip-hop music and samurai stories. In Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868), the young waitress Fuu, the fighter Mugen, and the enigmatic rônin (masterless samurai) Jin travel together. Lower-key than Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo is a charming series with good character introspection and an interesting plot. (Some excellent screenwriters worked on the show, including Satô Dai and Nobumoto Keiko.) Watanabe’s short ‘Baby Blue’ appeared in the omnibus film Genius Party (2007). Written by Watanabe himself, the film focuses on the relationship between two students in a reflective, poetic, almost nostalgic way, with the help of large-scale shots and a soundtrack by Kanno Yôko.

For example, according to The Anime Encyclopedia: ‘one episode features a character whose head is a photograph of a Gainax staff member, while another is animated with paper cut-outs, until Yukino bursts into real flames. As with director Anno’s earlier Evangelion, onscreen captions and subtitles comment on the action and warp the characters’ meanings, perfectly capturing the adolescent power struggles and hypocrisies of the original.’ (Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 2001, p. 174.) 65 Philippe Christin, Matthieu Pinon, and Chihiro Maruyama, ‘Interview with Watanabe Shinichiro’, Animeland 95 (October 2003). 66 Champloo, meaning ‘a mix of different ingredients’, is a work from the Japanese island of Okinawa. 64

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Watanabe and Kanno reteamed for the 2012 TV series Sakamichi no Apollon (called Kids on the Slope in English). It is a story about two schoolboys in the 1960s who bond over their shared love of music, and jazz in particular, with some bravura extended sequences showing them perform.

Yuasa Masaaki In 1987, Yuasa Masaaki (b. Fukuoka prefecture, 16 March 1965) began to work at the Ajiadô studio, specializing in works based on children’s literature. He worked on popular series, including Crayon Shin-chan with Hongo Mitsuru. He soon became a freelance artist, mainly working on productions by Studio 4°C and Madhouse. At Studio 4°C, he created layouts and was character designer and animation director for Noiseman Sound Insect (1997), directed by Morimoto Koji. Yuasa’s creative contribution in this work is remarkable, as it is in Nekojiruso (‘Cat Soup’, 2001), a medium-length film by Fukutomi Hiroshi. Based on the manga by suicidal artist Nekojiro, using his wife’s screenplay, the story is set on a world of anthropomorphic cats. The soul of Nyata, a female kitten, is stolen by Death, and her brother helps her find it. The characters are very stylized, with a childish touch, but the surrealism and themes are mature. Yuasa worked on the planning, scenario, storyboard, and animation direction. Yuasa then directed the feature Mind Game (2004), based on an unusual manga by Nishi Robin. (Tanaka Eiko and Morimoto Kôji had the idea of adapting it.) Mind Game is a psychedelic journey, where the alternation of techniques and stylistic choices brings an enviable unity and coherence,67 unlike much experimental animation. There are shared elements between Cat Soup and Mind Game, but the latter is more personal. Yuasa then conceived the series Kemonozume (literally ‘Beast Claw’, 2006), with Ito Nobutaka as character designer. It is a love story between a female flesh-eating monster and a male hunter. In its 13 episodes, Yuasa creates interesting characters with animation recalling that of the 1970s. He then contributed the short Yumemiru kikai (‘Happy Machine’) to Studio 4°C’s 2007 omnibus Genius Party. A  baby leaves his house to find a strange, desolate

world, with bizarre beings and animals. The style is minimalist; the backgrounds are flattened, with pastel colours. Among Yuasa’s works, it is the most graphic, reminiscent of a child’s imagery. The series Kaiba (2008) is set in a world where it is possible to transfer human memories into new bodies. The visuals are simple, essential. Kaiba won the Excellence Prize at the XII Japan Media Arts Festival. The style of Yojohan shinwa taikei (‘The Tatami Galaxy’, 2010) is inspired by the illustrator Nakamura Yusuke, though the concept is based on a novel by Morimi Tomihiko. The oeuvre of Yuasa is vivid, with a careful use of colours and very original character designs. His greatest merit is a ceaseless wish to experiment, even while he remains within the industry, often working with a format – the television series – that has various limits.

Hosoda Mamoru Hosoda Mamoru (b. Toyama, 19 September  1967) has worked in animation since 1995. Toki o kakeru shojo (‘The Girl Who Leapt through Time’, 2006) was his first personal work (the director chose his collaborators). It is inspired by a story by Tsutsui Yasutaka, adapted by Okudera Satoko. High-school girl Konno Makoto discovers she can travel through time, an ability that creates various problems that finally escalate to a life-or-death crisis. Hosoda’s direction lingers over everyday Japanese life and adolescence. The hinted nostalgia does not overshadow the romantic comedy or the audience appeal.68 Hosoda was consecrated as a top director with Summer Wars (2009). The film portrays OZ, a virtual world that connects people. Meanwhile, schoolboy Kenji is visiting the grand country house of a girl, Natsuki, along with her large and chaotic family, when OZ is hacked, causing crises in the real world. The film is a skilful mix of comedy, adventure, and drama. The director’s delightful third feature, The Wolf Children Ame and Yuki (2012), was made at Hosoda’s new Studio Chizu. It follows a young Japanese woman who falls in love with a ‘wolf-man’ (that is, a werewolf) and bears his children. A disastrous event forces her to bring up the

In an interview, Yuasa said: ‘From the beginning, I wanted to use different techniques, as you can see. Because of the comic book, it was important to use a rough style and [making it look] spontaneous was important. So I wanted to use different styles, not only one style. It looks spontaneous and rough, but overall it has a structure. It makes sense.’ (Emru Townsend, ‘Interview with Masaaki Yuasa’, Frames per Second, fpsmagazine.com, last modified 18 July 2005, Fpsmagazine.com/feature/ 050718yuasa-2.php.) 68 Hosoda himself said: ‘Movies are a thing for the public; a director is a servant of film.’ (Interview with Hosoda Mamoru on the Japan Media Arts Plaza Web site, http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/english/festival/2006/animation/000492/index.php.) 67

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shapechanging infants by herself in the remote Japanese countryside. The blend of a fantastical premise and a convincing portrait of practical everyday life recalls Miyazaki Hayao’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, though Hosoda’s work never imitates that of the Ghibli director.

Shinkai Makoto A young animator who became prominent in the 2000s, Shinkai Makoto (b. Nagano, 9 February 1973) graduated in 1994 in Japanese literature at Tokyo’s Chuo University. He then worked as a graphic designer at Falcom, a video games company. In private, he experimented with computer graphic animation. These studies led to Kanojo to kanojo no neko (‘She and Her Cat. Their Standing Points’, 1999), a five-minute film combining 2D and 3D animation. It is about the relationship between a cat and its master, shown through the animal’s eyes in elegant monochrome. Winning numerous awards, She and Her Cat brought Shinkai fame, leading him into contact with CoMix Wave, a production company with which he made his subsequent works. Hoshi no koe (‘Voices of a Distant Star’, 2002) is a medium-length film about a girl and boy separated by millions of miles when the girl is chosen for a space mission. They send messages across the void, which take longer and longer to arrive. Shinkai is the director, writer, animator, art director, and – in the first version of the film – he also dubbed the film with his girlfriend. The result is amazingly professional, and despite weak character design, the author conveys deep emotions in a brief time. Voices of a Distant Star won a Special Prize at the VI Japan Media Arts Festival in 2002. Shinkai’s first feature was Kumo no muko, yakusoku no basho (literally ‘Beyond the Clouds, the Promised Place’, better known as The Place Promised in Our Early Days, 2004). It revisits the emotions of Voices of a Distant Star, mixing sci-fi with geopolitics (with references to the situation in the Japanese island Okinawa, occupied by American forces). The visuals are good, but the screenplay is overextended. Byosoku 5 centimetres (‘Five Centimetres per Second’, 2007) was a compendium of Shinkai’s art, a feature

divided into three parts, focusing mainly on two teenagers as they grow up and take different paths. Shinkai returns to daily life, narrating the loneliness of Japanese youth. His next feature was Hoshi o ou kodomo (‘Children Who Chase Stars’, 2011, known in English as Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below, or alternatively Journey to Agartha). It is a fantasy about a young girl in present-day Japan who discovers a vast subterranean kingdom. The film is visually very attractive (especially its early scenes set in the real world), but the story is less compelling than in Shinkai’s best works. Shinkai’s gaze lingers on small everyday objects and urban places, such as streets or stations, or on elements dear to the iconography of Japanese animation, such as trees in summer blossom. His debt to Miyazaki is clear in his storytelling and in the attention to backgrounds (above all, landscapes and skies), which give breath to his story and characters. For Shinkai, the choice of light that defines his glorious skies is very important.69

Internet and CG Anime Original net anime, or ONA, are popular: these are anime made for the Internet that, if successful, may be later distributed on DVD or broadcast on TV. In the beginning, the medium was good for independent authors (often amateurs). Commercial projects include the sci-fi serial Bonen no Zamudo (‘Xamd of the Lost Memory’, better known as Xamd: Lost Memories, 2008), produced by Bones Studio.70 Other titles include the crazy Yawaraka sensha (‘Soft Tank’) by Rarencho, posted on the Livedoor Net Anime71 Web site, and the science fantasy Ivu no jikan (‘Time of Eve’, 2008) by director Yoshiura Yasuhiro (b. Hokkaidô, 1980), produced by Studio Rikka. The first wholly CG Japanese animation was A.Li. Ce (1999) by Maejima Ken’ichi, a science-fiction film with a good plot but an unsatisfactory execution. Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within (2001), a big-budget project by Sakaguchi Hironobu and Sakakibara Motonori, was a US-Japanese coproduction connected to the Final Fantasy game franchise. The visual approach was incredibly

Japanese critic Azuma Hiroki said: ‘When I first saw Hoshi no koe, I thought, this is something completely different from anime thus far. This isn’t a moving image; it’s something more like a collection of still images that happen to be moving.’ (Azuma Hiroki, ‘Sekai kara, motto tôku e’ [‘Far from the world’], Hajô genro [September 2004]. Reprinted in Azuma Hiroki et al., Kontentsu no shiso, Tokyo, Seidosha, 2007, p. 23. 70 Directed by Miyaji Masayuki. 71 Livedoor is a Japanese Internet service provider. 69

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detailed, with motion-captured movement.72 The later Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children (2005) had more stylization and less ‘realism’. Both are unusual in Japanese animation.

Visual Art, Anime, and Manga Beginning in the 1990s but attaining international recognition in the 2000s, a brand-new generation of artists arose, influenced by the imaginary universe of Japanese animation. This new wave created some of the most interesting integrations between animation and art, going beyond theory and commenting on Japanese society. People such as Yanobe Kenji (b. Osaka, 1965), Aida Makoto (b. Niigata prefecture, 1965), Murakami Takashi, and Tabaimo embraced various subculture such as anime, manga, and tokusatsu (effects) TV shows.

Murakami Takashi Murakami Takashi (b. Tokyo, 1 February 1962), the initiator of the Superflat art current, attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He obtained a doctorate in the nihonga, an artistic form that developed in the mid-nineteenth century, mixing the pictorial Japanese tradition with Western trends. He stayed in the United States from 1986 to 1993. There he came to know the US art movements directly; he was most impressed by the erotic sculptures of Jeff Koons. Murakami also says that filmmakers and animators were among his biggest influences. His most noted animated production was in 2003, when – together with the stylist Marc Jacobs of the fashion brand Louis Vuitton – he was the creative director of Superflat Monogram, a five-minute short film directed by Hosoda Mamoru. Projected in fashion shows, brand stores, and art galleries, Superflat Monogram reinterprets the story of Alice in modern Tokyo. A  girl is literally absorbed into an artistic world, dominated by the coloured revisitation of the

Vuitton symbol created by Murakami. Murakami’s first personal project was Kaikai  & Kiki, with segments made in 2004 and 2005.

Tabaimo Tabaimo (the pen name of Tabata Ayako, b. Hyogo, 1975) uses animation in her installations. Using mixed techniques, she deals with contemporary society in its most commonplace moments and places (typical of many anime and manga environments). However, strange events occur; for example, a salaryman (Japanese employee) is beheaded by a housewife chopping onions. Such surreal happenings underline Japanese malaises (solitude, suicide) and the indifference of people. The animations – created by hand and then with the help of the computer at a later stage – are not fluid, but this is of little importance for Tabaimo’s purposes. In terms of form and colour, Tabaimo’s works go back to the ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) of Hokusai. Her works include Nippon no yuya – Otokoyu (‘Japanese Bathhouse – Gents’, 2000) and Public conVENience (2006), with projections on three walls. In Nippon no tsukin kaisoku (‘Japanese Commuter Train’, 2001), the images surround the viewer, alternating total fields with details, from commuters on a train to a child hanging on a doorknob. Midnight Sea (2006–2008) uses black and white animation, reproducing a night seascape by way of a wave motif. In 2008, Tabaimo collaborated with the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company for Furo (‘Bathhouse’), a dance revue that uses the artist’s animation as the scenery.

Ishida Takashi Ishida Takashi (b. Tokyo, 1972) began making films in 1995. Emaki (‘Scroll’) was taken frame-by-frame during the creation of his paintings. In Gestalt (1999), he paints a picture on a wall for an entire year. In The Art of Fugue (2001), the artist synchronizes visual abstract images with

Jasper Sharp writes: ‘The lineage to which The Spirits Within belonged was that of the video games industry, which emphasizes dynamism, hyperrealism and interactivity. Its credited director Sakaguchi Hironobu had created one of Japan’s most successful games franchises, the Final Fantasy series, to which this project was connected only by name. He had no links with the Japanese animation industry or its traditions, and the film was essentially a US–Japan coproduction, created by an international staff based in Hawaii overseen by animation director Andy Jones.’ (Jasper Sharp, ‘Between Dimensions – 3D Computer Generated Animation in Anime’, in Deutsches Filminstitut / Deutsches Filmmuseum / Museum für Angewandte Kunst, ed., Ga-Netchû! The Manga Anime Syndrome, Henschel, Berlin, 2008, p. 126.)

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melodies. In the same year, he began presenting live painting performances. In Chair/Screen (2002), he creates the illusion of suspended objects in time and space. In 2006, he made Ema/ Emaki 2 (‘Votive/Handscroll 2’). Film of the Sea (2007) was between animation and installation.

The Superflat World Developed through exhibits and publications, the foundations of the Superflat Manifesto were already contained in the essay ‘Greetings, You Were Alive: Tokyo Pop Manifesto’, published by Murakami Takashi in April 1999 in the magazine Kôkoku hihyô (‘advertisement criticism’). However, the project officially began in 2000 with the publication of the book Super Flat, accompanied by the exhibit of the same name. Both collect the works of several artists, including some of the best-known names in Japanese contemporary art. The Superflat Trilogy continued in 2002 with the exhibit Colouriage and ended in 2005 with the book and exhibit Little Boy. In addition to artists such as Takano Aya (b. Saitama, 1976), Aoshima Chiho (b. Tokyo, 1974), Mr. (b. Cupa, 1969), and Nara Yoshitomo (b. Aomori prefecture, 1959), the exhibitions also involved professionals who were directly involved with animation and manga, such as director Morimoto Koji, mangaka Mizuki Shigeru, and revered animator Kanada Yoshinori (5 February 1952–21 July 2009).73 The Superflat movement and the theories surrounding it are instructive for understanding some of the mechanisms behind mainstream Japanese animation – in particular, limited cel animation. For Murakami, the world of the future may be like Japan was today – super flat. In the arts, a two-dimensional sensibility pervades Japanese history. Today that sensibility is most present in Japanese games and animation.74

The main theme in the three exhibits, and the concept at the base of the Superflat movement, revolves around a new reading of the artistic history of Japan, marked by lack of depth. The artists draw both on the iconography and language of anime, manga, cinema, and advertising, and on the art and culture of the Edo period (1603–1868). The Superflat artists are children of a nation of consumers, dependent on the United States, growing up as otaku with manga, anime, and the kawaii style. They perceive art, based on Pop art objects to which they were exposed, as a natural outlet. The form of their works – mainly painting, though sculpture is well represented – is joyous, childish, stunning. However, the content is disturbing, sharply critical of contemporary Japanese culture.

Independent Animation Critics Chris Robinson and Doi Nobuaki note there was a second wave of Japanese independent animation in the 1990s.75 The public broadcaster NHK76 and MTV Japan (later called Vibe) carried animation projects that involved major independent animators. If NHK’s programmes were primarily for children, MTV Japan represented an important broadcasting space for independent animation in the 1990s. The two most important independent figures in these years are Kurosaka Keita and Yamamura Koji. Most of the projects are shorts, but some features were made, including Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (2002). This was part of an artistic and commercial project in different fields – music, graphics, Web design, merchandising, and an art event. Made almost entirely in black and white, the film focuses on a cute female cat called Tamala in a futuristic world. There are criticisms of marketing and capitalism, and pastiches of Tezuka Osamu’s style and Hello Kitty.

Kanada was known above all for the rendering of explosion scenes. As Thomas Lamarre observes, ‘as a first example of Superflat, the catalog juxtaposes a series of stills of the explosion of a planet from Ginga tetsudo 999 with a famous woodblock print from Hokusai’s Sanjurokukei (Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, 1831). The compositional similarities are striking. Both images flatten the relation between different planes (foreground, background, and middle grounds), with zigzagging, arcing, sweeping lines that encourage the eye to wander over the surface of the image, restlessly scanning it.’ (Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine. A Media Theory of Animation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009, p. 112.) 74 Murakami Takashi, ‘Superflat Trilogy: Greetings, You Are Alive’, in Murakami Takashi, ed., Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005, p. 153. 75 Chris Robinson and Nobuaki Doi, ‘Chris Robinson and Nobuaki Doi Present: An Extremely Brief, Unsexy and Dry History of Independent Japanese Animation’, in Chris Robinson, ed., Japanese Animation: Time out of Mind, London, John Libbey, 2010. 76 For example, 1998 saw the introduction of Domo, a new mascot of NHK television. The character (a hairy creature with a wide square mouth) appeared in brief puppet animated sketches by Goda Tsuneo (Tokyo, 1967). Goda’s other puppet animations include Komaneko (‘The Curious Cat’, 2006), a delightful children’s feature. 73

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Shôjo Tsubaki by Harada Hiroshi The feature film Shôjo Tsubaki (literally, ‘Camelia Girls’, also known as Midori – The Girl in the Freak Show), based on an underground manga by Maruo Suehiro (b. 1956), was released in 1992. Set in the 1920s, it is the harsh story of a young girl, Midori, who is sold to a freak show after her mother’s death and travels into violence and perversion. The manga was ably adapted by Harada Hiroshi (b. Karyukai, 1962). In 1979, Harada made City Nocturne, followed by Kagirinaki rakuen (‘Eternal Paradise’, 1985) and Nido to mezamenu komori uta (‘Lullaby to the Big Sleep’, 1985), about a boy opposing the building of Japan’s Narita Airport. In 1987, Harada began working on Midori alone because the subject deterred sponsors. However, the director was supported by Tokyo’s artistic underground scene. The premiere was an interesting mise en scène: a red tent on the grounds of Mitake Jinja, a Tokyo Shinto shrine. Amid strange decorations and exhibits, the underground theatre group Aka Neko Za (‘Red Cat Theatre’) staged acts that were performed by the freaks in the film. In 1999, Midori was confiscated at Narita Airport.

Kurosaka Keita Kurosaka Keita (b. 1956) studied figure and still-life painting at Musashino Art University, where he graduated in 1979. Later he spent two years at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, specializing in oil painting. In France, Kurosaka found a better sensibility in textures and surfaces and began to learn film production at the Image Forum. At this point, he began exploring animation with various techniques. An important influence was Matsumoto Toshio, master in independent filmmaking and Kurosaka’s teacher for a time.

In the series Henkei sakuhin no. 1–5 (‘Warping Compositions’), Kurosaka used photo collage in cut-out animation. No. 2 (1984) used various materials;77 No. 5 (1986) was a tribute to the painter Rembrandt. In Umi no uta (‘Sea Roar’, 1988), burning old boats release their spirits; Mimizu monogatari (‘The Worm Story’, 1989) is a dark parody of The Hare and the Tortoise. After Personal City (1990), Kurosaka made Haruko no boken (‘Haruko’s Adventure’, 1991), which looks into Japanese urban life, animating photocopied photographs. Later works include Box Age (1992); the surreal Atama (‘Head’, 1994, for MTV Japan); Papa ga tonda asa (‘Flying Daddy’, 1997, again for MTV Japan: three children find a bug in their father’s bed); and Dragon (1999), for the Vibe television channel, which uses a manga-like style to depict workplace harassment. In the 2000s, Kurosaka participated in Kawamoto’s project Winter Day and made other visually impactful works: for example, Mochibe (2005) and the animated video clip Agitated Screams of Maggots (2006) for the Japanese metal group Dir En Grey. Above all Kurosaka worked, nearly alone, on Midoriko, a 55-minute film presented in 2010 after more than ten years of work. Midoriko was hand-drawn in coloured pencil, with a soundtrack by the cellist Hiromichi Sakamoto. The film creates a world full of a sensual, sinister imagery. The works of Kurosaka are often disturbing but amazingly seductive. His visual style is based on concepts of grotesque and organic transformation. Eroticism is an important part of that. For me, animation has never been anything but an extension of my painting work. My films started out abstract, but they began to evolve in a more concrete direction, until eventually there were even what you’d call dialogue and stories starting to appear in the films, and eventually even characters.78 His style seems unusual for a Japanese artist, reminiscent of Francisco Goya, but it’s also strictly connected to the reality of Japan. He says: I grew up in the first non-political generation in Japan, so for us, rather than using surrealism to talk about the

Gigi T. Y. Hu writes: ‘He experimented with photo images of concrete slabs, rocks, sand, walls, grounds in natural conditions, particle forms and sizes, tarnished with natural and plastic colours, etc. To further express earthy and primal states, he juxtaposed them in lightness and darkness, moments of quietness and rest, and explosion and speed.’ (Gigi T. Y. Hu, ‘Independence in Japan’, Animation World Magazine 4, no. 9 [December 1999], awn.com/mag/issue4.09/ 4.09pages/huindependence.php3.) 78 Interview with Kurosaka Keita, translated in Benjamin Ettinger, ‘Keita Kurosaka’s Midori-ko this year?’, AniPages Daily (24 April 2010), Pelleas.net/anitop/index.php?title=midoriko_bringiton&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. 77

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outside world, surrealism was aimed inwards. In other words, we use surrealism to talk about the self. Underpinning this approach to surrealism were often basic aspects of identity such as our dreams and our formative experiences as children.79

Yamamura Koji Yamamura Koji (b. Aichi, 4 June 1964) is the most important figure in Japanese independent animation in the 2000s and one of the most significant in world animation as well. His passion for animation began early. As a child he loved drawing, and at thirteen he created some homemade animations with a Super 8 camera. In 1983 he entered Tokyo Zokei University. During this period, Yamamura worked for big movie productions in art assistance and special effects modelling.

In 1985, thanks to his visit to the Hiroshima International Animation Festival, Yamamura came in close contact with international animation and got to know the work of artists including Ishu Patel, Yuri Norstein, and Priit Pärn.80 They had a great influence on him. In 1987, Yamamura graduated with his first short, Suisei (‘Aquatic’). In a watercourse, where the sky reflects itself, fish appear and disappear, swimming together with birds. The screen seems plunged into water. After a period as a background artist at the Mukuo Studio (a subcontractor studio for television animation), Yamamura turned freelance in 1989. He worked in different fields as a magazine and children’s book illustrator, an advertising artist, and a collaborator on television series. In the same year, he created Hyakka zukan (‘Japanese–English Pictionary’). This is a charming voyage into a dictionary, in which the last syllable of a Japanese word is linked to the first syllable of an English word in a visual game requiring speed. The work won first prize at the Image Forum Festival.

Figure 4.1  Yamamura Koji.

Interview with Kurosaka Keita, translated in Benjamin Ettinger, ‘Keita Kurosaka’s Midori-ko this year?,’ AniPages Daily (24 April 2010), Pelleas.net/anitop/index.php?title=midoriko_bringiton&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. 80 Regarding the latter author, Yamamura said: ‘I cannot say that he influenced me from a technical point of view, but surely I found strong references in Priit Pärn’s graphic style and way of narration. And in his “spirit”. [. . .] I was also influenced by his skill to find a good balance between entertainment and elaboration.’ (Monica Cavalieri and Hanako Miyata, ‘L’anima nascosta del Giappone’, eMotion 7 [October–November 2003]: 68.) 79

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The experimentation in Yamamura’s Enkinho no hako – Hakase no sagashimono (‘Perspektivenbox – Researchers Search’, 1990) is remarkable. Using mixed techniques (2D animation, photo collage, 3D objects), Yamamura presented a visual compendium of modern cities. In Fushigina erebeta (‘Wondrous Elevator’, The Elevator, 1991), an elevator carries a boy into an underground world. In 1993 the artist and his wife, the painter Yamamura Sanae (b. Aichi prefecture, 1964), founded Yamamura Animation. A personal studio, it would produce all of Yamamura’s subsequent works. Its early output included many productions for children.81 Among them was an excellent series focused on the characters Karo and Piyobupt, followed by Ame no hi (‘Imagination’, 1993), Sandoitti (‘The Sandwich’, 1993), and Ôchi (‘A House’, 1993). Kids Castle (1995) was a journey into a child’s imagination, made with drawings. Kipling Jr. (1995), a puppet animation, tells of an anthropomorphic dog and his family. In 1994, Yamamura directed a clay animation series for NHK, Pacusi (18 one-minute episodes), inspired by his eldest child. All of these reveal a poetic touch in recreating children’s worlds, reflecting Yamamura’s idea of animation: an instrument to experience the world.82 Yamamura is fascinated by the freedom of the children’s universe to enjoy simple, everyday things. A strong influence comes from the Western illustrations beloved by the artist in childhood. With Bavel no hon (‘Bavel’s Book’, 1996), Yamamura introduces a Latin-American atmosphere with a work inspired by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. More aesthetically complex than his previous works, this short uses mixed animation to represent the adventures of children who enter a book. After Chikyu rokkotsu otoko (‘Mr Rib Glob’, 1998), an interesting, nihilistic work, Yamamura returned to children’s animation with the short Dottini suru (‘Your Choice!’, 1999), the result of a workshop in Chicago. Yamamura’s first masterpiece was Atamayama (‘Mt. Head’, 2002). In modern Tokyo, a cherry tree grows on the head of a stingy man who has eaten some seeds. His efforts to weed the plant are useless. Based on a rakugo83 piece that Yamamura heard as a child, Mt. Head succeeds in representing Japanese society in a way that anyone could understand. Mt. Head’s soundtrack is a masterpiece in itself: there is a real rakugo storyteller and a shamisen (three-stringed guitar) player.

Figure 4.2  Yamamura Koji, Atamayama, ‘Mt. Head’, 2002.

The drawings were made with a Sakuras Pigma 0.3 felt-tip pen for the outlines and oil marker for the colours. Some elements were made with Tombow Irojiten pencils and a concealer for light effects. Mt. Head touches themes of marginalization and loneliness in Japan in a gentle, satirical, visually powerful manner. The film won the Grand Prix at the Annecy, Zagreb, and Hiroshima festivals and the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. It was also nominated for an Oscar in the animated short film category. In 2002 Yamamura signed a contract with American Acme Filmworks as an animation director. He directed Omake (‘Pieces’, 2003) and a segment of Winter Days (2003). Toshi o totta wani (‘The Old Crocodile’, 2005) won various prizes – as well as the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. The work was based on the fable Histoire du vieux crocodile, written and illustrated by Léopold Chauveau in 1923. It is a satirical story, about a crocodile too old to hunt alone. One day he eats his grandson; then he meets a friendly octopus and eats one of its legs each night. Yamamura chooses simple drawings in black or red on a sepia background. The Old Crocodile is reminiscent of some early Japanese animations, with good story development. In 2007, Yamamura presented Kafka inaka isha (‘Franz Kafka’s a Country Doctor’), his longest work at 21 minutes. Graphically similar to Mt. Head, Franz Kafka’s a Country Doctor sees an old country doctor visit a young patient, though the real subject is the doctor’s thoughts, suggesting his madness. The motion is ceaseless, with deformed figures; heads and bodies are seen as if through a fish-eye

In fact, Yamamura had already made a short animation for children before his graduation: Hirake! Ponkikki (‘Open, Ponkikki!’) Monica Cavalieri and Hanako Miyata, ‘L’anima nascosta del Giappone’, eMotion 7 [October–November 2003]: 71. 83 Rakugo is a Japanese form of entertainment in which a storyteller narrates a comic story that normally involves a dialogue (the narrator changes his voice for the different characters). 81 82

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lens. The film grows more and more claustrophobic. Yamamura uses a language close to expressionism but also incorporates Japanese traditional theatre elements, with the Shigeyama family – practitioners of Kyogen, a comical form in Japanese shows – providing voice acting. In 2007 Yamamura also directed A Child’s Metaphysics, where he regards the world of children with a touch of sadness. Yamamura’s oeuvre is unique, thanks to his expressive and evocative images. He alternates different styles, techniques, and genres (he also makes animated commercials, music clips, and television programme titles). He has taught in various Japanese animation universities: at Tokyo Zokei University since 2004, and at Tokyo University of the Arts since 2008. During these years, remarkable new animators have started their own careers thanks to him.

More Independent Animators Yokosuka Reiko Yokosuka Reiko (b. Hitachinaka, Ibaraki prefecture, 1960) is famed for her use of India ink and Japanese paper. Her style seems inspired by traditional Japanese calligraphic art and sumie,84 and is based on simple, elegant lines. The balance between black brush and emptiness, between drawn parts and white parts, is central in her animation. Illusions (1981) is her first work. A Piper (1987) uses curvilinear and soft lines, the continuous movements set to the soundtrack’s rhythm. In 1994, she made Nanja monja obake (‘Weird Ghost’), a delightful short in which a fox encounters a curious ghost. Movement (2003) uses ink stains to animate shapes, together with outlines drawn with brushes. Her delicate contribution to Winter Days (2003) uses a transformation theme. In GAKI Biwa hoshi (2005), a gaki (Japanese ghost) plays his biwa (traditional Japanese instrument), transforming the environment.

Yonesho Maya Yonesho Maya (b. Hyôgo, 18 October  1965) creates her most famous abstract ink animations85 in her sketchbook, which she animates like a flipbook. Yonesho studied visual design and animation at Kyoto Saga University of Arts, where she made her first animation, One Lonely Cactus (1985). In the 1990s, she was a clay animator for the children’s TV programme P-kies. She independently made Momoiro no kirin (‘Peach-Coloured Giraffe’, 1995), a puppet film from a children’s story. She also made two animations experimenting with biscuits: Bisco Dance-1 and Bisco Dance-2 (1996). In 1996, she took a Bachelor of Arts degree in conceptual and media arts. In this period she began her abstract works using animated objects with ink animation, synchronizing images and sound. An example is Don’t You Wish You Were Here? (1997). On her style, Yonesho says: When I create an animation, I first decide on a theme, then edit the sound, and finally I  draw the images to match the sound. The theme always develops from something that has been in my mind, but rather than create a story and address the theme explicitly, I prefer to express abstractly, through sound and music, a mood or atmosphere that cannot be expressed in words.86 In Introspection (1998) Yonesho reflects on comprehension problems. She asked her foreign friends to engrave words of encouragements in their 13 different native languages, treating them as sounds, and expressing them through shapes, movement, rhythm, colour, and animation. ‘I tried to express, through the universal language of animation, the feeling that understanding – particularly of warm feelings – was possible even when the words were foreign.’87 Believe in It (1998) uses a child’s voice and Yonesho’s music. The short won the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival and other awards. She continued with

84 Sumie means ‘brush painting’, using ink on washi (calligraphy paper). The technique was brought to Japan from ancient China. Sumie painters condense their subjects in harmonic, simple paintings, using only black ink in different degrees of tone. The white surface is also important, contributing to shaping the work. Artists normally draw subjects such as flowers, birds, and landscapes. 85 Yonesho uses ink on paper for her animation, though the images look like watercolours. Ink is a dye colour that doesn’t wrinkle the paper, while watercolours do. 86 ‘AAJ – Artist Talks: Yonesho Maya’, Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan (AAJ) English Web site, 7 March  2003, http://web.archive.org/ web/20071109234146/http://www.aaj.at/artists.html. 87 ‘AAJ – Artist Talks: Yonesho Maya’, Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan (AAJ) English Web site, 7 March  2003, http://web.archive.org/ web/20071109234146/http://www.aaj.at/artists.html.

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her original technique. ‘I try to keep the shapes as simple as possible, and have them move to the rhythm in pleasing ways.’ Between 2002 and 2003, Yonesho went to Eesti Joonisfilm Studio (Estonia), thanks to the Japanese Government Study Program for Promising Artists and Art Fellowships. In Estonia, she made Üks Uks (2003). Various flipbooks represent important aspects in life. She also contributed to Kawamoto’s Winter Days (2003): her style was perfect for the elegiac theme. This short showed that, in fact, her drawings were not really abstract; rather, they were stylized representations of objects, elements, and concepts. Yonesho likes each viewer to interpret her work individually. She shows her sketchbook in her animations and uses the physical space of this object, an interesting contrast with the weightlessness of her colours. She makes her drawings jump from one sheet to another and play between them. Invited to participate in the jury at the Tricky Women International Female Animation Festival in Vienna in 2003, she made a trailer for the same festival two years later. Wiener Wuast (2006, known also as Vienna Mix) expresses a particular relation with the Austrian city. Her ink animations were shot while she held them in her hand, showing various corners of the city that inspired the drawings. The drawings themselves interact with the real-view environment and with Norbert Trummer’s soundtrack. Besides being a freelance animator, Yomesho made 20 short works for the NHK educational programme Inai inai baa! from 2007 to 2009.

Sato Dino Sato Dino (b. Tokyo, 14 September  1968) made Treedom in 1999. It was an animation inspired by a series of posters by his father, the illustrator Satô U.G. Trees with hand forms are cut and bleed; a pine is formed from many eyes; baobabs grow on zebras, all expressing the idea of life on Earth.88 Scrapland (2006) was based on a series of sculptures created by graphic designer Sato Hiroshi to suggest environmental problems. Its world is populated only by strange metallic animals.

The elegant The Line Magic by Red  & Blue was again based on illustrations by Sato’s father, making elegant use of animal silhouettes drawn with only two coloured lines. In Frog Seed (2008), a frog is run over by a car. From the dead frog, numerous frogs are born and invade a city. In the 30-second Frog Box (2009), there are three frames, and a frog moves from one to the other; the real concept is the game between the frame and the surrounding world. Frog Box and Frog Seed both make interesting use of textures, realized in computer animation.

Murata Tomoyasu Murata Tomoyasu (b. Tokyo, 1974) is probably the best puppet animator in Japan, after Kawamoto. Among his early works, Suiren no hito (‘Nostalgia’, 2000) won the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. In 2002, he established the Murata Tomoyasu Company while pursuing his artistic career in clay animation, cel animation, painting, installation, and photography. His most famous works are collectively called the Michi (‘Road’) Series. The first, Aka no michi (‘Scarlet Road’, 2002), is a melancholic, wordless short in which a pianist remembers his life. Reality is interspersed with memories and dreams. The next works continue to focus on the pianist: Shiro no michi (‘White Road’, 2003), Ai no michi (‘Indigo Road’, 2006), and Remon no michi (‘Lemon Road’, 2008). Additionally, Sora iro hana iro (‘Sky Colour Flower Colour’, 2005) seems to belong to this series, featuring a female protagonist seen in other works. Every short was influenced, in different ways, by the colour that names the work. Murata’s other films are lyrical, such as Fuyu no niji (‘Winter Rainbows’, 2005) and Nuance (a section of the collective project Tokyo Loop, 2006), or comical, such as the cel animation Sakadachi kun (‘Handstand Boy’) series, in which a little boy runs on his hands. The series begins with Sakadachi kun, hitasura hashiru! (‘Handstand Boy Intently Running’, 2005). Murata is one of the most prolific Japanese animators and a master in elegy. His style feels like a unique mix of Eastern European puppet animation and Japanese cinema, with an expressive richness rarely matched.89

Sato draws inspiration from the Gaia hypothesis by James E. Lovelock, according to which organisms and their environment constitute a unique self-adjusting system, and the Earth is a living being. 89 Another artist using puppet animation is Nagashima Atsuko. Her poetic NOS·TAL·GI·A (2007) is maturely directed, using animated sketches to depict the protagonist’s memories. The Last Blue Sky (2008) is about a pianist at the point of death. In 2010 she made Rokujo to yojohan (‘Two Rooms’). 88

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Katô Kunio Katô Kunio (b. Kagoshima, 24 April 1977) attracted international attention when he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the first Japanese animator to do so. The winning short was Tsumiki no ie (La maison en petits cubes, or The House of Small Cubes, 2008).90 An aged man lives alone in a house surrounded by the sea. As the waters rise, the man is forced to build one cubic room on top of another: each cube holds memories of a period of his life. The short is full of nostalgia and emphasizes the ephemerality of life. Katô also created a picture book with the same story. Katô’s first success had been The Apple Incident (2001). It is set in a city of oblong people, where big apples fall from the sky. The citizens eat them and apples grow on their heads. The film has ochre and azure tones and sharp-edged graphics. In 2001, Katô joined Robot Communications, Inc.,91 where he worked at Animation Studio Cage (an animation creator team within the company) in the character animation division. While there, he devised products for Web sites, mobile phones, commercials, and television programmes. Fantasy (2003), a web animation for the J-pop artist My Little Lover (J-pop is short for Japanese pop music), was composed of evocative scenes depicting a girl’s romantic waking dreams. Aru tabibito no nikki (The Diary of Tortov Roddle, 2003–2004, literally ‘A Traveller’s Diary’) was one of his most famous works. This series, composed of six parts (three minutes each), is centred on the titular traveler who rides a long-legged pig. The belly of a bear is used to screen a movie; cities are hoisted over an enormous frog. A melancholy permeates the animation. In 2005, Katô made Cell no koi, an episode for the NHK programme Minna no uta.

Totchka Totchka is a duo, formed by Nagata Takeshi (b. 2 February 1978) and his wife Monno Kazue (b. 24 August 1978), who operate in different fields – illustration, graphics, comics, and animation. Totchka is both a Russian word

that means ‘point’ and a Japanese term meaning ‘post, pillbox’. The couple’s most remarkable animated work is the series Pika Pika – Lightning Doodle Project. During an open animation workshop in the summer of 2005, the couple had the idea of applying a technique mainly used in photography. They ‘drew’ using flashlights in the dark photographed with long exposure. Totchka made a video from this experience – editing the photos together to create an animation – and put it online. It brought them to various festivals and events and inspired international artists to make similar works. These light animations play with the relation between the images and the rhythm, creating simple coloured shapes that cross urban backgrounds. The works were collective – Totchka’s friends and acquaintances from different fields contributed ideas. There was much improvisation, although the commissioned films had more planning. Pika Pika (2006) was awarded the Excellence Prize at the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival. Pika Pika (2007) and Go! Go! PikaPika!! (2008) followed. Totchka directs intense and joyful animations that exploit the evanescence and evocative powers of light. Later the duo brought the project to different Japanese settings (Kanazawa, Yamagata) and around the world (Indonesia, Canada, Brazil).

Sakakibara Sumito Among the youngest artists, Sakakibara Sumito (b. Tokachi, 1980) is one of the best known internationally. In 2002, he began studies in the animation department at the Royal College of Art in London. His graduation film was Kamiya’s Correspondence (2004), which received various international awards and a nomination from BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Association). Realized simply and elegantly, this story about a family described by a girl in a letter to her dead mother deals with life delicately. After his graduation, Sakakibara worked as a freelancer in different artistic fields (animation, comic strips, illustration). In 2005 he produced Flow, which won the Grand

The House of Small Cubes won, among others, the Hiroshima Prize and the Audience Prize at the 12th Hiroshima International Animation Festival, 2008; the Annecy Cristal and Junior Jury Award at the 32nd Annecy International Animation Film Festival, 2008; and the Grand Prize in the Animation Division at the 12th Japan Media Arts Festival, 2008. 91 Robot Communications, Inc. was established in 1986 and creates visual content for different forms of media. The Animation Studio Cage was founded by animation director Nomura Tatsutoshi (b. 1964). 90

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Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. It depicts a small village, with the camera zooming in on details and people.

Oyama Kei Calf is an independent DVD label, established by the critic Doi Nobuaki and the animators Oyama Kei, Wada Atsushi, and Mizue Mirai to make Japanese independent animation and short movies. Oyama Kei (b. Tokyo, 1978) has a striking technique, making use of computer-generated images based on photo collages shot in close-up, creating a rich texture. His works often show disturbing aspects of daily life and seem to come from his nightmares. His first short was Nami (2000), codirected by Shimada Go, Sato Isu, and Kojima Izumi. Itsumo no nichiyobi (‘Usual Sunday’, 2003), codirected with Hirata Yu, is an installation work composed of three monitors. Yukidoke (‘The Thaw’, 2004) is visually more delicate, incorporating pencil drawings with photography. With Shinsatsu shitsu (‘Consultation Room’, 2005) Oyama gained some fame and a prize at Ars Electronica. His graduation work, the film shows a man visiting the doctor. Oyama evokes the disturbing sense of illness through a texture created with close-up photos of skin. His other shorts include Anizo (2006); Yuki chan (2006), his contribution to Tokyo Loop; and SMAP X SMAP (2007). Hand Soap (2008) is his longest work at 16 minutes. Oyama shows the hard life of an adolescent, who has problems at school and at home. The film won the Special Prize at the  Hiroshima International Animation Festival in 2010.

Wada Atsushi Wada Atsushi (b. Hyogo prefecture, 1980) began making personal animations in 2002, during his university years, giving life to doodles. His early films include Yume utsutsu (‘Between Sleep and Dreams’, 2002) and Kono mayonezu wa yurusugiru (‘This Mayonnaise Was Too Liquid’, 2002). Graduating in 2004 from Osaka Kyoiku University, Wada attended the Image Forum Institute of Moving Image in Tokyo and graduated in 2005. His works from that time include Annerida Tantuelin (‘Dancer of Vermicular’, 2004) and Kakari (‘A Clerk in Charge’, 2004).

Hana no hi (‘Day of the Nose’, 2005) is perhaps his most famous short. A queue of salarymen wait patiently while their noses are pinched by a doctor, one by one: then they go toward a wall with a little hole and smell it. The work has a magnetic structure and rhythm without a clear explanation. Wada shows the alienating situation (in grey) and the curious thoughts of one man in a pink-orange colour. Wada alternates action moments and still moments and has spoken of the Japanese concept ma, the tension produced between movements. To Catherine Munroe Hotes he said: If one applies this to animation, it was because there was movement that was also silence (the absence of movement). I  do not only mean movement and the space and time between movements, but that it was necessary to have movement in silence. They both need to be included in the concept of ma. It was important to think about how an animated movement affects the silence that follows it, and how that connects to the movement that follows the silence. [. . .] It wasn’t really that I was interested in the movement itself, but in the ma that develops by putting the drawing into a time sequence.92 Wada’s other films include Yasashii fue, tori, ishi (‘Gentle Whistle, Bird, and Stone’, 2005), Koe ga detekita hito (‘A Manipulated Man’, 2006, presented in the Tokyo Loop collection), Soiu megane (‘Well, That’s Glasses’, 2007), Wakaranai buta (‘In a Pig’s Eye’, 2010), and Haru no shikumi (‘The Mechanism of Spring’, 2010), which shows the reactions of animals to the coming of spring. Wada privileges absurd narration, a particular sense of humour, repeated actions, and a clean graphic design, with characters with no facial expressions. He prefers a soundtrack made by sounds from daily life. Often his animations are at first drawn in black and white on rough textured hanshi, a Japanese paper for calligraphy, and later scanned into the computer to colour them.

Mizue Mirai Mizue Mirai (b. Tokyo, 1981) made some films (like Affection of Sisterly, 2004) based on the metamorphosis of human figures. However, he is famous for his abstract

Catherine Munroe Hotes, ‘Art of the Absurd: An Interview with Atsushi Wada’, Nishitaka Film Review. A Journey through Japanese Visual Culture (23 November 2010), http://nishikataeiga.blogspot.com/2010/11/art-of-absurd-interview-with-atsushi.html. 92

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animations, in which organisms – cells, Paleozoic beings, spermatozoids – dance elegantly to a musical rhythm. The artist draws each image by hand and then scans them into a computer. The Carmen – In Fantastic Cell (2002) is set to Bizet’s Carmen. Fantastic Cell (2003) uses figures drawn in black on a white background. The film only brings colours in at the end, when cells join to give birth to a human. Trip!-Trap! Eternal Triangle (with music by Nakamura Alice) uses a different graphic style and animation technique, bringing back the metamorphosis theme; In the Sweet Mont Blanc (2006) is similar, with continuous, very fast movement. Lost Utopia (2007) is almost a sequel to Fantastic Cell. The very funny Devour Dinner (2008) shows strange entities eating each other. Jam (2009) is a colourfully chaotic parade of his strange creatures moving to a very rhythmic sound (‘Fractal Aquarium’ by Kai&Co.). Metropolis (2009, the opening film of the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival) is an abstract piece reminiscent of urban structures. In Playground (2010), his drawings appear softer. In addition to aqueous pens, Mizue uses a paintbrush with India ink and chooses more natural colours; the result is reminiscent of Joan Miró’s paintings. In Wonder (2014), the animation, the timing, and the palette are all skilled and fresh. Although sometimes redundant, the film gives the viewer a true feeling of euphoria. Mizue treats the screen as a frame, creating a particular tension through elements that are always moving (cells in Last Utopia, rectangular forms in Metropolis, or handmade backgrounds in Playground).

Tsuji Naoyuki

Nakata Hideto

Conclusions

Elemi (2009) is an incredible puppet animation feature directed by Nakata Hideto (b. Hyôgo prefecture, 1972) and his studio Sovat Theatre. Established by Nakata with Matsuo Kenji, Hosoi Hirokazu, and Masuda Shigeaki, the studio made puppet shorts. Elemi won the Excellence Prize at the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival and the Ofuji Noburo Award. Boasting a wonderful character design, the film is a strange love story between Elemi, a female telephone pole, and Takahashi, a telephone company worker.

The film critic Dave Kehr wrote in 2002 that Japanese film had probably never been as popular worldwide as it was then.93 There was a flowering of publications – specialized magazines and journals, books, scholarly studies, newspaper articles. There were also writings devoted to the cultural cross-pollination between Japan and the West.94 The South Korean director Peter Chung declared: ‘There are two ways of looking at animated films: to emphasize the animated aspect, or the film aspect. I think

Tsuji Naoyuki (b. Shizuoka prefecture, 1972) excels in animation, sculpture, and illustration. His disturbing, charming black and white animation is rich in symbolism. He debuted as an independent animator in 1992 with Mezamero (‘Wake Up’), alternating puppet and pen animation with great visual impact. Kiekaketa monogataritachi no tame ni (‘For Almost Forgotten Stories’, 1994) is a straightforward puppet animation. Yoru no okite (‘The Rule of Dreams’, 1995) is a charcoal animation; it was made by drawing, erasing, and redrawing on a single piece of paper. Experiment (1997) combines object and pen animation. Yami o mitsumeru hane (‘Feathers Staring into the Darkness’, 2003) is a charcoal animation that, after some screenings in France, was selected for the 2004 Cannes Film Festival Directors Fortnight. Earth, Good, and Evil struggle against each other to give birth to a new world. At Cannes the following year, Mitsu no kumo (‘Trilogy about Clouds’, 2005) was screened. As his fame grew, Tsuji made the short Kage no kodomo (‘Children of the Shadows’, 2006), about two children running away from their father. The suggestive Enzeru: The Place Where We Were (‘Angel: The Place Where We Were’, 2008) concerns a couple wanting a child. Zephyr followed in 2009. Tsuji uses a childlike, naive style, often monochrome, to tell disturbing stories about nightmares, fables, psychoanalysis, and myth. His technique is almost the same as the one used by the South African William Kentridge. Starting with an idea on paper, he begins to follow his imagination; the drawings leave a visible track.

Dave Kehr, ‘Animé, Japanese Cinema’s Second Golden Age’, The New York Times, 20 January  2002, nytimes.com/2002/01/20/ movies/20kehr.html. 94 For example, Roland Kelts’ Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York, 2007.

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in the USA the tendency is to evaluate it as animation and in Japan the tendency is to put emphasis on the film part.’95 Studio 4°C’s Tanaka Eiko explained: ‘In Japan there’s a way of looking at the world only through lines – as in the kimono or torii [ceremonial gates]. In Europe, they were using light and shadow. So Westerners have long been paying more attention to volume than flat spaces. They don’t pay that much attention to these lines. We learned how to express shapes and forms and ideas using lines.’96 In most cases the Western cartoons influenced by Japanese anime maintain a narrative structure linked to Western productions (aimed almost always at kids), as with several French television animation series, including Totally Spies (2001–2008).97 What these imitations lack is the emphasis of non-stated and vacuum space; in other words, they lack the tendency in anime to be sometimes narratively elliptic and to grant moments and phases of silence, calmness, and stillness. Western commercial animation tends to be hectic, whereas anime preserve a balance between action and stasis. Already mentioned several times, Animatrix (2003) was a collection of nine short films produced mainly by directors of anime,98 drawing inspiration from the live-action film The Matrix (1998) by Andy and Larry Wachowski. That film in turn had been heavily influenced by anime and manga, completing a circle in American and Japanese production.99 Within the mythology of The Matrix, the authors inject their own style into their shorts. This was particularly successfully in the noir A Detective Story, the

visually experimental Kid’s Story (both by Watanabe Shinichiro), and the fantastical Beyond (by Morimoto Koji).

Challenges Some ominous signs appeared in the second half of the 2000s. Low salaries and long working hours characterized the anime system, as well as bad management of younger talents, who were not given sufficient space to emerge. Manually-intensive animation work was outsourced to countries with cheaper labour costs like South Korea, Thailand, China, India, and Vietnam. There is now an overabundance of anime made specifically for fans, the so-called otaku.100 It may win this target audience but push away a potential, more general, public. There is also Internet piracy to consider.

Israel101 In Israel, the 1990s saw huge changes for animation with the introduction of cable TV. Commercial TV had received halfhearted approval for a trial run in 1986 and obtained official government approval in 1993. Uri Shinar, who had previously produced outstanding animation and who would go on to establish the AniBoom studio, was in charge of its content.102 The new TV channels created a growing demand for animation in logos, promos, music clips, and children’s

Interview included in the documentary Scrolls to Screen: A Brief History of Anime (2003), directed by Josh Oreck. Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York, 2007, pp. 213–214. 97 A more creative use of Japanese influences can be seen, for example, in France’s Code Lyoko (2003–2007) and America’s Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008). 98 The short films are: Final Flight of the Osiris, by US director Andy Jones; The Second Renaissance Part I and The Second Renaissance Part II, directed by Maeda Mahiro; Kid’s Story and A Detective Story, both directed by Watanabe Shinichiro; Program, directed by Kawajiri Yoshiaki; World Record, directed by Koike Takeshi; Beyond, directed by Morimoto Koji; and Inmatriculated, directed by Peter Chung. 99 Another interesting example of coproduction that highlights the international importance of anime is The Origin of O-Ren, the animated sequence from Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). It was directed by Nakazawa Kazuto and made by Production I.G. The interesting sketched look is reminiscent of 1970s Japanese animation, with a similar effect to that of Watanabe’s Kid’s Story. Both sequences are dominated by a distinctive animator, Ohira Shinya (b. Aichi prefecture, 12 December 1966). 100 Many critics say that an excessive use of moe will bring Japanese animation into a deeper crisis. Moe has different meanings, but in regard to anime it refers to a feeling of affection and attachment, often towards cute girl characters, and often with an erotic nuance. 101 By Paolo Parmiggiani. 102 AniBoom was based in Israel and had offices in New York. According to AniBoom’s press release, the studio was a full-service animation group including over 10,000 independent animation professionals in 72 countries. AniBoom made possible a faster and less expensive process to create high-quality animation for all platforms: TV, film, advertising, videogaming, the Internet, and mobile phones. 95

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series. Another innovation was the first prime-time animated TV series for adults, The Samsons, created by Noam Meshulam (Pitchi Poi studio, Jaffa) and Dudu Geva (1950–2005). The new channels supplied a much-needed base for an animation industry while expanding the public’s exposure to mainstream animation. Later, YES showed some of the best international auteur animation on satellite TV. Additional demand for animation came from the producers of CD-ROMs, video games, the Internet, and cassettes featuring children’s songs and adaptations of children’s stories. All of this, in addition to developments in digital hardware and software, led to the establishment of new studios. Among the prominent ones were Broadcast Postproductions, Disk-In, JCS Post Productions, Gravity Rhino, and PIL Animation.103 The collapse of the Soviet Union had an impact too. Over 800,000 people emigrated to Israel during the 1990s. Among them were a few animators and many people with solid art training. Some found work in existing studios or opened their own. Around fifty were invited in 1991 to go through animation training at a new studio, Anima Studios, established in Beit-Shemesh by veteran producer-director David (Dudu) Shalita, with some government support. The studio created commercials, five children’s cassettes, and some work for foreign markets before it closed in 1996. Some of the artists joined Shalita at Disk-In, Tel Aviv, for the ambitious film Rashi: A  Light after the Dark Ages. It told the story of the wise eleventh-century Torah commentator, Rashi. The film, directed by Ashley Lazarus, has impressive animation sequences and designs. Israeli animators became less isolated internationally thanks to cheaper flights, Internet exposure, and the growing awareness of international festivals. There was also the contribution of artists who returned to Israel after studying abroad. They brought knowledge and contacts, helping to open possibilities of work with and for foreign markets. One of the first such returnees was Noam Meshulam. After graduating at CNC Gobelins, Paris, in 1985, he established Pitchi Poy studio in Jaffa. In addition to commissioned work, the studio initiated series and features.

Baldy Heads deals with intolerance. In a city of bald people, the mayor discovers a single hair on his head. Tami Sivan (who graduated from Sheridan College, Canada) joined with Daniel Isaacs (a graduate of the London School of Printing) in 1990. Among their first creations were the animated music clips Agam Anakit (‘Giant Lake’) and Hashomer shel Hagan (‘The Garden’s Guard’). They won the first and second prizes at the 1991 Haifa International Film Festival. The brothers Yigal and Yehuda Doron worked in The Netherlands and Germany before returning to Israel in 1983 with the first computer that could create animation, a Bosch 2000. Tsvika Oren (see below) studied at De Vrije Akademie in The Hague. He returned to Israel in 1977 and organized the first animators’ association, Israel Animation. In 1995, he initiated and directed the annual Creative Filmmaking international festival. Hanan Albert Kaminski (b. Brussels, 1950) came to Israel from Belgium, graduating from the Bezalel Academy in 1977 and eventually establishing a studio that supplied work to clients in Israel and in Europe. In 1992, he coestablished the TV Loonland animation studio in Budapest, where he directed his first two features: The Real Schlemiel (1995) and Petson and Findus (1999). Yossi Abulafya, the animator, director, and illustrator (of over 140 books) had worked in Canada and the US in the 1970s. In 1996, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem recognized the importance of animation and put Abulafya and Kaminski in charge of expanding the animation unit. New equipment was bought, lecturers recruited, and a curriculum developed. From the year 2000 on it was developed further under veteran animation director Rony Oren. It had 150 students, over forty lecturers, and an intensive four-year curriculum for which it awarded an academic degree. There were quite a number of other options for animation students, including the Animation Centre, Tel Aviv Cinematheque (1990–2003), Tel Hai College, Camera Obscura, WIZO Haifa, and Sela University. However, none of these had as many resources as Bezalel, which was the most important school. There were three retrospectives of Israeli animation: at the 1996 Ottawa festival, the Zagreb festival in 2000, and the Poznan festival in 2010. All three were curated by

103 PIL Animation was established in 1998 by the architect Sharon Gazit. Besides commercials, TV specials, and kids’ series, Gazit created personal films: Master Café Shake (2003), Parents’ Channel Filler (2004), Couples in Treatment (2008), and Woosht (2008). The studio introduced Ari Folman to animation when it created sequences for his documentary series The Material That Love Is Made Of (2004). PIL Animation also created the pilot for Folman’s feature Waltz with Bashir (2008).

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Tsvika Oren, who said that most Israeli animation artists chose not to deal with their country’s political situation. The complex, violent reality is often expressed, indirectly, in the use of black humour. Some depict violence as absurd, stupid and pointless in films on human behaviour. Still, life in Israel does not centre around what is shown on the news. There is a lot of creativity, sun, fun, and daily pleasures, including animation, which do not make the headlines.104 Tsvika Oren (b. Tel Aviv, 1946) was an animation director, curator, journalist, and lecturer. He studied agriculture, economics, education, and graphic design in Israel, then he went to The Netherlands in 1971 to study art. In each of his films, he experimented with different animation possibilities. Beresheet bara . . . (1974, an anti-war allegory) used ordinary objects interacting with cutouts. Ice-cream & Other Vegetables (1975), about ambitions and disappointments, used frame by frame manipulation of melting ice-cream and sliced cucumbers. Autumn Leaves (1975) used the titular leaves in a choreography of colours, shapes, and textures. Oh, Paradise (1976), a love fantasy, used cutouts of playing cards animated in an exaggeratedly wide screen (1 metre x 3 metres). ’Yer Drivin’ Me Nuts! (1976) deals with everyday symbols and commercial logos, using drawings on celluloid, watercolour backgrounds, threads, and cutouts. Thready Games (1976), a parable about life cycles, used threads as textured line drawings, with metal and animated watercolour stains as backgrounds. To See or Not (1977) used Oren’s still photographs to create a cinematic album. Oren returned to Israel in 1977 and worked in various capacities on live-action films and documentaries. Working with the Tel Aviv Museum, he initiated animation workshops and the decade-long Animation Art series of monthly lectures, accompanied by films brought from all over the world. The lectures took place in museums, film clubs, and cultural centres across Israel. In the summer of 1980, Oren received a grant for a year-long study tour in the US and Canada. He said: One can imagine the insights gained by spending a week at Chuck Jones’ studio, or by talking with Frank Thomas, June Foray, Faith Hubley and many others,

as well as by being allowed to sit at animation lobbyists’ meetings in Washington DC. I even had the luck of doing a bit of animation on John Canemaker’s The Wizard’s Son and a drawn-directly-on-film short on Norman McLaren’s table.105 Back home, he was invited to work as a film critic on national radio and as a film journalist on several publications, giving him opportunities to promote animation. In 1990, he established The Animation Centre, Tel Aviv, which ran intensive workshops and organized conferences, master classes, and exhibitions until 2003. In 2000 he also initiated ‘ASIF’, an annual summing up of Israeli animation organized by ASIFA Israel at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. His films include Mermaid S.O.S. (2004), codirected with Avi Ofer, and two ‘diary films’ revealing thought process and emotional changes: Diary 1: ReAnimacja (2009) and Diary 2: Feelings (2010). Rony Oren (b. Haifa, 1953, no relation to Tsvika Oren) was drawing, working in leather artistic craftsmanship, and also working as an usher at the Jerusalem cinemathèque, when he was asked to create illustrations for the art department of IBA national TV in 1975. When asked if he could make some animation, he said yes and learned on the job. His first personal film was At the Beginning .  .  . (1976), a humorous social critique depicting the Creation as a process leading from the sea to futile bureaucracy. He and Meni Salama created The Egg series (1978) with Meni Salama in Jerusalem’s Frame-by-Frame studio. The Egg is a series of 20-second episodes, each opening with a huge white egg falling onto a white stage, with an imaginative, often funny, story following. Frame-by-Frame studio closed down in 1984. Two years later Oren opened a new studio in Binyamina, about an hour’s drive north of Tel Aviv. There he created award-winning commercials, the popular Plasticine TV series Foxy Fables (13 episodes, 1986) and The Animated Haggadah (1986), a TV special retelling the story of Passover in a charming way. Tales of a Wise King I, II (1989, 1993) was a clay animation series of 26 episodes, based on oriental tales and the legends of King Solomon. Grabbit the Rabbit (1997) followed. It was a series of 13 episodes based on African-American folktales (published as Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris, already adapted by

Tsvika Oren, ‘Contemporary Israeli Animation’, in Animator 2010, Catalogue of the Third International Animation Festival, Poznan, p. 91. 105 Tsvika Oren, personal communication to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 2010. 104

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Figure 4.3  Yuval and Merav Nathan, Attractive, 2007.

Walt Disney). In the Three Green Frogs (2003) series, the frogs are upset because of their skin colour. In 2000, Rony Oren was appointed as head of the animation department at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. Graduate films were selected for competition by the leading international festivals and several won awards. Husband and wife Yuval and Merav Nathan created a unique style combining photography, design, 3D animation, object animation, and 2D compositing. Yuval started by directing Road Kill (2000–2001), six episodes about animals killed on the road. Audition (2002) is a short about a kid auditioning as Rambo; Getting Stoned Again (2007) features a stoned paranoid rat. Yuval and Merav directed many commercials and music videos together, such as Attractive (2006–2007), Postcard for Amit Erez, and Dancing (2008) for ‘The Walking Man’ by Gilad Kahana, They also directed the Grammy-nominated music video Her Morning Elegance (2009), together with Oren Lavie; the sand sculptured Lose this Child for Eatliz (2011); and the plants and flower animated video Robin (2014) for Efrat Ben zur singing Emily Dickinson. The couple also holds an Annie award for best commercial (2009). Uri (b. Jerusalem, 1975) and Michal Kranot (b. Tel Aviv, 1977) made their own films with their own studio, called Tindrum. Their style focuses on graphics that are scarcely coloured. The drawings move on monochrome backgrounds, with particular attention to chiaroscuro effects. Avinu Malkenu (id., 2001) concerns the salvation of lost people. Ducks (2002) is about persecution. Fallout (2003, ink on paper) tells a love story between a girl and a painter during a war. God on Our Side (2008) is a mixed-media animation

(with significant use of paper cutouts) inspired by Picasso’s Guernica, which deals with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. White Tape (2010), on the same subject, explores the theme of boundaries and the implications of occupation. Avi Ofer (b. Tel Aviv, 1975) is a highly regarded independent illustrator who excels in expressive free line drawings. His first experiences with animation came during his military service, in a unit where his duty was to supply graphic design and illustrations. He later worked at Disk-In as a designer and in 2000 for a high-tech company, where he became acquainted with an early version of Flash software. It became his main animation tool. In 2001, he created his first independent film, Autofoto, a charming story of a young person entering a Photo-mat, where the photos he makes reflect his thoughts and wishes. Escapism (2002) depicts an eighteen-year-old soldier dreaming of peace and faraway exotic places. Mermaid S.O.S. (2004), an improvised film made with Tsvika Oren, is an urban fantasy. Avi Ofer then moved to Barcelona, Spain. Sandbox (2006) was another improvised film, a gutreaction to news stories about innocents killed by military force around the world. The film, made in three days and nights, shows children playing. Casually, without any dramatic reaction, each child is killed by a rocket, his soul flying away. Between these independent personal films, Ofer made adaptations of popular children’s songs (Tulik, and Dream Child, 2007), as well as animation sequences for Amos Oz’s theatre play, That Same Sea (2010). Yoni Goodman (b. 1976) began his career as illustrator and designer for the Israeli newspapers Maariv and

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Figure 4.4  Avi Ofer, Sandbox, 2006.

Haaretz. In 2004 he worked as director of animation for Ari Folman’s documentary series The Material That Love Is Made Of, and developed a special Flash technique. A few years later, Ari Folman (b. Haifa, 17 December 1962), together with animation direction Yoni Goodman, used this Flash technique for his famous feature Waltz with Bashir (2008). It is an animated docudrama, based on the facts of the Lebanon War (1982) and the Sabra and Shatila massacre.106 It depicts Folman’s memories as a soldier who witnessed the horror of the war, reconstructing the events in his mind with the help of friends. Despite some stylistic flaws, the film is sincere, animating impressive drawings by David Polonsky, which merge and redefine the 90 minutes of real video shot before the animation. There are numerous memorable sequences, including the film’s introduction (a nightmare of wild dogs running through a town) and a night swimming with falling lights.

Both are characterized by the use of a yellow-orange that contrasts with black-blue shadows, creating different atmospheres: dark and oppressive in the first, surreal and melancholic in the second. The use of music allows precise changes of narration rhythm, passing from classical music to rock songs. Waltz with Bashir ends with live-action images of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, avoiding drawing and animation. According to Folman, ‘It was an ideological decision, not an artistic decision, telling you, you know, it’s not a cool animated anti-war film, with drawings [.  .  .] the ending, there was no way to do it animated, it didn’t exist in my brain.’107 In 2009 Yoni Goodman directed Closed Zone, a short film about the Gaza blockade, mixing and animating photographs and drawings with Flash. He also worked as an animator director on the American-produced The Gift (2010), by Ari Mark.

Between 16 and 18 September 1982, the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, were attacked by groups of Maronite Christian Phalangists, and innumerable Palestinian civilians were massacred. It was a cruel settling of scores, triggered by the assassination (by Palestinian Special Forces) of Bashir Gemayel, the charismatic leader of the Maronites. The Israeli forces didn’t intervene in the massacre – which they could have easily stopped. 107 http://www.cincity2000.com/current-reviews-topmenumembers-41/63-movies-essays-etc/1654-a-waltz-and-an-interview-speakingwith-waltz-with-bashir-creator-ari-folman (retrieved 8 January 2011). 106

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Israeli–American Tatia Rosenthal Tatia Rosenthal (b. Tel Aviv, 1971), an Israeli–American artist, attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Here she created the short puppet animation film Crazy Glue (1998), based on a story by Etgar Keret, one of the most popular authors in Israel. (Many of his short stories have been adapted into films.) Keret’s work inspired another puppet animation short by Rosenthal, A Buck’s Worth (2005), about the suicide of a homeless man. A Buck’s Worth was used as proof of concept for the animated feature film $9.99 (by Tatia Rosenthal and Etgar Keret, 2008). The feature reproduces the short film as its opening scene, using higher-budget puppets and settings. An Israeli–Australian production, $9.99 was shot in New York. Dave Peck is unemployed and devotes himself to the meaning of life. The film is set in Sydney and focuses on the problems of Dave’s family and neighbours in order to represent the hopes and doubts of postmodern life. The silicone puppets are realistic, and their attitudes portray the characters’ multifaceted psychology. The puppets and settings are sometimes augmented by CGI. Rosenthal said: [T]he biggest criticism from people who find it not to their taste [is that they] think that the script is such an adult drama, it should have been done live-action [. . .]

It’s a better film in puppet animation, because there are fantastical elements, and there’s a certain level of conceptualism or symbolism in the characters, in the behaviour and conflict, and putting everything in one world that is a little fantastical and has its own rules makes the piece more cohesive.108

Turkey109 S¸ahin Ersöz (b. Ankara, 15 November  1964) was the first Turkish animator to work for the Disney studio. He worked on the title character in Hercules (1997), on Andreas Deja’s team, and was also a supervising animator on Amblin’s Balto (1995). Enis Tahsin (‘Tash’) Özgür (b. Istanbul, 19 January  1956) was inspired by Disney and Don Bluth and worked in, among others, Dublin’s Sullivan Bluth studio and Walt Disney in Paris. Tahsin worked under John Pomeroy (for All Dogs Go to Heaven, 1989) and Glen Keane (Tarzan, 1999). Back in Turkey, he taught at several universities including the animation department of Anadolu University in Eskis¸ ehir. He and his wife Lale Özgür (b. Kırklareli, 12 October  1963) produced animation under the trade name Esin Desen, making commercials and outsourcing scenes for studios abroad. In 1995, they made the very funny Kebabaluba, which was probably the first successful piece

Figure 4.5  Enis Özgür, Kebabaluba, 1995. 108 109

www.laweekly.com/2009–06–11/film-tv/tatia-rosenthal-a-mighty-tenner, retrieved 20 December 2010. By Enis Tahsin Özgür.

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of character animation in Turkey. It won some domestic prizes and toured the world festivals. The animation department of the Anadolu (‘Anatolia’) University in Eskis¸ehir provided the bulk of Turkey’s animation workforce. Erhan Gezen animated for two features in Germany (Der Kleine Dodo and Friends Forever). Rıdvan Çevik (b. Eskis¸ehir, 25 January  1979) interned at Esin Desen then taught at Anadolu University. A gifted animator, he showed skill and dedication in rallying students to create hand-drawn shorts in a genuine studio atmosphere. They made the polished Yag˘mur Makamı (roughly, ‘Rhythm of Rain’, 2007). Murat Bas¸ol (b. Istanbul, 1 July 1973), Koray Kuranel (b. Bursa, 2 January, 1975), and Ahmet Tabak (b. Kütahya, 21 August 1986) are also Anadolu University alumni who grasped the essentials of hand-drawn character animation. The naturally talented Tayfun Sezer (b. Paris, France, 24 July 1972), from the same school, spent some years working in animation domestically and abroad (for Kalisto, a CGI games studio in Bordeaux, France). He then moved on to illustration. His twin brother, Tufan, yet another graduate of Anadolu University, took the CGI path. Bas¸ar Muluk (b. Ankara, 23 August  1973) studied industrial design and took animation as a course from Tahsin Özgür, showing great aptitude for it. Murat Çelik (b. Istanbul, 17 June  1972) also proved to be a natural. Ozan Kaygısız (b. Istanbul, 24 July 1968) was introduced to the art when he apprenticed for Tahsin Özgür at the Manajans advertising agency. He developed into a highly competent animator in the hand-drawn tradition. Anadlou University also produced Deniz Mutlu (Ankara, 1 March  1972–Kırıkkale, 17 July  2012, following a tragic car crash) and Berat I˙lk (b. Pasinler, 16 October 1970), who both made marks in puppet animation. Mutlu was a fine, patient teacher and created many images for commercial TV breaks that passed into the public consciousness. I˙lk was instrumental in organizing a yearlong animation workshop in 2010, with guest artists, within the framework of the Istanbul–European Capital of Culture activities. These individuals devoted their skills almost exclusively to advertising films, working as hired pencils for different studios. Ozan Kaygısız and his company, Animascope, made quality advertising work, notably the Vadaas – roly-poly purple CGI men advertising a bank (Yapı Kredi). Murat Bas¸ol has his own operation under the trade name Canlandırma Servisi (‘animating service’). Bas¸ar Muluk was a prime creative force

110

This film is mentioned in the section on Saudi Arabia, too.

for the oddly named Yog˘urt Teknolojileri (‘yogurt technologies’, which had nothing to do with yogurt). Standing out in originality are three educational shorts, in the music video format, directed by Baran Baran in collaboration with Bas¸ar Muluk for Yog˘urt. The shorts were produced in 2008 in cut-out looking computer graphics. They were collectively called Rock Sınıfı (‘The Rock Class’) and use catchy tunes and humour to explain physics, geography, and grammar to schoolchildren. Representatives of fundamentalist Islam have been strong investors in animated films. Their reasoning is that children like cartoons and will be more susceptible to religious persuasion if the pill is coated with animated sugar. The largest such studio is Ella, which enjoys Saudi financing and whose considerable output hardly goes beyond moving illustrations. The first Turkish animated feature, 85 minutes long, carried the Ella label. Zeytin’in Hayali (‘Olive’s Dream’, 2009) was a poorly drawn, poorly animated, crassly political tale about Palestine. Of the director Omar Kawan Alani, the scriptwriter Amed Abdulhafiz, the producer Usame Ahmed Halife, and the composer Ilyas Rahbani, none of them were Turkish.110 Several films running more than 60 minutes each have been made, without receiving theatrical releases. One example is the 75-minute hand-drawn Çanakkale Geçilmez (‘Chanakkale the Unpassable’, 2005), directed by Orhan Bal (b. Tokat, 1968). The film is a moderately accurate recounting of the World War I battles of the Straits (the Dardanelles), with a religious slant. Well meaning as it may be, the film’s use of manga-like action poses joined by simple inbetweens, poor lip-synching, and countlessly repeated cycles result in a work unworthy of the history. As CGI developed, a new kind of student appeared. Their vocation was triggered by watching movies on the Internet, and/or trying amateurishly to make animations, looking online for suggestions. After graduating they swiftly staffed the various production houses, filling television advertising with their work. However, Turkish CGI animation suffers from not having firm roots in the classic animation tradition. In addition to commercials, CGI is now regularly used for children’s television series. Hayal Dünyası (‘The World of the Imagination’) produces Pepee, a series with a cute child character. It has little to do with story or acting but is generally appealing visually. Cordoba produced Nane ile Limon (‘Mint and Lemon’), a talky comedy with two kids, with the same strengths and weaknesses. Cordoba’s Cille is

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more striking: an action-oriented anime-style karate series, based on a game of marbles (‘Cille’, pronounced ‘Djillé’) from Turkey’s Bursa region. Kelog˘lan Hikayeleri (‘The Tales of Kelog˘lan’) by Animax stands out in scope and ambition. It retells the stories of Kelog˘lan (‘Bald-boy’), a well-known Turkish folk character. The series is a creditable effort to produce a cartoon with drama, humour, and acting, drawing on native culture, within a TV budget and timetable. Like the hand-drawn features, the CGI features are imbued with the values of religious education that clash with the needs of showbusiness. Allah’ın Sadık Kulu-Barla (‘Allah’s Loyal Subject-Barla’, 2011), directed by Esin Orhan, is a heavy-handed account of Said Nursi, an Islamic mystic at odds with the young secular Republic. This film was made in CGI for children because there was already a live-action film for adults on the subject.111 But Allah’s Loyal Subject-Barla is cheerless and unappealing to young audiences, probably another propaganda piece promoted by religious conservatives.

Arabian Middle East112 ‘When the use of computers for producing animation spread everywhere,’ wrote Faisal Al-Yasiri,113 ‘groups of young people, consisting of amateurs mostly, formed all over the Arabic World producing short or medium-length animation films. Some of these groups developed and became small professional production companies that adopted pedagogical, educational and religious institutions. They spread in particular in those Arab countries that offer more funding opportunities than others, especially the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia who mainly fund animation films with religious or moral content. ‘Accordingly, there were dozens of short or mediumlength films produced on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, stories from the Quran, folk stories and legends as well as stories from One Thousand and One Nights. The Arabic television channels, which specialize in children’s programmes, contributed to the development of producing animation films with the computer. At the same time, commercial advertising agencies raised the standard of those working in this field in terms of technical skills but not in terms of producing impressive or influential animation production.

‘Nowadays, there is a vivid animation production scene in all Arabic countries but it is mainly dedicated to cater for religious, educational or commercial ends.’

Palestine The first-ever Palestinian animated commercial film was Fatenah, telling the true story of a young Gazan woman’s futile battle against breast cancer. The 30-minute film was directed by Ahmad Habash (b. Iraq, 1976) and based on a case documented by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights. Much of the emotion lies in Fatenah’s humiliating and frustrating efforts to get into Israel for treatment. The film was translated into English and Hebrew, screened at many festivals, and received many awards. Habash spent his childhood travelling from one country to another with his family. After graduating from the Cairo Film Institute, he worked in independent film and in a variety of advertising and artistic productions, documentaries, and features. In 2003, he directed his first professional animation (Coming Back), taking a blackly humorous view of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. In 2006, he directed and animated Flee, a sand animation short, part of a Palestinian filmmaker collective’s project called Palestine, Summer. Another Palestinian animator, Amer Shomali, worked as multimedia designer at Birzeit University and in ZAN Studio in Ramallah, Palestine. He used political cartoons and animated shorts to support local and international political campaigns and open local social debates. He finished his MA studies in animation at the arts institute at Bournemouth, UK. Since then, he has created a famous series called Homoom Motahrika (‘Animated Concerns’) for Palestinian TV (2008). Radwan Kasmiya directed Wall in My Heart (2008). It is a story about a Palestinian family from the West Bank: three days of going to school through checkpoints, of being attacked by Israeli forces, of visiting Palestinian prisoners. There is also a Jewish youngster, forced to live in Palestine, who has become mentally ill.

Jordan Amer M. Kokh, a self-taught artist born and raised in Amman (b. 3 September 1979), studied law at university

Hür Adam Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (‘The Free Man, Said Nursi, the Finest of the Age’), released the previous year (2010). This section was coordinated by Mohamed Ghazala and Giannalberto Bendazzi. 113 Faisal Al-Yasiri, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 16 March 2012. 111 112

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but dreamed of opening a studio to produce cartoons and comics. In 1998, he started working at the TV company Menhaj as its animation department team leader and animation director, making educational cartoons. In 2005 he launched the animation studio Crazy Piranha, working as the managing director–artist and art director. According to its Web site: ‘We have sharpened our teeth working on a multitude of cartoon series, delivering premium products year after year for several countries and TV stations all around the globe. We feast upon character and conceptual design for cartoons, games and story boards.’114 Crazy Piranha began by working on the Emirates’ successful series Shabiyat Alcartoon. The company also worked on two seasons of the comedy series Samurai Love God and on the children’s series Meawoo. In 2012, it produced the second season of the Bahraini series, Salim Watani. Emad Hajjaj (b. Ramallah, 1967) started as a press cartoonist and caricaturist, creating the character Abu Mahjoob. Despite his Jordanian identity, the character became a true comic hero in all Arabic countries. Since 2004, he has appeared in animated series on Jordanian TV. Ben & Izzy is a Jordanian computer-animated children’s television series, directed by Glenn Chaika. Produced by Rubicon, a rising educational and CGI animation company, the series followed the adventures and friendship of two preteen boys. Ben and Izzy are from the United States and Jordan respectively; a desert genie called Yasmine takes the form of a young girl. Although produced in Jordan, it was primarily released in English for international purposes before its official Arabic dub in 2008. The series was created primarily to entertain, but also to educate viewers about aspects of Arab history and how it affected Western culture. These are reflected in the bond between the American Ben and the Jordanian Izzy.

In general the production was based on foreign orders, since domestic demand was weak. Moreover, copyright protection was also weak, so the commercial distribution of DVDs was not profitable. The work for international organizations and Gulf countries did not offer enough opportunities for a unique Syrian form of animation to be established. Pioneers include Nizar Ghazi and Sami Gabr with their film Traffic Sign at the end of the 1980s; Moffaq Qat’s Mismaran Tale (1991); and Abdul Moeen Oyoon’s Vito (1991) and Sorry Sidaks (1993). More recently, Nasser Naasan stepped in with Stick (1994) and He  & She (1995). There were also such films as Jrra by the Al Najm studio; Silent Ideas by Antoan Antebi; and Attention (2005) and The General’s Boot (2008) by Akram Agha. TV series included Haret Abu-Hudejan (2007) and Kractoon (2010). Razam Hijazi (b. Damascus, 21 January 1969) made the first Syrian animated feature, the internationally awarded Khait Al-Hayat (‘The Thread of Life’, 2005), which won first prize at the Cairo children’s film festival. The protagonist, Alaa, is catapulted into the future by a magic thread. Hijazi says she wanted to create an animation with international appeal but rooted in Middle Eastern and Arabic culture. ‘We created an environment within the film in which every Syrian or Arab would be able to feel as though this was their own village, that this souk was in their city such as al-Hamidieh or other old souks in any Arab country such as Khan al-Khalili in Egypt or the old souk in Tunis,’ she said.115

Syria Syrian production was the prerogative of a few private and multinational companies. They include Al Najm (established 1995) and Tiger Production. There was also the animation department (established in 1983) of Syria’s national TV, which produced ads and series titles. Late in the 2000s, the same department cooperated with private studios on feature films.

Figure 4.6  Sulafa Hijazi.

http://www.crazypiranha.com/about. http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/syria-syrian-director-razam-hijazi-produces-an-award-winning-animated-film-for-syrian-andarab-children/z7iNUQ9X58_NLQZE8vPY3A (retrieved 27 November 2010). 114

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Almost a hundred Syrian animators were involved in the film, which was produced by the privately-owned Tiger Production headed by Hijazi’s brother Mannaa. The film was produced with the Syrian General Film Establishment, which brought in public subsidies. Razam’s younger sister Sulafa Hijazi (b. Damascus, 24 March  1977) directed 2009’s The Jasmine Birds. The 84-minute film addresses death and immortality, giving a simplified philosophical answer to one of the most common questions children ask. A  jasmine bird called Gaith roams the woods, searching for the memory of his departed parents and for a cure to the epidemic that took them. Sulafa Hijazi was involved in theatre and film at a very young age. At twelve years old, she won the National Theatre Competition; a few years later, she won best director in the youth theatre festival of the Syrian Youth Organization. After high school she continued her education at the Adham Ismail Centre for Fine Arts and the Higher Institute of the Dramatic Arts, where she majored in theatre literature. Hijazi’s productions include different types of animation, live drama, puppet shows, and documentaries. Her works as director and writer include three animation

on-air interactive TV series, called Point of View, Dai on-air, and Konan on-air (30 episodes each); the 2002 TV series Domtom Salemeen (65 episodes); the 2004 series Data City (52 episodes); the 2007 series My Arabic House (52 episodes); and the 2011 short The Memory Box.116 At the beginning of 2010, Hijazi established Blue.dar, a digital art production house based in the Middle East. It is linked to a network of national and international freelance experts including artists, writers, researchers, educators, and animators. The animation industry radically improved in the late 2000s. This began in the private sector, the main source of talented animators and filmmakers in this field. The public sector then felt the competition. As a result, the Syrian National Film Organization coproduced both The Thread of Life and The Jasmine Birds with Tiger Production. It was a notable departure from the organization’s previous productions, which had been limited to a few shorts. The General Trust of Damascus (The Arab Capital of Culture 2008) funded eleven grants for short animation films by young filmmakers. These films included Short Dream by Salam Al-Hassan, Silent Thoughts by Antoine Entabi, Shaows by Hussam Haddad, and The Journey of an Idea by Sawssan Nouralla.

Figure 4.7  Sulafa Hijazi, The Jasmine Birds, 2009.

The film resulted from an animation workshop that trained about 40 children and young adults who were forced by wars to leave their homes and take refuge in Syria. The concept creator and director was Sulafa Hijazi.

116

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Lebanon117 A complicated area, where ethnic and religious issues sometimes balanced and sometimes didn’t, Lebanon was always extremely cultivated. It became independent in 1943. Like other countries, it had public TV stations run by the public administration and the content was controlled by government media policies. Unlike the other Arabic countries, however, Lebanon had no partisan policy, having adopted a democratic system from the beginning. A major focus of the TV programming was kids’ shows. They were shown after the opening broadcast each day and started with cartoons, mainly American (though Japanese cartoons were also shown). The 1950s and 1960s were dominated by these imports. No attempt was made to create a local production because of the lack of professional artists and manpower, and also because of the perception that cartoons were for children and not worth the investment. After the civil war of the early 1990s and the growth of private TV stations, there were the first attempts at local animation production. Future Television (founded in 1993) was the first TV station (and local production house) to introduce locally made cartoons. The station’s production was exclusively directed to an adult audience, and its series and themes had a political or social base. Future Television was also the first TV station to have an in-house animation department. Kalil wa Dimn (‘Kalil and Dimn’, 1993) could be considered the first Lebanese cartoon series. Addressed to an adult audience, it tackled political and social issues with anthropomorphic animals. The team was headed by George ‘Jad’ Khoury (b. 1956). It included cartoonists who were later involved in their own series; Lina Ghaibeh (b. 1967) and Edgar Aho (b. 1965) were joined in the mid-1990s by Joumana Medlej (b. 1979), Fulvio Codsi (b. 1965), and Bahige Jaroudi (b. 1982). Future Television remained the sole player for almost a decade, covering several genres of animation techniques. Its 2D animation series include Taaleek Al-Yaoum (‘Daily Commentary’, a daily political short after the news, 1995); Roussoum Mutaharrira (‘Liberated Cartoons’, 2001, still running in 2010); and the Independence 05 series/campaign (id.,

By George Khoury. Born 1977. 119 Born 1983. 120 Born 1983. 121 By Jassim Mu Jassim. 117 118

2005). The animation team also ventured into clay animation with ATA Adventures (1997). Al-Watwat wa Al-Sununu (‘The Bat and the Swallow’, 2004) was a daily three-minute soap-opera-like series that lasted three months and used rotoscoping. The new millennium saw the animators of the Future Television team authoring their own shorts. Alf Youm wa Youm (‘1001 Days’, 1999, 15 minutes) could be considered the beginning of Lebanese auteur animation and received awards at regional and international festivals. Lina Ghaibeh’s Saba’t Ayyam fil Ousbouh (‘7 Days a Week’, 2000), Al-Rajoul Al-Hazeen (‘SadMan’, 2002), and Ya Waladi (‘My Son’, 2005) marked the birth of a confirmed auteur-animator. Her shorts were widely shown at festivals. Bahige Jaroudi’s El Toro Azul (id., 2008), The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar (id., 2009), and Isabelle (id., 2010) brought in new style trends. Two major contributors to Lebanese animation were the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University. A few years later, the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) offered a four-year programme in animation. Lena Merhej’s118 Kammen Sene (‘Another Year’, 2009) confirmed her as a politically committed animator. Chadi Aoun119 made the AHAWA video clip (2006), and Jad Sarout120 made Zeid wa Leyla (‘Zeid and Leyla’, 2009). Adaimy Studios was founded and run in 1988 by the cartoonist and animator Emile Adaimy. In 2008, young graduates from ALBA founded their own company, Yellow Studio.

Iraq121 Animation failed to take off in the 1980s, even after Faisal Al-Yasiri’s feature The Princess and the River (1982). Before and during the First Gulf War in 1991, a number of propaganda clips were made by the cartoon department of Iraqi Television. In the beginning of the 1990s, the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq created extremely difficult conditions for the population. The negative effect on media production was huge. In the mid-1990s, there were attempts at animation production, but none of them led to a finished work.

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From 1997 Until 2003

Since 2008

In 1997, Laith Aljassani (b. 1967) established the studio LNA Bureau for Digital Art. He was a computer science graduate with a computer programming background. He started the studio by collaborating with Bashar Abdalameer (b. 1970), a student at the fine art college and a cartoonist with background knowledge in animation. Together with another artist who did the character design, they produced their first animated short film, The Joke, in five weeks. There followed another 30-second animated spot, as part of the Cartoon for Children’s Rights – a UNICEF broadcast initiative aimed at informing people around the world about human rights. For two years, Aljassani personally financed the studio and the productions, as there was no income. In 1999, the studio was granted a UNICEF contract to produce 37 animated spots about children’s rights. Four full-time people were hired, fine art students and comic illustrators who worked for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture. The LNA team eventually grew to 21 artists (animators, inbetweeners, colourists, character designers, video composers, script writers, and audio professionals). In 2000, Aljassani produced and directed Juha and the Sultan’s Elephant, a 45-minute film inspired by stories from the 1001 Arabian Nights. The rights were bought by an Arab distribution company in Amman-Jordan. Juha and the Shadow of the Tree (2001) was also financed and directed by Aljassani, who sold it to the same company. In 2002, LNA studio entered into a joint venture with Jordanian Pioneers, a production house, to contribute to Alam Simsim, the Arabic language version of Sesame Street. LNA did all the animated clips in the show. At the same time, another animation company was formed in Baghdad: Al-Nahij, financed by a Jordanian businessman and run by local people. It was one of a new generation of professional animation studios that had structure, a strategy, and – to some extent – financial stability.

Around mid-2008, the security situation in Iraq started improving and many of the local talents returned home. Animation production gained new momentum. LNA did not disappear, but the studio shifted focus towards civil and social work. With its long experience in animation, it made awareness messages (animated spots) for a number of causes and for governmental and nongovernmental organizations. LNA began to make interactive animation, animated games, and Apps development. It produced Apps and iBooks for the App Store, investing its experience in animation and writing for children. Jassim Mohammend (b. 1974), a graduate of the College of Fine Art in Baghdad, started a career as an individual filmmaker on his return to Iraq. He produced and directed many shorts, including the award-winning The Key (2005), So What (2010), Folk of Stars (2011), and Half-Illuminated (2011). Every one of Jassim’s works was a challenge in terms of using fresh creative solutions that diverged from his previous works. His puppet films were unique and technically innovative; their themes related to Iraq and to environmental and global matters.

From 2003 Until 2008 In 2003 the country was hit by the Second Gulf War, which soon triggered sectarian violence. Most of the local talent, including those trained at LNA, left to find jobs in neighbouring countries such as Syria, Jordan, Turkey, or elsewhere. Some refugees worked for new animation studios, influencing them with their knowledge, skills, and techniques. 122

Kuwait This country hosted the joint programme production institution GCCJPI, mounted by the Gulf Cooperation Council. GCCJPI produced many educational animation series, including Salamatac and Kef in the late 1970s. It also produced several parts of Alam Simsim, the Arabic version of Sesame Street, as well as Domtom Salemeen (2002), and Data City (2004).

Saudi Arabia Osama Khalifa, the CEO of Alaa, the media production company, was one of the first Saudi directors to pay attention to social values. He made the first feature animated film, The Island of the Light in 1988, followed by thirteen films with Islamic and Arab content. Alaa entered into coproduction with studios in Malaysia and Syria. Olive’s Dream (2009), for example, was coproduced with Turkey and dealt with a refugee Palestinian family returning home.122 In Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, the first association of animators and cartoonists was established in 2009.

The film provoked diverse and passionate reactions, including accusations of anti-Semitism.

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Khalid al-Dakheel (b. Riyadh, 11 May 1981) was an outstanding independent cartoonist and animation director. He started using Macromedia Flash and made two short animated cartoons in 2003, Kick Kivi and Cats’ Benefits. In 2006, he produced the much-praised Sida, a traditional Arabian story about the mysterious title character.

Bahrain Ahmed Ghalloum was the first artist from the Gulf States to study animation professionally, in France in the late 1970s. He made his first film in 1978. After returning to Bahrain, he made some short clips for Bahrain TV but later devoted himself to painting. Yousif Al Qaseer, a self-taught plastic artist, cartoonist, and musician, made his first animated film, Kermo, in 1986 on 8mm film. From 1990, he worked in Bahrain TV as a graphic designer. In the 2000s, Al Qaseer worked with Flash with 3D elements, directing successful TV productions: Island of Fugue (2000), The Magic Lamp (2003), and Daily Cartoons (2004). These shorts poke fun at local society and criticize everyday behaviour. Mohammad Jassim (b. Muharraq, Kingdom of Bahrain, 4 August  1980) started drawing from early childhood. In 1998, he began training in computer drawing and digital graphics. His career started in 2002; he worked on TV commercials and national advertisements as an editor, graphic designer, and director. In 2011 he wrote, produced, and directed his first personal film, The Power of Generations,123 followed by The Last Drop of Oil (2011).124

Qatar The Doha-based Al Jazeera Children’s Channel was the first Arabic edutainment channel. Its first animated series was Kalila wa Dimna,125 made with Syrian Tiger Production in 2006. In 2010, the CGI animated series Saladin featured a hero who aims to unite his people and deliver them from their enemies. The producers were Jazeera Children’s Channel (JCC) and Malaysia, supported by the Qatar

Foundation; the budget was 15  million US dollars. The series was released in English and Arabic, first in Qatar and then around the world.

Emirates – Dubai In the 2000s, new animation companies and talented artists gained international attention for their characters and shows, focused on life and culture in the Middle East. Companies started considering animation as big business, though the region was a relative newcomer when it came to producing its own content. There was also a rich comic book culture to draw on and plenty of local children’s channels – including e-Junior TV, Space Toon Kids TV, Qanaty Kids Channel, ART Teenz, and MBC3 – all hungry for local cartoons. The series Freej (‘Neighbourhood’) is considered the first indigenous computer-animated cartoon (2005). It was directed by the 30-year-old Mohammed Harib, who had studied animation in the US. Four elderly grandmothers deal with life in the fast-paced, ever-changing, modern Dubai. The characters were featured on everything from pencils to backpacks. This success prompted other people in the region to come up with new characters, all looking for their TV series. The inaugural Dubai International Character & Licensing Fair, in October 2008, was attended by many would-be cartoonists. Aired on Sama Dubai, Shaabiyat Al Cartoon is a social comedy dealing with the problems of the Gulf community through the lives of people from different cultures living in Dubai. The director was the Jordanian Amer Kokh. JumJum is a camel character created by the Dubai-based Index Holdings, the organizer of the Licensing Fair. It was launched at the Tokyo International Anime Fair in 2008. Eventually Index launched a series called JumJum World, representing desert life. In 2010, the UAE firms Glory Horizons and 2Digital Productions groomed the yellow jack-in-the-box character Modhesh for a 26-part TV series, after it had spent nearly ten years as a mascot for Dubai Summer Surprises. Another Arab cartoon character, Hamdoon, is a

The official press-kit synopsis says: ‘A man on a bench in the middle of the desert watches the world around him develop. Deserts turn to pastures and then modern buildings. The man watches until global wars break out. Eventually, all developments vanish and the desert returns.’ 124 The official press-kit synopsis says: ‘One of the creepers who conserved some oil [a] long time ago is walking, trying to remember where he hid the last barrel of oil. Then he remembers the place of that barrel and runs quickly to it, but finds an empty barrel.’ 125 Kalila wa Dimna is a collection of fables in the Sanskrit language, originating in India. The fables are told through the jackals Kalila and Dimna. The 26-part cartoon series is based on the Arabic version by Abdullah Ibn El-Muqafa. 123

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mischievous boy who wears an oversized kandoura. Ajyaal Entertainment and Saerom Animation of South Korea developed Hamdoon’s TV series, Hello Hamdoon.

Oman In 2007, two Omani students in Ireland, Al-Kalbani and Al-Ghafri, created a short film called The Adventure of Khalfan Looking for Coffee. The illustration department at the Faculty of Applied Sciences in Ibri (South Oman) designed a programme for teaching animation in 2009, supervised by an Egyptian professor, Mohamed Abu Aleneen. This resulted in seven short Flash animated films using Omani traditional stories. Among them were Hamdan’s Alarm (by Said Alkalbi and Mohamed Al Shaqsi), Ayoosh & Nahool, and Goats.

Yemen The first Yemeni animated film, Salma (id.), was produced in 2006 and was a collaboration between the Yemeni Women’s Union (YWU) and Egyptian animators. The Egyptian animator Mohamed Ghazala played a key part in designing the pioneering film, cooperating with the Yemeni caricaturists Mazin Shugaaldin and Tohamy Mahmoud. Salma, a village girl, wishes to study at school but faces problems in her district. The second part of the film, directed by Ghazala, touched on the issue of the kidnapping of foreign tourists. Later, the same team was commissioned to produce a film for another NGO, Shaouzab, about the local problem of children’s labor. The film was called Ahmed Back Home (2007). These films were funded by the American Embassy in Sana‘a, as a part of social funds for NGOs in Yemen, and were aired on TV. They were screened in more than five thousand Yemeni schools and at regional festivals.

Iran126 After the crisis years of the Iran–Iraq war and the Cultural Revolution, Iranian animation was reborn at the

beginning of the 1990s, with new techniques and organizations. It was a fertile time. The arrival of computers in private homes encouraged young people to produce animated stories. The Saba TV organization was founded to produce animated series for Iranian TV, according to Cultural Revolution guidelines. Social reforms helped animation, with hundreds of studios producing educational animated series for children. Finally, young people were actively requesting animation, especially after the birth explosion. ASIFA-Iran helped promote animation in the country. In 1990, it joined ASIFA International, and in 1995 it merged with the syndicated organization House of Cinema of Iran.127 Nooreddin Zarrinkelk, dubbed the ‘father of Iranian animation’, had a very important role in developing and promoting the project. In February 1999, the Tehran International Animation Festival was established, with the aim of helping Iranian animators meet their foreign counterparts.128 Saba is a leader in the Iranian animation scene, producing many types of films and series with different techniques and variable quality. (Sometimes it produces fine work; more often it is too conventional.) Its 2D animated titles included Holy Stories, No Days, Niki & Nikan, and Ario the Little Hero. CGI titles included Holy Kings, Fireman, Holy Garden, and Jungle Adventures. Puppet titles include Our Home, Prophet Jonah, and Magic Ring. Many Saba productions are based on the lives of martyrs and on political episodes. For example, Martyr Bahonar relates the life of a prime minister up to his death in a bomb blast; Ashurian is about the martyrdom of Imam Hussein; and Children of al-Rashid is about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Saba productions also explore Iranian myths and folklore.129 Abdollah Alimorad’s puppet films have had international success, such as Jewel Mountain (1994), Bahador (2001), and White Birds (2003). The first is about a child, an eagle, and a treacherous jeweller. Bahador is about tyranny and freedom: mice are ruled by a king supported by a cat, but the cat finally turns out not to be real but just a puppet. Noureddin Zarrinkelk made significant short films including  Moscow  (Mouse  & Cow, 1998),  which  was supposed to be part of a collection of films from different

By Paolo Parmiggiani. http://www.zarrinkelk.com/eng/animation_history.html (retrieved 8 November 2010). 128 http://www.tehran-animafest.ir (retrieved 8 November 2010). 129 Frances Harrison, ‘Iran’s Booming Animation Industry’, news.bbc.co.uk, 9 May  2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_ east/4528563.stm. 126 127

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countries (it was never completed) and addressed to young Russians for the 850th anniversary of the city of Moscow. Zarrinkelk’s  Identity  (1999), produced by UNICEF, is made with simple drawings and is about a child’s right to a country and an identity; Pood  (1998) tells about the innovation of carpet. Later, he directed Bani Adam (2010). As the author himself said, this movie is ‘a manifestation to condemn international organizations which are scarifying nations to maintain their own dirty ambitions’.130 The film is made with realistic but grotesque black and white drawings by Hasan Tabrizi and displays the arrogance and stupidity of power. Mozaffar Sheydaei (b. Kermanshah, 1957) took a BA in graphic design at Honar University and started working as a designer. In 1993, he started studying traditional 2D animation at Honar University, where he made Fish on Soil (his first animation short) as his graduation film. It was presented at international film festivals and won the AnimaExpo97 in South Korea. His later shorts include Sabz (1998), Apple (2000), and Memory (2002).131 Farkhondeh Torabi (b. Tehran, 1965) studied psychology at Alzahra University in Tehran. In 1988, she joined the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA-Kanoon). Here, she studied animation with Vajihollah Fard-Moghaddam (1945–2013) and assisted him on the film Lili Hosak (1992). She started to work on her own in 1991. One of her first films was Flight (1993), followed by Health Brings Joy (1994), The Thirsty Crow (1996), and The Rainbow Fish (1998). Her most famous film was Shangoul and Mangoul (2000), shown in France, Portugal, Chicago, and Leipzig. Her later work included The Sprout (2005). Alireza Kavian Rad (b. Tehran, 1967) studied graphics at the University of Arts in Tehran and started to develop animation skills while there. He started his film career by making animation clips. In 2002, he created his own animation studio, Green Pencil, which made the historical animation series The Old Tales for Saba. He also made Coalition with the painter Ali Akbar Sadeghi, which received many festival prizes. His other films include Rostam  & Esfandiar, Our Tele Came as a Maxim, and Koodakaane.132 In 2005, Omid Khoshnazar (b. Isfahan, 1981) received a BA in animation at Iran’s National Television Academy.

He worked as an art director for television news channels then studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. He worked with black and white CGI, using innovative rhythms, dynamic movements, and points of view. His films include Zero Degree (2005), Labyrinth (2007), and Parasite (2009).

Kazakhstan The largest and northernmost of the Soviet Asian republics became independent in 1991. Zhanat Zakiyeva, Counsellor of the Kazakhstan National Commission for Unesco (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), explained the situation of animation in the country. ‘It should be said that Kazakh animation (having more than a 60-year history) was well developed in previous times. The animation studio Kazakhmultifilm produced quality classical animation films, representing folklore of the different nations of Kazakhstan and promoting cultural diversity. For example, the film Why the Swallow’s Tail Is Forked,133 made in 1967, was a colossal success. [. . .] ‘After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, animation production almost stopped in many republics, including Kazakhstan – its production was 1 to 2 films a year. Domestic animation was in stagnation. The animation production of the very few animation studios did not get spectators. American, Japanese and Russian animation dominated the society. ‘However, nowadays thanks to the efforts of the Government of Kazakhstan on cultural development within the frames of the State Cultural Heritage program and other programs, the animation production has been intensified. On the basis of the animation studio Kazakhmultifilms, another 7 to 8 private animation commercial studios have been established. [. . .] ‘Among the problems standing in the way of their wide production are the problems of screening, searching for financial resources for their production and payback of the investments. Another challenge is the dilemma: whether to produce a masterpiece which will come into the history of animation, or to do commercial films which will bring a quick profit.’

http://www.zarrinkelk.com/eng/animation_works.html (retrieved 28 February 2015). http://www.waxscreen.com (retrieved 9 November 2010). 132 http://www.kavianrad.com/; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alireza_Kavian_Rad (retrieved 8 November 2010). 133 Pochemu u lastochki hvostik rozhkami, by Amen Khaidarov. 130 131

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Zhaken Danenov, the Master With national independence, Zhaken Danenov’s inspiration flourished. In 1998, in cooperation with Gani Khistauov, he directed The Dragon’s Island, a philosophical parable. Based on a story by the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke,134 and visually recalling the paper drawings and vase decorations of the Japanese tradition, the film was welcomed at various international festivals. The directors said: ‘We were just given the opportunity to do what we had wanted to do – had wanted to do for long time and in vain.’135 By himself, Danenov directed Dunie Kezek (2000). The film was visually extremely beautiful, with a sober but masterful use of colours, slow animation, and a seemingly incongruous (but fitting) accompaniment of European music, from Baroque to contemporary Schnittke. A wanderer praising peace is first welcomed, but then rejected, by the crowd. Aksak Kulan (2003) repeats the condemnation of violence and develops Dunie Kezek’s visual research. A horde of horsemen kills unarmed civilians. The king’s son takes the same pleasure in killing as his warriors, but nature takes its revenge. The Wolf ’s Bride (2004) is the story of a princess who duels with swords but can’t feel love until she is banished to the steppe and encounters a wolf turned into a man. Danenov’s style is mature, already classic, to the point that he chooses stylization and renounces any colour except soft sepia. His style is majestic and at the same time bare; seldom (possibly never) has rotoscoping been so elegant.

Younger Kazakhs With the arrival of a new age, old-timers retired. The new generation had a more international outlook and weren’t necessarily bound to folklore or educational themes. Ramil Usmanov (b. Alma-Ata,136 18 October 1963), was educated in the art and graphic department at Kazakh

State University. He made a name for himself at the international festivals with Hunting (2006), a tender story of a bear saved from hunters. The short film, which received many awards, was codirected by the self-taught Samat Algozhin (b. Kuryk, Mangystau region, 6 May 1984). Arthur Kraus (b. Verhneberyozovsky village, EastKazakhstan region, 29 October  1962), directed the 22-minute The Old Man, the Fox and the Ogre (2004). It was followed by The Elephant (2005) and The Crow and the Fox (2006). Kaiyrgaly Kasimov (b. Shu, Zhambyl District, 1967) debuted in 1999 with the two-minute Sazsyrnai. Then he teamed up with the veteran Amen Khaidarov to make the four segments of The Little Tale (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005), I Believe (2004), Destiny (2005), and The Thieves and the Wolf (2005).

Uzbekistan137 During the first two decades of Uzbekistan’s self-rule (1991–2009), the state continued to maintain rigid economic controls. However, the policy of gradual transition to a market economy produced a noteworthy recovery after just a few years. Two decrees in March 2004 showed that authorities were aware that, in a globalized economy, national culture had to be subsidized. Between 1991 and 2009, 53 animated films were released,138 most from Uzbek folktales.139 They included Karavan (‘Caravan’, directed and designed by Mavzur Makhmudov); Koshka so scetilnikom (‘A Cat with a Lamp’, directed and designed by Makhmudov); Podruzhki (‘Friends’, directed and designed by Gayane Matevosyan); Schast’e Mashkoba (‘Mashkob’s Happiness’, written and directed by Nazim Tulakhojaev); and Dobry printz (‘A Gentle Prince’, directed and designed by Dmitry Vlasov).140 Some folktales were made in Plasticine. Sorok nebylitz (‘Forty Cockandbull Stories’) and Provornyi I Lodiry (‘A Nimble and Slackers’) were written, directed, and designed by Sergey Chufarnov. He also directed and designed Bey Dubinka (‘The Club Hit’).

The story is called Susanoo no mikoto (‘Susanoo, the August Sir’, 1920). Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892–1927) is especially famous for his short story ‘Rashomon’ (1915), adapted for the screen by Kurosawa Akira (1950). 135 http://en.nomad-kazakhstan.kz/1792.html, (retrieved 5 June 2010). 136 Today Almaty. 137 By Shoyista Ganikhanova. 138 Cartoons shot at private studios are not included. 139 Ironically, Uzbek filmmakers avoided folk stories when Moscow encouraged them, on the ground that they were a way to keep them far from current problems. After 1991 the filmmakers rushed to them, searching for their national roots. Historical discourse and folklore motifs were common in Central Asian pictures of the 1990s–2000s. 140 Born in Tashkent on 6 July 1966. 134

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Puppet films included Chudesnyi Chemodanchik (‘A Magic Suitcase’, directed by Nikolay Smirnov), about a dog who teaches a donkey and a sheep to work; Mikrofon (‘A Microphone’, directed by Irina Krivosheeva), about two dogs; and Priklucheniya Sindbada (‘Sindbad’s Adventures’, directed by Makhmudov). The following animated cartoons came out on cinema screens: Dva Jinna (‘Two Gins’, directed by Zinovy Roizman); Staraya Novaya Skazka (‘The New Old Tale’, directed by Mavzur Makhmudov), about fidelity and love; and Angel (‘An Angel’, directed by Delya Batirova, 1999), about a callous, rational world. Uzbekistan’s animation was enriched with historical themes, related to the state’s period of self-determination. The animated parable Tzvety na polyane (‘The Flowers in the Glade’, written and directed by Nazim Tulakhojaev) consists of five stories and foresees mankind’s future. Alpomysh, a folk epic about love and devotion to the Motherland, was filmed in shifting techniques, written and directed by Nazim Tulakhojaev. Dastan o Jalaladdine (directed and designed by Mavzur Makhmudov) relates the exploits of the general Sultan Jalaliddin Manguberdi, who fought Mongol invaders. Tomaris (written and directed by Svetlana Muratkhojaeva) is based on the titular patriot leader, who defended her people’s freedom. In Zvezda Zaroastra (‘The Star of Zoroaster’, scripted, designed, and directed by Svetlana Muratkhojaeva), we learn about Zoroaster and his doctrine. In 1996, director Nazim Tulakhojaev, designer Sergey Alibekov, and composer D. Yanov Yanovskyi launched a cartoon series called The History of Islam.141 The puppet animation Bakhram and Dilaram (directed and designed by Mavzur Makhmudov) was based on a poem by Alisher Navoi, ‘Sem Planet’ (‘Seven Planets’). The critic and historian Mahsura Mirzamuhamedova said: The Uzbek animated cinema lives, and produces four films annually [. . .] The core of the Uzbek animated cinema consists of talented, creative artists fanatically devoted to their art. Therefore, even in the most inconsistent period – the early 1990s, when state financing was interrupted – they continued to work. [. . .] From time to time, the names of such cartoon directors as Nazim Tulakhojaev, Mavzur Mahmudov

and Dmitry Vlasov sound abroad. For example in 1993, at the international festival in Ankara, the puppet film Billiardnaya istoriya (History of Billiards, by Mavzur Mahmudov) was recognized to be among the best. This pamphlet against brutal dictatorship over a person, and over a nation in general, without any words and translation, was clear to spectators all over the world. [. . .] After Independence, the art of animated films turned to national and historical themes, the classic literature. [. . .] In 2009, the director and artist Dmitry Vlasov finished the antiwar drawn film Qulol (Potter). Ancient folk craft is very touchingly connected with the present. The potter, by easy movements of his hands and fingers, transforms the clay into beautiful jugs and lyagans. However, the war deprives him of his favourite occupation. He loses both hands. [His] only hope – his little son sitting at a potter’s wheel. The life, as a vessel on a potter’s wheel, always moves and changes. [. . .] According to the Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, since 2005 the studio should produce ten films annually.142

Kyrgyzstan143 From the early 1990s, the Television Studio Kyrgyztelefilm, where Viacheslav Belov started to work, became the centre of Kyrgyz animation. In 1990, Belov shot his ten-minute film Fimka (id.) there. His production designer was a young architect, Emil Guzairov (b. Frunze [Bishkek], 9 April  1961). In 1993, Guzairov directed his own film, Vremya Nebesnyh Ryb (‘The Time of Heavenly Fish’). Open, educated, gifted, and confident, Guzairov was an outstanding representative of a new time, raised during perestroika and glasnost. The new era lacked prohibitions; an author could choose a theme by him or herself and lovingly cultivate it. Guzairov made a film about the junction of two astrological eras. Five years before, such a theme would have been simply impossible. Guzairov drew his film in watercolour on white and toned paper, using pastel and colour pencils. The fundamental principle of the film is a constant camera zoom-out, which creates the effect of an object slowly moving away from the viewer. The Time of Heavenly Fish won the award for best first film at the Festival of Films for Children and Teenagers in Moscow in 1994.

All rights were reserved by the private owners, who did not release it to the public. San’at No. 2, Tashkent 2004. http://www.sanat.orexca.com/eng/2–04/cinema.shtml, retrieved 30 May 2010. 143 By Gulbara Tolomushova. 141 142

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In 1994, Guzairov made his second film, the 20-minute Valsy Dymov (‘The Waltzes of Smokes’). With symbols and metaphors, it reflects on time and fate, global processes, and a journey of a simple person along life’s path. Two characters – He and She – are in an irrational, allegorical space, hardly interacting with each other. They go through time and space, live in and out of the world, yield to temptations and overcome them. Guzairov’s third film, Gemma-Yuy: Metodika Uskoreniya Vremeni (‘Gemma-Yuy: The Methodology of Acceleration of Time’, 1995), used live characters to a greater extent. From the end of the 1990s, Emil Guzairov lived and worked in Moscow, abandoning animation for the fine arts. Only two or three studios survived, doing small commercial projects with generally low-quality animation. The biggest animation project since perestroika was the Keremet Koch television series for children, made by a small team of youngsters with Sergey Korolyov at the head. Teaching also lost momentum. Old-timer Bakir Dzhusupbekov organized courses at the Bigim studio, lasting a couple of months once a year. Would-be animators could also have some lessons at the Communication Faculty of Manas University. Izat Abdraimov was born on 12 November  1984 in Tamchi village, in the Issyk-Kul Lake region. In 2007 he made Gul (‘The Flower’) at Aitysh-film, a private company. A  film about the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005,144 it shows two crowds moving towards one another, shouting and holding banners. They stop in front of children, who are trying to save a flower that has grown up between flagstones. Stylized and sincere, the film was widely acclaimed.145 It was shown many times on all of the Kyrgyz TV stations and played successfully at festivals. Izat Abdraimov, together with his young colleagues Rashid Sadykov and Chinghiz Kylyshev, organized the creative independent group Bugulab in 2008. It created a two-minute computer animation film called Shirenke (‘Matches’).

New Period, New Horizons Studio 5palcev consists of young professionals with intensive experience of producing children’s edutainment programmes across Central Asia. Some of the educational projects were funded by international organizations such as ADB,  UNICEF, and the Aga-Khan foundation, targeted at preschool-age children. The studio’s crew was invited to several international workshops held by Sesame Street, New York University School of Communication, and the Reuters Foundation, to learn new techniques and share the studio’s best practices. Some of 5palcev’s products gained international recognition. For instance The Magic Journey series was named as the most popular children’s programme in Kyrgyzstan in 2007–2008 and won fifth place in the NHK Japan Prize contest in 2008. Ulan Dubanaev (b. Bishkek, 10 December  1981), the leader of 5palcev, says: We believe that our best practices, combined with interesting stories and original music, help our products win popularity among children in Central Asian countries. We have produced the first animated series both in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. We apply gender and ethnic minorities’ lenses, pre and after testing activities, a participatory approach, evaluation and a feedback system in all our projects. We are young, flexible and ambitious. We are open to any form of cooperation in early childhood development activities.146

Tajikistan The nation declared its independence from the Soviet Union on 9 September  1991 but fell into a bloody and confused civil war. The conflict ended officially on 27 June 1997, but the peace was tenuous. The civil turmoil destroyed Tajik animation.

The Tulip Revolution was a nonviolent movement in 2005 that overthrew president Aksar Akayev, who was blamed for corruption, despotism, and nepotism. 145 ‘My relations with animation began with the offer to assist in a graduation short by Guldana Myrzakulova (Komuzdun syry, Mystery Coming of Komuz; the komuz is a Kyrgyz national musical instrument). In this short I was occupied in all the parts of production pipeline except the screenplay. It was a good practice for me. Then I went to Turkey to work as designer and animator in the studio Wonder Worker (Konya). One year later, in 2006, I came back to Kyrgyzstan. In 2008, with my friends Rashid Sadykov and Chyngyz Kylashev, I founded our own studio Bugulab to make design and animation; sometimes we do paintings, illustrations, short films and other works. We try to bring together young draughtsmen, painters, designers and other enthusiasts in our Bishkek.’ (Izat Abdraimov, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 2009.) 146 Ulan Dubanaev, personal communication to Gulbara Tolomushova, September 2012. 144

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Young artists left and went abroad. Only the director Munavar Mansurkhodzhaev, operator Anvar Mansurov, and animator-director Bakhtier Kakharov remained. The film Reka v svete luny (‘The River Under the Light of the Moon’), begun in 1991 by Dzhashmed Mansurov, was completed in 1997 under the direction of Alexei Tsirulev. It was the first animated film of the new Tajikistan.

Bakhtier Kakharov After the turn of the millennium, Tajik animation counted on Bakhtier Kakharov, who worked practically alone. A  former architect, he discovered animation in 1986, when the art director Dzhashmed Mansurov enlisted him as draughtsman for Munavar Mansurkhodzhaev’s short Hrabryj pastushok (‘The Brave Little Shepherd’). Until 1990 he worked as animator-draughtsman at Tajikfilm. Then he went to Moscow and entered the Shar Studio-School, where he had Fedor Khitruk and Eduard Nazarov as teachers. During the civil war he was in Moscow, studying at the Shar. Drakon (‘The Dragon’, 1994) was his graduation film. In 1997 he left for the US, making commercials in the Long Island-based Barukh Studio until 2000. Back in his own country, Kakharov taught animation at Dom Kino in Dushanbe and made Chea, chea (id., 2001) with computer technology. Osel (‘The Donkey’, 2004) is the story of a widowed, lonely countryman who lavishes his attention on his dog, overlooking his donkey. Murgak (Tajik title; ‘Kurochka’ in Russian; ‘The Little Hen’ in English) was the animated version of a folkloric song, made to order for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation with Tajikistan. In 2005, Kakharov founded his own studio, Tasvir, and produced and directed Andante (id., 2009). Stylistically, he is the opposite of his baroque master, Mansurkhodzhaev; Kakharov prefers to look naïf and popular. But his characters are memorable.

Turkmenistan Since independence in 1991, Turkmenistan was effectively dominated by Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov and his Democratic Party.

147 148

A deleterious consequence of Niyazov’s rule was the withering of cinema culture. There were no more cinema theatres in the country and the state-owned TV channels mostly showed propaganda and political speeches. Nevertheless, the old lion Evgeny Mikhelson continued to work. In 1991, he made Spor (‘A Dispute’), followed by Ya, kazhetsya, poteryalsya (‘It Seems I’m Lost’, 1994), and Khudayberdy i Dev (‘Khudayberdy and Dev’, 1998). Zagadka (also known as ‘Tapmacha’, called ‘The Puzzle’ in English, 2005), was the first Turkmen experiment in CGI. (Mikhelson was one of the few puppet film directors to make the transition to computer animation.) Back in 1987, Mikhelson had created Yartygulak i lentyai (‘Yartygulak and Loafers’). This was followed by the sequels Kak Yartychulak nashel ottsa i mat (‘How Yartychulak Found His Father and Mother’, 2006, CGI) and Predpriimchivy Yartychulak (‘Enterprising Yartychulak’, 2008, CGI). The protagonist is one of the most famous characters in Turkmen fairy tales. Charyeva Maral Dzhumaevna (b. 13 November 1958) was Mikhelson’s production designer for many years. In 2000, she made her directorial debut with Man in the Wilderness.

Mongolia147 Especially after the split between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, Mongolia’s government aligned itself closely with the Soviet Union and its allies. The history of Mongolian animation started in 1975 with Zherebyonok (‘The Colt’), a puppet film by Badrakh (1947–1992), coproduced with the DEFA Studio in East Germany. The acknowledged ‘father’ of Mongolian animation was Miagmar Sodnompilin (b. 1952), trained in Moscow by Ivan Ivanov. In 1982, as part of his diploma work at the Soviet Institute of Cinema in Moscow, Miagmar made Good Night Baby, a cel animation that would later serve as a lead-in for a Mongolian children’s TV series. In 1986, Miagmar made a second cel animation, Year 12 (‘Year of the Mouse’), coproduced with Russia.148 From the thirteenth century, Mongols subjugated Russia for about 200  years. Because of this history, it was understandable that Soviet influence would discourage

By David Ehrlich. Miagmar Sodnompilin, telephone conversations with David Ehrlich, 21 November 2009 and 3 December 2009.

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any nationalistic return to the days of Genghis Khan. However, Miagmar hoped that someday he could deal with Mongol history with pride. That time came in the mid-1980s, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika and glasnost. It led to Mongolia’s peaceful Democratic Revolution, along with the introduction of a multi-party system and a market economy. The transition to a market economy was often rocky, and the early 1990s saw high inflation and food shortages. The funding for animated films was scarce. But in 1992, Miagmar made his first historical work. The Secret History of the Mongols was based on the sacred Mongol text of that name. That year, Miagmar told the American independent animator David Ehrlich that he would make an ambitious film depicting Temujin, the boy destined to become Genghis Khan. The two found funding in New York through Italtoons, a film distribution company. They worked on the script with Ehrlich’s brother, Jeff, about Temujin’s life when he was only eight years old.149 This US–Mongolian coproduction began in August, but the film became a cause célèbre among Ulaanbaatar intellectuals. They tore into the storyboard, pointing out that many details in the film had been taken from foreigners’ history books and maintaining that only The Secret History of the Mongols itself was an acceptable source. Compromises were needed between the harsh reality desired by the Ulaanbaatar intellectuals and the gentle children’s legend desired by a sponsor who hoped to at least break even in TV sales.150 After studying the art from the historical period at the museum in Ulaanbaatar, Ehrlich understood that the usual cel animation, with its neat outlines and bright colours, would not fit. It was too smooth, too slick for the rough feel of the Mongols’ life, especially during the winter months when the film was set. Miagmar opted for rough slashes of black and brown, slightly softened by intermittent pastel surfaces. All the drawings were on paper that was textured a little like rice paper. The film used authentic period music for all but the introductory title sequence. The sound effects were created by Darmasuren, a brilliant Mongolian foley artist, who

had no computer equipment but used only his voice, his body, and a few rough instruments. Because Ulaanbaatar cameras were not sufficient, a colleague at the Shanghai Studio came to the rescue, filming the entire production late in the evenings. In June 1993, the eight-minute Genghis Khan, a historically accurate animated short depicting the young Temujin, premiered at the Annecy Animation Festival in France. It soon appeared on TV stations in the United States and throughout Europe and Asia, becoming a source of pride for Mongolians. It was another seven years before Miagmar’s protégés would reach their stride and begin to produce their own work. In 2000, a small studio called Sono-Studio opened in Ulaanbaatar. This group of seven filmmakers worked on commercials and produced one animated short each year. The first of them, Sukh’s White Horse (23 minutes of cel animation), was directed by Munkhbaat (b. 1960). Completed in 2000, it tells the story of a little boy called Sukh who adopts an orphan foal, and the film shows the unique respect of a Mongolian for his horse. In 2001, Ganbaatar (b. 1974) used cut-out animation to make None of My Business, portraying the dangers of selfishness and living outside the community. In 2003, Tungalaag (b. 1958) made The Rooster (drawn animation) about the consequences of arrogance and disrespect. In 2005, Munkhbaat made the cut-out The Lama at the Monastery Out in the Countryside, in which the clever students of a mean and miserly lama teach their teacher a lesson. The year 2006 was a strong one. Ganbaatar made a 45-minute puppet film, Does a Bear Sing?, about the downfall of a deceitful fox. Tuguldur (b. 1959) made the ten-minute puppet film The Assembly of the Wise, about a boy matching wits with the Khan’s wise men. Finally, Munkhbaat made the puppet animated film The Mazaalai, about a small bear that refuses to leave the Gobi Desert despite a drought and prevails through hard work and diligence. In 2007 Ganbaatar returned to puppets with World Garlic Flatbread, recounting the adventures of a bear, a rabbit, and a chipmunk in the forest.151

Adapted from David Ehrlich, ‘The First US–Mongolian Co-Production: Genghis Khan’, in John Lent, ed., Animation in Asia and the Pacific, John Libbey, London, 2001. 150 An anecdote: from New York, Miagmar and Ehrlich were told that if Temujin had to hunt an animal, it should not be one that American children would find cute. In Ulaanbaatar, on the other hand, the two were admonished that the animals left after excluding the cute ones were not considered edible by the Mongols. After long discussions, Miagmar settled on a wild boar. 151 Miagmar Sodnompilin, telephone conversations with David Ehrlich, 21 November 2009 and 3 December 2009. 149

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South Korea152, 153 At the beginning of the 1990s, the new Disney films boosted interest in animated features and independent animation looked to take a place in the spotlight. As mentioned in the chapter on Korea in Volume 2, a cultural movement called Minjung Yesul tried to make animation a way to comment on and criticize current events. They covered many social problems as animators became exponents of civil rights. These animators were young (predominantly university students) and explored new ways of making cinema, including computer techniques. This new animation could be considered a kind of ‘neo caméra stylo’ for independent filmmakers.154 Future Art was the most important group to choose this path, led by Jeon Seung-il, Jeong Dong-hee, and Na Gi-Yong. Meanwhile, some animators continued using classical techniques, such as Lee Yong-bae and Oh Seong-yun. In the mid-1990s, improved welfare and economic growth decreased interest in social issues, and animation became just a subculture to be consumed.155 KBS and MBC broadcast many successful TV series. KBS screened The Earth, the Emerald Planet (1991, by Lee Hak-bin), an educational series about the importance of environmental preservation; Cory the Son of a Sorcerer (1993, again by Hak-bin), about magic, human feelings, and the protagonist’s search for his father; and KkoBiKkoBi (1995, by Song Jung-ryul), in which a boy and a little ghost fight evil aliens. MBC broadcast General HukKkokDo (1991, by Kim Seong-chil), from a fairy tale by Kim Byung-kyu with a comic book style; and The Adventures of Penking and Liking (1992, by Baek Sung-kyun and Min Kyung-jo), about two boys in the future. Hocus Pocus! Story Pouch (1997) consists of traditional fairy tales teaching traditional values to children. Little Comi (1998, by Min Kyung-jo) concerns a curious girl who asks her parents about adolescence and sex. Adult cartoon series were also made. Nudl Nude (1998) and Nudl Nude 2 (2000) are based on Yang Young-soon’s comics, dealing with sexual situations. Goindol (2000) describes sexual life in the Stone Age. Peter Chung (b. Seoul,

1961) made Æon Flux, a series of short films that became a TV series thanks to the contribution of MTV in 1991. It’s a sci-fi action story about a sexy secret agent in love with her nemesis. Later, Chung was character designer on a Japanese production broadcast by MTV, Alexander, telling the story of Alexander the Great. In 1992, Kim Young-sam was elected as South Korea’s president. The new government made many reforms to promote the cultural growth of the nation. In 1994 the Yongsang Baljeon Mingan Hyeopeuiwhoe (Visual Products Development People’s Committee) was created to study the development and export of Korean visual products. In 1995 the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sport highlighted animation as one of the highest value business and cultural export products. It fixed quota restrictions for imported animation, encouraged the production of Korean films, and promoted animation in high schools across the country. The Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sport also created many animation festivals and exhibitions. The most important and lasting of them was SICAF (Seoul International Cartoon Animation Festival),156 which brought people and works from all over the world to Seoul. The 1990s and 2000s saw a boom in feature films and quality short products. In 1994 Yong Sung Cinecom Co. released the adult animated movie Blue Seagull (directed by O Joong-il). Hall, a young Korean man, fights Japanese Yakuza and American Mafia and falls for a beautiful showgirl. It was a great success with audiences, but the animation was of low quality and the computer-animated scenes were poor. In 1995 and 1996, five new features were released. Hong Gil-dong Returns was popular, though it was criticized for its Japanese influence.157 A Chivalrous Man – Red Hawk (directed by Sim Sang-il), about two brothers who belong to an evil gang, was taken from an action comic book. Hungry Best 5 (by Lee Kyu-hyung) was made with the help of some Japanese animators and criticized for its similarity to the Japanese series Slam Dunk;158 it’s about a university basketball player. Armageddon was taken from a comic

By Francesca Pirotta. We thank Nelson Shin for his valuable advice. 154 Joon-yang Kim, ‘Critique of the New Historical Landscape of South Korean Animation’, in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, I, Sage Publications, London, 2006, p. 73. 155 Joon-yang, ‘Critique of the New Historical Landscape of South Korean Animation’, in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, I, Sage Publications, London, 2006, p. 74. 156 For more on the festival see http://en.sicaf.org/. 157 Nelson Shin described it as ‘samurai Hong Gil-dong’. 158 The TV series and its source manga were written, drawn, and directed by Takehiko Inoue at the beginning of the 1990s. 152 153

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book written by Lee Hyun-sei, who directed the movie with space fights, time travel, and intergalactic love. It was expected to be a huge success, but audiences were disappointed by its poor techniques and badly adapted story.159 The last of the five was Baby Dinosaur Dooly – The Great Adventure on Iced Star, directed by Kim Soo-jung, from a series made in the 1980s by KBS.160 The popularity of the dinosaur made it a big success across Korea. It is possible to say that animation became a viable profession during the 1990s. Thanks to economic growth and government promotions, animation started to be recognized as a serious medium. During the 2000s, Korea reached a new level of quality in its animation production. There were more features.161 In 2002 Lee Sung-gang directed Mari Iyagi (‘My Beautiful Girl, Mari’). It depicts a boy’s country childhood and his fantastic adventure with his first love Mari. It is the first Korean feature with a high budget, mixing traditional and computer animation. Lee and his collaborators made a nostalgic and emotional fresco of their nation, which won the Grand Prix at Annecy. Two years later, another Korean product won the same prize: Oseam, released in 2003 and directed by Seong Baek-yeop. A blind girl and her little brother wander until they are accepted in a Buddhist temple. In the winter, the boy goes to a mountain with a monk and gets left behind; he dies but reaches Nirvana, thanks to his prayers. Wonderful Days (2003), directed by Kim Moon-saeng, is set in a future world where the rich and poor clash. The characters are a young male rebel and his childhood friend, a woman defending the city. The film uses computer animation, but it comes close to being a technical showreel; some wonderful images do not hide the lack of characterization and uninvolving action.

Another important feature film is Empress Chung (2005, by Nelson Shin), from a traditional Korean folktale. A young woman must sacrifice herself to a sea monster to restore her father’s eyesight. The production of short films and auteur works also increased, thanks to the Minjung Yesul and to the promotion of animation schools. The best was Daddy and I (1999), the sad story of a little girl who is abused by her stepfather. It was directed by a team of authors: Kim Eun-soo, Kim Hye-jung, Park Mi-sun, Lee Kyung-Hwa, Lee Dong-jae, Lee Song-hee, and Jung You-jin.162 The fear and the suffering of the girl are visualized using just two colours (light brown and newspapers scraps for the child and for rooms; black symbolizing the man). This short film played at many festivals all over the world. The Life (2003) was directed by Kim Jun-ki.163 A  man climbs a totem with his son on his back. As the years go by, the child becomes a man who helps his father climb. At the end, after his father’s death, the son reaches the top of the totem. Wolf Daddy (2005) was directed by Chang Hyung-yun.164 A novelist, drawn as a wolf, has to become a father. The Hell: Two Kinds of Life (2006) was directed by Yeun Sang-ho.165

Figure 4.8  Chang Hyung-yun, Wolf Daddy, 2005.

159 John Lent and Yu Kie-un, ‘Korean Animation: A Short But Robust Life’, in John Lent, Animation in Asia and the Pacific, John Libbey, London, 2000, p. 95. 160 See the chapter about Korean animation in Volume 2. 161 The creators of those feature films ‘studied in universities, but their major was not the art of animation, because there was no animation major in South Korean until the mid-1990s. They have no career in the notorious industry of subcontracted production for foreign animation. Seemingly influenced by Japanese directors such as Miyazaki Hayao or Otomo Katsuhiro (not by Disney), they have self-consciousness in art.’ (Kim Joon-yang, personal letter to Francesca Pirotta, September 2010.) 162 These are all young directors who received degrees from the Kaywon School of Art & Design, one of the new schools of art created during the 1990s by the Ministry of Culture. 163 He was born in Seoul and graduated from Kongju Communication Arts College. He also made Survival (1995), Cubic (1996), and Lighthouse Keeper (2001). 164 Chang Hyun-yun (b. Yeosu, Korea, 1975) received a degree from the Korean Academy of Animation Arts. He also made Maybe I Am Blind (2002), Tea Time and The Letter (both 2003), If You Were Me (2005), Coffee Vending Machine and Its Sword (2007), and My Friend Go-ra-ni (2009). 165 Yeun Sang-ho (b. Seoul, Korea, 1978) received a degree from Sangmyung University. He also made D-Day (2000) and Love Is Protein (2008).

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A woman must accept death and starts to understand the value of life. The Things She Can’t Avoid in the City (2008), directed by Park Jee-youn,166 features a woman who finds a cheap flat – unfortunately it’s lifted in the air by a crane. A strong, interesting atmosphere is set by Joung Yumi (b. Pusan, 14 February 1981) in her films Dust Kid (2009), Math Test (2011), and Love Games (2013). The spectator feels the morbid anxiety of someone who doesn’t want to open up to the outside world but who at the same time is caught by curiosity and laughter. Besides short films, Korea produces Internet animations, mostly made with Flash software. Pucca Funny Love features a girl who works in her family’s Chinese restaurant and loves a ninja boy. This series is one of the best-known Korean productions, but despite its East Asian setting, there’s no sign of its Korean origins. In 2004,167 the KIAFA168 (Korean Independent Animation Filmmakers Association) was founded, followed a year later by the first edition of Indie-Ani Fest. Held annually, this festival offers a window on new developments in animation.

China169 Many Chinese animated films made a long time ago are still popular today. However, there were exciting developments in the 1990s and 2000s. To an extent, they reflect the rapidly changing nature of global animation, advances in technology, and new methods of expression. However, they also reflect the nation’s creativity. These developments had their basis in the 1980s, when Chinese TV began to boom, even rivalling movie theatres. Animated films entered millions of Chinese family homes and quickly became an indispensable part of children’s lives. However, at the end of 1980s, the animation on Chinese TV was dominated almost entirely by Japanese and American products. Meanwhile, Chinese animation experienced a series of reforms: in economic and management systems, in technology and media, and in ideology and culture. From 1995, China’s State Film Distribution Corporations ceased to be the exclusive buyers and sellers of all the animated films produced. The ‘planned economy’ and state

monopoly for purchase and marketing were replaced by a market-oriented approach. Without the government subsidy, Chinese animators were exposed to the market’s ups and downs and had to pay attention to new technology and the field of media and communications. Traditional animators could hardly keep up with the revolutionary technology. At the same time, changes in lifestyle and recreation called for more and more animation on television. Imported products, which were highly entertaining, pushed domestic animators to learn from the West and to do away with the past didactic and aesthetic approach. The concept of animation changed and expanded, encompassing film and television, advertisements and Web site design, game design, and effects in live-action films. The progress of the 2000s could hardly be exaggerated. The introduction of CGI, the spread of computer animation technology, the establishment of animation majors in colleges and universities, and the founding of animation companies, studios, festivals, exhibitions, magazines, and academic forums, all helped create many jobs and a new era in Chinese animation. Since Toy Story in 1995, more and more computergenerated films of higher quality were made. Once-popular formats – paper-cut animation, puppet animation, shadow puppet animation – almost disappeared. On the other hand, the combination of digital technology with traditional animation opened great opportunities. Qin shi ming yue (‘The Bright Moon of the Chin Time’, 2007) combined past and present animation and made use of traditional Chinese ink painting. So did Pan Tian-Shou, about the Chinese painter of that name,170 directed by Joe Chang (b. Shenyang, Liaoning Province, October 1956). Since 2000, many Flash-animation groups and individuals have appeared. Probably their most representative early work was Qiangdao de tiantang (‘The Paradise of Bandits’), made by Jiang Jian-qiu (b. Bozhou, Anhui Province, August 1972) in 2004. The film marked Flash’s advance from technical exploration to artistic creation. Animated films were no longer just by professionals. Amateurs, school students, teachers, and ordinary individuals could all try. There were many good experimental short films, presented at contests or exhibitions of various levels. These attracted college students, professors, and

Park Jee-youn was born in Sacheon in 1974. He also made Instant Memory (2005). We thank Jinny (Hye Jin) Choo for her advice and for the information about this association. 168 For more information see http://kiafa.org/eng/main.php. 169 By Joe Chang and Ran Zhang. 170 Pan Tianshou (1897–1971) was a notable painter and art educator in modern China. 166 167

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other artists; they, in turn, raised the quantity of animation works, taking more or less artistic approaches. They may have little commercial value, but they explore a great range of styles and subjects, enriching Chinese animation greatly.

Short Chinese Animation 1990–2000 The short Chinese animated films created during the 1990s–2000s had these characteristics: 1. Emphasis on the exploration of differing forms, including experiments with existing methods, such as paper cut-outs, puppets, sand, clay, printmaking, ink painting, DV, photography, and mixed media. (However, because of the excessive stress on the form and technology in such films, the content tends to be neglected, with a lack of depth and inner meaning.) 2. Enthusiastic learning from Western animation, especially computer technology. An original, distinctive Chinese style was still a long way away. 3. The creators of the shorts had little persistence; after a few films, many shifted to other areas. Many of the works were made for a certain contest or special occasion, with hasty composition or piecing together. The traditional understanding of the animated film was as a work of fine art and a series of painted images. Almost all Chinese animators began as painters or designers, with a limited knowledge of film language. Their works may have perfect colours, but they were by no means filmic. There was a need for training in art and film, as well as in skills such as script writing and postproduction. There was also a need for funding and marketing. Nevertheless, there was plenty of originality in Chinese animation. Liaotian (‘Chatting’, 2001), made by Meng Jun (b. Hubei Province, 1968), depicted romance between boys and girls during a period of political turmoil. Liaotian won the Best Music and the Best Story Awards at the South

Korean International Animation Festival (PISAF2001). Hudie quan (‘Recollection’, 2002) by Chang Guang-Xi (b. Wanxian, Sichuan Province, 1942), takes a symbolic approach, borrowing from the Western modernist style. Cai Wei (‘Picking Osmund’, 2003) by Zhao Ye (b. Beijing, 23 January  1979) and Huang Yang (b. Jieyang, Guangdong Province, 30 December 1979) uses woodblock printing, absorbing the style of Han dynasty painted bricks. It was selected for the Annecy 2004 International Animated Film Festival. The aforementioned Pan Tian-shou (2003) by Joe Chang (Chang Hong) was exhibited at the same festival, winning several prizes. Duan Jia’s171 He (‘Lotus’, 2004) impressively conveys a striking classical sense of poetry through contemporary computer technology. Other notable films include Yu Shui’s172 Shenghuo yuanlai shi zheyang de (‘This Is What Life Is’, 2004); Huang Ying’s173 Tang yun (‘Pond’, 2003); Chen Liao-Yu’s174 Qiu (‘Autumn’, 2002); and Chen Xi’s175 Xihu cuyu (‘The West Lake Fish Cooked with Vinegar’, 2008). The young animator Zhang Zhen-Xing (b. Liling, Hunan Province, June  1984) combined traditional Chinese ink and wash painting with computer techniques in his Lin Chong ye ben (‘Flee At Night’, 2007). His Die (‘Butterfly’, 2009) explores the relationship between humans and nature through pixilation. At the beginning of the 2010s, Chinese animation went through a revolution of media and communications comparable to the shift from cinema to television. Animated films or programmes came to the Internet and mobile phones. Because of China’s rapid economic development, a dynamic market, and the government’s active role in promoting animation, there were many job vacancies in animation. There are still challenges, but challenges are not always negative.176

Investment and a New Mainstream In 1988, about thirty animation films were produced in the country. Among them, Te Wei’s Sanshui qing (‘Feeling

Born in Beijing, 18 March 1956. Born in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, 1978. 173 Born in Shanghai, 1978. 174 Born in Yueqing, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, 1971. 175 Born in Beijing, September 1977. 176 A highly interesting facet of the Chinese animation scene is the Flash animation movement. We quote from the essay ‘Flash Empire and Chinese Shanke: The Emergence of Chinese Digital Culture’, by Weihua Wu and Steve Fore, Animation Journal 13 (2005). 171 172

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from Mountain and Water’) was probably the best Chinese animation in nearly twenty years. Te Wei was still the head of the Shanghai Film Studio, which produced it. The 19-minute film shows the actions of the Chinese ink painting spirit; the style matches the story elegantly. The technique (sometimes called Lavis), invented by Shanghai animators to transfer the traditional Chinese ink painting onto the screen, was never better demonstrated than in this delicate, pensive masterpiece. Feeling from Mountain and Water was the swansong of a difficult, but original and rewarding, era. From then to the mid-1990s, with the reform and the opening-up policy promoted by the government, the pattern of animation production became totally different. Craftsmen gave way to industry, and the national Shanghai Film Studio had to get involved in the market just like any other company. Cartoonists had to think about investment and profit, which was difficult for them. Meanwhile, animation and comics from America and Japan took over 90 percent of the market share. Domestic animation seemed lost. The fact that, because of cheap labour costs, China became the second biggest ‘assisting’ country completing foreign cartoons only made the situation worse. In 1995, the government produced a series of decrees to support the domestic industry, but they were carried out badly. Since 2004, about fifteen more decrees have been promulgated. In 2005, the General Office of Broadcasting and Television made it compulsory to show domestic animation daily on national channels in the ‘golden time’ period (5–9 p.m.). Investments in the animation industry came from CCTV (China Central Television), about 30 million yuan per year, and from the private market, about 50  million yuan per year. However, ten times as much would have

been needed to meet the broadcasting needs of TV stations. Some animation series for children were created at the Shanghai Film Studio, the most popular being Luxixi Qiyu Ji (‘Luxixi’s General Mobilization’ / ‘Luxixi’s Adventure’), by Chakan (Trachan). From 1989 to 1990, Chang Guangxi (b. 1942) directed Qiyi de Mengguma (‘Fantastic Mongolian Horse’). Between 1989 and 1992, the studio also made the excellent Shuke he Beita (‘Adventures of Shuke and Beita’), directed by Yan Dingsian. In 1995, the studio made its first bid for private investment to produce Zigu Yingxiong Chu Shaonian (‘Little Heroes’). The competition with imports forced people to think about Chinese feature animation and to try to widen the ways that it could be developed. In 1999, a milestone feature called Bao lian deng (‘Lotus Lantern’) was released, based on a traditional story. The total investment amounted to 21 million yuan. Directed by Chang Guangxi, with Wu Yigong as art director and Jin Fuazi as musical supervisor, it was four years in the making and internationally competitive, especially in its music. Lotus Lantern marked a new way of making Chinese animated features, seeking a balance between investment and quality. That same year, Wo Wei Ge Kuang (‘Craze for Song’) began production. This series featured a group of middle-school students who wanted to build a band. Both The Lotus Lantern and Craze for Song were produced by a renewed Shanghai Studio, imitating American and Japanese styles. By the mid-1990s, animated cartoon series had become the central stream of production. Datou Erzi, Xiaotou Baba (‘Big Head Son, Small Head Father’, 1995) showed the colourful life of a typical two-parent-one-child family. Journey to the West (1999) was based on the Monkey King

‘How does the Chinese animation industry move beyond the dichotomy between political and commercial orientations in the context of a contemporary postmodern, post-socialist culture? An answer might lie in the brief history of Flash in China, its origins as a decentralized Internet-based medium, and in the motivations of its practitioners and fans. The latter are mostly young people who have grown up in a command economy in the process of a rapid and somewhat messy transition to full-on consumer capitalism, and in a political system that continues to actively discourage freedom of expression. Consequently, there is a pent-up demand for images that connote – often indirectly – freedom and liberation. [. . .] ‘Flash animators have faced some of the aesthetic and socio-political dilemmas that have been common to innovative Chinese artists in all media since early in the twentieth century: how to articulate (and rearticulate) the grand narrative of China’s modernization, and how to deal with the pressure to create nostalgic images of China that may be more comforting to overseas audiences, but are in fact little more than orientalist mythologies. Since the mid-1980s, China’s Fifth and Sixth Generation film directors and reform era avant-garde visual artists have explored avenues of self-expression and artistic experimentation in ways that had been taboo since 1949 (if not earlier). Similar thematic subtexts have been explored by some Flash animators, and these journeys of discovery have taken place in a public arena far closer to the centre of contemporary popular culture trends and aspirations than most Chinese fine artists and art filmmakers have been able to venture. In a very real sense, to understand Chinese Flash is indeed to understand the postmodern turn of cultural identity in the digital era.’

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story, and The Legend of Nezha (2003) on the child warrior deity (running 52 episodes). All three of these series were produced by CCTV. Meanwhile, Lan Mao (‘3,000 Whys of Blue Cat’), which had an emphasis on science, was produced by the Hunan-based Sunchime Digital Cartoon Development Company. Investment and national animated output rose. Xi Yang Yang yu huitai lang (‘Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf ’, 2008) was four years in the making, with an investment of 20 million yuan. After it became a hit, it spun off a feature film with a record box office of up to 90  million yuan. Similarly, Taoqibao Ma Xiaotiao (‘Naughty Boy Ma Xiaotiao’), a 104-part series from 2006 to 2008 by China Film Animation, spun off a feature in 2009.

Animation Studios In 2004, the Shanghai Film Studio presented two highinvestment animation products: the 52-part series Sui Tang Yingxiong Zhuan (‘Sui and Tang Heroes’) and the feature The Butterfly Loves. In 2008, Hulu xiongdi (‘Calabash Brothers’) was a revised version of a 1980s series that had been one of the most popular animated productions in China. At the end of the 2000s, the Shanghai Studio was still the largest production company in the country. CCTV Animation Inc., the second biggest animation structure, included the animation department of CCTV, the animation department of the Beijing Science Education Film Studio, and Brilliant Animation Company. In 1999, it presented the 52-part Journey to the West, on an investment of 50  million yuan. In 2003, it made the 52-part The Legend of Nezha, with an investment of more than 10  million yuan. Another series of the same length, Sanguo Yanyi (‘Three Kingdoms’, 2009), was the first to be approved by the State Administration of Radio as a Sino-Japanese coproduction. It was also the first high-definition animation in China. The Beijing-based Brilliant Animation Company was responsible for the production; the series’ investment exceeded 30 million yuan. Zhejiang Zhongnan Group Cartoon Film, established in 2003, is a high-quality, large-scale 3D computer animation company. Its series Tian Yan (‘Eye of Heaven’, 2005) ran for 500 seven-minute episodes. The Central Academy of Drama, Beijing Film Academy, and CCTV invested a total of 48 million yuan in the series. In 2008, Magic Xianzong was presented as China’s first original fully computer animated television series. The 26-part series was coproduced by Zhejiang Zhongnan Group and CCTV, with a total investment of 60 million yuan.

Great Dreams Cartoon Group was founded in May  2004. It entered into a strategic cooperation with Intel, establishing China’s first computer animation technology development centre. It has an animation team of 3,500 professionals. In 2006, the group presented Hongmao Lantu Qixia Zhuan (‘Howie and Landau’) as a 2D/3D action animation. Shanghai’s Fantasia Animation International was established in 1996 by Zhang Tianxiao, a Chinese animator who lives in France and who belongs to the Chinese Association of Television Artists. Fantasia developed into a studio capable of producing six to seven 22-minute episodes per month. Its activities encompass graphic design, storyboarding, layout, x-sheet, animation, background, colourization, compositing, special effects, and postproduction. The studio’s series A Ping (‘Agrippina’, for Ellipse Animation) and Jack Palmer (id., for Les Cartooneurs Associés) were screened at Annecy in 2002. The following year, Mardin de Zaochen (‘Martin Matin’, coproduction with Les Cartooneurs Associés) was selected at the same festival. The 26-episode Shaolin wuzang (‘Shaolin Kids’) is one of the company’s original projects. The Original Power Culture Communication of Guang­dong produced live-action films as well as cartoon animation. It was founded by a group of young but experienced filmmakers and aimed high. Its cartoon series Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf (2008) and a feature film version were both hits. Its Cartoon is a branch of Its Happy Film and Television Institution, established in 2001 by the Beijing Film Culture Communication Co. After six years of development, it became one of the most creative film and television companies in the country. In 2005, Its Cartoon produced the 240-episode series Kuaile Dongxi (‘Happy Things’). In 2009, it made the feature Qiyi Jiazu (‘Strange Family’), an original creation with a high-level team, arguably a new milestone in Chinese theatrical animation. By the beginning of the 2010s, there were 40,000 studios around the country producing animation, games, and digital art. There were also up to 200,000 animation students scattered in Beijing (Animation School of Beijing Film Academy, CUC Anima/Communication University of China), Changchun (Jilin Animation Institute), and many other places. The annual animation output in 2011 was 250,000 minutes. However, quality suffered as the industry demanded more and more standardized product. A  new offensive to boost creativity was planned; foreign partners were sought. In February 2012, China’s vice-president Xi Jinping flew to Los Angeles on an official visit to the US. He

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had an invitation for Jeffrey Katzenberg, the cofounder of DreamWorks, to join China Media Capital and Shanghai Media Group, in concert with Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. (an investment arm of the Shanghai municipal government), to establish Oriental DreamWorks.

Taiwan177 In the 1990s, Wang Film Productions (WFP) was downscaled. In the previous decade, it had produced 60 percent of the animation aired in the US. It dwindled because of decreasing demand from US contractors; subcontracting work moving to other countries; and more competition as digitalization made animation production easier. Government help came through plans such as the Broadcast Development Fund of the late 1980s, the Government Information Office’s Financial Fund for Indigenous Film Production, the Taipei Film Festival of 1995, and the Software Industry Five-Year Development Project of 1999. The latter heavily subsidized animation, with the goal of improving content. Because of government promotion, investment in animation rose threefold over a few years until 2004. Ministries set up the Digital Content Industry Promotion Office to fund films and sponsor international animation festivals. In 2002, the government’s ‘2000  Millions: Double Star’ project was initiated. It resulted in the establishment of digital schools, international animation festivals, and regulatory stimulants for the industry. In the early 1990s, WFP set up a branch in Suzhou, China and worked with the master Te Wei. Deng You-li had a relatively strong presence in the mainland, as did a few other companies. In 2009, nine Taiwan animation companies signed an agreement to invest in China’s Guangzhou animation business park. Initially, digitalization was important as a tool to lower labour costs and speed up production. However, it quickly became part of the creative process. Shorts such as Chuang Bian De Xing Xing (‘Stars at the Window’, Chiu Li-wei), Jie (id., Chiu Hsian-yuan), Xia Ban Shi Jian (‘The Men of the Hour’, Chen Kang-wei), Chu Kou (‘Exit’, Chen Lung-wei), and Liu Xing (‘Meteor’, Huang

Shi-ming) used digitalization. In 2005, James Wang experimented at WFP with ways to ‘remove the plastic look of 3D’. Characters created for the Internet, such as A-kuei and K. K. Long, were immense hits, leading to much merchandising and an Asia-wide audience. In the mid-2000s, there were two animated features that combined digital hand-drawn images with computer-generated backgrounds and special effects. They were WFP’s Hong Hai Er Jue Zhan Huo Yan Shan (‘Fire Ball’) and Deng You-li’s Liang Zhu (‘The Butterfly Lovers’). Fire Ball was directed by James Wang’s brother, Wang Tung; the story used parts of the classic novel Journey to the West. The film succeeded at the box office, with a 60  percent return on investment and some international distribution. The Butterfly Lovers was a coproduction, as was Deng You-li’s Shao Lin Si Chuan Qi (‘The Legend of the Shao-lin Temple’). In later years, Deng’s family-structured China Cartoon Company independently made Hai Zhi Chuan Shuo – Ma Zu (‘Matsu’) and Ba Xian De Chuan Shuo (‘The Legend of the Eight Immortals’). Animation continued to advance in Taiwan, with innovations such as the controversial depiction of the news in cartoon form launched in 2009 by Next Media Animation. About 100 animation/comics companies exist in Taiwan, though there are few giants among them. Most are small firms with limited resources depending on government support.178

Taiwan Independent179 Taiwan’s large-scale development of independent animation was closely related to the Golden Harvest Award, established by the Executive Yuan’s Government Information Office in 1978. The award’s purpose was to encourage new directors to enter Taiwan’s film industry.180 From 1982, it set up an animation short category; the winners included E Shi Yin Xiang (‘Impression from My Childhood’, 1985). The film’s creator, Chen-Yi Chang (b. Taipei, 10 December 1963), later made a career in California. His most representative work is his character design for Disney’s Mulan. The independent animators who emerged in the 1980s generally had no professional background. In a time when

By John A. Lent. Much of the information in this article came from the author’s interviews and conversations with James Wang, Deng You-li, and Yu Wei-cheng, and secondary sources, especially conversations with Shiau Hong-chi and C. Jay Shih. 179 By C. Jay Shih. 180 As far as live-action is concerned, the Golden Harvest Award contributed to the blossoming of the career of the world-famous director Ang Lee. 177 178

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there were no animation departments in colleges, the works of this generation were full of experimentation and exploration. The content reflected the filmmakers’ determination to ridicule social events and protest about them. Among this generation, Chung-Li Kao specializes in art installations. In the 2010s, he was still using the 16mm film format and employing actual film tape with mechanical projection equipment to display his works. C. Jay Shih (b. Taichung, 26 January 1960) started making 8mm animation shorts while in college. In 1988, he and some friends founded Taiwan’s first clay animation studio, Cats Animation Co., and engaged in advertising. From 1988 to 1992, Shih studied in the US, where he obtained a master’s degree in computer graphics from the department of communication arts at the New York Institute of Technology. Back in Taiwan, Shih made Taipei, Taipei (id., 1993), using multiple materials to illustrate the rapid transformation of Taipei’s cityscape. The film mocked the lack of urban planning. Hou Ren Lei (‘Post Human’, 1995) is a sci-fi fable about the environmental damage caused by domineering contemporary technology. Wei Xiao De Yu (‘A Fish with a Smile’, 2004) was adapted from Jimmy Liao’s181 picture book. Shih made this film about friendship with Odd Incredible Inc. and Green Paddy Animation Studio. The digital 2D techniques retained hand-painted textures and

reflected the ‘let go’ spirit of the book. A Fish with a Smile won the Grand Prize for children’s films at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival. From 2004, C. Jay Shih worked as a full-time professor in the department of multimedia and animation arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. During the period he also engaged in experimental filmmaking and the production of animation titles and documentary films. In Ju Ge Cao Meng (‘Pursuing a Dream Frame by Frame’, 2006), and Shu Wei Yi Shu Xin Lang Chao IV and V (‘Digital Art New Wave Episodes IV and V’, 2006), he interviewed local experts and artists, documenting the development of Taiwan’s art and animation industry. In 2014 he completed the excellent and controversial Hu Zhongdao (‘The Island’) about the conflict between the incoming Nationalist Chinese forces and the original Taiwan inhabitants. The lifting of the country’s martial law in 1987,182 together with economic growth and the rise of local culture, led to a blossoming of animation in the 1990s. From the middle of the decade, animation contests were held and government subsidies given out.183 Computer digital production was convenient, and animation courses and classes were set up. Most of the artists who emerged at this time used a range of techniques, including cutouts, painting on glass, and sand. Of the artists who chose 3D

Figure 4.9  C. Jay Shih, Hu Zhongdao, ‘The Island’, 2014. 181 Jimmy Liao (b. 1958) is a famous, prolific Taiwanese picture book author. In 1998 his first picture books, Secrets in the Forest and A Fish That Smiled at Me, won several awards. 182 Martial law was declared in Taiwan in June 1949 and lasted 38 years. 183 Such as the animation grant application mechanisms set up by National Culture and Arts Foundation, or Two Trillion & Twin Star, which had the aim of fostering the digital content industry.

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computer animation, the most representative was Jack Shih (b. Taitung, 26 October 1968). Shih started by cooperating with Shih-Ying Pu on the traditional cut-out film Xu Wu Dao Ji (‘The Empty Island’, 1992). After winning the 1992 Golden Harvest Award, he went to California and got a master’s degree in animation at CalArts. All his subsequent works made creative use of 3D computer animation. Several of them, including Ma Tong Gong He Guo (‘The Toilet Republic’, 2011), Xiao Xin Di (‘Cindy’, 2004), and Yuan Kuai Le (‘A Happy Wish’, 2011), deal with the loneliness and fear in children’s hearts. Fei Yueh Lan Diao (‘Fly Out Blue’, 2007), and Ji Mo Ma Tou (‘The Solitary Pier’, 2012) examine adult men’s problems and loneliness as the breadwinners of their families. In 2009, Shih established his Red Aliens Studio. Li-Wei Chiu (b. Tainan, 21 August 1973) also specialized in computer animation. His graduation work was Cheng Shang (‘Sorrow for a City’, 2002), about how religious faith declines even as groups are fascinated by the devil. Since 2005, he produced animated TV series at his own Studio 2, such as Xiao Tai Yang (‘The Little Sun’, 2009) and Xiao Mao Ba Ke Li (‘Barkley the Cat’, 2010). Joe Hsieh (b. Taipei, 12 November 1977) is a 2D digital animation specialist focusing on erotic themes. He made Rou E Tian (‘Meat Days’, 2006), telling a story of cannibalism in ancient China. Both its subject and visual style are very original. Xiang Le Hua Yuan (‘The Garden of Delights’, 2005) mixes Eastern and Western symbols, boldly depicting Chinese people’s repressed sexual desires. Li Wu (‘The Present’, 2012) returned to Taiwanese imagery. The story is an adventure-thriller in the countryside, but again the main theme is lust, to which Hsieh adds religiosity. The contrast is rich and shocking. Taiwan’s female independent animation artists were bolder and more innovative than their male peers. In 1999, Charlene Shih (b. Taipei, 25 March 1971), a graduate of CalArts, made Nu Zi (‘Women’). Using Chinese ink animation, it presents the experience of menstruation and the female erotic imagination. The film breaks the purely aesthetic tradition of Chinese ink, injecting the strength and sorrow of a modern woman. Lan Se Zhou Yu (‘Papa Blue’, 2003) focuses on Shih’s father’s depression. It is the first Taiwanese film to combine Chinese ink animation with rotoscoped live-action, and it won the ‘one-milliongrand-prize’ at the Taipei Film Festival. Peiwen Hsieh (b. Kaohsiung, 8 August 1976) and ShuMan Chang (b. Taichung, 11 January  1977) also made

184

By Fabia Abati.

films about lust. Peiwen Hsieh’s Nao Nei Fong Jing (‘Mindscape’, 2004) combined painting on glass with cutouts. The film portrays Hsieh’s paralyzed grandfather, whose heart is still attached to youth and sexual fantasies about his lover. Shu-Man Chang’s Mei Mei Bei Zhe Yang Wa Wa (‘The Garden’, 2009) was made with digital cut-out animation. It takes a familiar Chinese children’s song but mixes it with images and symbols implying sex organs.

Hong Kong184 After World War II, the twins Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan stayed in Hong Kong, trying without success to finance a project called The World of Insects. Then they became heads of the art department of Yung Hwa Motion Picture and were in charge of the design of many Hong Kong films. They also trained young art directors. In the early 1960s, there was no consolidated animation industry, but animated sequences and special effects appeared in local live-action features. Lo Ki-ping was a pioneer of special effects; his most famous sequences can be found in Ten Brothers (1959), The Ten Brothers vs. the Sea Monster (1960), and Buddha’s Palm (1964). He created special effects that were directly hand-drawn, and he also built installations and puppets. The Hong Kong animation industry effectively started with the boom in commercials. At first, advertising companies built up their animation departments. Later animation studios were founded from scratch, such as Au Ching’s United and Dick Wong’s Eastern Cartoon Company Ltd. The 1970s were the golden age of independent production, both for live-action and animation, revealing new talents: Neco Lo, Apple Kwen, and Roger Ho. The organization of the first animation workshops in the Chinese University of Hong Kong helped the production of many independent short films. Examples included Hand (1978), Moon (1978), Night of a Sleepy Writer (1980), and Roger Ho’s Blackboard (1978). The Independent Short Film Festival enabled young animators to show their works and watch their colleagues’ films. The experience continued with the Hong Kong Film Culture Centre, which established an International Animation Festival. In 1981 it showed The Men Who Shot Snapping Turtles by Neco Lo. The most important step in the development of independent animation was the foundation of Single Frame,

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the first Hong Kong animation organization. Its activities included production, screenings, publication, and data collection. In 1982 several short films were released: Senpei’s Summer by Neco Lo, Louisa Ma’s I’m on Diet, and Human Figure in Motion by Bob Cheng. The Hong Kong Independent Short Film Festival Award was awarded to Head by the outsider Wagner Tang, and Neco Lo’s Senpei’s Summer. During the next years Single Frame continued its activities and began important partnerships, including those with the Hiroshima and Shanghai animation festivals. After Single Frame ceased to exist, independent animation found new spaces, such as the Hong Kong Independent Film & Video Awards (IFVA), and new sponsors. The TV animation department of RTHK was set up in the mid-1970s. Headed by Ng Ho-cheung, it produced short films transmitted during children programmes. ETV channel (another broadcaster) ran animated shorts, and the TVB (Television Broadcasts Limited) arts department set up its animation unit too. The most famous character in Hong Kong is Old Master Q , who has been presented in comics and live-action. In the 1980s the character moved to animation. Old Master Q (1981) was written by Alfonso Wong, who had created the character four decades earlier, and directed by cartoonists Wu Sau-yee, Tsai Chih-chung, and Hsieh Chin-tu. The next year, Old Master Q Part II was codirected by Alfonso Wong, Wu Sau-yee, and Hsieh Chin-tu; it sees the characters travel to ancient times and was based on a thirteenth-century novel, Outlaws of the Marsh. Old Master Q Part III was codirected by Japan’s Honda Toshiyuki with Choi Ming-yum. The later Master Q 2001, directed by Herman Hau, combines live-action and computer animation, as computeranimated characters interact with pop stars. Alfonso Wong plays a role too. The film was considered technically excellent but not captivating. ‘It is a shame that its plot, just like most Tsui Hark185 films, develops too quickly and loosely. There are too many story lines going simultaneously, so the film fails to deliver the satirical punch.’186 The 1980s was a time of development in Hong Kong. Animators arrived from mainland China, while a

remarkable slate of TV programmes began in 1986 with the foundation of Jade Animation Studio. Its first series were Cartooned Chinese Fables and Parables and Kid Goku. The big studios began developing a special effects film industry, driven by the Shaw Brothers’ Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (1983) and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. In 1986, Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop Co. Ltd set up the special effects department Cinefex, which worked on features including A Chinese Ghost Story (Siu-Tung Ching, 1987). In 1991, Tsui Hark had the idea of making an animated movie with the same title. Ning, a tax collector, arrives in a ghost city, meets the beautiful Shine, and falls in love with her. Even if the aesthetic result was not completely satisfactory, A Chinese Ghost Story – The Tsui Hark Animation represented a huge production effort. For nearly five years Tsui Hark worked with Taiwanese and Chinese animation studios, with Japanese investments. The film, mixing traditional animation and CGI, was released in 1997. The production of special effects continued into the 1990s with the founding of new companies and the release of internationally successful films: A Man Called Hero (1999), Shaolin Soccer (2001), and Kung Fu Hustle (2004). In 2003, a Hong Kong piglet won the Crystal for the best feature film at Annecy. His name was McDull, star of My Life as McDull, directed by Toe Yuen.187 In Hong Kong, he was already famous as a supporting character in the comic and TV series McMug.188 McDull struggles to make his mother proud; he has a naive, daydreaming attitude.

Figure 4.10  Toe Yuen.

185 Tsui Hark (b. Saigon, 1950) is considered one of the major directors and producers in Hong Kong. As we will see, his work influenced animation production. 186 Andy Liu, ‘Master Q Films’, in Frame After Frame, Hong Kong Film Archive, 2006, p. 109. 187 Toe Yuen (b. Hong Kong, 26 April 1969) graduated from the communication department of the Baptist College in 1991. He worked as the chief editor of a comics magazine and was also a scriptwriter and worked on special effects and computer animation. He directed the McMug series from 1997. 188 In the first episodes of the series it is suggested that the two piglet characters, McMug and McDull, are cousins. When the production of the movie started, the team thought McDull was more interesting.

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His mother, Mrs Mc, is a resolute woman who exhorts him to study and uses her imagination to make his innocent dreams come true. The film goes far beyond a children’s audience, representing childhood with sensitivity and humour as well as the little personal dramas of becoming an adult. Sweet and clumsy, McDull faces his limits every day. The heart of the film is the love between McDull and his strong mother. The film’s success led to a sequel, McDull, Prince de la Bun (2004), which won the Best Film Award from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society. The piglet is growing up, facing decisions with shaky self-esteem (he shakes his legs when he’s nervous). Once again, his mother fights to help him and make him independent. The films’ humour and surrealism enchanted foreign audiences, while in Hong Kong McDull was appreciated for its realistic representation of the city and its society. The Hong Kong film and art critic William Cheung writes, ‘When foreigners ask me which animation film can exemplify Hong Kong culture, I always say “McDull ” without hesitation because it is so true-to-life.’189 The neighbourhood where the story takes place is Tai Kok Tsui, where ordinary people live. There were two more McDull films: McDull the Alumni (Samson Chiu, 2006) and McDull Kung Fu Kindergarten

(Brian Tse, 2009). The former mixes live-action and animation, with many Hong Kong stars playing with the piglet. In McDull Kung Fu Kindergarten, McDull and Mrs  Mc move to the mainland to find a better life and the piglet becomes involved in a martial arts competition. Toe Yuen went on to direct CJ7: The Cartoon (2010),190 produced by the actor and director Stephen Chow (best known for Shaolin Soccer, 2001). It is a bid to translate Chow’s comedy into animation.

India191, 192 Although India produced filmic cartoons as early as the 1910s, it was not until the mid-1990 that a viable animation industry developed. What happened during the next fifteen years was, without exaggeration, phenomenal. The industry’s worth approached a billion dollars at the start of the 2010s, catching the interest of India’s huge film industry, local and foreign investment firms, and big players in international entertainment. There were many stimulants for this expansion: a revving up of outsourcing, done inexpensively for overseas studios; a proliferation of content-hungry television and cable channels; and India’s becoming a major cog in the

Figure 4.11  Toe Yuen, My Life as McDull, 2001.

William Cheung, ‘My Life as McDull: Typical Hong Kong Animation and Character Design’, in Frame After Frame, Hong Kong Film Archive, 2006, p. 135. 190 Based on a live-action film, CJ7 (2008) by Stephen Chow. The title character is an alien adopted by a boy and his father. 191 By John A. Lent. 192 This chapter benefited from acquaintances, conversations, and interviews with Ram Mohan, Bill Dennis, Dhvani Desai, Suresh Eriyat, Pran Kumar, Gulshan Rai, and Kanakasabapathy Pandyan. 189

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computer world. The rapid growth of efficient animation production in India seemed inevitable. India had the world’s largest film market; a pool of raw talent; an increasingly lucrative information industry; and the world’s largest percentage of children between one and fourteen, per capita, as an audience. In addition, there was a liberalization of Indian foreign trade in the 1990s that facilitated the import of equipment and capital needed for the production and global distribution of Indian animated works. The boom was first sparked by the establishment of work-for-hire studios in the 1990s. These overseas animation providers quickly began to make domestic films and television series as well, using the technology and skills that they had attained. Most studios also continued subcontracting jobs from abroad. In 2006, more than 70 percent of India’s animation revenue came from exports, and the major part of the animation workforce was involved in outsourcing. Major studios established or rearranged to meet the production demands of North American and European customers. They included RM-USL, Silvertoon, Crest Communications, Pentafour (later Pantamedia), Toonz Animation, and Colour Chips Ltd. RM-USL (later UTV-Toons) resulted from a merger of Ram Mohan Biographics and United Studios Ltd. in 1997. Ram Mohan Biographics was started in 1972 by the doyen of Indian animation, Ram Mohan (b. Kerala, 26 August, 1931). It stayed relatively small until the late 1990s, when the number of staff more than quadrupled. On-site training was sped up and full service (from conceptualization to postproduction) was offered at competitive costs. Other new animation studios were offshoots of companies that were not themselves known for animation production. For example, Silvertoon was an animation arm of the software developer Silverline Technologies. Pentafour started as a Madras-based software and export firm involved in fixing Y2K bugs before it turned into a multimedia powerhouse concentrating on animation in 1996. Two years later, Pentafour could boast of having the largest digital studio outside Japan. Less than three years after its 1999 start-up, the Trivandrum-based Toonz evolved from a work-for-hire business into a contract house with coproduction deals in Canada, England, and elsewhere. With a fall in overseas clients, Toonz fulfilled one of its early missions – to adapt indigenous characters and stories to animation, giving them an international twist. Its first solo original television series was The Adventures of Tenali Raman, which was picked up for worldwide distribution, followed by Indigo Kids.

Famous’s House of Animation in Mumbai, a spinoff from Famous Cine Labs and Studios (started in 1946), set out in 1998 to adapt popular Indian folk stories and biographies to animation. The following year, the studio made The Freedom Song, directed by Narayan Shi. It is a highly stylized short about a songbird that quits singing when captured by a maharaja but, upon its release, returns to serenade him. However, Famous’s founding creative director Suresh Eriyat said the studio could not survive making such ‘beautiful’ marketless films and shifted to creating award-winning commercials. Colour Chips Ltd., established in 1999, became one of India’s largest animation studios. The Hyderabad-based company is a subsidiary of UBC Feature World, a large cartoon features syndicate in India. Colour Chips aimed to develop software and produce globally acceptable animation, while ‘Indianizing’ characters and contents. In the 2000s, animation studios were formed at a breakneck pace, until there were about 300 in 2007. Some evolved as appendages of large corporations involved in multimedia, software and hardware technology, and other industries. Others grew out of Bollywood film studios. Still others partnered with US and European animation companies. Realizing animation was potentially profitable, large banks such as Export Import Bank of India (Exim), IDBI, Standard Chartered, and Yes Bank financed features and series or made loans to studios. Other examples of animation companies that are part of larger corporations include Toonz, connected to the Geneva-based Comcraft Group, an international business conglomerate; Pentamedia; Crest, a subsidiary of Crest US; Virgin Animation, a creation of the British conglomerate Virgin Group; and Big Animation in Pune, which is part of a larger operation, Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Big Animation was born in 2005 when Ani Rights, an offshore animation studio in Bangalore, was purchased by billionaire Anil D. Ambani. In 2008, it was announced that Reliance Big Entertainment had invested one billion US dollars in DreamWorks. Additionally, DQ Entertainment and Paprikaas Animation are each linked to French companies, Method Animation and Thomson respectively. The interest in animation taken by banks and other huge businesses caught Bollywood’s attention in the late 2000s. This resulted in A-list studios, including Yash Raj Films, Dharma Productions, and Adlabs, setting up animation divisions. Film hits were converted into animation, such as Kuch Kuch hota hai (‘Something Happens’), which became the animated Koochie Koochie hota hai, directed by Tarun Mansukhani and released in 2010. Bollywood superstars were voice actors, character models, and directors.

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Actor Jugal Hansraj (b. Mumbai, 26 July 1972) directed the much-touted Roadside Romeo in 2008. Director Govind Nihalani (b. Karachi, 19 August 1940) made Kamlu, about the adventures of a baby camel lost in the desert. Director Singeetam Srinivasa Rao (b. Udayagiri, 21 September  1931) made Ghatothkach – Master of Magic. Bollywood entered animation with established audiences, close links to merchandising and gaming, and reduced production costs. To take advantage of tie-ins with the international market and offset the dearth of skilled talent, Indian animation firms increasingly moved into coproduction and partner arrangements with many major US entertainment companies. There have also been similar arrangements with companies in Italy, England, France, Canada, the Philippines, Singapore, and Ireland. To handle the shortage of talented animators, studios such as Graphiti, Pentamedia, and Hear set up on-site training programmes to complement the National Institute of Design’s animation courses. An often-voiced criticism, though, relates to the quality of hands-on teaching. There are calls for more specialized training, especially in preproduction. Indian animators have done exemplary work to Indianize content. They have conceptualized stories built around legendary Bollywood star MGR; the nationalist Mahatma Gandhi; director Satyajit Ray’s live-action series about the detective Feluda; the tennis star Leander Paes; and fairy tales and mythology. In the late 2000s, animation studios dipped into children’s and comic books. Toonz tied in with the long-established Chandamama and its repository of 15,000 children’s stories. Diamond Comics animated Pran Kumar’s Chacha Chaudhary strips. A mainstay of animation is the retelling of stories from mythology. The renderings of Hindu gods and goddesses are a crutch for an industry hesitant to experiment, but they are not very marketable outside India. Features originating in mythology such as Return of Hanuman and Ghatothkach were aggressively promoted worldwide but did not fare well. Ghatothkach, the story of a fun-loving five-year-old prince and his elephant, performed poorly despite being a collaboration between six countries. Inside India, though, the mythological films are sometimes profitable, prompting studios to bring out stories about Ramayana, Ganesha, Hanuman, Krishna, and others, and also to introduce lesser-known deities. Mythological stories have ready-made storylines and characters; they are also less costly and risky to make. Indian parents approve because these cartoons introduce ancient tales to a generation they believe is losing touch with its 5,000-year heritage. The epic Ramayana – The Legend of Prince Rama was a two-and-a-half-hour animated feature codirected by Ram

Mohan and Japan’s Yugo Sako (b. Gifu, 4 February 1928). It was released in 1993, after nearly a decade of delays. Its success was partially attributable to the directors’ emphasis on action and adventure. In 2001, Padavas, the story of five princely brothers from the Hindu classic Mahabharata, was the first animated Indian mythology show on television. However, the first animated box office hit was Hanuman, directed by V. G. Samant (Mumbai) and Milind Ukey in 2005. Its fivefold earnings over investment made Bollywood and other investors take note; in 2007, six animated features dealt with deities. Return of Hanuman, by Upendraa Desai, was temporarily court-restrained for unauthorized use of characters in another animated film. Once released, it failed to impress at the box office. Other 2007 releases were Ghatothkac – Master of Magic, which premiered at Cannes, and My Friend Ganesha, directed by Rajiv Ruia, a mix of live-action and animation (India’s first 2D composite), in which a boy befriends Ganesha. The series Little Krishna, about a blue-bodied, mischievous god, directed by Bapu (b. Narsapur, 15 December 1933), became the most popular series on a children’s television channel that year. There were also two more Krishna feature films by Colour Chips and Ani Rights, as well as Phebus Creations’ Lord Vishnu. Return of Hanuman, Krishna, Ghatothkach, and My Friend Ganesha I and II all lost money. However, studios continued to churn out mythological animation. Lava Kusa: The Warrior Twins (2010) was directed by Rayudu V. Sashank and depicted the adventures of Lord Rama’s twin sons, Lava and Kusa. There were also new versions of Ramayana, and stories of Lord Ayyappa and other mythical characters. To survive in a youth-centric culture, the mythological stories were usually given modern and Western twists. Deities played guitars, spoke in colloquial Hinglish, dodged bullets, and used the Internet. Hanuman was shown watching over New York City, capturing Osama bin Laden, and straightening the leaning tower of Pisa. The elephant-headed Ganesha snowboards in My Friend Ganesha and rides a bike in its sequel. Non-mythological animated cinema films and TV series do exist and may proliferate as audiences become jaded with the ancient stories. Some have the masala characteristics of Bollywood: a mixture of song and dance; ‘rich boy meets poor girl’ and ‘small guys versus gangsters’ routines; gunfights; romance; and, often, patriotism. Roadside Romeo epitomized the genre. It was a 2008 Disney/Yash Raj film that was expected to triumph at the box office but opened to a dismal response. Romeo is a pampered dog abandoned on the mean streets of

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Mumbai who faces hardships and finds love. It was the first full-scale, 3D CGI film in India, and it was Bollywood personified in its structure, story, music, and voices (A-list actors and actresses). Bird Idol (2010) by Jyotin Goel told the story of Hummi, a bird that prefers human to bird music. The first animated feature in Bengali was Lal Kalo (2008), directed by R. D. Mallik. It was based on a 1930s children’s fairy tale about quarrelling ant kingdoms; a black and red ant fall in love, causing turmoil. The later 2000s also saw the first Malayalam-language animated feature, Manikandan. There were also short artistic and social consciousnessraising films. Manpasand (‘The Perfect Match’, 2006) was shown at fifteen festivals worldwide; it was directed by Dhvani Desai (b. Mumbai, 11 November 1968) and produced by the Children’s Film Society, India. The story is based on an ancient tale from Panchatantra and animated in an almost extinct art form, Sanjhi. (In Northern India in the seventeenth century, there was a custom whereby an unmarried girl was encouraged to draw Sanjhi paintings, which were then sent down the river in the hope of finding a suitable groom.) Desai spent two and a half years making Manpasand; much of that time was spent tracking down the few practitioners of Sanjhi and learning from them. Research also figured strongly in one of India’s most impressive and far-reaching development animation projects: Meena, produced by UNICEF and supervised by Ram Mohan. Concentrating on the disparities in the status and treatment of Indian girls, the thirteen television episodes were distributed through South Asia with much success. The project involved in-depth feedback and research; the opinions of more than 2,500 South Asians were obtained; and scripts and clothing and other designs were tested in rural and urban areas. Other Indian animation dealt with the ecosystem, the safe disposal of plastic, and underprivileged children. Despite all this activity, Indian animation had to adjust its optimistic projections downward after the industry was shaken in late 2008 and 2009. Many studios closed or shifted business focus; production on some films was delayed or terminated; and legions of employees lost their jobs. The first decade of the new century began with rejuvenation for animation but ended on a cautionary note.

Nepal The first spark of a national Nepalese animation came from a UNICEF/Kratky Film workshop held in Kathmandu in 1986. Twelve local artists, trained by two Czechs, produced a film clip promoting oral rehydratation therapy as a remedy for diarrhea. The mini-short was called Shaym, after the main character’s name (a small boy). The familiar story of artists’ committed attempts, audience disinterest in domestic production, and backers’ inaction followed. The advent of digital technology helped young professionals enter the arena, and commercials, TV logos, and so on were made. The first ambitious project was Nunu, the Sleep Fairy, a music video made in 2001 by the NANI (Nurture Arts Network Initiative), a group of artists, filmmakers, and musicians. In 2007 the tiny but combative studio Escape Animation was founded. It produced commercial works of various kinds, and at least two shorts worth remembering: Seru (directed by Deepak Limbu and produced by Pranaya Ratna Shakya, 2012) and Awakening (same team, 2013). The first is a tale of friendship between a bizarre explorer on a flying wooden canoe, and his even more bizarre pet, Seru, who resembles a winged guinea pig. Awakening shows how spirituality can win over violence and was inspired by a visit that the filmmakers paid to the holy city of Bhaktapur. From 1996–2006, Nepal suffered a civil war that led to more than 12,000 deaths and the end of the monarchy. Leaving the Village (Sanyukta and Niyukta Shrestha, 2007) was the story of a mother and her young daughter chased from their home by a bomb attack. It is a touching if unskilled wail dedicated, according to the film’s intertitle, ‘to the innocent people who lost their lives or their loved ones due to domestic violence’.

Southeast Asia193 In Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam have appreciable levels of animation.194 The countries have diverse cultures, languages, religions, and political systems. Yet the region’s

This section was coordinated by John A. Lent with the collaboration of Hassan Muthalib. Most of the information for this section was obtained through conversations and interviews with Dwi Koendoro, and Bamba of Indonesia; Hassan Muthalib, and Mohd. Nor Khalid (Lat) of Malaysia; Bill Dennis, Leo A. Cariño, and Mimbi Eloriaga on the Philippines; Johnny Lau of Singapore; Payut Ngaokrachang, Kompin Kemgumnird, Sasikorn Chansate, Grirggiat Punpiputt, and Napat Jungpatanaprecha of Thailand, and Chi Do Huu of Vietnam.

193 194

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animation has much in common: a renaissance in the 2000s, spurred by subcontracting for overseas studios and, in some cases, by government support; the huge inflows of Japanese and Western features and TV series, reducing the appeal of domestic stories, characters, and styles; and generally unsuccessful attempts to reach international markets. Much of the growth of regional animation occurred after the 1990s. Before then, Indonesia had only three known animation studios. By the 2000s, there were hundreds. In Malaysia, the governmental documentary film studio Filem Negara was the sole producer of animation until about a dozen privately-owned studios began in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Philippine animation production was sporadic until American work-for-hire companies were established in the 1980s and 1990s. Thailand could count one successful animator, Payut Ngaokrachang, until the late 1990s. Only Vietnam sustained an animation industry for any length of time, starting with the governmental Hanoi Cartoon Studio in 1959. By the late 1990s, it had brought out 260 titles. The use of Southeast Asian labour as the workhorse of American and other foreign animation contractors had supporters and detractors. Defenders claimed that domestic animation would not have developed without the studios, equipment, training, and steady funds and resources from abroad. Critics called it labour exploitation with no visible transfer of skills. They claimed the practise reduced local artists to an artisan status, following inelastic codes without much artistic free rein. As for cartoon imports, they were argued to have renewed interest in the medium and stimulated local production; on the other hand, critics said that they impeded people’s values and morals, national identity, and local creativity.

Work by Hanoi Cartoon Studio was sent to companies in France, the United States, Japan, and Australia. The mid-2000s saw the first 3D CGI animation, Phu Dong Thien Vuong (2004), the story of Thanh Giong, who volunteered to fight the northern invaders when he was three years old. In 2005, Vietnam Television Centre Animation Studio began a project to produce 100 ten-minute computerized cartoons on Vietnamese history. The project was called Chiec Gieng Thoi Gian (‘The Time Well’) and was made to mark the one-thousandth anniversary of Hanoi in 2010. The directors were Phanm Minh Tri (b. 20 June  1988), Phuong Hoa, Tran Thanh Viet, and Nguyen Thai Hung. The stories were linked by the character Kim Quy (‘Little Turtle’), who falls into the well of time and witnesses the many ups and downs of Vietnamese history. The stories included Au Co-Lac Long Quan, in which Au Co gives birth to one hundred sons, the first generation of indigenous Vietnamese; Chuyen Co Loa Thanh (‘The Loa Citadel Story’); Banh Chung-Banh Giay (‘Square Cake and Round Cake’); and the Adventures of Son Tinh, in which Princess Mi Nuong is pursued by mountain and water genies. The project stuck closely to folklore but added modern aspects. (The rough formula was 60 percent fidelity to the original and 40 percent additions by the filmmakers.) Also celebrating the anniversary, the computer-animated feature Nguoi Con Cua (‘The Son of Dragon’) was directed by Nguyen Minh Tri. The film related how King Li Thai To moved his capital from Hoa Lu to Hanoi. At the same time, Vietnam Cartoon Studio launched a nine million USD master plan to make 70 works, of 30 to 40 minutes each, for cinema and television. The studio used all types of techniques in works presenting legends, folktales, and mythology; historical events; resistance wars against foreign invaders; and national heroes and historical characters.

Vietnam

Thailand

With the longest sustained animation history in Southeast Asia, Vietnam had to make significant adjustments after 1990 as state-owned studios were mandated to be self-supporting. Domestic animation declined because of expensive methods and high investment risks. In 2006, the yearly production of animation was 100 minutes, mostly by Liberation Film Company. Concentration had been on short films (seven to 24 minutes), using cel, puppet, and cut-out techniques, telling moral fables. As with most countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam became a haven for overseas animation studios from 1991.

For decades, Payut Ngaokrachang (Warkoe,  Prachuap Khiri Khan Province, 1 April  1929–Bangkok, 27 May 2010) was the sole voice promoting Thai animation. In his lifetime, he saw some of his hopes fulfilled as the government took an interest, studios sprouted, and other domestic works were made. The Thai-originated animation of the 1990s was often done by outsourcing studios, and it was not taken very seriously. It was used for interludes between TV programmes. For example, Chao Jook (1996), was a 20-second spot that led to a short film emphasizing Thai culture. Longer

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works, but not feature-length, gradually appeared in the late 1990s. One of them was adapted from Chai Rachawat’s popular satirical newspaper strip, Phooyai Maa Kab Thung Mah Mern. Among studios bringing out the indigenous shows were Imagimax, Kantana, Image Design Co., and Vithita Animation Co. The successful Imagimax was started in 1998 by Sirisak Koshpasharin, with money from his parents. Vithita was set up in 2000 to manage and develop all licenses (including animation) of the Kai Hua Roh Group; this was Thailand’s largest comics publisher, with titles such as Kai Hua Roa, Mahasanook, and Pang Pond. At the turn of the century, other studios and their works appeared, including the 60-part series Plaa Boo Thong (‘Golden Goby Fish’, 2000). It was directed by Songsak Plainpasert in the traditional Thai tale-telling genre of jak jak wong wong style. Boyd B’s Dracula Tok Show caricaturized the comedian Lor Tok. In 2002 and 2003, animation was jumpstarted professionally and financially. The first Thai animation festival and the Thai Animation Association began and the government pledged to support the industry. The Institute for System Development and Initiation in 2002 was followed in 2004 by the state-run Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA). The government had the lofty goal of expanding multimedia and animation into a two-billion USD industry in five years. SIPA signed a deal for 25  million US dollars with seven Thai animation firms to coproduce ten projects. Kantana was granted ten million US dollars to produce the feature-length Khan Kluay. The goals of the government’s expansion effort included joint agreements with private companies to make animated movies of world-class content with a Thai brand name. The government also aimed to increase the labour pool for animation and multimedia from 1,000 to 25,000; to grant tax privileges to animation houses; and to sponsor digital content courses and animation festivals. Released in 2006, Khan Kluay, directed by Kompin Kemgumnerd, was the highest grossing film of the year in Thailand. Thai in look and plot, Khan Kluay is an old story of a fatherless elephant; he is captured by humans and becomes a war elephant. Khan Kluay 2 followed in 2009, directed by Thaweelap Sriwuthiwong. Other hits in the late 2000s included Gor Ei Gor Gai (2008) by Idiom Company, teaching the 44 letters of the Thai alphabet to children through an adventure story; Adventures of Shelldon (2008) by Shellhut Entertainment, Thailand’s first 3D CGI series of 52 episodes; and Nak (2008), by Natthapong Rattanachoksiriku, about a wife who dies in childbirth and returns as a vengeful vamp-demon.

In 2009, the government allocated a huge sum to support creative economy projects, including animation.

Malaysia The development of Malaysian animation, following its first animated TV series in 1995, was unprecedented in Southeast Asia. In less than two decades, there were seven cinema features, 120 television series, and two telemovies. Government agencies such as the National Film Development Corporation (FINAS) and Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) included animation as an important arm. The levels of professionalism and training were increased. There were two big catalysts for this rapid growth – the Malaysian government and the animator Hassan Muthalib (b. Alor Setar, 3 November 1945). In the early 1980s, the then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad reacted to what he saw as the negative impact that Japanese and American animation had on society. In 1994, by official decree, a partial ban was placed on foreign shows. Local animation slots were guaranteed on government-controlled television, and contracts were offered to Malaysian animators to make suitable series. Later, as part of the government initiative, MDeC and the Malaysian Animation Creative Content Centre were established in a locale called Cyberjaya. It housed and offered high-tech animation facilities to start-up companies. Hassan Muthalib, nicknamed the ‘Animation Man of Malaysia’, was prominent in animation for about forty years as a director, teacher, historian, writer, and organizer. He started his career at the governmental Filem Negara graphics unit, which he headed for years. He played an integral role in the production of the Mousedeer series. In 1995 he joined the Peninsula Group, where he made the country’s first animation feature, Silat Legenda (‘Legendary Silat Warriors’, 1998). He initiated animation workshops and promoted the profession as head of the Animation Society of Malaysia, set up in 2001. He also wrote the first book on the history of Malaysia’s animation. Muthalib’s Silat Legenda and Malaysia’s next two features, Puteh (‘The Girl, Puteh’, 2001) and Mann Spider and the Princess of Melaka, were all built around folktales. Silat Legenda is the well-known tale of Hang Tuah, a legendary warrior of Malacca, and his four friends’ exploits. Like much mythological animation, the story is given a modern twist; five contemporary schoolboys find the warriors’ weapons and take on their powers. Puteh is a Cinderella-like story. Mann Spider and the Princess of Melaka

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began production before Silat Legenda but was not released commercially. Contemporary characters are transported to ancient Malacca by a magic book. The first 3D CGI feature was Nien Resurrection (2000), based on the characters in the Chinese epic Journey to the West. This film went straight to video compact disc (VCD) and was distributed internationally by its studio, Young Jump Animation. The next feature was Budak Lapok (‘The Raggedy Boys’, 2004), planned and finished at Indonesia’s Red Rocket studio. It featured well-known characters from the Singapore cinema of the 1950s, portrayed as children in a village football competition. Scenes of daily life had been a staple of the popular humour magazines of Malaysia since the late 1970s. They were animated in the mid-1990s by the print cartoonists Ibrahim Anon, better known as Ujang (b. Kuala Pilah, 1965), and Datuk  Mohammad Nor Khalid, commonly known as  Lat (b. Kota Baharu, 5 March  1951). Ujang’s Usop Sontorian, which marked the rebirth of Malaysian animation in 1995, features the artist’s strip character Usop and his Chinese and Indian friends, living in a village. Lat’s Kampung Boy (1999) depicts his experiences as a village boy; it was internationally distributed and was a winner at the Annecy festival. In 1997–1998, four new series with fantasy/superhero overtones appeared. They were Yokies, a family of eggs; Sang Wira (‘The Hero’), the adventures of a boy and his cat-like alien friend, reminiscent of Japan’s Doraemon; Keluang Man, Malaysia’s only superhero; and Jungle Jokes, based on Jaafar Taib’s (b. Alor Gajah, 28 July 1952) strip in the humor magazine Gila-Gila. A number of pioneering works appeared between 1997 and 2000. They included the first telemovie (Kartini, 1997, based on a humour magazine character); the first animated series with real heroes (Anak-anak Sidek, or ‘Sidek’s Kids’, 1999, featuring badminton stars); the first 3D effort (Nien Resurrection, 2000); and the first feature (Silat Legenda, 1998). There were also several new studios, including Jutakira (Sang Wira series), JAS (Anak-anak Sidek), Fine Animation (Yokies and Frooties series, Puteh), UAS Animation (Keluang Man), APT (Tuah), Peninsula Animation (Silat Legenda), Matahari Animation and Production (Budak Lapok), and Les’ Copaque (Geng: Pengembaraan Bermula). Another new studio, Shock 3D! made Alamaya – Garden of Beautiful Creatures. It was Malaysia’s first animated feature in English, about a boy’s adventures in a fantasy land. Tripod Entertainment made War of the Worlds: Goliath, a stereoscopic feature with Joe Pearson from Los Angeles as director. Animonsta, established in 2009, released Boboi

Boy, about a boy and his friends’ struggle to fight off aliens who invade Earth to obtain its coffee. The TV series Upin dan Ipin and its movie spinoff, Geng: Pengembaraan Bermula (‘Gang: The Adventure Begins’), were great successes. They were both made by Les’ Copaque Productions, established in 2005. Geng was the second highest grossing film in Malaysian history. Upin dan Ipin was popular on both Malaysian and Indonesian television, including an English version on the Disney Channel. The title characters, Upin and Ipin, are twins living in a kampung (village). Les’ Copaque (‘Last Kopek’) was started by three Multimedia University graduates in their twenties who convinced oil and gas businessman Burhanuddin Mohd Radzi to take a chance with animation production. The studio is one of very few to find a niche in the international market with its nationalistic spirit, homegrown kampung stories, and merchandise. The feature Seefood is a joint venture between the studio, Silver Ant, MDeC, and Al-Jazeera’s Kids Channel. It was distributed to 96 countries. Previously Al-Jazeera and MDeC had teamed up to make the computer-animated series Saladin, based on the exploits of the legendary Muslim warrior. The series was broadcast in some Middle Eastern countries, as well as in Malaysia. Upin & Ipin and Boboi Boy appeared on Disney Asia, while the Inspidea studio made Johnny Bravo in Bollywood in 2011. Much of Malaysian animation imitated Japanese and American cartoons. Other works were distinctively Malaysian in stories, characters, and design motifs (such as batik and wayang kulit), but their exhibition was limited to clubs and festivals.

Singapore Animation came to Singapore in the 1990s, in the midst of the government’s efforts to attract foreign investment in its drive to become Asia’s media hub. The already-mentioned K. Subramaniam (Subra, see Volume 2) set up Animata in 1990 and made Singapore’s first animated feature, The Life of the Buddha (1995). Other studios soon appeared, including Animasia, 25 Frames, Garman Animation, and UTV. Animasia was established in 1995 as part of the multinational Wuthelam Group. Its production schedule was divided between 70 percent overseas work and 30 percent Singapore television commercials. UTV International, which also came to Singapore in 1995, aimed to create local characters and situations to be marketed worldwide. In 1998, UTV produced the first Singapore-based

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cartoon, Jo Kilat, directed by India’s Ram Mohan, about a group of multiethnic boys. The Singaporean animators knew they could not compete with other Asian countries in providing inexpensive labour pools for overseas production, using traditional techniques. Instead they turned to digital ink and paint, capitalizing on the country’s supply of highly computer-literate people and its ability to invest in high-priced equipment. As in some other Asian countries, the government lent a hand – a generous one in this case. In the 1990s, the Economic Development Board (EDB) helped set up animation training programmes. They combined local companies with international counterparts to coproduce and distribute material for the overseas market. They also enticed a number of foreign firms to set up studios in Singapore. Eventually, both Lucasfilm and Universal established their presence in the country. There were also funding schemes set up by the Media Development Authority (MDA) for coinvestment in exportable content and the First-Time Writers and Illustrators Publishing Initiative. In 2010, MDA announced financial support of up to five million US dollars each for projects from any country with a partner in Singapore.

Figure 4.12  David Kwok.

MDA helped fund Peach Blossom Media’s Tomato Twins, the first locally made series to break into the international market. The same studio made Tao Shu – The Warrior Boy (2005), a series of 52 episodes; and the feature Zodiac: The Race Begins (Edward Fu, 2006), portraying animals of the Chinese zodiac. This was followed by Legend of the Sea (Benjamin Toh, 2007), about a dragon prince in the ocean, and Sing to the Dawn, directed by Phil Mitchell (b. Warwickshire, 1962), based on a 1975 novel by Ho Minfong. A  dubbed version was shown in Indonesia. MDA also commissioned Peach Blossom to produce an animated short based on Lee Jin Pyn’s children’s book, The Elephant and the Tree, and eight other stories by Singapore authors. Singaporean animators have found it difficult to create indigenous stories and characters, as the country’s cultural traits are just beginning to be defined. As a result, some animation in Singapore has a wider Asian appeal, such as King Monk (1998), an updated version of India’s Monkey God. Tatsumi (2011) was directed by Eric Khoo, a live-action director making his first animated film, about the life and work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a pioneering Japanese manga

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Figure 4.13  David Kwok, Dream Defenders, 2011.

artist.195 The film is based on Tatsumi’s memoir-manga A Drifting Life and five of his shorter strips. By the end of the 2000s, the internationally prestigious Nanyang Technological University opened its School of Art, Design and Media, a hub of international (especially Southeast Asian) animation culture. CG Protege Animation School was recognized by the Workforce Development Agency of Singapore. It helped artists enter the production chain at a national and international level. The ArtFusion Media School offered courses in 3D modelling, character animation, concept art, and digital visual effects, as well as a programme to create anime-style animation. Some of the companies that the graduates could access included Big Communications, Lights & Shadows, Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, Mikoishi Studios, Real U Singapore, Sparky Animation, ST  Electronics (Digital Media), Double Negative Visual Effects, Weta Productions, Sandlot USA, SAMG Korea, Sunwoo Korea / Singapore, and Polygon Studio Japan. CG Protege and Tiny Island Productions shared the same CEO, David Kwok (b. Singapore, 14 January 1971). Kwok also founded the Singapore Animators Connection (SAC, comparable to ASIFA), chairing it from 1998. Kwok has over a decade of experience in production management, handling animation for local and international clients.

Founded in 2002, Tiny Island Productions grew to become an independent production and producing/consultancy company. It also attracted international work and was a collaborator on Ben 10, an American cartoon for Cartoon Network. This collaboration came from the recognition that the company had received from its successful work on Dream Defenders (2011), an action-comedy show for children and Singapore’s first stereoscopic TV show.

Indonesia In Surabaya, East Java, Mohammad (Haluk) Yuwono started the Index Production House. Using computers and a small crew, he produced commercials and a computer-animated TV series, Hela, Heli, Helo. Yuwono’s studio also made a pilot episode called Bima 2000, based on shadow play, and then a series on the Nine Saints of Java. In the early 1990s, Dwi Koendoro’s Citra Audivistama was the private animation company in Indonesia. Not much else existed except for the government’s Pusat Produksi Filem Negara. Koendoro itself listed problems: high production costs; lack of confidence by foreign and Indonesian businesses in local animation; a public belief that animation was unworthy of recognition as a profession; and insufficient training. To remedy the last of these,

Tatsumi is the father of the ‘gekiga style’ of Japanese manga (directed at adults, about social issues such as urban alienation, poverty, and loneliness). The sad and beautiful mood of his works is reproduced in the film. 195

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Koendoro set up an elaborate training scheme as part of Citra Audivistama. This was also the time when outsourcing work was being done for Japanese studios. Several studios were set up which did ink and paint, inbetweening, and clean-ups for series such as Candy Candy, Sailor Moon, and Doraemon. In the early 1990s, Daniel Haryanto collaborated with Andi Rukmana to make animated films directly for video compact disc (VCD). Among the many series produced were the popular Timun Mas, Si Kancil, and Puri Sihir. Other studios, including Platoon Studio, Planet Karton, Studio Wisata, and De Dans soon appeared and made their own series. The setting up of Asiana-Wang (1996–2004) by a Taiwanese animation company to outsource for Hollywood and Japan was a boon. It provided jobs for animators and other personnel, and there were attempts to create characters that were uniquely Indonesian. In 1995, Nurliswandi Piliang formed PT Potlot Nasional to produce an animation series called Buriswara, based on a classic story found in shadow play. The situation changed during the following decade as subcontractors set up many studios (250 in Jakarta alone by 2001). A sense of professionalism prevailed. There was an association, in addition to training programmes and festivals. Domestic animation increased, though by a limited amount. Foreign animation still held sway in Indonesia, eating into the domestic market and influencing styles, formats, and stories of Indonesian origin. The influences are clear. For example, two of the winning works at the first Indonesian animation festival resembled Japanese robot shows (Da Pupu and A Bug’s Life). In 2009, one studio (CAM Solutions) made animated TV series imitating Pixar’s Cars (Tora Tori, with big trucks), Tom and Jerry (Bany), and Japanese animation (On: Comm, another robot show). Poppy Palele returned from studying animation in Canada in the early 1990s and set up Red Rocket Animation in Bandung. It produced animated commercials with Erwin Huynangtias as the animation director. In 2000, Red Rocket made series including Dongeng Aku dan Kau (‘Fables of You and Me’), Klilip dan Puteri Rembulan (‘The Firefly and the Moon Princess’), Mengapa Domba Bertanduk dan Berbuntut Pendek (‘Why Domba Has Horns and a Short Butt’), Si Kurus (‘Skinny’), and Si Macan (‘The Tiger’). In 2001, Red Rocket entered into collaboration with Matahari Animation and Production of Malaysia. Kilip and Puteri Rembulan and another short, Ketam dan Kecil dan Rumahnya (‘The Little Crab and Its House’), were packaged with a Malaysian story, Kancil dan Kerbau (‘The Mouse

Deer and the Buffalo’), to create a feature called Cheritera (‘Legends’). It was marketed as a Malaysian production and had a cinema screening in Malaysia. However, it was rejected at the Malaysian Film Festival, as almost everyone involved in the film was Indonesian. The collaboration continued, with Red Rocket completing the animation for another Matahari feature, Budak Lapok (‘The Raggedy Boys’, 2006). Red Rocket closed soon after. In 2003, Janus Perajurit Terakhir (‘Janus the Last Soldier’) was a live-action feature with computer animation; it was made by Chandra Endoputra, about a boy and his toy robot. In May 2004, the first 3D CGI feature, Homeland, was made by Studio Kasatmata. It is about a boy, Bumi, who inherits a venerable castle.

The Philippines The Philippines first brought overseas production to Southeast Asia when Burbank Australia set up a studio in 1983. It was succeeded by Fil-Cartoons and Pasi. Both had run into hard times by the late 1990s as the demand for animation dipped worldwide and China and India offered cheaper sources of labour. Although there had been domestic animation since 1941, it could not be considered an industry until after the late 1990s, and then only a limited one. In the intervening half-century, animation was used to propagandize for the Marcos dictatorship, and – on the other hand – to satirize the political and social order. In the 1990s, animation dealt with everyday issues and identities, such as Anong Trabaho ng Nanay Mo? (‘What Is Your Mother’s Job?’), Tita Rosel’s account of a mother and housewife; Sa Kabila ng Bulkan (‘The Other Side of the Mountain’), by Ellen Ramos, dealing with displaced people in the Pinatubo volcano area; and Mr Klean (1995), a depiction of commercialism by Kris Layug. As in other territories, the Philippine government helped spur domestic animation. The Commission on Information and Communications Creative Content Development Project provided funds for distinctly Filipino projects. The government had a role in establishing the Animation Council of the Philippines (ACP), formed of forty-seven companies. It promoted animation from the Philippines globally, in order to attract overseas production. In 2008, almost all animation studios joined in an alliance, fostering the sharing of contracts in a bid to overcome the shortage of animators. The alliance enabled big studios to have a steady pool of skilled workers, with ACP farming out the work.

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By 2008, the animation industry in the Philippines was growing by 20 percent per year and was worth 120.7 million US dollars, most of which was outsourcing work. The country had fifty small and medium-sized animation studios with a total of 5,000 employees; the short-term goal was to increase the labour pool fivefold. To meet that target, fourteen animation schools had begun by 2008. Despite these impressive figures, the challenge remained to make quality animation on shoestring budgets. An extreme example of make-do is Tuldok Studio, founded by four Filipinos in their twenties. They worked out of their homes, using tablet PCs. In 2010, they produced a 40-minute folklore story, Pasintabi. Similarly the computeranimated film PRG Metanoia (2010), by Luis Suarez, was made by only 26 animators. Studios linked to outsourcing companies or Filipino conglomerates are spared these shortcomings. For example, ABS-CBN Animation Department is attached to one of the country’s largest corporations. Formed in 2008, it made a television series, Super Inggo atang Super Tropa, about a boy, Budong, and his trusty sidekick. Profitable outsourcing companies occasionally attracted major investors. Banotan Consolidated Industries, manufacturer of steel and other goods, acquired Toon City Animation in 2008. The same year, studios Cutting Edge Productions and APT Entertainment advanced Philippine animation considerably, making Dayo and Urduja. Designed for children, Robert Quilao’s Dayo was the first full-length animated feature in an all-digital format. The story revolves round a manananggal, a mythical monster, here turned into a friend. Gerry A. Garcia made the feature Ibong Adarna (1997) about the search for a mythical bird to heal a sick king. Long in the making, Urduja, directed by Amy Portes, is about the thirteenth-century Princess Urduja of Central Luzon. She falls in love with a Chinese pirate, against her father’s wishes. The characters in Urduja had strong resemblances to Disney’s versions of Mulan and Pocahontas. This may offer support for a comment made by Fil-Cartoons director Bill Dennis, who said that indigenous animation did not take off because Filipinos are too partial to American animation.

More About It 3 Spirited Away put Japanese animated production in a favourable light all over the world. Noriko T. Reider wrote the masterful paper ‘Spirited Away: Film of the Fantastic and Evolving Japanese Folk Symbols’ for

Film Criticism (Vol.  29, No.  3, 2005, 4–27, Meadville, Pennsylvania). She and the journal have very kindly let us reprint it here. Many critics have compared Miyazaki Hayao’s animated film Spirited Away with such western stories as Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, or even Harry Potter [.  .  .] While the influence of western stories, art, and architecture is evident, Spirited Away is replete with Japanese folklore, tradition, and symbolism. A folk belief, kamikakushi (literally, ‘hidden by deities’) is part of the film’s Japanese title, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. In the past, when children or women suddenly disappeared and could not be found for a long time, such disappearances were often attributed to the spirit realm, as many believed that spirits took the person away to the spirit world. Yanagita Kunio’s Tono monogatari (‘Tono Tales’, 1909) includes many examples of kamikakushi. One of them is about a daughter of a rich family in the village. Some time after she disappears, a hunter from the same village meets her in the mountains. She tells him that she was captured by a strange being and forced to marry it and bear its children, only to have them devoured by her husband. She tells the hunter that she would remain in the mountain for the rest of her life but that he should return to the village as soon as possible. Komatsu Kazuhiko, an anthropologist, writes: ‘The truth of kamikakushi could have been a runaway disliking a village life, longing for urban city, or elopement. The veil of kamikakushi conveniently situates a runaway in the realm of deity [. . .] Kamikakushi hides not only a person but also the truth behind the escapee’. Komatsu further comments that Kamikakushi is a verdict of ‘social death’ in this world, and coming back to this world from Kamikakushi meant ‘social resurrection’. Kamikakushi may be said to be a horrible experience of the other world, and at the same time, a time of rest as a ‘social being’, or entering a life of ‘the other world’ as a new social being. At the beginning of the film, Chihiro is seen as a sulky looking girl, moving to a new town. Indeed, with all the stress of relocation, she may have felt like she needed an escape from this world. Entering the other world, she discovers her own potential and identity. She comes back to (or resurrects in) this world as a new, more mature and responsible girl. Another folk belief present in the title revolves around the importance of one’s name. This theme is not endemic to the Japanese – it is universal. The act of depriving a person of one’s name has far more reaching consequences and implications than simply affecting how one person addresses another; the very act implies total control over the person whose name is being withheld. A  good example of this can be found in the European folktale Rumpelstiltskin (Rumpelstilzchen in the German original version collected by the Grimm brothers) and a counter example is present in the Japanese story Daiku to Oniroku (‘Carpenter and Oniroku’). In the latter tale, a carpenter has to build a bridge over a fast river and is worried as to how to go about its construction. A demon then appears from the river offering the carpenter a deal: He will build the bridge for him in exchange for the

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carpenter’s eyes. The carpenter agrees and the bridge is magically completed. Having fulfilled his side of the bargain, the demon intends to collect his prize, but the carpenter runs away from him. While running in the mountains, the carpenter hears a song that identifies the demon’s name as Oniroku. On the following day the demon demands his eyes again unless, he says, the carpenter spots the demon’s name. No sooner does the carpenter shout, ‘Oniroku,’ than the demon disappears. In Spirited Away, Yubaba has Chihiro sign a contract and takes three-quarters of Chihiro’s name, i.e., three characters out of Ogino Chihiro, leaving only Sen. Actually, the audience never knows the content of the contract Chihiro signs. We only know that Yubaba controls people by depriving them of their names. When Haku has remembered his real name, for example, his true form comes back and he decides to quit being Yubaba’s apprentice. The importance of names, however, probably comes from Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea quartet, i.e., A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu. The Earthsea quartet, a series that influenced Miyazaki Hayao in creating Spirited Away, describes a wizard’s quest to restore peace in the land by pursuing a shadow-creature that he had unwittingly released. Throughout the quartet, names are critical as ‘who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping’. In the second book, the Tombs of Atuan, when a girl remembers her true name, her memory as a human gradually comes back and she fights against the dark forces. This experience is similar to Haku’s recalling his true name, quitting as Yubaba’s apprentice.

The Characters in Spirited Away Yubaba The spirit characters in the film are rich, multi-faceted entities replete with cultural memories and histories. The most interesting among them is Yubaba, the witch who owns the bathhouse. She is an avaricious old witch who is quite strict toward her workers. Many critics have pointed out the similarity between Yubaba and the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Ando Masashi, the art director of Spirited Away, states: ‘In our previous project, Yubaba was drawn as a grotesque character, the kind that might appear in the illustrations of Alice in Wonderland’. Yubaba’s appearance and demeanour, the very way she commands her minion workforce, is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts character. But Yubaba, who is also seen excessively pampering her gigantic spoiled baby-boy named Bo, strikes me most as a descendent of a yamauba, or a Japanese mountain witch. To many contemporary Japanese, a yamauba conjures up the image of a mountain-dwelling hag who devours unsuspecting humans who happen upon her path. In many ways, she can be considered the Japanese counterpart of the witch in Hansel and Gretel of the Grimm Brothers as well as Baba Yaga of Russian folktales. In the tale Ushikata to yamauba (‘Ox-Cart Puller and Mountain Witch’), a ravenous yamauba attempts to devour anything she can obtain: first, she demands fish from a young man

carrying fish in his ox-cart. After consuming all of the fish in his cart, she demands the ox and after devouring the ox, she sets her sights on eating the man. He flees from her and soon comes upon a lone house in the woods that turns out to be the yamauba’s dwelling. Eventually, he vanquishes her with the help of another maiden who is living with yamauba. Yamauba are almost always endowed with supernatural powers. In the Medieval Nô text entitled Yamauba, the protagonist yamauba uses her supernatural power to darken the sky so that the courtesan/entertainer who is reputed to be good at yamauba dance would be forced to spend a night at her lodging. In Spirited Away, Yubaba is an old woman with white hair who controls her employees through the power of language and magic. She can freely transform humans into animals and eat them, which is entirely reminiscent of yamauba’s cannibalism. Yamauba is regularly portrayed in an unflattering manner, but one of yamauba’s lesser-known traits is her nurturing character, often associated with motherhood. Hori Ichirô writes: ‘In the popular belief of rural areas, the mountain deity is believed to be a goddess who gives birth to twelve children every year. She is therefore called Mrs. Twelve (Juni-sama), and her twelve children symbolize the twelve months of the year’. One example of yamauba’s motherhood is a legend that a mountain yamauba gave birth to and raised a son possessing Herculean strength, by the name of Kintarô. Kintarô was then discovered by a great warrior, Minamoto no Raiko (or Yorimitsu, 948–1021), changed his name to Sakata no Kintoki, and became one of Raiko’s shitennô (‘four guardians/lieutenants’). Eventually Raiko and the shitennô eliminated such supernatural beings as Shuten dôji (‘Drunken Demon’) at Mount Ôe and tsuchigumo, the earth spider. The oldest extant story of Yamauba being the mother of Kintarô is found in the old jôruri (‘puppet theatre’) text of the middle of the 17th century. Given the widely held perception that yamauba was the mother of many children or superchildren in the medieval period, it is not surprising to find her as the mother of a strong warrior who conquers demons. Kintarô is portrayed as full of energy and presently often identified with his red harakake (‘bib/apron’) on which the character kin (from Kintaro) is printed. In Spirited Away, Yubaba is the mother of super-baby, Bo. Just like Kintarô, Bo wears a red harakake on which a big character (Bo) is written. Similar to Kintarô, Bo has prowess in accordance with his gigantic size – he can easily break Sen’s arm if he so wishes. In contrast to her strictness to her employees, Yubaba dotes on Bo and protects him almost to excess, confining him in a germ-free playroom full of germ-free toys. In this detail, the director may be hinting at an aspect of present-day Japanese parenting: the tendency to spoil/shelter children while depriving them of negative experiences, some feel, deprives children of developing their full potential. Perhaps most strikingly, this same image of over-protecting one’s offspring is portrayed by yamauba in Kabuki’s dance pieces. The mountain where yamauba lives is higher than ordinary flatland. Likewise, Yubaba lives on the top floor of the

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bathhouse – higher than anyone else, a command centre where Yubaba controls her operation and gives orders to her employees. This architectural structure is reflective of vertical, hierarchical Japanese society. The character who lives on the opposite end of this vertical relationship – steadfastly resisting Yubaba, but still providing vital work to the bathhouse – is Kamaji; one of Yubaba’s employees, he lives in the basement of the bathhouse.

Kamaji Kamaji is an old man who controls a boiler room. He has six long arms and two ordinary length-legs. At first sight he looks scary, but in reality he is a kind and understanding man. From all angles – the way he sits and manipulates his unusually long limbs – Kamaji resembles a spider (or spirit of a spider). On the symbolic significance of the spider, Merrily Baird writes: ‘with the importation of Chinese traditions, the Japanese adopted the view of the spider as an emblem of industry and ability’. As evident in the film, Kamaji is a diligent worker who makes full use of all his extra limbs and his helpers, sootballs (susuwatari). A  spider has an ominous aspect, too. It is commonly accepted among scholars to consider that tsuchigumo refers to less-cultivated indigenous people who had lived before the Heavenly descendants claimed his authority. Specifically termed an earth spider, tsuchigumo is an appellation used derogatorily in ancient Japanese literature for those who defied imperial (central) authority. For example, in Kôjiki (Ancient Matters, p. 712), on his eastward expedition to claim his heavenly authority, Emperor Jinmu and his men smite a great number of resisting indigenous pit dwelling tribe-men described as tsuchigumo. Regarding the origin of the term, Itsubun Settsu Fudoki (a missing writing from the Topography of Settu Province, known from other literary sources) notes that ‘in the reign of Emperor Jinmu, there was a villain called tsuchigumo. He was given of the disdainful name tsuchigumo because this person always dwelled in a pit’. An attribute of pit dwelling is strongly associated with tsuchigumo. This also applies to Kamaji, who lives in the basement of the bathhouse – a form of pit dwelling. In Spirited Away, Yubaba is paralleled to the central authority ruling the bathhouse from the top of the building, and Kamaji is likened to tsuchigumo who live in the pit dwelling, or bottom floor.

No-Face Without doubt, the character of No-Face (Kaonashi) is a most baffling creature. He is a mysterious man, who, ‘like Chihiro, came to the world of the bathhouse from a different realm. He is a pathetic creature who does not have self, and he can only communicate through the voice of someone he has swallowed’.

No-Face may be interpreted as a lonely young Japanese person who does not know how to make friends. Apparently, at the beginning of the production, No-Face was just a character standing on a bridge, but because of the need to finish the film on time Miyazaki assigned No-Face a major role of ‘something like a stalker’. Ando Masashi writes that ‘No-face is basically expressionless, but I ended up adding just a tiny bit of expression. It might have been better to make his mask more Noh-like without any expression at all, conveying his expressions through lighting. No-Face swallows the bathhouse workers, and I thought it might have been interesting if he acquired their personalities and ability to reason. This way he might become more human and appealing’. Regarding the role of the mask itself, Doris Bargen writes: ‘Symbolically, masking can hide or disguise the self; it can also be a form of self-disclosure or revelation. Sometimes masking is associated with twinning in that the doubled face has the effect of blurring or confusing identities. Masking also has the potential for making a face both more elusive and more expressive’. Using a Nô mask creates an otherworldly ambience. Ema Tsutomu, a noted folklorist and a Kyoto scholar, recounts an example of an old mask transforming into a mysterious woman. Ema notes that a mask transforming into something/someone is called menreki (‘mask monster’). A  masked, trouble-making spirit is a conventional, even sometimes common, folk belief. So what is the significance of all the symbolism and beliefs intertwined in Spirited Away? It is often said that in Japan high technology and traditional customs live side by side. They exist in fact not only side-by-side, but are inseparable, symbiotic. [. . .] Spirited Away provides a good example of how, within the modern and the technological, folk beliefs and customs still thrive. [. . .] Just as when a storyteller would entertain the audience by fireside with interesting stories (with some moral edification), Miyazaki’s story is entertaining and hopeful. It appears that the folk beliefs and images come to surface in artefacts regardless of the media form. The phenomenon of Kamikakushi gives an unstable youth a period of rest from this world (social death) while s/he has disappeared. If and when s/he comes back to this world, s/he is ready to start a new life. During the time of disappearance, s/he may have saved the lives of some creatures in the other world, much as Chihiro did. That world may be inhabited by supernatural beings who have lost their place in this world. Those beings who have lost their physical place in this world – be it by modern technology and/ or belief in materialism – have reclaimed it in the very modern technology, such as animation and computer games. In virtual reality, folk characters including yamauba, tsuchigumo, and millions of spirits appear abundantly with some modern-day additives to the original images. At the same time, the ‘original’ images are evolutionary rather than set in stone. They are alive and continue to stay alive, morphing with the times and they remain both important and dear to the Japanese.

5

AFRICA1

Morocco

Algeria

This northeastern African country has seen a bloom of diverse young talents. Said Bouftass made plenty of animated shorts and animated ads, and in 2011 he directed an animated film about Ibn Battuta, the Arab traveller from the Middle Ages (Ibn Battuta, 2011). J’ai bu un café dans un Café (‘I Drank a Coffee in a Café’, 2005) is about a man’s imaginary journey. Rachid Jadir is known for his shorts that sneer at everyday Moroccan behaviour. He is the creator of the popular series Rass Derb (computer shorts). ‘I had a subject in my head and wanted to talk about the streets and the young people of my generation. My language is 3D animation; I started a series of shorts, portraying scenes from districts of Casablanca. [These shorts are] based on self-irony and popular humour.’2 Salah Eddine Basti and Mouhssin Al Manouri made La Balade (‘The Walk’); El Mehdi El Ouazzani directed Green-Green (id.) for the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts of Casablanca; Hatim Kadmiri made Le Petit Prince (‘The Little Prince’); Anas Rafik directed Woody (id., 2003); Hicham Maama made Ninja (id.); Youssef Defali made Nova (id.); and Youssef Bahji made 8 Bot (id.). Chouaib Chirour and Amine Beckoury, graduates of the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Casablanca, made the video clip Blad Skizo (id., 2008) for the Hoba Hoba Spirit Moroccan band. Studio Sigmatoon made the series Adam et Ramzi (30 3-minute episodes), popular among Arab audiences and shown on Qatar’s Al Jazeera Children’s Channel in 2008.

Altayib Sharif Basheer, a comic cartoonist and director of Numidia Art Association, set up his studio in 1998. He made many series for Algerian TV, including Adrar 13, Kalila Wa Demna, The Book of the Time, The Dedicator Taher, Adel and Media, and Professor Maher. The 52-part series Algeria Is History & Civilization was financed by the Ministries of Culture and Defense and took five years to make. Up to 2012, few people were involved in professional production and training. Mohamed Meziani, director of the Heritage Association, created a link between visual and graphic artists. In 2004, he began Les Journées Internationales du Film d’Animation (JIFAA) in Algiers, a festival offering workshops by professionals in the field. The French/Algerian live-action director Rachid Bouchared made L’Ami y’a bon (‘Okay, My Friend’, 2004), a computer-animated film about young African men taken from Senegal to join the French army during World War II. Mohamed Aram made Lyrics (id., 2006), directed by Khaled Chihab, which was nominated at the Africa Movie Academy Awards in Nigeria in 2010. In the same year, Algerian Amel Djeneni was nominated at the same festival for One Step of Love (id., 2006).

1 2

Tunisia In 1992 Zouhaïer Mahjoub made Fleur de pierre (‘Stone Flower’). His 12-part TV series Les Aventures de Hatem, le courageux cavalier Zlass (‘The Adventures of Hatem, the

This section is coordinated by Mohamed Ghazala and Cinzia Bottini. Interview published in French in Maroc Hebdo International no. 862, 19 November 2009, p. 60.

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Courageous Horseman of the Zlass’) used the old legends of the North African region of the Zlass. Mahjoub began an animated feature in 1993; production was halted in 2000, but it still resulted in a medium-length film, Le sous-marin de Carthage (‘The Carthage Submarine’). Mongi Sancho directed Ruse pour ruse (‘Trick for Trick’, 2006), which is 20 minutes long. In 2009, Leila Ben Rejab, Darine Kouche, Haykel Dridi, and Rim Ben Salah made Les Terriens (‘The Earthmen’). Tunisi Animation Studio created the series Viva Carthago in 2004, coproduced by Ahmed Attia Bahaeddine (1945–2007). From the series, Cinétéléfilms made the 75-minute feature Les naufragés de Carthage (‘The Shipwrecks of Carthage’, 2006), directed by Abdelkader Belhedi. Adventurers, led by a 10-year-old boy, travel through time aboard an ancient vessel, experiencing ancient Mediterranean history. Segu Fanga or Le Pouvoir de Ségou (‘Segu Fanga, or The Power of Segu’) is the first Arabian feature film in French, directed in 2006 by Mambaye Coulibaly (from Mali) and Abdelkader Belhedi (from Tunisia). Running 80 minutes, it is set in the streets of Ségou, the ancient capital of the Bambara Empire. Two children are told the stories of ancient heroes. Mohamed Hassine Grayaâ directed the 30-minute L’Enfant-Roi (‘The Child King’, 2008) about Bouba, a child who learns how to be good from his grandfather and how to be bad from the devil before he returns to his village to be a good king. Aladin Abu Taleb directed Coma (id., 2010) about people driven by irresistible nostalgia. Lofti Mahfoudh made Ryeh (id., 2008) about Séïf, an engineer who recalls his childhood through memories. Nadia Rais (b. Tunis, 1967) directed her first animated short, called L’Ambouba (id., 2009), using pastels on paper. Up to 2012, there were about ten production studios specializing in animation in ads and series (private TV channels helped fund the series). Tunis 2050 (id., 2009) is a popular CGI series released in the month of Ramadan, when TV is watched the most, about a Tunisian family in 2050. Icha Makrouna is a 2D series about a family; Barhouma features a taxi driver. Many private schools have organized training courses on software for 2D and 3D animation, while the University of Manouba launched the first three-year course specializing in animation in 2010. Two associations promoted animated films: the APCAAC (Promotion Association of Animation Film and Art Related to La Marsa), created in 1995 by Zouhaïer Mahjoub; and ATCA (Tunisian 3

Association of Animation), established in 2010 by Wassim ben Rhouma.

Libya The first attempt to make animation in the country was made by one of the most famous cartoonists in the Arab world, Mohamed El-Zawawi (1935–2011). In the early 1980s, he was asked by the national television station to make an animated series. One episode, Hajj Nakad, was made in collaboration with a studio in England. Another 45-minute film, Joha’s Diary, was finished in Japan. Both openly criticized Libyan society. Madghis Mohammed Madi (b. Adrar Nafousa, 7 May  1972) was born and raised in Libya till the age of 14. Then he moved to California, where he worked on DreamWorks’ feature The Prince of Egypt in 1998. After returning to North Africa he made two shorts: Karakis (id., 2003, never publicly screened), a silhouette animation; and Memory of the Shadow (id., 2005), about a Berber hero, broadcast on Moroccan TV. The speech is in Amazigh, the language of the Berbers. Joha (id., 2009) was a 12-part clay animation series (26 minutes each) about the popular character Nasreddin Hoja, with a little Berber flavour. It was broadcast in Arabic, French, and Amazigh. Madghis Madi’s latest film, Libya as It Is (2010), was about a girl who goes back to her family in Libya. Made in classic drawn animation, it ran more than 50 minutes.

Egypt Among the Egyptian animation filmmakers, Mona Abou El Nasr (b. Alexandria, 1953–2003) stood out for her distinctive graphic style. She made the award-winning Survival (1988) during her time at CalArts in the US. At the end of the 1980s she opened her own studio and worked on TV projects. Among her works were the 45-part series Kani & Mani, the 25-part Rehalt El Sendibad El Bahari (‘Sinbad’s Adventures’), and the American-produced TV series Once Upon A Time (1992). The other grand lady of Egyptian animation is Zeinab Zamzam – artist, musicologist, and psychologist. She directed Terracotta Dream (1997), which combined live-action and clay animation, and the very good Open Your Eyes (2000), also using the clay technique. Both are works of subtlety and taste. She has produced over 650 films for children,3 including A Group of Friends (1999), No

Andy Wallace, ‘Animation History in Africa’, ASIFA Magazine: The International Animation Journal 21, no. 2 (2008): 31.

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for War (2005), The Room of Drafting (2006), Tree of the Moon (2007), and Little Heroes (2009). In the 2000s in Egypt there were more than 50 big, medium, and small animation studios. About ten of them were producing a combined total of more than 100  hours of animation each year. Some dominated the market not only in Egypt but also in such countries as Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The larger studios monopolized Egyptian TV, leaving little room for small outfits to enter the marketplace. However, these small studios received funds from other Arabian countries, making series or ads for Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Libya, Yemen, Kuwait, and so on. It was primarily 2D work as well as clay animation, in addition to newer work with 3D and Flash. Some studios specialized in computer animation. Tarek Rashed, for example, started making ads in early 2000 and then worked on coproductions with Arabian countries in local series, specializing in CGI animation. The studio Zamzam specialized in Islamic series in clay animation. The same technique was used in projects under Eid Abdel Latif. Many freelancers worked individually or part-time and sometimes directed their own projects. Hussain Nemr, Hazem Gooda, and Ahmed Fathi made many awardwinning works. Mohamed Ghazala (b. Benghazi, Libya, 1978) directed or codirected Carnival (2001), Crazy Works (2002), HM HM (2005), Sayari Yetu (2006), and Honayn’s Shoe (2009), for which he was awarded the Animation Prize at the Africa Movie Academy Awards ceremony. Ghazala was also active as a critic, an organizer (he was founder and director of ASIFA-Egypt, the first African

Figure 5.1  Mohamed Ghazala, Honayn’s Shoe, 2009.

and Arabian chapter of the International Animated Film Association), as well as being a lecturer at large and a professor at Minia University. The 1990s and 2000s could be considered the golden age of Egyptian animation. Many new studios opened and many students took animation classes at the Cinema Institute, Helwan University, and Minia University.

Mali Kadiatou Konate made the screen adaptation of a well-known African story about a child capable of talking, eating, and walking the day of his birth who becomes imperious and domineering (L’enfant terrible, 1993).4 With his older brother he goes in search of adventures, and only the animal-gods save them from a village king’s wrath. The film, produced by the Belgian Atelier Graphoui, is visually beautiful with excellent puppets and costumes. In 2006, Mambaye Coulibaly directed the aforementioned Segu Fanga or Le Pouvoir de Ségou (‘Segu Fanga, or The Power of Segu’). It was followed by Segu Janjo (id.) in 2008.

Niger After the success of Kokoa in 1985, featuring a wrestling match between chameleons and other animals, Moustapha Alassane made Kokoa 2 (2001), a remake. Alassane had studied in Paris and in Canada, and his films won awards around the world. He spoke refined French and often travelled. Despite all of this, in Kokoa 2 he made the same ‘mistakes’ of timing, scriptwriting, and filmmaking that he had committed 35 years earlier in Have a Nice Trip, Sim. The fact is that, despite his studies, Alassane did not learn animation. He invented it, shaping animation according to his ideas. He created his own timing, framing, screenwriting, and editing. He presents the viewpoint of a man from Niger expressed through simple, basic, inexpensive techniques just slightly more expensive than painting or sculpting. In 2003, Alassane directed Tagimba, a tribute to the great Nigerian singer Tagimba. He died on 17 March 2015.

The tale has many local variants. The French artist Michel Ocelot used the premise of a newborn baby as the hero in his cartoon feature Kirikou et la Sorcière (2008) and its sequels. 4

294  Chapter 5: Sudan

Sudan5 Sudan has a long history that is entwined with Egypt’s, since the two areas were politically united over several periods. After gaining independence from Egypt and the United Kingdom in 1956, Sudan suffered 17 years of civil war, followed by ethnic, religious, and economic conflicts. There was a second civil war in 1983, before the country was seized in a bloodless coup d’état by colonel Omar al-Bashir in 1989, who proclaimed himself President of Sudan. The civil war ended with the new Constitution of 2005. A referendum in January 2011 stated the secession of a large area, which became the Republic of South Sudan on 9 July 2011. Despite the country’s torments, animation began in the early 1960s with Edmond Munier. He studied at the Khartoum Technical Institute (later Sudan University for Science and Technology). In 1963, he started to work at the Sudan national television station as a graphic designer. Realizing there were no animated programmes for children, he experimented with model animation using a 16mm camera. Munier made many animated short opening sequences for TV programmes and introduced several characters in a famous TV programme called Janat Al atfal (‘Children‘s Heaven’), including a purple cat and mouse. All of his animations were self-produced, without government support. In 1972 Munier went to Germany for three years to study. In 1983, he attended another course in Berlin. Despite his commitment, because of lack of funds from the head of the department he wasn’t able to accomplish anything. Sara Gadala Gubara, daughter of cinema pioneer Gadala Gubara, graduated from Cairo Academy of Arts and Film Institute in 1984, having studied film animation and directing. A  year later, she joined Sudan Television, where she made four short animated films using drawings rather than CGI. Then she established her own studio and started to work as a photographer and director. By 2006, she had made three features and 20 documentary films. In an interview,6 she said: ‘[I made a] 15 minute animation entitled The Beautiful Fatma, which could

pass for the Sudanese version of Cinderella. I  made the second film on video.’ Gubara explained how difficult it was to make films in her country. ‘Television is vigorously and strictly censored [. . .] Islamic Sharia law is impacting negatively on filmmaking while most people in filmmaking are not professionally-trained.’ Gubara also talked about her personal disability and how she turned it into a source of strength: I was born with polio in my leg. Under ordinary circumstances I would have been rendered almost useless but my father helped me a lot and encouraged me to do cinema. I’m famous in Sudan, where I was an international swimming champion. If you are courageous enough, you can do just about anything. [. . .] My father even made a film script about me called Viva Sara7 that he sold in Italy, where they made a film about me and my accomplishments.8 In 2005, two workshops for the Sudan TV staff in Khartoum were held by the Malaysian Hassan Muthalib, senior artist-in-residence in the Faculty of Creative and Artistic Technology at the University of Technology MARA Malaysia. Muthalib completed a four-minute short in cel animation and Flash. Some animated series were made and broadcast by private channels, but the official television station was not interested in animation. Moatasim Al-Jaili, the Sudanese producer and owner of Harmony channel, created the animated series Boltya, Daughter of the Nile, telling the story of a fish. It was made by Sudanese artists with the help of computers. Moatasim produced two other groups of stories: Foli & Folaya, the Nuts and Mondial of the Vegetables, using comedy to teach Sudanese values to children. The Shrouq TV channel also made daily episodes called Mahjoob  & Salam (two minutes each) and quizzes, Farah Wed Taktok; both series were made by the Egyptian studio Khlood. More and more young independent artists tried to make their own animation films. ‘Helna’ is a group of friends who used Flash and later learned Toon Boom software.

We thank Nisren Abasher for her important contribution. Sara Gadala Gubara, interview by Ogova Ondevo, Art Matters Info, 12 October  2006, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/sea rch?q=cache:CO8QTDSbFOcJ:artmatters.info/%3Fp%3D530+Sara+Gubara+The+beautiful+Fatma&cd=1&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=it. 7 The film is Sarahsarà (1994), directed by Enzo Martinelli. The title is a pun, literally meaning ‘Sarah will be’. 8 Sara Gadala Gubara, interview by Ogova Ondevo, Art Matters Info, 12 October  2006, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/sea rch?q=cache:CO8QTDSbFOcJ:artmatters.info/%3Fp%3D530+Sara+Gubara+The+beautiful+Fatma&cd=1&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=it. 5 6

Chapter 5: Ethiopia  295

Nisren Abashar (b. Singa, 1983) moved to Khartoum with her family when she was seven days old. She was a sculptor and a painter and made installations. In 2008, after moving to Germany, she turned to animation and made Trip, in collaboration with the German artist Anne-Lisa Lippoldt. This three-minute short uses chalk on a blackboard and shows Abashar’s perspective on moving abroad. In Sudan, Abashar worked alone in a small studio in a town called Omdurman. She decided to shift from sculpture to animation as ‘sculpturing is forbidden in my own country, because of the Islamic way. I  love to make figures and to decide to make them in small size and later move them frame-by-frame.’9 In 2009, she participated in a workshop for digital animation (ADEF) held in Cairo, Egypt. She made the short One Line in collaboration with Arabian animators.10

Ethiopia Almost all Ethiopian animated films have been made by self-taught individuals who used simple home computers. The country had no animation studio, as such, yet. Most members of the target Ethiopian audience for animation, including children, are familiar with Western animation. There is no governmental or nongovernmental body with the aim of introducing or encouraging local animation. There were TV shorts made in November 1994 – while they were not strictly animated, they were relevant to the country’s animation. A monkey hand puppet named Cherry was voiced in Amharic by the comedian Asres Bekele. Cherry was very well known and remained beloved by most youngsters in Ethiopia who had access to television sets.11 In 2003, the painter Workneh Bezu (b. Addis Ababa, 21 March 1982) released an hour-long Amharic puppet feature, Yesase Teret (‘The Fable of Sase’). Workneh Bezu made 15 distinct characters by himself – three life-size puppets and 12 hand puppets. This film was screened for three months in a first-class theatre and also released on DVD. The first computer animated short was by Girma Zelleke, shown on the Ethiopian Television Kids programme

in 1998. This film was based on the adventures of a model infant boy named Senzero, dancing the Eskista (a typical Ethiopian dance) for about four minutes. The film was embraced by wide-ranging audiences and was still popular a decade later. Senzero was developed into a doll and was commercialized.12 The first 2D animated short film was made by Yohanes Alemu (b. Addis Ababa, 23 July 1968) in 2001. A 20-minute film called Muchit (‘The Little Girl’), it aired on Ethiopian Television. Alemu made the film using Inscriber (a TV broadcast graphics tool) and DVE (a digital video effect tool, usually used in TV to enhance the transition of scenes by morphing, zooming in/out, flipping, etc). The characters combined basic geometric lines and were animated using preset effects. Alemu chose this solution since he was working at the Ethiopia Television Corporation, and the TV broadcast tools were the only tools he had to make animation. In July  2006, the first 2D animated feature film was released by Netsanet Kidanemariam (b. Asmera, 24 February 1977) with the help of his younger brother, Filimos. The 80-minute film, Washaw – The Cave, is about Ethiopian patriotism during the Italian occupation of the 1930s. In 2007, the 90-minute horror film Jawisaro was enhanced with visual effects by Kirubel Estifanos (b. Tullu, East Showa, 5 February 1986). Following a yearlong graphics course in Russia, the artist Getahun Asefa (b. Addis Ababa, 7 October  1967) made a number of animated programmes for Ethiopia Television. Since about 2005, many short animated films were made on an individual basis, which is an indication that there were many beginners taking regular courses and training. In October  2009, more than ten animators formed a group and celebrated International Animation Day, an event that collected several Ethiopian animated films together. The screening lasted 60 minutes. There were also three demos taken from feature animation projects: The Fable of Sase (puppets), Tsehai Loves Learning (puppets/2D animation), and Zeganbaw (3D animation). Tsehai Loves Learning is an animated educational film for children aged three to six, made by Bruktawit Tigabu and

Nisren Abashar, e-mail message to Cinzia Bottini, 24 August 2010. The animators who worked together are: Maha Sherin (Egypt), Mohamed Ghazala (Egypt), Nisren Abasher (Sudan), Nour Al Zeer (Lebanon), Roger Anis (Egypt), and Wassim Ben Rhouma (Tunisia). 11 Long before Cherry, there was a similar children’s programme telling stories using still pictures. 12 On the production of the doll, see Damien Zane, ‘Ethiopia Hoping for Doll Success’, bbc.co.uk, last modified 3 November  2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3231213.stm. 9

10

296  Chapter 5: Senegal

Shane Etzenhouser and released as episodes on Ethiopia Television in 2006. Zeganbaw (‘The Monster’) was made by Alemu W/Mariam (b. Harer, 14 March 1971).13

Senegal In February 1998, Pierre Sauvalle, a Senegalese national who had been trained at the Gobelins school in Paris, founded the Pictoons company in Dakar with manager Aida N’Diaye. Pictoons invested in up-to-date technology, trained many young professionals, and began working on commissions: television titles, advertising, and so on. Its first television series, in 2000–2002, was Kabongo the Griot (‘griot’ is a nomadic storyteller). Scenarios from the Sahel – The General Assembly of Diseases (2000) followed. It features the Senegalese music star Ismaël Lô and is set in the village of Contaminobo, where Tuberculosis, Polio, Hepatitis, Measles, and Diarrhea (anthropomorphized characters) live, joined by Supreme AIDS. They are spied on by a scientist under the microscope, teaching the audiences how to protect themselves. The characters’ shapes mingled the international standard style with a design following the Dogon and Fang masks of local culture. Pictoons was the most important example of an indigenous animation company in Black Africa, exploiting indigenous talents and strengths and competing with European, American, and Asian products. Pictoon continued to produce animated series, releasing The Invincible Lions (2004). Others Senegalese directors are Mahamadou Ndoye, who made Train Train Medina (id., 2003) about the Muslim part of Dakar being destroyed bit by bit by noise, traffic, and anarchy; and Ibrahima Niang-Piniang, who made Sacou Wala Bouteil! (2005), about the recycling of plastic water bottles.

Ivory Coast Didier M. Aufort, known for his non-animated feature Cache-Cache d’Amour, produced Grand Masque ET les Junglos (1996), which combined computer animation and live action. In 2001 Vincent Glès made Le Bûcheron de Ziétrou, a computer film. Idrissa Diabaté directed The Adventure of Guédé (id., 1999), in which young Guédé moves from a village in the jungle to Abidjan, the country’s capital, but faces difficulties.

13

In 2003, several series were made in Abidjan from African legends and stories: Ali et Bibi (‘Ali and Bibi’), about a child and an old dog; Le Bouc et le Coq (‘The Goat and the Chicken’), about an industrious chicken and a lazy goat; La tortue, le singe et le paysan (‘The Turtle, the Ape and the Farmer’), about a turtle found in the forest by a farmer; L’histoire du grand chasseur de N’zassa (‘The History of the Great Hunter of N’zassa’), about a hunter deceived by a sorcerer; Les aventures de Adji et Alho (‘The Adventures of Adji and Alho’), about two young female friends with different attitudes; and Toto l’éléphant (‘Toto, the Elephant’), about an elephant who becomes a hero. After graduating from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts d’Abidjan in November  2007, Pierre Marie Sindo (b. Abidjan, 1985) established the Sinanimation studio in Abidjan. It made shorts and series for TV, the Web, and mobile phones. S-7: Le devoir n’aura pas lieu (‘The Exercise Won’t Be Done’, 2008) is about the daily life of a student class. Le Rag (id., 2009) describes a frequent activity of a young student: waiting in a queue. Sinanimation also made series: Foot’Ivoire (id., 2008), about the Ivory Coast National Football Team, and C kéma? (2008–2011), about the bizarre daily adventures of Ivorian people. (‘C kéma?’ is the short form of ‘c’est comment?’, the French expression meaning ‘how is it?’.) Each episode is about a minute long and is inspired by everyday events and popular African tales.

Ghana Alex Bannerman (b. Accra, 1956), an ex-student of the film school, set up an animation studio in 1994 called Akroma, together with Kofi Sarpong (b. Accra, 1961). He had previously worked at the Ghana Films Corporation and as a freelance animator for advertising companies. Akroma studio survived in its early years by making animated commercials. In the late 1990s Hugh Quist, another cartoonist and a self-taught animator, also started animating for TV, mainly educational and public service programmes. His works were popularly referred to as Zingaro, the name of his studio. Samuel Quartey (b. Accra, 1968), a former head of the animation department at the National Film and Television Institute, set up Animation Africa in 2007 with three of his former students, Frank Tetteh (b. Accra, 1981), Salamatu Yakubu (b. Tamale, 1979), and Emmanuel Mensah

We thank Alemu Damena and Eskindir Awoke for their fundamental contribution.

Chapter 5: Burkina Faso  297

(b. Accra, 1981). The studio’s TV animation included Papa Seku, a short series about personal security, Kofi Lesson Book, Courtesy and Etiquette for Young People and Parents, and Ananse Tales, based on African spider folklore. Animation Africa also offered training to introduce artists to animation. In 2009, it began Animafrik, an annual animation film festival. This created a platform to discuss and promote African and Caribbean animation.14

Benin The country’s first animated film was Le Livre Magique (‘The Magic Book’, 2007), made by a team of cartoonists and illustrators of children’s books under the direction of Belgians Paul Lhoir and Raymond Burlet. In the short, Anna and Bazil are two children in modern Benin (characters in the children’s books by the illustrators). Thanks to the film’s success, the animators created Afriqu’Art Toons – Studio de dessin animé d’Afrique de l’Ouest in Cotonou. The association received funding and made Anna, Bazil et le masque sacré (‘Anna, Bazil and the Sacred Mask’, 2008) and Anna, Bazil et la petite Amina (‘Anna, Bazil and the Little Amina’, 2008). The latter is about AIDS.

Burkina Faso The German-Burquinese Cilia Sawadogo (b. Leipzig, Germany, 1965) worked on African issues at the National Film Board of Canada. Among her early films, La femme mariée à trois hommes (‘The Woman Who Married Three Men’, 1993) uses pastel drawing on rough paper. Birth (id., 1994) is about overwhelming love. In 1995, Sawadogo was assistant to the directors of Jonas and Lisa, from the award-winning NFB collection Rights from Heart: Part 2. In the same year, still at the National Film Board, Sawadogo directed The Cora Player for the collection Rights from Heart: Part 3. Set in the African jungle, it tells the story of a couple who come from different social groups and who are in love. The film is inspired by Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to love, free of tradition or their respective social status. In 2000, Sawadogo made Christopher Changes His Name for the Talespinners series.

1996 saw another Sawadogo film, made by Benjamin Ntabundi, Michel Castelain, and Jacques Faton. The eight-minute Carnet noir (‘Little Black Book’) deals with political themes, handled with model animation, clay animation, and photos. The film is set in November 1993, in the Burundi area. It was the setting of a coup d’état in which the president was murdered and an ethnic massacre ensued. During an attack on a small village, an artist barely survives but then becomes a fugitive, hiding all over the country. He writes and draws what he sees in a small black book. From 1999, Sawadogo worked as a full-time professor in Montreal, at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. There she directed and produced The Rabbit’s Trick (2000) and Tree of Spirits (2005). She also collaborated as a trainer in workshops in Africa, Europe, and Canada, and with UNESCO in Kenya and South Africa on the project Africa Animated. Her films are based on African culture, mixed with fantasy. Justin Zerbo produced The Island (2003), a three-minute short about two characters isolated on an island and how their friendship deteriorates when a chest falls from the sky. Leila (2007) and Kono (2008) concern child abuse. He mostly produced his work in his native country. Rasmane Tiendrebeogo (b. 1971) made Tiga guérisseur (‘Tiga the Healer’, 2001). Tiga is a puppet who decides to become a healer in order to make money without working hard. Discussing the film, the director said: ‘It deals with the theme of traditional medicine, since in Burkina Faso 80% of the population doesn’t gain access to modern medicine, due to lack of money. It happens that there are mean people who disguise themselves as healers. I wanted to criticize these people because medicine is, above all, a profession.’15 Three years later, Tiendrebeogo made Tiga au bout du fil (‘Tiga on the Other End of the Line’, 2004), in which Tiga works as a watchman in a residential neighbourhood. It deals with mobile phones, which is a tool of communication as well as a work tool16 in the director’s mind. Ollo Drissa Kambou made I’ll Go, Me Too (2007) about Alex, a small boy who wants to read and write but must face his father and grandfather, who want him to work in the field like they do. The arrival of an uncle living in the city changes his destiny. Frédéric Kaboré made Koudougou (id., 2002), a seven-minute film about a sick child taken to a blacksmith healer by his parents.

We sincerely thank Samuel Quartey for the information provided. Rasmane Tiendrebeogo, interview by El Watan, Actualités & Revue de Presse Algérie, 15 December 2009. 16 Rasmane Tiendrebeogo, interview by El Watan, Actualités & Revue de Presse Algérie, 15 December 2009. 14 15

298  Chapter 5: Nigeria

Nigeria17 The first widely known Nigerian animated film was Rooted (1997) by Victor Olusola Opeyokun (b. London, 30 March 1975). This artist had an early passion for animation and experimented with many materials before focusing on his drawing skills. Four and a half minutes long, Rooted is a mostly black and white hand-drawn animation on paper, enriched with sparse, effective colour. It explores a man’s journey from chains to freedom. It was first shown in Germany at the Stuttgart International Animation Festival in 1998, and then at various festivals around the world. Opeyokun developed a professional and teaching career, but Rooted remained his only auteur film. In the twenty-first century, digital technology allowed individual animators to make independent productions. However, unstable infrastructures, such as the failing electricity supply, hindered their efforts. Some people left Nigeria to study animation. For example, Ebele Okoye (b. Onitsha, 6 October 1969), a trained graphic designer and illustrator, migrated to Germany in 2000. She pursued a further training programme in 2D cartoon animation at the International Film School in Cologne, worked in some studios, and eventually settled down to make her own films. Her first professional short was The Lunatic (2007), using an evaluation version of the 2D software Bauhaus Mirage (now called TV Paint Animation). The story revolves around a strange woman

Figure 5.2  Ebele Okoye, The Legacy of Rubies, 2015.

17

By Ebele Okoye.

roaming the streets of a small suburb. Her only reaction to constant harassment by the locals is laughter. The Lunatic received an honourable mention at the 2008 Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA). In Papermouse (2008), a struggling architect tries to catch a mouse that destroys his drawings. In 2009, in a bid to get Okoye to return to Nigeria, her brother and animation enthusiast Ifeanacho Okoye set up a firm called Shrinkfish.® It focused on animation training, mentorships, and production of African content. Under this umbrella, Okoye made Patterns (2009), a ten-minute film dealing with the patterns involved in migration and the search for greener pastures. Also in 2009, she produced and animated Anna Blume, a nine-minute adaptation of the poem ‘An Anna Blume’ (‘To Eve Blossom’), written in 1919 by the poet and Dada artist Kurt Schwitters. The film was directed by Bulgarian Vessela Dancheva, who used the original voice-over of the poem read by Schwitters himself. In 2010, under the production of Shrinkfish,® Okoye directed The Essence from a story by Hafeez Oluwa, a young medical student. It was a strange combination of very simple character design and strong 2D computer drawn animation. The Essence was applauded at the Africa in Motion Film Festival in Edinburgh as magical and thought-provoking. In 2011, Okoye made Footy My Love, about a Nigerian-born female pro soccer player, Chi-Chi Igbo. The seven-minute film, with bits of live video, was premiered at the opening

Chapter 5: Nigeria  299

of the world female soccer championship in Germany. The following year, Okoye made Meine Heimat (‘My Homeland’), a five-minute interpretation of a very abstract poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig, rendered in a combination of 3D and 2D styles. The film focuses on an old woman who confusedly recalls her life and growing up in post-war Berlin. In 2015 she completed the 28 minute long The Legacy of Rubies. Another woman who left Nigeria to realize her dreams was Oluwatoyin Adewumi (b. Asaba, 5 October  1981), a computer-science-graduate-turned animator. Oluwatoyin, who lived in North America from 2000, combined her qualifications with her passion for animation to create an interesting series that teaches science, technology, engineering, and mathematics concepts through an African perspective. Based on a study she undertook at Harvard graduate school, Adewumi was frustrated by the small percentage of lead black characters in children’s programming. Her series was The Royal Whiz Kidz and its first episode had its Internet release in July 2010. Made in a combination of Flash and Anime Studio pro, the very colourful animations tell the story of three nine-year-olds of royal blood. Using their powers, the smart, inquisitive, and adventurous children fight evil in their land. A second production, the Bo  & Tami series, based on West African folk tales, was made in parallel. In the first episode, The Tortoise & the Wisdom Gourd (January 2010), we see a tortoise, a famous protagonist in Nigerian folk stories, trying to become wise but realizing she has not gained any wisdom. Each episode ran three and a half minutes, animated on the digital 2D platform using Flash and Toon Boom Studio 4. Olanrewaju Oluwafemi (b. Lagos, 14 November 1979) is an accounting graduate from Ohio State University. He spent 12 years in the US teaching himself animation. Back in Nigeria, he set up a studio called La Fem Animation. He makes very short 2D computer animation films, rendered in a rapid display of images. In 2008 he made Officially African (2008), screened at the Krok International Film Festival. He also made Chef de Sound (2008), a promotional clip for Sound City, a popular African cable music channel. In 2009, Oluwafemi made a series of shorts called Police Report, and Lagos Sanitizer, a 90-second clip about the sanitization exercise in Lagos. The latter won the Best Animation Award at the 2009 Abuja International Film Festival in Nigeria. The Adventures of Alayo-Wishfood Thinking (2009) has no dialogue. Naija Chicken, Nigerian Baller, and Plaque Dare Talk are comedy clips made in 2009, each 30 seconds long. National Cake Embezzlement was screened at the Terra Cotta Awards, Lagos, in 2010.

Kenway Afam Oforeh (b. 15 April 1978) worked on a more commercial platform as the founder of the TV production company Euphoria! Entertainment. In 2008, he produced a music video, Mu Bottle ye wa, for the 4th Republic band. Intolerance was released in 2010 through the TV Music Africa channel. Mike Steve Adeleye (b. Lagos, 2 March  1978) made Evolution of Intelligence (2003). His Playground was appreciated in Nigeria and abroad. It tells the story of an underprivileged boy who dreams of going to school and playing with other children instead of hawking goods on the street. Oloto Oluwafunmilayo Oluwaseun (b. Ibadan, 21 March  1988) pursued animation training outside the country as well. Between 2008 and 2010, she studied 3D animation at Frameboxx Animation and Visual Effects in India. Her first film was Fishing Trip, a short 3D clip released on the Internet in August 2010. By 2012, established animators were either working independently or freelancing in studios (more than twenty) across the country. Most animators worked on commercials and commissioned films, but they also used local content to make materials for local consumption. Though the infrastructural setbacks remain, people went into productions as much as they could, focusing on slim content animation with digital videos as the end product. Because of this, there is widespread use of software such as Anime Studio Pro and Flash on 2D environments. Also notable, however, is the popularity of 3D CG with the younger generation and the fact that a good number of the new studios were established by ‘returning’ animators, or by animation enthusiasts in partnership with Nigerian professionals. Adamu Waziri (b. Lagos, 8 March 1974) left Nigeria as a teenager to study architecture in the UK. In 2008, he returned to his native country and founded a studio called EVCL. He had studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, known for its experimental creativity. He adopted 3D animation software quite early, using it for architectural visualizations and animations. A master course in 3D animation brought him nearer the industry. His graduation piece, Majestic, was shown at several festivals, including the Black Film Festival in London. With the help of animators working under Waziri, such as Sagir Mohammed Carpenter, EVCL made numerous digital video clips dealing with Nigerian lifestyles and social problems. In a very humorous way, Planes Immigrations Nigerians (2010) depicts the effects a Nigerian passport has at immigration control points. In 2009, EVCL began the series Bino and Fino, created and directed by Adamu Waziri. Bino and Fino are brother

300  Chapter 5: Cameroon

and sister, living with their grandparents in a modern African city. Bino and Fino is an educational show intended to widen the ethnic diversity of children’s entertainment. It is aimed especially at African children ages to three to five. The cartoon series teaches children to count, colour, and identify the different species of animals and the major African languages. Waziri explained: ‘We want to show a couple of kids in a middle class life, which I know isn’t the reality of all the kids in Africa, but let’s show that reality – the reality of people using laptops, phones, going to school, doing their daily business – no talking ants, no dancing “jinga jinga” music – just a cartoon of life.’18 Boduvision Studios was established in 2002 by Ade Bodude (b. Abeokuta, 8 April 1968), a mass communication graduate who taught himself animation. The studio worked mostly for television. Its children’s show, Kali and Tewa Show, ran across Nigeria in 2007; by 2010, it was being broadcast through West Africa through Mnet’s DSTV. The same studio’s Grandma Stories (2008) used cutouts and Plasticine; it was commissioned by the top noodles brand in Nigeria, IndoMie (Taesuniyoyin Indomie, ‘Grandma Telling Stories’). Broadcast in the Hausa language, it was shown on the AIT Television Network before moving to Mnet’s DSTV.

Cameroon Guillaume Nzamewi can be considered his country’s first animator. In Douala, with a group of musicians and artists, he established his first atelier called MUD’A (Musique et Dessins d’Afrique) in 2003. Two years later he opened the studio 123 Images; he widened this in 2010, hiring the actor and singer Michel Sangha and the video editor Armand Tamtchouong. Nzamewi also renamed the company Illusion Animation.

His animation includes a pilot film for the series Les aventures du jeune sorcier Ndoube Leya (‘The Adventures of Young Sorcerer Ndoube Leya’, 2003). He followed it with the six-minute Le Destin d’un guerrier (‘The Destiny of a Warrior’, 2005), a colourful, dynamic film. He also directed the music video Mon Plaidoyer (‘My Advocacy’, 2005) for the rapper Gagui T. and later worked for advertising and educational spots. Paul Ebode made L’homme qui a tout vu (‘The Man Who Has Seen Everything’, 2008), about the problem of young alcoholism, and Le pouvoir de la pensée (‘The Power of Thinking’, 2009). Désiré Menga made Deido Boy (id., 2006), which portrays a chaotic African metropolis.

Kenya In 2008, Tiger Aspect Productions (UK) and Homeboyz Entertainment19 started the production of Tinga Tinga Tales in Nairobi, an animation series inspired by the Tinga Tinga art of Tanzania.20 The series was created by Claudia Lloyd,21 the head of animation and children’s programming at Tiger Aspect Productions, after she had travelled East Africa. Tinga Tinga Tales is made for a global audience of children three to six years old and based on animal stories from all over Africa. The images are hand-painted by Tanzanian artists22 then computer animated in the Homeboyz Nairobi studio before being shipped to the UK, where they are broadcast on CBeebies and BBC. In October 2010 the series was broadcast on Citizen TV in Kenya. By 2010, Tiger Aspect and Homeboyz Entertainment had trained and employed over 50 people at the Nairobi studio, working in all areas of production: scripting, editing, design, animation, sound, and music. It takes nine months to complete an episode – from storyboard to final music – and each animator produces approximately 30 seconds a week.23 There are 20 animators involved in the project, including Martyn Jones as animation director.

Mark Tutton, ‘Introducing Bino and Fino, Africa’s Answer to Dora the Explorer’, cnn.com, last modified 23 February 2012, http:// edition.cnn.com/2012/02/23/world/africa/nigeria-cartoon-bino-fino/index.html?hpt=hp_c3. 19 Homeboyz Entertainment began in 1992 when a small group of music lovers got together to form an organized DJ-ingunit (a group of young people that performs little DJ shows), whose performances ranged from small house parties to weddings. Managing director Myke Rabar then expanded the company into one of East and Central Africa’s biggest entertainment companies. By 2010, Homeboyz ran a record label and studio, a DJ academy, a TV production wing, and two radio stations, in addition to marketing its own branded water. 20 The Tingatinga artists paint wonderful animals in bright colours with an intricate use of pattern and design. Tiger Aspect works with artists from the Tingatinga Arts Co-Operative at Morogoro Store in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 21 Lloyd’s previous credits include the BAFTA Award-winning Charlie and Lola, the animated Mr. Bean, and Comic Relief. 22 Tingatinga artists who worked on the series include: Abbass Rafiki, Zachi Chimwanda, Mbwana Sudi, John Kilaka, and Maulana. 23 Each episode runs about 12 minutes. 18

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Allan Mwaniki (b. Nairobi, 5 April  1982) developed a passion for drawing as a child.24 He started to work as an animator in 2003 and taught at the Shang Tao Media Arts College, the major animation school in Kenya. In 2006, he directed Samak for UNESCO’s Africa animated workshop; it was a three-minute short on overfishing and greed. The following year, he made Owen and Mzee, from a true story about a friendship between a tortoise and an orphaned hippo. The same year’s The Adventures of El Moran was a nine-minute film about a Maasai bullfighter. In 2010, he worked on The Legend of Ngong Hills with Kwame Nyong’o (see below). Alfred Muchilwa (b. Kakamega, 17 September  1978) studied design at the University of Nairobi before working as a designer and illustrator in Tbwa/Creative, a Nairobi advertising agency. He was introduced to the world of animation after attending several UNESCO animation workshops. As part of Africa Animated!, he directed Toto’s Journey (2005) and Ding Dong (2004). Kwame Nyong’o (b. Chicago, 6 May 1972) is an animator and illustrator who cofounded the Apes in Space studio in Nairobi in 2009. The company’s main objective was to create original African animated TV series and short films. In 2011, it completed The Legend of Ngong Hills, a 10-minute short based on a Maasai folktale about the creation of the Ngong Hills. In this action adventure film, the terrible Ogre of the Forest, who continually wreaks havoc on the Maasai community, falls in love with the beautiful village maiden, setting up the events that create the famous Ngong Hills that sit on the outskirts of Nairobi. The film was premiered in Kenya on 11 March 2011. Nyong’o says: ‘The objective with the film was to demonstrate the potential of using animation to tell African folklore, regardless of our limited budget and resources. In today’s modern Africa, many traditional stories are not being documented, so many are lost forever. With the medium of animation, we have the opportunity to celebrate and protect culture.’25

Figure 5.3  Kwame Nyong’o. Nyong’o was also the project coordinator and an animation trainer for the UNESCO Africa Animated! Project, 2004–2006, which trained dozens of animators from around the continent.26 Sharon Chema Ali Massoud directed Masha (id., 2004), a two-minute short about a schoolgirl who is sold into marriage by her father. Paul Butiga and Peter Mute made Nyonyi (id., 2004), another two-minute short, about a newborn baby bird. Moses Wanjunki and Toni Sankale directed Shiku’s Song (2004), about a character who longs to play the flute.

Allan Mwaniki, on his passion: ‘At around the age of 4, I was already doing crude drawings that my mom and sisters thought were worthy of filing in a folder for future use. It was at that time that I got really engrossed in animation, because there were a lot of European and American cartoons showing on TV most of the time. As a teenager, I found myself being very fascinated by titles like X-Men, Gargoyles, and Samurai X. When I was around sixteen years old, I did a lot of character studies at high school based on action hero animations. ‘Later, I joined college in 2002 and I started doing photography. There, I got unlimited use of the internet and my researches in animation started, studying Disney characters and producing my first animated short The Adventures of El Moran, about a Maasai warrior fighting a lion. I was very fascinated by this experiment although it lacked a lot in terms of animation principles like timing, squash, stretch and film language in general. What followed was a frenzy to animate and research, plus more experiments using different software, until I finally got animation in my fingertips.’ (Allan Mwaniki, e-mail message to Cinzia Bottini, 15 October 2010.) 25 Kwame Nyong’o, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 10 February 2015. 26 Kwame Nyong’o, e-mail message to Cinzia Bottini, 13 October 2010. 24

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Figure 5.4  Kwame Nyong’o, The Legend of Ngong Hills, 2011.

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Jean-Michel Kibushi Ndjate Wooto built on his previous works with Muana Mboka (1999), about a street child who earns a living through small jobs and petty thefts. Prince Loseno, a film about birth, death, and succession, followed in 2004. The Congolese cartoonist Hallain Paluku, whose strips appeared in many local comics, moved to Brussels in 2002. He directed the series Bana Boul (id., 2008), about two brats, for Congolese TV. The brothers Ike Elyenser and Quiet Bamuinikile made Kayembe le Tenace (‘Kayembe the Tenacious’, 2009). It was produced by Matrix Toon, a corporation of Matrix Melodies Studio, and was strongly influenced by Japanese media. Bebe Rico (‘Baby Rico’), a very popular series in Kinshasa, is about a white baby who sings and dances like a Congolese. It was created by Studio Pix Image, which also made Papu & Yaki (id., 2007), the first 3D CGI series with African characters and settings. It was directed by Stani Muke and features a child and a parrot.

Mozambique Isabel Noronha (b. Maputo, 1964) started to work as a filmmaker in 1984 at the National Film Institute, where she directed many documentaries. Along with Brazilian director Vivian Altman (b. São Paulo, 1961), who was in

27

Mozambique for an animation workshop, she made Mother of the Grandchildren (2008). This six-minute film tells the story of Grandma Elisa, whose son and his eight wives all die from AIDS, leaving her to look after 14 children; it mixed animation and documentary. Their next animated project was Salani (‘Goodbye’, 2010), a documentary animation about trafficked children at the border between South Africa and Mozambique. It tells the story of three Mozambican children who were forced to go to South Africa. Altman explained: ‘In a mixture of documentary and animation, this film shows how “tradition” is used by some families to disguise the exploitation of young girls. It explores the trafficking, sexual exploitation and cheap labour to which these unprotected children easily fall victim.’27 In 2011, they codirected another documentary/animation, Meninos de parte nenhuma (‘Boys from Nowhere’, 2011). Espelho meu (‘Mirror My’, 2010) is a documentary/ animation directed by Isabel Noronha, Vivian Altman, the Spanish filmmaker Irene Cardona, and the Iranian Firouzeh Kosrovani. The documentary is a reflection of women’s self-image in four continents, with a mirror as the common thread.

Madagascar Afrika (1997) was a German production directed by Raberanto Ramaherison Andriamirija that expressed hope in the younger generations.

Mohamed Ghazala, ‘Animating in Mozambique: A Recent But Promising Story!’, Animatoon 95, p. 41.

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The Razafindralambo brothers, Fabrice Maminirina and Jiva Eric, directed shorts that were screened at some European festivals and collected on a DVD in 2008. They are Dadarabe (id., 2002), Sur les murs de la ville (‘On the Walls of the City’, 2005), Le soleil se lève . . . puis se couche (‘The Sun Rises . . . Then It Goes to Bed’, 2005), and Les âmes du clocher (‘The Souls of the Bell Tower’, 2006). The latter was dedicated to the victims of Madagascar’s 2001 cholera epidemic. The films are all in 3D CGI, without dialogue. The production of animated films gradually increased thanks to the Encounters Short Film (RFC) festival held annually in Madagascar from 2006. One of the films it screened was The Merchant of Dreams by Laza (2006), a 12-minute short in which the objects come to life, meet before a television, and (in a veiled way) criticize the country’s political manipulation. The organizers of RFC had their own production house, Rozifilms, which started to invest in making animation. The result was the computer-animated feature Andavabiby (id., 2011). It was directed by Thierry Andrianasolo and inspired by the legend of Andrebabe, a mysterious village. The director said of the film: ‘Andavabiby is mainly the first film in Madagascar with inlays of real characters in the 3D (CGI) scenery. The film lasts 96 minutes and all levels from the beginning to the end are rigged (about 700 shots).’28 The story has elements of fantasy and science fiction, with fantastic creatures and hidden treasure. It was made on a very low budget and has flaws, from rendering to performance. Andrianasolo said, ‘It is not perfect, I know, but for a first try, I am satisfied.’29

Zimbabwe30 The African continent’s first animated feature, The Legend of the Sky Kingdom, was produced in 2003. Two white Africans, producer and screenwriter Phil Cunningham and director Roger Hawkins (b. Harare, 24 March 1965), headed a multiethnic group. The film tells the story of three children fleeing the slavery of an underground city and making a difficult and dangerous journey to the Kingdom of Heaven. Despite its pioneering spirit, the film is predominantly amateurish. The narrative is not compelling, and the photography

crushes the characters on the scenery. However, it has an interesting technique, a variant of puppet animation that the filmmakers called ‘junkmation’ because each character or scene was made by recycling old items that had been thrown away. This unique craft is typical of Austral Africa (the part of Africa south of the equator). In the beginning of the twenty-first century, young animators spread throughout the country, becoming more aware of their potential. In 1999, the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) was founded and run by Saki Mafundikwa. It was the first multimedia development school in Zimbabwe, where the students, as a part of the curriculum, were introduced to 3D CGI animation and visual effects production. Most design houses and multimedia production houses snap students from ZIVA up as soon as they have finished the course. In 2007 Marvel Banda, Nqobizitha Mlilo, and Simbirirai Solomon Maramba conceptualized the Joint Afrikan Animation Group (JAAG) to develop animation in Zimbabwe and Africa. In 2010, the Zimbabwe Festival of African Inspired Animation (ZIMFAIA) was held in Harare. It was the first International Animation Festival in Zimbabwe and sub-Saharan Africa, under the direction of Solomon Maramba. Simbirirai Solomon Maramba (b. Cape Coast, Ghana, 22 September 1976), a visual effects artist and 3D CGI animator, is one of the most active people in the field. He was working on his BSc in electromechanical engineering (robotics) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa when he was part of the conceptualizing and organizing team for the first University of Cape Town Arts Festival in 1998. He went to Zimbabwe in 2001. Since 2005, he has been involved in the commercial advertising industry and also in film, as a character animator and multimedia developer. Together with Marvel Banda (b. Kwekwe, Zimbabwe, 17 December 1974), he started Enchant Creative, a small production company, in 2003. Since its beginnings, Enchant Creative has produced the largest percentage of character-animated television in Zimbabwe. In 2007 Solomon Maramba directed and animated the Untouchables’ Change it Up music video. The Untouchables are an animated hip-hop group that began when Solomon Maramba created a concept song with Nqobizitha Mlilo, another animator. The Untouchables became a multimedia project that includes a comic book and music videos.

Mohamed Ghazala, ‘Andavabiby, the First Animated Feature from Madagascar, without Animals!’ Animatoon 93, p. 39. Mohamed Ghazala, ‘Andavabiby, the First Animated Feature from Madagascar, without Animals!’ Animatoon 93, p. 39. 30 We thank Simbirirai Solomon Maramba for his helpful contribution. 28 29

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In 2008 Solomon Baramba wrote, directed, and animated Tariro – A Peace of Afrika,31 a three-minute short that tells the story of Tariro, a monkey taken in by a village family. One day it comes home to find the village destroyed and sets out on a journey to find the family. The project was intended to educate children on peace and social tolerance.32 Solomon Baramba’s Heart of Hearts33 (2008) deals with the idea that each individual walks a different route through life. The protagonist leads a lonely and secluded life, trying to find passion but encountering hostility and segregation. In 2010 Solomon Baramba codirected (with Nakai Matema, Allan Muwani, and Nqobizitha Mlilo) music videos for the Willis Watafi Afrika song ‘Woman of Rock’, the Transit Crew song ‘Rozi’, and ‘Silver Bullet’ by JP4 and Maximus. These were live-action videos with a number of visual effects shots. In the same year, Solomon Baramba started the 13-part fully-animated series Chidhanana, based on the story of Nyika, a boy chosen to be his clan’s next spiritual leader. Nqobizitha Mlilo runs the Enqore Media Group (EMG). He is one of the most experienced music video producers in Zimbabwe, with skills ranging from illustration to character animation. He began animating in his teens and attended the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA). After graduating, he gained some industry experience then returned to ZIVA to lecture. Together with Maramba, he made the music videos Untouchables 1 and Untouchables 2. For the Zimbabwe International Film Festival (ZIFF) in 2008, he made a low-budget film in a week and a half, Ninja Bete, which is a live-action short with an animated cockroach. Tafadzwa Tarumbwa is a 2D animator and runs Animartion Studios. He has produced a large number of animation pieces. Mhle Nzima (b. Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 9 July 1986) is a 2D animator whose first piece, Canvas of the Fallen, received

special mention at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival in 2009. This fully animated34 25-minute film tells the story of an ancient Zimbabwean tribe facing extinction and of the avenging angel born among them. In 2010 he directed the captivating Silent Wishes, which also received an award at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival. Nzima completed the animation project using just a camera, panning and zooming over the 200 sketches he had made while narrating the piece. Nzima encapsulates the spirit of the Zimbabwean animator, often self-taught and working with the bare minimum of resources. Sabina Mutangadura is a puppet animator whose background is storytelling. She participated in a puppet workshop as part of the Zimbabwe International Film Festival in 2005. She has also been involved in getting children interested in animation. Shingai Mtezo is the most experienced of the new school of animators, having been involved in 3D animation for over a decade. Mtezo has specialized in visualization and photorealistic renderings. He has worked with the architectural industry for several years and has a reputation unparalleled in the field in Zimbabwe. Carl Joshua Ncube has been involved in animation as a 2D and 3D animator and as a director. A great advocate for Zimbabwean animation, Ncube is the spokesman for the Zimbabwe Festival of Afrikan Inspired Animation (ZIMFAIA). He started Tatu Multimedia and encouraged the establishment of animation facilities in Zimbabwe. Towards the end of 2009, a newly incorporated company, Sadomba-Mahari Computers, began working on a software package. It would be used in creating professional, commercial media products, including films, commercials, and other CGI works. Throughout 2010, work on this software (called the Visual Package) expanded into different tools, encompassing cutting-edge technology that the company later patented. The software became part of the company’s Project Genesis.35

The team included Batsirayi Freddy on backgrounds and Nqobizitha Mlilo as a character designer. Asked what motivated him to write the story, Solomon Baramba replied: ‘Images of war and our history and the evil that war is. Thought of having a little monkey that is part of a village which gets destroyed by war, what it sees – you don’t need much brain to see – and tries to follow the family.’ (JAAG Conference Report, jaagonline.org, last modified 25 March 2010, http://www.jaagonline.org/ publications/Report on JAAG Conference 2010.pdf.) 33 This was filmed entirely on green screen, with 3D computer environments. 34 Nzima drew all the illustrations in the film and used a hand camera to pan and zoom over the piece. He also narrated the story. He used only the resources he had available to him, with no prior knowledge of filmmaking. 35 For more about Project Genesis and the Visual Package, go to http://www.sadomba-mahari.com, where updates on the project are published. 31 32

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The JAAG Group In 2007, a group of animators created the Joint Afrikan Animation Group (JAAG). They were Marvel Banda, Nqobizitha Mlilo, and Simbirirai Solomon Maramba. The JAAG group existed as an online network, including many Zimbabwe artists. There were 89 people in JAAG by July 2010, developing a viable visual effects and animation industry in Africa. In February  2008, the JAAG members from Zimbabwe met for the first time. The meeting was attended by over 30 animators, visual effects artists, and students. The projects completed under JAAG initiatives include:36 the fully animated Untouchables music video; Ninja Bete by Nqobizitha Mlilo; Tariro – A Peace of Afrika by Simbirirai Solomon Maramba; and Salad Chick 1, Salad Chick 2, and Stunt Goat by Tafadzwa Tarumbwa. JAAG members directed and produced a short film for the Short Film Project, an initiative of the Zimbabwe International Film Festival. It was called Heart of Hearts. JAAG’s activities at the 2008 festival also included a series of 2D animation workshops. In 2009, JAAG held a daylong ‘production focus’ event, where the players in the industry opened up the process behind the creation of animation and visual effects. In 2010, JAAG held its first conference with the animation community in Zimbabwe. A number of recommendations were made, including engaging animators in each other’s projects and the formation of a body to streamline activities and develop the industry.

South African Republic37 In the 1990s, South Africa experienced radical sociopolitical and economic change and the end of apartheid.38 The 1990s also ushered in a new era in South African broadcast history. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was restructured, developing a new policy regarding local content, cross media ownership, and control.39 There were new animation training initiatives across Africa in a bid to empower people with new media skills. In the late 1990s, tertiary institutions sprang up to cater for a wide range of new careers, in particular in animation. Their numbers grew steadily. By the late 2000s, there were several local and international franchises offering training and education in animation. They collaborated with both international concerns and various local industry initiatives. In the latter half of the 2000s, South Africa’s animation industry continued to grow steadily, supported by a number of national and local government schemes, especially in the Western Cape. The industry, however, remained primarily a service industry for the commercial and advertising sectors, barring some innovative and sometimes avant-garde exceptions.

Frame-by-Frame Animation Studios Most of the studios in the early 1990s were engaged in 3D CG animation, as this was the new technology available and at their disposal. However, three visionary studios were concerned with the production of model animation. They were Klaybow Films, XYZoo, and Triggerfish Studios.

Up to 2010, the JAAG initiatives were carried out with no funding and in the artists’ free time. The projects aimed to present positive moral messages, portraying the culture of the Zimbabwean and African people. 37 By Shanaz Shapurjee Hampson and Adam De Beer. 38 In 1990, the newly elected president, F. W. de Klerk, announced the lifting of the ban on political parties such as the African National Congress, as well as the release of Nelson Mandela from jail. He also announced his intention to lift the state of emergency declared ten years earlier by P. W. Botha. This was followed by a period of political reform and negotiations between the ruling National Party and the African National Congress. It eventually led to South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. 39 The broadcaster began buying American television animation, which was cheaper than commissioning local animation. The South African industry shifted from content for children to making advertising. This period also saw the lifting of international sanctions and boycotts, allowing South African studios to once again do business with international clients. However, the industry and market were small. Theresa Collins, in her book Beyond Cartoons: An Exploration of Independent Forms of Animation (Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2002, p. 32) says the 1990s industry was characterized by small animation studios appearing and disappearing. 36

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Klaybow Films In 1981, the Romanian-born Ted Berenson (b. Lasi, Romania, 25 January  1955) formed Klaybow Films in Cape Town. Here, he trained many young South African artists and introduced them to model animation produced by masters such as Will Vinton and Jirˇí Trnka. The studio constructed a loose partnership with Dirk de Villiers, a South African filmmaker and producer, who helped fund and produce a one-minute pilot for a children’s clay animation series, The Adventures of Dr. Kleiman (1981). The pilot was well received and the SABC commissioned Berenson to produce the series. The series, Klaybow’s first major production, consisted of thirteen five-minute episodes in which Dr Kleiman uses his magic to animate everyday objects. Together they move, swing, and rock to Spike Jonze-inspired music.40 The following year, Klaybow Films was commissioned to produce a second series (13 parts) called The Wonderful World of Dr Kleiman (1982). Kleiman sends the goofy assistants he created on different adventures round the globe.41 Over the next three years, Klaybow Films experienced substantial growth and employed new staff.42 The new artists included Philip Marcus, Gary Kachelhoffer, Brett Shuman, and Lindsay van Blerk; several would be involved in the South African animation industry in the 1990s. Berenson’s primary concern during this period was developing ways to move the camera in puppet animation filmmaking. He constructed his own manually operated mechanical rigs to use in production. In practice, these were time-consuming devices, requiring much planning, concentration, and note taking. In 1987, they were able to buy a state-of-the-art motion control device, custom built by an animation studio in Johannesburg.43 This device allowed greater control of the characters and camera as well as fluid movement. (The artists

could view a previously captured frame and compare it to the current one.) By 1985, Klaybow was bustling. It employed a diverse and highly talented crew working in specific roles such as character design, set design, and construction. Klaybow’s most successful and important work was Bimbo’s Books (1985–1987), thirteen 15-minute episodes for SABC’s English channel. A  speaking bookend tells humorous versions of fairy tales to a robot and a clown.44 The series was a multimedia mix of clay, cel, and cut-out animation, created by a recent recruit to the studio, Taiwanese animator Min Cha Lin. The beginning of the show was done in 3D CGI animation. However, when the Professor (the Bookend character) begins telling the story, a clay book with two-dimensional pictures opens and the story comes to life through drawn animation. When the Professor falls asleep, the drawn characters burst out of the book into clay versions of themselves and act out the tale.45 The intensification of economic sanctions in South Africa during 1985 caused Berenson to start looking abroad for potential investors and clients. He travelled overseas with the studio’s showreel and received considerable interest from animation producers. (Klaybow Films’ high-quality work was produced on significantly lower budgets than the work in America and Europe.) America’s HBO (Home Box Office) commissioned Berenson to make Hello and Goodbye (1985), a clay-animated music video. According to Berenson, local film studios were supported by a lot of work commissioned by American clients in the 1980s, because of the low production costs. This effectively came to an end when the American Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) and the Budget Reconciliation Act (1987). These stopped Americans doing business with South African companies,

Personal communications from Klaybow Films. Interview with Berenson by Andrew Haycock. Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, pp. 60–62. 42 During the early 1980s, there were no formal institutions with specialized animation training courses. Berenson, together with his trainees, began studying anatomy, physiognomy, and skeleton structure to improve their sculpting capabilities with Plasticine. Various armatures and puppet types were tried. Eventually an engineering firm in Cape Town was sourced to produce a ball and socket armature kit, allowing the animators to make puppets of various sizes. 43 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, p. 62. 44 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, pp. 63–64. 45 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, p. 64. 40 41

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on penalty of fines. According to Berenson, a hard time for South African filmmakers followed.46 Despite these sanctions and boycotts, Berenson went to New York in search of potential clients and sponsors. He met Frank Moynihan, of Billy Budd films, who had previously been making short clay animation films with Will Vinton. Moynihan expressed interest in producing a short with the studio, but not if it remained in South Africa. Consequently, Berenson moved Klaybow to England in 1987, taking recruits he had trained and their families. Billy Budd films then commissioned Klaybow to make a clay short based on Oscar Wilde’s The Star Child. Production began in 1988 and took a year. Berenson was forced to invest a lot of his own capital in the project, as Moynihan could not refund him until the film started to sell. As a result, financial difficulties forced Klaybow Films to close in 1989.

Miros Productions, and tasked her with constructing sets. Brett Schuman, a colleague of Van Blerk from Klaybow Films, had also returned to South Africa and was recruited by the studio. The studio made ten commercials in 1990–1991, allowing Van Blerk to raise the capital to develop the studio’s shooting capabilities. In 1992 Trowell created and animated her first commercial, Pipers Sweet Milk Cheese; Van Blerk let her manage all the commercial work coming into the studio. Van Blerk spent the next year making The Prodigal Son for Billy Budd Films (1993). This was well received and, over the next decade, XYZoo Animations made four 24-minute films48 for Billy Budd. Making clay commercials49 and films, Van Blerk built up the character animation skills at the studio. In 1996, Jacquie Trowell broke away from XYZoo Animation to create her own model animation studio, Triggerfish.

Lindsay van Blerk and XYZoo Lindsay van Blerk (b. East London, South Africa,47 3 December 1961) returned to South Africa in 1991 after Klaybow Films closed in London. He started his own studio, called XYZoo Animation, to produce clay animation. However, he lacked the necessary film equipment and joined Miros Productions in 1990 as their animation director. During this period he produced several clay commercials, including Simba Chipniks (1990), Alcolin Glue (1990), and I&J Stir Fry (1990). In 1991, he left Miros Productions to make commercials independently and set up a studio in Paarden Island, making commercials for National Air Conditioners (1991). During the production, he realized he would need to staff for larger projects. He contacted Jacquie Trowell, who worked for the art department at

Triggerfish Studios Following the democratic elections in 1994, the South African film industry saw the emergence of a cinema characterized by new voices and more diverse themes.50 Audiences were exposed to previously neglected communities and cultures. One of the most important themes in film at this time was the search for identity. In some ways, Triggerfish’s model animation between 1996 and 2005 reflects this. In 1996, Jacquie Trowell51 (b. Perth, Western Australia, 12 December 1964) and Emma Kaye (b. Zimbabwe, 1968) formed Triggerfish studios and made it one of South Africa’s most successful animation studios yet. They saw that the animation industry was small and rather limited.52

46 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, p. 67. 47 East London is a South African city, not to be confused with London, England. 48 These were Michael the Visitor (1995), The First Christmas (1998), The Chimes (2000), and The Velveteen Rabbit (2003). Van Blerk explains the films were made ‘intensively and continuously for a long period of time’. Because of his limited budget, he could not compete with overseas companies in terms of the scale of production and technology, so he chose to focus on the characters’ performance. (Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation.) 49 XYZoo’s main source of income was from commercial productions, and between 1995 and 2004 the studio produced 22 puppet animation commercials. These include commercials for SABC Radio (1995), VW Citi Golf (1997), Wellington VO Brandy (2001–2002), and Sanlam (2004). 50 Martin Botha, ed., Post-Apartheid Cinema. Marginal Lives and Painful Pasts: South African Cinema After Apartheid, Village Walk, Parklands, 2007, pp. 19–47. 51 She moved to Cape Town around 1973, at the age of nine. 52 Theresa Collins surveyed the South African animation studios in 2001. Four obstacles restricted the development of the animation industry: the lack of funding; the lack of animation training courses at institutions; the influence of American animation; and the politics in the South African industry.

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Kaye describes South African animation in the 1990s as a nascent, fractured industry, with risk-averse companies fighting each other for survival. The animation training courses focused on software training and had no theory or history. Thus, there was enormous scope for a company to break new ground in the market.53 A fundamental part of Triggerfish’s business plan was to educate the market about model animation in order to create work for their studio. An ‘Animation Showreel’, with examples of Trowell’s work, was created, while Kaye set up screenings with advertising agencies and potential financiers. Triggerfish’s first address was a three-metre space in Trowell’s house, in the Cape Town suburb of Observatory. The studio’s first project was The Paraffin Safety Campaign (1997), two 25-second educational clay animations for the Paraffin Safety Association of Southern Africa.54 These were followed by animations with various puppet animation techniques and styles never before used in South Africa.55 Their popular commercials included Soviet Clothing (1997), Plascon Woodcare (1998), Royco Potato Bake (1999), I-Net Bridge (1999), Slo-Jo (1999), and another clay animation for the Paraffin Safety Association of South Africa, Paraffin Safety Campaign (1999). There was also a 90-second insert, Huapango De Los Volcanos (1997), for a short Mexican film, and a pilot for a puppet animation, One Hot Day in Africa (1998). The studio’s model techniques contrasted greatly with those of most other animation studios, which were primarily producing 3D and 2D computer animation. By 1999, Triggerfish had attracted the attention of The Children’s Television Workshop, which was looking to outsource cheaper animation for the American edutainment show Sesame Street. Triggerfish was commissioned to produce 20 puppet animations, between twenty and thirty seconds in

length. Trowell explains this was an opportunity to experiment, making puppet animation with a distinctly South African feel.56 In 2000, the Children’s Television Workshop released a South African Sesame Street called Takalani Sesame. Impressed with the distinctive shorts, The Children’s Television Workshop commissioned Triggerfish to make another set of model shorts with The Video Lab, Cape Town. The studio created puppets based on the crafts sold on South African streets and craft markets. The design grew in sophistication and scope through the years. To begin with we looked at traditional sculpture and animated traditional Zulu dolls. Then we looked at the amazing street art around us – it was more modern, accessible and recognizable to the younger generation. Wire constructed objects were just starting to flood the streets and plastic chickens – those were the two we used the most. In an effort to support street artists we often bought or commissioned them to make characters for us, especially the chickens. We’d have to make adjustments to armatures and [add] additional bits and pieces for animation [purposes].57 By 2001, Triggerfish was producing commercials steadily, as well as the animation for Takalani Sesame. The studio had grown considerably, eventually relocating to Woodstock in an old beer brewery. In 2001, the studio was commissioned to make 40 minutes of animation for Takalani Sesame’s second season. It was the largest single international animation commission received by a South African studio.58 In 2005, Trowell and Kaye sold the Triggerfish brand to Stuart Forrest, one of

53 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, pp. 100–110. 54 Paraffin is used in over half of all South African homes and accidents occur regularly. The two educational shorts, informing people of the dangers, are significant as they featured the first animated black South African family. Both Trowell and Kaye felt strongly about using characters and contexts to which South Africans could relate. Trowell also produced the Eastern and Southern African Handwashing Campaign with Triggerfish in a record-breaking three months, confined to a nonprofit organization’s low budget (De Beer, Interview, 2010). 55 Triggerfish used techniques and styles rarely seen in South Africa, such as pixilation in the Soviet Clothing commercial and solid wooden puppets in the Plascon Woodcare commercial. They used clay in innovative ways in the Slo-Jo commercial and in Huapango De Los Volcanos. (Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation, p. 102.) 56 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, p. 104. 57 Andrew Haycock, South African Stop-Motion Animation from 1980–2005, Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010, p. 105. 58 Following the success of this project, new studios mushroomed over the country. Kaye believes this helped develop competition in the market. There was also an increase in schools and courses training animators. The collaboration was so successful that the Children’s Television Workshop asked Kaye to put together a business presentation about how Triggerfish achieved it.

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the animators at the studio. Triggerfish’s focus gradually changed from puppet animation to 3D CGI. In 2007, Triggerfish and local producer Ambient Animation worked on Life at the Pond – Tony’s Paper Route. Fish Fry followed in 2008, for the US-based Studio 125.

Commercial Studios Commercial production houses, such as Masters  & Savant, have led the field in animation production since they began to open in 2004. Most of their animation is for advertisements. For example, SolidPDA produces commercials for Coca-Cola and J&B Scotch; Wicked Pixels makes adverts for BMW and Red Bull; and newer technologies are catered for by companies such as Breakdesign. These latter groups focus on mobile entertainment and software for cell phones and PDAs.59 In terms of small screen animation, Clockwork Zoo is perhaps the largest animation studio in Africa, with over 80 staff members.60 Clockwork Zoo is best known for URBO: The Adventures of Pax Africa, made for the SABC. The series was written, designed, built, animated, and posted in-house. Other leading commercial studios included Black Ginger, Luma, Rage, as well as The Blackheart Gang61 and their commercial alter ego, Shy the Sun62 (ostensibly, they are the same group of artists). The Black Heart Gang’s work, while often filling a commercial brief, is brilliantly auteurist, though not specifically African in aesthetic or tone. As well as animation, their work extends into printed material, installation, and even performance art. Most notable is their commercial work for United Airlines and the independently produced The Tale of How (2006), a prime example of their storytelling and aesthetics.63 FopSpeen Moving Pictures is another eccentric animation production house. It was started in 2004 and has an eclectic portfolio of mostly model animation. FopSpeen has won several awards in a very short time. Little Bird ABC won Best Animated Film for Children at the Teheran International Animation Festival in Iran and Best

Animated film for Children at the KROK Animation Festival in the Ukraine, both in 2009.

William Kentridge64 Born in Johannesburg on 28 April  1955, William Kentridge is a multifaceted artist. His work, from pure drawing to theatre direction, from animation to sculpture, was internationally acknowledged from the 1990s. His contribution to animation basically consists of a series of nine short films, Drawings for Projection (1989–2004). It was made entirely with animated drawings and based, at least initially, on the opposition of two very different characters: the greedy entrepreneur Soho Eckstein and the dreaming artist Felix Teitlebaum. They are rivals for the love of Mrs.  Eckstein, the entrepreneur’s wife, with their private story set against the background of South African history, from the apartheid regime to post-apartheid. Eckstein, owner of a vast mining empire, is self-assured, greedy, and indifferent to his workers’ poverty. Felix is an artist, shown naked and often accompanied by water as a symbol of freedom, contrasting with the rigid rationalism of Soho’s world. His nakedness, with no heroic or statuary implications, hints at the uncertainty and exposure that permeate his character. The first film was Johannesburg – 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), followed by MONUment (1990). The second film has no conflict: Felix is absent and Eckstein glorifies himself with a mONUment. The third film, Mine (1991), juxtaposes the tycoon’s prosperity with the brutal, inhuman world of miners. Felix returns in the beautiful Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991) in which Eckstein’s empire is crumbling. Now fragile and vulnerable, Soho quits being a grotesque and becomes a fully rounded character. In the sixth film, History of the Main Complaint (1996), Soho lies in a hospital bed. Violent memories take life in his mind, like one of a black man beaten to a pulp on the side of the road. Kentridge argues that acknowledgment of one’s mistakes and repentance are the only ways

http://www.animationsa.org/article/the-animation-factory (accessed 3 October 2010). http://clockworkzoo.com/news/?page_id=3 (accessed 4 October 2010).. 61 http://theblackheartgang.com (accessed 4 October 2010) 62 www.shythesun.tv/about/ (accessed 4 October 2010) 63 This visually and acoustically bizarre film, coming from a distant country, was a must-see in the boreal animation festivals for a couple of years. 64 By Sara Fumagalli. 59 60

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to heal. Weighing  .  .  . and Wanting (1998) also focuses on Eckstein’s internal struggle, the redefinition of his ego. Stereoscope (1999) involves internal rupture. Finally, in Tide Table (2003), Soho is on the beach (outdoors like his rival), carelessly watching events unfold. Kentridge says: ‘Over the next few films, up to Weighing. . . and Wanting, I understood Soho and Felix much more as two different sides of one character, rather than two fundamentally different characters.’65 In the saga’s course, the characters grow in complexity, reflected in an evolution of the narration and the means peculiar to animated cinema, such as particular uses of editing or sound. In Johannesburg – 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the South African choral chanting embodies the screaming of the oppressed masses of workers; its slow cadence accompanies their nearly powerless movements. In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, when Eckstein’s empire crumbles, there is fast, fragmented editing, a quick sequence of shots of falling buildings arrested only by the image of Soho in his office, about to operate a lever to destroy Johannesburg. History of the Main Complaint narrates Eckstein’s experience in a coma. Kentridge uses random connections between scenes and highly fragmented editing with collage dynamics, sudden cuts, and flashbacks.

65

Kentridge hangs two large paper sheets on the wall of the studio, where charcoal drawings are made and photographed. The camera, an old Bolex, stays in the same position for most of the time, keeping the same distance from the two sheets. Afterwards, the same drawing is modified to make the scene evolve. One drawing can be reworked and re-shot up to 55 times. There is no work planning or preexisting storyboard – just some starting points, often constituted by key images that kick-start the creative process. They also allow new ideas, maybe even more meaningful ones, to emerge. The improvisation of the process is what Kentridge calls luck. He explains it in this way: ‘something different from a cold art possibility and something even outside the rational control sphere’, hence something leaving room to improvise, yet with some degree of awareness. The process is one of repeated erasures and redrawing performed on the same sheet of paper. In fact, it is impossible to completely wipe off traces of previous drawings, which ‘contaminate’ subsequent images. This can seem a defect at first sight, yet it is the peculiar trait of Kentridge’s animation and makes it unique. In the context of South African history, the erasure stands for the impossibility of wiping out white people’s guilt for a story of brutality and racial iniquity.

Lillian Tone, interview for MOMA exhibition brochure, New York, 13 April 1999.

6

LATIN AMERICA

Mexico In 1994, Carlos Carrera directed his best-known short, El héroe (‘The Hero’), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It’s the blackly comic story of a man who sees a young lady walking close to the edge of the platform in the Underground. He tries to save her, but she yells and accuses him of harassment; the poor hero is led away by police. Seconds later, the woman throws herself under the train. Laboriously produced by Mario Noviello’s Visiographics, the dark-toned visuals are reminiscent of oil paintings. From 1994 to 2004 Carrera also directed live-action films, having great success with the feature El crimen de Padre Amaro (‘Father Amaro’s Crime’, 2002). In 2004, however, he released a new animated short, De raíz (‘From the Roots’). He then began work on the feature Ana. Dominique Jonard was born in L’Arbresle (France) in 1956 and moved to Mexico in 1997. He was fascinated by the many indigenous cultures and their artistic traditions. His films tell stories conceived, designed, and narrated by indigenous communities, or by marginalized children. In 1990, in collaboration with the National Institute for Indigenous People, he produced three shorts based on traditional stories: El carero de don Chi, Itziguari, and Tembucha xepiti. Jonard’s Santo Golpe! (‘Holy Golpe!’, 1998) was made with the children of Chiapas and received an award from the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. He then made Hapunda (id., 2005, drawn animation), a legend of the Purépecha people from the Relación de Michoacán, a sixteenth-century manuscript. Jorge Villalobos and Guillermo Rendón directed Cuatro maneras de tapar un hoyo (‘Four Ways to Stop a Hole’, 1996). The excellent soundtrack is by Zbigniew Paleta, a violinist 1 2

and composer of Polish origin. The film is an intellectual exercise, well drawn in black and white. José Ángel García Moreno (b. 1961) went to Prague in 1987 with a scholarship. In 1989, still in Prague, he made Abrimos los domingos (‘Let’s Open the Sundays’), a reflection on the death penalty. Its approach is comparable to that of ‘Four Ways to Stop a Hole’. In 1990, Moreno returned to Mexico and made three films with Villalobos and Rendón: Largo es el camino al cielo (‘It’s a Long Way to Heaven’, 1998), Cocktail Molotov (id., 1999), and Catrina Posada y la gran piedra (‘Catrina Posada and the Big Stone’, 2000).1 In 1994, Jorge Ramírez Suárez made Pronto saldremos del problema (‘Soon We’ll Get Out of the Problem’), about the economic crisis that struck Mexico in 1994. In a squalid room, an obese man desperately fights a fly, hoping to eat it. This was probably the first computer animated Mexican short film, and it won the Diosa de Plata.2 Since the late 1990s, the city of Guadalajara has seen some of the animated films receiving the most awards. Guadalajara is the capital of the State of Jalisco, and the cultural capital of western Mexico. Its university has promoted courses and workshops on animation; one of this school’s first productions was Cecilia Navarro’s Cerraduras (‘Keyholes’, 1990). Nevertheless, there was also a professional base already in existence as well. Rigoberto Mora (b. Guadalajara, 1965–2009) and the famous live-action director Guillermo del Toro (b. Guadalajara, 1964) had founded Necropia, a firm devoted to special effects for TV and cinema. The International Film Festival was also important for the development of animation in Guadalajara and Mexico. (Its twenty-fifth anniversary was held in 2010.) Rigoberto ‘Rigo’ Mora taught courses at the Universty of Guadalajara and at the Western Technological Institute

Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea, El episodio perdido. Historia del cine mexicano de animación, Mexico City, Cineteca Nacional, 2004, p. 128. Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea, El episodio perdido. Historia del cine mexicano de animación, Mexico City, Cineteca Nacional, 2004, p. 129.

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of Higher Studies (ITES). He helped make Sin Sostén (‘Without Support’, by Antonio Urrutia and René Castillo, 1998), El octavo día (‘The Eighth Day’, by Rita Basulto and Juan José Medina, 2001), and Hasta los huesos (‘To the Bones’, by René Castillo). He also made very good films himself, brief and black-humoured: Gustas? (‘How Do You Like It?’, 1997), which is about drugs; Cómo preparar un sandwich (‘How to Prepare a Sandwich’, 1997); Polifemo (‘Polyphemus’, 2000); Sombras (‘Shadows’, 2004), based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’; and his last work, Devorador onírico (‘Dreamy Devourer’, 2007). ‘The Eighth Day’, by Rita Basulto and Juan José Medina, is a 15-minute puppet animation. An old man tries to give life to dead creatures in his dingy workshop. He succeeds, but they rebel against him. All this takes place in a nightmare atmosphere where the only sounds are the old man’s gasps and the beat of the bones of the creatures. The themes of death and life after death, central in Mexican tradition, are also reflected in two short films by René Castillo (b. Mexico City, 21 February 1969). These are the already mentioned ‘Without Support’3 (with Antonio Urrutia, 1998) and ‘To the Bones’ (2001). Castillo attended a course in animation given by the Chilean Vivienne Barry, then found his own way. ‘Without Support’ was made by animating junk; it’s the tragicomic story of a man who jumps from the roof of his house. As he falls, two billboard characters try to save him, and the man ends up between the breasts of a woman. But everything turns out to be a dream, and his dead body is taken away. The Plasticine puppet film ‘To the Bones’ is a kind of sequel, about a suicide who must accept his own death. Malapata (‘Pulling My Leg’, 15 minutes), was made in 2000 by Ulises Guzmán Reyes. After the Spanish conquest, a shaman is imprisoned by the Inquisition but gets the last laugh. Reyes was born in Mexico City in 1968 and graduated from the University Centre for Film Studies (CUEC) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. ‘Pulling My Leg’ takes place in a bloody and oppressive atmosphere, with mangled and rotting bodies, feral faces, and muffled sounds. It depicts Spanish colonization (and Catholic conversion) as bestial, unleashed with no mercy on the indigenous population. The film has grandeur that is rare in either animation or live-action. Lourdes Villagómez Oviedo (b. Nuevo Laredo, 1968) made a name for herself with Las maravillas del mundo

salvaje-hormigas (‘The Wonders of Nature-Ants’, 2000). It is an installation about our unquestioning acceptance of the vision of nature in TV documentaries. In 2003, she made Síndrome de línea blanca (‘White Line Syndrome’) about the imagined life of a young girl, shown as a silhouette. Both critics and filmgoers welcomed the film. Villagómez responded with a strong personal commitment to promoting independent animated films. Karla Castañeda (b. Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1978) directed her first personal film, Jacinta (id.) in 2007. It is a beautiful short with latex puppets, inspired by Castañeda’s grandmother. Jacinta portrays the loneliness of an elderly woman who lives in a nursing home and weaves, as if preparing for her death. She has woven much of her history, every stitch a symbolic bit of her life. Castañeda’s second short was La Noria (‘The Waterwheel’) in 2012. This is a great, melancholic film about the wake for a dead child, strong in atmosphere and original film language. Castañeda’s husband, Luís  Téllez Ibarra (b. Mexico City, 18 July 1969), studied communication sciences and then worked on some important animation shorts. He was producer and character designer for ‘To the Bones’, key animator of ‘White Line Syndrome’, and producer of his wife’s Jacinta. He also directed El show debe terminar (‘The Show Has to End’, 1998), produced by UNICEF, and his best film, Viva el rey (‘Long Live the King’, 2004), a clay animation where a chessboard and its pieces play out an allegory for the senselessness of war. They were followed by several films produced in Spain by Oqo Films: La princesa de Trujillo (‘Trujillo Princess’, 2009), La bruja rechinadientes (‘The Teeth-Gnashing Witch’, 2009), El niño terrible (‘The Terrible Child’, 2010), La cosa que más duele en el mundo (‘The Most Aching Thing on Earth’, 2010), and El gran viaje (‘The Great Trip’, 2011). Ibarra also directed eleven episodes of the series Batallón 52 (‘Battalion 52’, 2010, in Mexico) and Os caracois (‘The Snails’, Galicia, Spain, 2010).

Feature Films From 2000 onwards, with the advent of digital technology and the consequent reduction of production costs, the quantity (if perhaps not the quality) of Mexican animation rose enormously. In 2002, Fernando de Fuentes and Fernando Pérez Gavilán founded Ánima Estudio. Their

This film was actually made without any support and with a camera from the 1940s; but the technical result was good because, ironically, the filmmaker realized that that ‘junk’ was actually the best tool for animation.

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first production was a children’s feature, Magos y gigantes (‘Wizards and Giants’, directed by Andrés Couturier and Eduardo Sprowls, 2003). It was followed by Alberto Mar and Isaac Sandoval’s Imaginum (id., 2005). Neither had much success, but the third feature, El agente 00-P2 (‘The Agent 00-P2’, 2006), was well received. The protagonist is a very awkward cockerel who tries to command a secret mission but is prone to disaster. Wisely the film was aimed at children and also at adults, who could enjoy the gags and funny situations. Another commercial success was Don Gato y su pandilla (‘Top Cat and his Gang’, 2011, directed again by Alberto Mar). It was based on the American Top Cat TV cartoon series made by Hanna-Barbera (1961–1962). The cat was very popular in Latin America, hence this Argentine-Mexican version. The film received scathing reviews (especially in Britain) when it was exported abroad, but it was a huge success in Mexico. Una película de huevos (‘A Movie about Eggs’, 2006, produced by Huevocartoon and other companies, directed by the brothers Rodolfo and Gabriel Riva Palacio Alatriste) jumped from the Internet to the big screen. Viewers loved its irreverence and puns and made it one of the most successful productions of the year. The feature La Leyenda de la Nahuala (‘The Nahuala Legend’, 2007) by Ricardo Gómez was a mystery/horror story, reflecting Mexico’s interest in the gruesome.

Cuba The fall of the Soviet Bloc led to Cuba losing 72 percent of its overseas market and the economic crisis substantially reduced the number of films being made. The animation division of the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria cinematográficos [The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry]) began providing services abroad (to Spain and Mexico in particular), while purely domestic production was limited to some Filminutos. There were only three international coproductions at the time. They were Mafalda, minutos (‘Mafalda, Minutes’, 1994, Juan Padrón, 108 one-minute shorts); Más se perdió en Cuba (‘More Was Lost in Cuba’, 1996, Juan Padrón, a

series of six half-hour chapters for Spanish TeleMadrid), and a feature-length sequel, Contra el águila y el león (‘Against the Eagle and the Lion’, 1997, Juan Padrón). The latter film was the last and greatest classic production by ICAIC. As the twenty-first century began, there were investments in technology. New premises were built to mount a larger studio with more staff and new animators and directors with the aim of producing at least 200 minutes a year. In 2003, Juan Padrón completed a new feature (now in digital technology), a sequel to Vampires in Havana! called ¡Más vampiros en La Habana! (‘More Vampires in Havana!’).

English-Speaking Caribbean Area4 The Caribbean was virgin territory for animation in the early twenty-first century. On one side, the region’s inexperience, as well as the lack of a model to work from, prevented the structures from functioning at full steam. However, the situation allowed for the creation of new paths. In the 1990s UNICEF pioneered a program in the English-speaking Caribbean using film animation to empower young people. There was rigorous training of Caribbean artists in collaboration with Disney Feature Animation. Thirty-six artists from the Caribbean and some African countries were trained in the basics of animation in Jamaica and Barbados.

Jamaica The African American producers Floyd Norman and Leo Sullivan5 went to Jamaica back in the 1980s. They wanted to start a studio there but it never worked out; instead they taught animation locally at the University of the West Indies. Some of their students eventually left the island to pursue careers in animation. A small but pugnacious number of young initiates freelanced or founded tiny studios, making money out of commercial assignments and spending it on personal films. By the end of 2011, the ASIFA-like Jamaica Animation Nation group counted 212 members.

Camille Selvon Abrahams and Michael Smith wrote this opening and the paragraph on Trinidad and Tobago. Disney’s first black artist, Floyd Norman, started working on Sleeping Beauty and did story sketches for The Jungle Book. In the mid-1960s, Floyd and his associates launched their own production company, Vignette Films, Inc., one of the first to make films about African American history. Later, Floyd did more story work on features including Disney’s Mulan and Pixar’s Toy Story 2. Leo Sullivan has many animation credits, including producing and directing videocassettes. These include Afro-Classic Folk Tales, Vol. 1 and 2; Afro-Classic Mother Goose; Afro-Classic Vol. 4 Lamuma and the Magic Stones; Ed and Chester Bible Stories, Vol. 1 and 2; and Black Profiles. 4 5

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Adrian Lopez (b. Nairoba, Kenya, 13 April 1966) drew animated flipbooks in the margins of his biology and history textbooks during class. He started animating professionally in 1994. ‘Primarily 3D computer animation, though I do dabble in cel and Flash animation from time to time. In 2002, I won first prize at the Animae Caribe Animation Festival in Trinidad and Tobago for my short film Roots.6 I went on to found my company, Liquid Light Digital, later that year.’7 Corretta Singer was born in Zurich, Switzerland, on 21 November  1981 and moved to Jamaica in 1986. She started teaching herself animation in 2003 and made her first short, Voyajah, in 2005. The next year, she won the People’s Choice Award at the Animae Caribe festival in Trinidad with the sequel, Voyajah: Episode Two. In 2007 she won another prize for the music video Deeper: Shadow Song, which she also composed. In 2009 her short Kina Sky was aired on American national television as part of the Nickelodeon Animation Festival. Kina Sky tells the story of a cyborg winged girl trapped on a floating island. She longs for freedom but discovers the world beyond is more treacherous than she imagined. Singer also made a name for herself as an international illustrator. Dianne Wan (b. Kingston, 22 November 1984) attended the Vancouver Film School in Canada, where she conceived and directed the shorts Little Brave (2007), Birds (2007), and Sticky (2008). At home she became the lead animator for the series Cabbie Chronicles, directed by Alison Latchman with her husband Anieph, illustrated by Marlo Scott. The series is about a cab driver (Delly) navigating the absurdities of modern Jamaican life. Reinardo Chung (b. St. Ann’s Bay, 1983) is a painter’s son. His first short, Bad Influence (2010), was about a character who’s persuaded by friends to help in a robbery.

Saint Lucia Ted M. Sandiford (b. Grande Rivière, 29 January  1980) brought animation into one of the tiniest independent

states.8 He’s well known for his satirical strip based on the mischievous teenagers Cocoboy and Girard. Their broken English and slang endear them to St. Lucian readers. Sandiford began as an animator/director in 2003. In Pass Me Dalla (‘Give Me a Dollar’, 2011), Cocoboy loses his bus fare and is pursued by the ticket collector. The animation is sometimes original, sometimes stuttering, but the comedy and timing are excellent.

Barbados The most easterly of the Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean area, Barbados is even tinier than Saint Lucia (431 square kilometres). Draughtsman Guy O’Neal (b. Bridgetown, Barbados, 5 November  1958) slowly became involved in animation. ‘In July 1991, UNICEF organised an animation training workshop in Jamaica. Since I  had already become fairly well-known in Barbados for my cartoons, I was selected.’9 Eighteen accomplished artists worked together for two weeks. They made a 50-second spot based on a character created at the workshop: Johnny Sad-Boy, a child who could be typical of any of the Caribbean islands. Originally, it was just a pencil test. It was later completed, becoming a spot against child abuse, and UNICEF broadcast it in 1993. After that, it was shown regularly in the area as a public service announcement. O’Neal later created a public service spot about teenage pregnancy. Again, UNICEF screened it throughout the Caribbean region. In 1997 O’Neal designed Ozzy Ozone, used by the UN as the International Mascot for the Protection of the Ozone Layer.10

Trinidad and Tobago Camille Selvon Abrahams (b. Trinidad, 25 March 1968) was a budding animator and entrepreneur. After receiving the Royal Television Society Award in 2000 for her student

Roots was a cautionary tale about environmental damage and the HIV virus. A cure is found for HIV, but it can only be found in a fern indigenous to the Jamaican Blue Mountains. One surviving plant is found, but the final reveal shows that the entire film has taken place in an orbital garden in space, with a blighted Earth in the background, devoid of green. 7 Adrian Lopez, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 11 December 2011. 8 Saint Lucia is 617 square kilometres (238.225 square miles) and is north of Martinique. 9 Guy O’Neal, ‘The Disney Internship Experience’, in Joyce Greene and Deborah Reber, eds, Drawing Insight – Communicating Development through Animation, Southbound, Penang, 1996. 10 A long altercation surrounded this character. According to Guy O’Neal: ‘I have not gotten the international recognition for this mascot. They took my name off [. . .] The UN refuses to listen to my legal people on this issue.’ (Guy O’Neal, Skype conversation with Giannalberto Bendazzi, 9 January 2012.) Justice was done to O’Neal later in 2012. 6

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film, The MasterPeace,11 in London, Abrahams returned to her home country. In Trinidad, she founded the Animae Caribe Animation and New Media Festival (2002). It gave young aspiring Caribbean animators a platform to promote and screen amateur productions. In 2005, the Canadian animation giants Toon Boom Animation recognized the Caribbean as a lucrative untapped region. They invested manpower, resources, software, and technical support. In 2007, the University of Trinidad and Tobago created the first formal animation programme in the English-speaking Caribbean. The university works closely with the Royal College of Art in London and ICAIC Cuba. Young animators of this time include Mathew Hudson (b. Port of Spain, 18 September  1971), director of Some Things Doh Change (2003), a comic look at postmodern Trinidad. Ansar Sattar (b. Trinidad, 1 September 1974) made 2009’s Vendor Rivalry, about two quarrelling city vendors. Christopher Guinness (b. Trinidad, 22 November  1981) is a visionary, devoted to commercials and special effects.

Guatemala Guatemalan Eduardo Beonchan made films determinedly thanks to computer technology, which facilitated networking and brought his costs down. His 45-second Pescado come pescado (‘Fish Eat Fish’, 2004) uses animated leaves. Meanwhile, Jayro Bustamante made the puppet film Todo es cuestion de trapos (‘It’s What You Wear’, 2006), produced in France. A  wooden window mannequin observes the comings and goings of the greedy customers at the arrival of the new fashion collection. The film was a success at international festivals.

Honduras Adrián Guerra (b. Tegucigalpa, 30 June  1977) directed Oscuro Cardinal (‘Dark Cardinal’, 2008). Two children arrive at a country house but discover the horrors of war. Adrián Guerra has a long experience in the field of advertising, having held senior positions in well-known national enterprises.

Omar Carias (b. Catacamas, Olancho, 26 June  1972) began as a painter then worked as an illustrator and graphic designer. In 1993 he was initiated into 3D computer animation and freelanced on many TV commercials. In 2001 he created his own production company, CLIMAX3D. In 2007 he wrote and directed Virus, the first theatrical Honduran short made in 3D CGI. (It is comic science fiction, in which humanity is ruled by the monetary system and needs ‘medical’ help to recover human feelings.) Virus won various awards in the Americas and Europe.

El Salvador Ricardo Barahona made the delightful El cuento de lo que quiero y no quiero (‘The Tale of What I Want and I Don’t Want’, 2004), based on the Salvadorian writer Salarrué.12 Barahona opts for formal simplicity; the film is tender and well crafted. Later, Barahona adapted Salarrué again in Cuentos de Cipotes (‘Children Stories’, 2005). Usul (id., 2005), by Sergio Aristides Rosa and Hans Rosenberg, is the story of a man investigating his best friend’s death.

Costa Rica The Animastudio Company was founded in the early 1990s by John Timms, Osvaldo Sequeira, and Ana Villalobos. Timms – a Costa Rican despite his name – came to international attention with his short Vita (‘Life’, 1993), which won a prize at the Festival of San Juan de Puerto Rico. The scholar Daniel Marranghello said: ‘[I]t’s a piece of less than three minutes, made with mixed media: a combination of retouched photographs, crumpled paper and traditional animation.’13 In 1998, Timms founded Martestudio together with Christian Glenewinkel (b. Mannheim, Germany, 1970), Hans Castro (b. San José, 1974), and Oliver Zúñiga (b. San José, 1971). Martestudio was important in local animation production, especially because it introduced CGI. The studio produced a variety of animated work for commercials and live-action features such as Del amor y otros demonios (‘Of Love and Other Demons’, 2009, directed by

11 Synopsis: Three beings are placed by ‘the Artist God’ in a new world. Their mission is simply to exist in harmony. One being decides his way of existence is the one to follow and sets about enforcing it. The short is about colonialism and social order. 12 Salvador Salazar Arrué (1899–1975) was a novelist, poet, and painter. 13 La Prensa Libre, San José de Costa Rica, 6 June 1994.

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Hilda Hidalgo). Martestudio also worked on some series for North America. In 2003, Timms helped establish a professional degree on digital animation at the Universidad Veritas in San José. ‘The animation scene in Costa Rica,’ said scholar Daniel Marranghello,14 ‘changed over the 2000s. The digital production grew enormously. The Flex Company made two long-feature films on behalf of an Indian producer and another one, on a religious subject, for a company [in] the United States. None of these has been seen in Costa Rica. The Government of Costa Rica supports the production of animation within its strategy of promoting export, in this case export of services. The production of short films increased, too. Recently Animales de alquiler (Animal Rental) won an award at the Film Festival of La Habana. It’s actually a modest work done in puppet animation, with intentions of social criticism.’ Pablo Ortega’s ‘Animal Rental’ (2010, puppet animation) is a satirical black comedy about human-animal hybrids. But auteur films are not the forte of Costa Rican animation. Costa Rica abounds in talented creators making popular art but must look for a foreign market given its population of about four million people. Asesores gráficos (Graphic Advisors) was founded in 1997, mainly working in illustration and graphic design. In 2000 it spun off Studio Flex to take charge of drawing projects for animation and multimedia. Osvaldo Sequeira, Roberto Guillén, and Carlos Eduardo Porras, the makers of such films as Anna (2005, which combines live-action and animation) and Mitos (2006), were its most important figures. Flex’s merger with America’s Motion Pixel Corporation was a leap forward. Under the direction of Manny Bains, Flex completed several animated feature films for the Asian market, mainly in India. Together with Ireland’s CPoint Entertainment, Flex also developed the animation of a video game, Druids: The Epic, plus two shorts based on Celtic myths. Rocket Cartoon was founded in 2008. It made Ivick Von Salza, Little Lumberjack, a 52-part series made in Flash (2D). Aimed at children ages four to eight, it features characters on a snowy mountain: Ivick, his father, and his little pig. It was bought in Finland, Portugal, and Japan. A younger company, Morpho Animation Studio, made the series Grandpa’s Robot, Wormie, and Lingo y Poison Squad for American and European audiences.

14 15

Nashla Abdelnour made Glia (2007) in Spain – it is an abstract work created by painting directly on celluloid.

Panama15 Animation in Panama started in the early 1970s for TV advertisements. There wasn’t much progress until the mid-1980s, when Stephan Profane organized the Maxell Video Festival (1985–1996; 2003) as a way for video creators to show off their craft and for others to profit from their former hobbies. Grupo Fusión created the short El caricaturista (‘The Cartoonist’, 1986) with real actors, cel, and clay animation. Seven years later, Snoot Amanap (id., 1993) used real actors and clay animation. The film criticized Panama’s situation. Alfredo ‘Wilfi’ Jiménez (b. Panama, 1933), a cartoonist from the daily La Prensa, turned his strip La pileta de las garzas into a fully animated music video called Nunca Jamás (‘Never Ever’), telling the story of the US invasion of Panama in 1989. The first professional facility was created by the self-taught animator Eric Rueda (b. Panama, 1966). Eral Animation (1986–1996) was an advertising agency that specialized in the production of clay, cel, and puppet animation using Oxberry and Bolex equipment. The start of the twenty-first century saw an increasing number of animated series. Remus Crisán (b. Panama, 1967) and Cheri Lewis (b. Panama, 1978) created a comic strip called Siniestro Mu y las vacas lobotómicas (1999). In 2004 (with the Luna production company), they put the characters into the animated El Show de Siniestro Mu y las vacas lobotómicas (‘Sinister Mu and the Lobotomized Cows Show’, 2004–2007). It had a run of more than one hundred episodes, each two to three minutes long. Sinister Mu is an extraterrestrial bull, king of the planet Udder 57. He arrives on Earth but encounters two fun-loving cows that refuse to follow his lead. In 2011, Remus Crisán and Cheri Lewis created Los Colourados (‘The Colourados’), an eco-friendly children’s programme. A howling monkey, a harpy eagle, and a tapir belong to a music band. The show ran for 13 episodes of 15 minutes each, and the animation director was Pedro Caicedo (b. Panama, 1974), a student of Van Arts. On returning to Panama, Crisán and Lewis created the ISAD

Daniel Marranghello, letter to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 20 January 2012. By Rolando José Rodríguez de León.

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(Higher Institute of Animation and Design). In 2012, they formed Monkey Animation to produce shorts and series. Jason Post (b. USA, 1973) relocated to Panama in 1998. He created Wellington Jackson (id., 1999–2000, 50 three-minute episodes), whose title character is a windshield cleaner who uses tricks to make money. Usnavy en la capital (‘Usnavy in the City’) ran from 2000 to 2003. Usnavy is a country gardener who works for a rich family, but there is a culture clash between them. In 2009 the series returned to television for 200 three-minute episodes. Fulano (id., 2008–present) was also made in three-minute episodes, telling socially and environmentally friendly stories. In 2003, Post formed Pana Animation, specializing in 2D digital and traditional animation. Talinguito (id., 2004–2005) was created by Manuel Vásquez (b. Panama, 1978), designed by Rafael Gallardo (b. Panama, 1976), and animated by Erasmo Sanchez (b. Panama, 1970). Running for 24 five-minute episodes, it parodies a Chilean comic strip. Alberto Godoy (b. Panama, 1972) founded AG Video in 1992. Its La liga de las chocobolas (‘The Chocoballs League’, 2003) was broadcast across Central America; it’s a mixture of story and advertising. Yuke (id., 2004, 20 five-minute episodes) is about a child called Yuke who wants to grow up to be a leader. His father gives him a marble made of lava and tells him that, in order to become a leader, he should find the strongest marble. Yuke was a national attempt to create an anime-like project. Superbirriosos (id., 2005, 20 episodes of 22 minutes each) was a Flash series about an upper-class child who becomes poor when his father is fired. In his new school, he makes friends and forms a football team. Both Yuke and Superbirriosos were broadcast on Panamanian national TV.

Colombia16 In 1978 the Ministry created the Compañía de Fomento cinematográfico, or FOCINE (see Volume 2). FOCINE was liquidated in 1992, due to irregularities in the administration and the long-term ineffectiveness of its policies for film promotion. A period of rapid changes in animation production began. In the 1990s, new directors and companies produced computer-assisted animation for commercials and television series. One example is El siguiente programa (‘The Following Program’), a TV series based on drawn animation

16

By Ricardo Arce and Camilo Cogua.

and digital 2D. It aired under the direction of Hernán Zajec between 1997 and 2000 and was clearly influenced by America’s Beavis and Butt-head. In Bogota, many companies with diverse backgrounds (ranging from digital 3D to drawn and puppet animation) made content for film, TV, the Internet, and digital devices. Álvaro Tangarife and Edwing Solórzano introduced animation in Medellín; Carlos Cajigas (b. 1976) and Mónica Ortiz (b. 1978) did the same in Cali; and Mauricio García Arigas and Mauricio Salazar introduced it in Manizales. In the 2000s, there were digital films by Diego Álvarez, whose Cabeza de mono (‘Monkey Head’, 2001), El amor es una bala en el corazón (‘Love Is a Bullet in the Heart’, 2002) and Wendidali (id., 2003) were shown at festivals worldwide. In 2003, the Ministry of Culture established Law 814, giving rise to the Film Development Fund (FDC). This new authority would be funded by a special tax paid by exhibitors, distributors, and producers to finance audiovisual creation in different categories. There was also a partial tax exemption for exhibitors who screened Colombian short films. As a consequence, El último golpe del caballero (‘The Last Blow of the Knight’, 2003) was widely distributed. Directed by Juan Manuel Acuña, it was developed entirely in CGI. Less popular was Acuña’s next experimental production, Los ciclos (‘Cycles’), which was made the same way in 2006 with music by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Bogota. LOOP (started in 2003), an international festival of animation and video games, generated strong momentum. This was reinforced by the creation of the Colombian chapter of the International Association of Animated Films (ASIFA) in 2006. Together with the FDC’s economic stimulus for the production of audiovisual content, it made possible such films as Corte Eléctrico (‘Black-out’) by María Arteaga (b. 1978), En Agosto (‘In August’) by Andrés Barrientos (b. 1978), and Rojo Red (id.) by Juan Manuel Betancourt (b. 1982). These films were all produced in 2008 and were all of international quality. In 2011, there were two Colombian animated features. The documentary Pequeñas voces (‘Small Voices’), codirected by Jairo Carrillo (b. 1969) and Oscar Andrade (b. 1971), became the first Colombian animated film projected in stereoscopic format. Los extraños presagios de León Prozak (‘The Mysterious Presages of Leon Prozak’), by Carlos Santa (b. 1957), was Colombia’s first non-representational animated feature.

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Using diverse techniques and methods of financing, there were shorts including Mariposa nocturna (‘Moth’, 2009, puppet animation) by Diana Sánchez (b. 1985) and Violeta (‘Violet’, 2009, traditional drawing). The latter, directed by Alejandro Riaño (b. 1980), depicted female victims of rape within the context of the long Colombian internal armed conflict. Juan Camilo González was born in Manizales on 26 January 1984. A groundbreaking filmmaker, he brought to the screen Los tres errantes (‘The Three Wanderers’, 2007), Mecanismo olvidador (‘Forgetter Mechanism’, 2009), In Abyssus Humanae Conscientiae/ReconoceR (id., 2011), and SiSiSiSiSiSiSiSiSiSiSi (‘Yes – Eleven Times’, 2011). Although nonnarrative, nonlinear, and linguistically innovative, these films are all but cold or ‘difficult’ and captivate audiences. The excellent soundtracks are all by Carolina Lucio (with the exception of In Abyssus, which is based on Rodolfo Acosta’s music).

Venezuela17 The year 1998 saw Hugo Chávez elected to the presidency after the pro-socialist Bolivarian Revolution. The state invested heavily in culture, especially film. Naturally, productions reflected the viewpoints of the backers: popular democracy, patriotism, equitable distribution of revenue, and respect for minorities. Among the auteur films, Tu historia es mi historia (‘Your Story Is My Story’) was an animated 18-minute documentary, made in 2005 by Jean-Charles L’Ami. He was born in 1966 in Belgium, where he directed documentaries and short films for European TV channels. He moved to Venezuela to found the 35 Quai du Soleil company. The actual creators and characters of ‘Your Story Is My Story’ are 70 children and teenagers, victims of the floods and earthquakes in Venezuela between 1999 and 2005. Nuestro Miranda (2006) was based on an idea of the screenwriter Norma Courlaender and a screenplay by Agustín García. Directed by Jean-Charles L’Ami, it is an animated biography of General Francisco de Miranda, the forerunner of Simón Bolívar and Venezuelan independence. The film involved very young artists, led by Norma Courlaender and Jean-Charles L’Ami and hired out of the Julio César Parra de Zumurucuare school in Coro. Nuestro Miranda is candid and original, full of colours and poetry.

17

By Francesca Guatteri.

Jean-Charles L’Ami went on to direct Así vivo yo (‘That’s the Way I  Live’, 2008), winner of the Cubanima award in 2010. In 2008, on the occasion of the Venezuelan Indigenous Cinema Festival in the little town of Betania de Topocho (Estado de Amazonas), L’Ami coordinated an animation laboratory with students from the Bolivarian school ‘27 de Junio’. This is where the film was actually born. It shows the daily life of people from Huottöja who are proud of their culture and language. The film uses raw materials – seeds, beeswax, leaves, and sand – that give it a unique beauty. The soundtrack features the singing of the community shaman and an old lady and narration in the Huottöja language, all of which combine to create a poetic description of daily life. In 2010, L’Ami collaborated again with Norma Courlaender and Agustín García to make Guardianes del Agua (‘Guardians of the Water’). The 20-minute film, with cut-out figures, was made with students and teachers from the Bolivarian school in Macanillas (Estado Falcón). An old snow cone seller tells us about the animals in the local mountains, which are threatened by human abuses but helped by the children of the Macanillas community. Estudio Metropolis made Eduardo Blanco y la Venezuela Heróica (‘Eduardo Blanco and Heroic Venezuela’), an 11-part TV series. A  cute character retraces Venezuelan history, starting from the fight for independence. How a Liberator Is Forged was made in 2D with 3D CGI effects, telling the life of Simón  Bolívar, with direction and soundtrack by Rafael Barroeta Parra. It ran for six 12-minute episodes. The Animandes Company made several other works about historic figures: Negra Hipólita, Antonio José de Sucre, Francisco de Miranda, and a series about Nevado, Simón Bolívar’s dog. Chuíto’s Machine was coproduced by R&TV Producciones and the TV channel Vive, about a margariteño (inhabitant of Margarita Island) child and his friends. The series aimed to present a story with Venezuelan circumstances and landscapes. The World of Onki Tonkis (2006) features alien beings who leave their world for a better one but find there aren’t better or worse worlds, just different ones. Historias Nativas (‘Native Stories’) was made by Macuare Producciones in cooperation with the state organization CONATEL and Estudio 3D Libre. Addressed to nonnative children, the series teaches the value of cultural difference and mutual help.

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Ecuador The establishment in 2008 of the ANIMEC festival (which took place in Quito and Guayaquil) was the first significant sign of interest in animation cinema in Ecuador. José Antonio Cardoso (b. Cuenca, 1984), an illustrator and animator, developed the following puppet animation productions: Mi amigo Shogo (‘My Friend Shogo’, 2008), Oiga Pana (‘Listen Buddy’), Gemelos (‘Twins’), Un maravilloso estado de mísera y morbosa no felicidad (‘A Wonderful State of Miserable and Morbid Not Happiness’), Trueno (‘Thunder’, 2009), Canción ancestral (‘Ancestral Song’, 2010, which received special mention by the jury at ANIMEC), Sr. Quinde (‘Mr.  Quinde’), and 3, 2, 1 Cortometrajes foto a foto (‘3, 2, 1 Short Film Shot by Shot’, 2011). The animation technique improves continually through his films. The best is ‘Ancestral Song’, about the origins of man. Two other creators had a tiny but interesting output. Daniela Toscano (b. Quito, 1984) made Marañas (‘Tangles’, 2006), which shows the nightmare of a little girl. The technique is inexperienced but it shows good imagination. Writer and composer Santiago Soto (b. Quito, 1982) made the erotic and philosophical ANA 747 (2007), an ambitious sci-fi short influenced by Japanese series. El hombre invisible, a production company founded in 2010, made the short Po-poc, directed by Daniel Jácome (b. 1980).

Peru18 Beside established animators such as Javier Prado (b. Lima, 1964) and Pepe San Martín (b. Callao, 1956), many media companies appeared in the 1990s, developing products in 2D and 3D animation systems. Most animation professionals worked in advertising. New digital animation studios included Digital Effects, Gamma Estudios, Animagen, Post Café, Multimedia, Phantasia Digital, Online Graphics, Audio Imágen, and Flamingo Producciones. The real development of computer animation resources, however, came in the twenty-first century. One of the first notable initiatives was the Web site of Eduardo Saravia and Juan Lopez, perucartoon.com. It was famous thanks to its star character Robotombo, a parody of Robocop. EXfera, the digital animation studio of Diego López Mobilia (b. Lima, 1969), began in 2002. This company produced animated ads, specialized in special effects for

live-action films, and joined the international consortium Qilqax. Other digital animation studios also appeared, including One Concept and República (both 2002), Magma Creations (2005), Plan B (2006), and Zeppelin (2008). The first Peruvian animated feature was Al encuentro con Jesús (‘Encountering Jesus’, Javier Prado, 2004), a film commissioned by the Catholic Church. Another feature, the weak Piratas en el Callao (‘Pirates in Callao’, 2005) was set in seventeenth-century Callao and directed by Eduardo Schuldt (b. Lima, 1972) and produced by Alpamayo Entertainment. Alpamayo, a company formed by Hernán GarridoLecca and Jaime Carbajal, triggered an international boom that was unprecedented in Peruvian animation. It linked advertising to well-planned marketing strategies (including toys, books, fast food, and clothing), which drove two more features: Dragones, destino de Fuego (‘Dragons, Destination Fire’, Eduardo Schuldt, 2006), about indigenous dragons, and Valentino y el Clan del Can (‘Valentino and the Clan of the Can’, David Bisbano, 2008), about a street dog in the circus. The Alpamayo films made more producers enthusiastic. Marco Descalzi (b. Lima, 1973) directed El Hada (‘The Fairy’, 2003), an exceptional short conceived in Flash. The brothers Mauricio (b. Lima, 1978) and Luís (b. Lima, 1981) Santa Maria Esparza presented an amazing confrontation between humanized knives in Acero inoxidable (‘Stainless Steel’, 2003), and the loves and heartbreaks of geometric digital characters in Maravillosamente Distintos (‘Wonderfully Different’, 2006). Luís Domínguez (b. Lima, 1976) and Roberto de la Puente made Las Tabas (‘The Tabas’, 2005), a documentary with animated scenes about a music group formed by three inexperienced girls, and Yawarpampa, campo de sangre (‘Yawarpampa, Field of Blood’, 2007), based on the legend of a battle between the forces of Pachacutec Inca and Chanca. Cristian Alarcón (b. Lima, 1976) made the outstanding Escuela Militar (‘Military Academy’, 2005). It merges elaborate drawn animation with live-action scenes, denouncing the ideological infiltration of terrorism in rural schools. Percy Kiyabu (b. Lima, 1974) made After Oz (id., 2006), a simple love story with a tin man. Henry Gates (b. Amazon, 1977), was known especially for his puppet film Turn On (id., 2007), about a small fan

This study mostly uses information from Raúl Rivera Escobar, El cine de animación en el Perú. Bases para una historia, Fondo Editorial Universidad Alas Peruanas, Lima, Peru, 2011.

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endowed with feelings. Cayetana Carrión (b. Lima, 1969) and Camilla Valdeavellano (b. Lima, 1973) created Las Memorias de Salmo Trutta (‘The Memoirs of Salmo Trutta’, 2007), with a plot composed of recollections. María Gracia Bisso made Ceda el paso (‘Yield’, 2008, graduation work at the University of the West of England at Bristol) about a lowly trash recycler. Diego Vizcarra Soberón (b. 1981) was the author of the award-winning Función macabra (‘Macabre Function’, 2010), about man damaging the planet. Jossie Malis (b. Lima, 1976) regularly made films at his studio Zumbakamera in Barcelona, Spain. These included Memento mori (id., 2004), El fantástico mundo de Fantástico Morales (‘The Fantastic World of Fantasy Morales’, 2010), and the Flash series Bendito Machine (id., 2010). The latter, referring to shadow theatre and ancient arts, creates an allegorical world criticizing the cult of the machine and consumerism. Dolphin Films, run by producer and writer Sergio Bambarén, specialized in CGI animation. Together with the Italian Password and the German DDG, Dolphin Films made the 2009 feature El Delfín (‘The Dolphin’, Eduardo Schuldt), budgeted at two million dollars and supported by 20th Century Fox. It was Peru’s most ambitious animated film yet. Later features included 2011’s Lars y el Misterio del Portal (‘Lars and the Mystery of the Portal’, produced by Dreams  & Entertainment and directed by Eduardo Schuldt). Lars, a child, discovers a mysterious portal in his new school that leads to adventure. It was followed in 2012 by Los Ilusionautas (id., produced by Aronnax and directed by Eduardo Schuldt) and Rodencia y el diente de la princesa (‘Rodencia and the Princess’ Tooth’), produced by Red Post and directed by David Bisbano.

Brazil19 In the 1990s, Brazilian animated TV commercials, popular there since the 1960s, began to be ranked internationally as some of the best in the world. Daniel Messias (b. São Paulo, 23 December 1941) had founded his studio back in 1975. He produced and directed thousands of spots, including ones for Kellogg’s and Sedex (the express delivery of the Brazilian post, for which Messias

got the license to animate Chuck Jones’s character Road Runner). Messias also directed an eight-part TV series that celebrated the fifth centenary of the discovery of Brazil (Terra à vista, ‘Land Ho’). His many short films had a cheerful satirical vein. Dinda’s (1993), for example, makes pitiless fun of the controversial former Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello.20 Luiz Briquet (b. São Paulo, 11 August 1945), who had the French animator Guy Lebrun (1930–1978) as his master, began his career at sixteen. His company, Briquet Filmes, became one of the most important and well equipped in the country. Over three decades, Briquet made almost two thousand advertising films for clients around the world. ‘I’d like to have the opportunity to do something that is not a commercial. But I love what I do so much that when I start animating, I forget everything else and devote myself to it.’21 Walbercy Ribas (b. Ribeirão Preto, 17 March  1943) founded his company, Start Desenhos Animados, in 1966. He provided nearly 2,000 commercials for international clients and was the only Latin American animator to whom the magazines Graphis and Graphis Annual, the bibles of the design world, devoted two pages. In 1972 Rodox Cucaracha, a well-designed character, won Ribas his first international award at the Venice Film Festival. Ribas then debuted in entertainment filmmaking, producing and directing the TV mid-length special O quarto rei mago (‘The Fourth Magus’, 1988), a Christmas classic for years. Ribas always dreamed of making an independent feature and saved time and resources for this project. He took more than 20 years to complete it, under the title O Grilo feliz (‘The Happy Cricket’). His daughter Juliana, who – as a baby – inspired one of the characters, was his 22-year-old assistant director when the film was finally released. The well-received film is set in the Amazon area, where a singing cricket fights against an alligator, an enemy of nature and living. The 2009 sequel, O Grilo feliz e os insetos gigantes, uses 3D CGI. Céu d’Ellia was a young employee in some of the advertising studios. In 1988 he completed his own film, Adeus (‘Goodbye’). While taking his film to festivals, he heard about a call for animators on the Amblimation feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West,22 which was being

By Marcos Magalhães. The title refers to the Casa da Dinda, the official residence of Collor de Mello while he was in charge. 21 Anima Mundi festival catalogue, 1997. 22 Released in 1991, this was a sequel to Don Bluth’s original An American Tail (1986). Bluth had no involvement in the sequel, which was codirected by Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells. 19 20

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made in London, and he was hired. He later called Fabio Lignini and Ennio Torresan to join him. The three were some of the first Brazilian animators exported to the world. Lignini remained a senior animator in the DreamWorks studio in Los Angeles. Torresan returned briefly to Brazil to complete his short El Macho (‘The Macho’, 1992) – an erotic and exuberant delirium about obsessive macho men. He returned to the US and held major positions at Nickelodeon (as a director and storyboarder for the enormously popular SpongeBob SquarePants TV cartoon) and at DreamWorks Animation. Céu d’Ellia himself returned to São Paulo, where he worked on animation series about environmental issues. Some years later, it was possible to point out talented Brazilians in every big animation studio in the world. Carlos Saldanha (b. Rio de Janeiro, 20 July 1968) was the biggest name. As a young student he went to New York to graduate from the New York School of Visual Arts. His graduation film was Time for Love (1993), with Chris Wedge as his tutor. Wedge invited his disciple to his newly established Blue Sky Studios, and from then on Saldanha’s career rocketed – from assistant director23 of the Academy Award-winning short Bunny (1998) to solo director of the blockbuster Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). In 2011 he released his own creation: the feature Rio, a tribute to his birthplace, which grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide.24 Arnaldo Galvão was initially the partner of Flavio Del Carlo in an advertising animation studio named Flip. He started his authorial career with Uma Saída Política (‘A Political Way Out’, 1990), Disque N para Nascer (‘Dial B for Birth’, 1992), and later the sensual Almas Chamas (‘Soul in Flames’, 2000), a torrid love story between a firefighter and a dancer. In 1993, the international festival Anima Mundi25 was founded and became the largest on the continent. Anima

Mundi stimulated animation in Brazil by bringing an excellent selection of international authors and producers to the country, some of whom were invited to teach workshops and training courses. The Brazilian Association of Animators (ABCA – Associação Brasileira de Cinema de Animação) was also founded. The founders and directors of Anima Mundi are Cesar Coelho, Marcos Magalhães, Aida Queiroz, and Lea Zagury. Queiroz and Coelho had been making commissioned films for publicity and television in their studio Campo4, including Tá limpo! (‘It’s Clean!’, 1990), a didactic film about recycling waste in poor communities, produced by the German Christina Koenig with Magalhães, Coelho, and Queiroz as directors. Petróleo! Petróleo! (‘Petroleum! Petroleum!’, 2002) was made for the national oil company, Petrobras. In 1996 Marcos Magalhães made Estrela de Oito Pontas (‘Eight Point Star’) with Fernando Diniz.26 It won three Kikito de Ouro at Gramado and best animation at the Havana Festival.27 Visiting the University of Southern California, Magalhães made Dois (‘Two’) in 1999, using scratched film together with 3D CGI. He also made many other shorts, including Precipitação (‘Precipitation’, 1991), and Pai Francisco Entrou na Roda, (‘Uncle Francisco in a Merry Go Round’, 1997). His commissioned works included a popular Plasticine blue mouse for the TV program Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum (1993–1994), whose overall director was Cao Hamburger. Hamburger himself had made an animated series called Os Urbanóides (‘The Urbanoids’, 1990–1993). In 2000, he made his first feature, Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum (based on the TV series mentioned above), in which he combined live-action and puppet animation. Subsequently, Hamburger worked mostly in live-action. Otto Guerra continued creating and producing many shorts, including Novela (‘Soap Opera’, 1992), and O Arraial (‘The Village’, 1997), about the war of Canudos, a bloody

The director was Chris Wedge. Synopsis: A parrot, kidnapped as a chick from the Amazon forest, ends up in Minnesota as a pet. When an ornithologist discovers he’s the last male of his extremely rare species, he’s brought back south to mate with the last female, but both are kidnapped. The film is full of colours, music, light, and joy, with charming characters. 25 Anima Mundi has a big presence every year on television and in the press, thus attracting a huge public (more than 100,000 people annually). Traditionally, the festival runs the ‘Estudio Aberto’ – open and free instant animation workshops that allow the public to create their own animation. Many Brazilian animation professionals say their first experience of the medium was in the Estudio Aberto. 26 Fernando Diniz (b. 1918) was in a psychiatric hospital for 50 years, where he painted and created artworks with the help of the Jungian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira. The Brazilian director Leon Hirzan told Diniz’s story in the documentary Imagens do Incosciente (‘Images from the Unconscious’, 1986). This contact with Hirzan awoke Fernando’s passion for cinema. He didn’t have a camera and he started drawing directly on film. In 1990 he met Magalhães, who helped him make the short Estrela de Oito Pontas. 27 Cfr. http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.2/3.2pages/3.2diniz_port.html. 23 24

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episode of the newborn Brazilian Republic. Together with Lancaster Motta, Guerra directed Rocky & Hudson, os Caubóis Gays (‘Rocky & Hudson, the Gay Cowboys’, 1994) from Adão Iturrusgarai’s comic books. He won the award for best short at the Gramado Festival in 2004 with Nave Mãe (‘Mothership’); it’s the story of a spaceship that becomes a space hen. In 2006 came Guerra’s feature Wood  & Stock: sexo, orégano e rock’n’roll, (‘Wood  & Stock, Sex, Oregano and Rock’n’Roll’). It was based on characters created by the cartoonist Angeli (the nickname of Arnaldo Angeli Filho). The protagonists once lived the ‘flower power’ life; now, 30 years later, they must revive their rock band. Clóvis Vieira directed Cassiopéia (‘Cassiopeia’, 1996), which some consider the first animation movie made completely inside the computer. (Pixar’s debut feature Toy Story, 1995, was based on some hand sculpted and digitized models.) Allan Sieber (b. Porto Alegre, 1972), a sardonic comics author, began as an animator at Guerra’s studio, debuting as director with Deus é Pai (‘God Is My Father’, 1999), an iconoclastic series about Jesus and God (voiced by Guerra). It was supposed to become a TV series, but the Catholic Church in Brazil influenced TV executives to abort the project. Sieber also made Os Idiotas Mesmo (‘The Real Idiots’, 2000), Negão Bolaoito Talk Show (‘Eight Ball Blackman Talk Show’, 2000), Onde Andará Petrucio Felker (‘Where Has Petrucio Felker Been?’, 2001), and Animadores (‘Animators’, 2008). Paulo Munhoz (b. Curitiba, 1962), a mechanical engineer specializing in computer graphics, got started in moviemaking in 1985. His first animation was 2005’s Pax (‘Peace’), about four religious men discussing contemporary violence. It won two awards at Anima Mundi in 2006. Brichos (‘Brazilanimals’, 2006) was a feature about animals of the Amazon forest; a TV series was developed from it. Belowars (id., 2007) was Munhoz’s second feature, while Poíesis (‘Poiesis’, 2008), his environmental short, was presented at Cleveland’s Global Forum in 2009. Guilherme Marcondes was born in São Paulo but migrated to New York. He made commercials and many shorts: The Real Zandonai, Servir Bem para servir sempre (‘Serve Well to Serve Forever’), Golden Shower (winner at the Brazilian MTV Music Awards in 2000), and We Hear Them Cutting, Into Pieces (2004). Tyger (2006), his most successful short, was based on William Blake’s poem. Marcondes creates a huge tiger sinuously moving through São Paulo, transforming people and objects into animals. Alê Abreu (b. São Paulo, 1971) attended an animated drawing class at MIS (Museum of Image and Sound) when he was only thirteen years old. During the 1990s he made

Sírius (1993) and Espantalho (‘Scarecrow’, 1998), a touching short about a girl and a living scarecrow. Garoto Cósmico (‘Cosmic Boy’, 2007) was addressed to young viewers and set in a future in which every day is programmed. In Passo (2007), Abreu shows the creation and animation of a bird in a cage, which is released by the animator himself. At the NFB in Montreal, Canada, Daniel Schorr made many shorts, including Jours de Plaine (‘Days of Prairie’, French, 1991), In Search of the Dragon (1991), Jonas et Lisa (1995), and Snow Cat (1998). Jonas et Lisa won many awards. In a poor family, the children are exploited by their drunken stepfather; the eldest son decides to escape and live alone. Schorr interviewed street children from Rio de Janeiro while researching the film, part of a series supported by UNICEF about childhood rights. Schorr also made Vida de Menino de Rua (‘Street Boy’s Life’, 1992), financed by the Foundation Vitae and addressing the same problems, with the same children. Dominós (‘Dominoes’, 2007), part of the ShowPeace series produced by NFB, uses dominoes in a metaphor for conflict resolution. Andrés Lieban is another author from Rio Grande do Sul who started animating at Guerra’s studio. His first authorial works (Sinai, 2000; Bonjour, 2001; and Soda Sexo, ‘SexSoda’, 2002) were made for the Internet and awarded in the Anima Mundi Web contest (a virtual animation competition under the Anima Mundi festival umbrella). Moving to Rio, Lieban partnered with André Breitman and they inaugurated the production house 2DLab. They started with children’s shorts, such as the successful Aquarela (‘Watercolour’) featuring a song by Toquinho and Vinicius de Moraes. 2DLab became one of the first Brazilian studios to establish an international animation coproduction, with Canada, on the Big Big Friend TV series. TV productions were the biggest trend in Brazilian animation at the end of the 2000s. Thanks to the efforts of many agents, including the producers and authors of ABCA, the association of independent producers (ABPI), the Anima Mundi Festival, and the Ministry of Culture, animation was considered a strategic force in cultural resources. Many initiatives stimulated new productions. The agreement with Canada in the 1980s was renewed on a new basis, favouring interchange between industrial studios and producers rather than just independent animation. Brazilian television started moving more boldly into animation, gradually producing their own content instead of just buying foreign series. An example was Peixonauta (‘Fishtronaut’), a children’s series

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by Kiko Mistrorigo and Celia Catunda from TV Pinguim. It instantly got top ratings on Brazil’s Discovery Kids cable channel. The government took measures such as launching AnimaTV, a program for assisting new studios in developing characters and scripts. It aimed to establish a constant production of animated TV series on Brazilian television, establishing animation as a cultural industry.

Bolivia28 Jesús and Elisabeth Pérez migrated back and forth to Switzerland, where Jesús Pérez worked at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. (For more on Pérez, see the section on Switzerland.) In 1993, Alfredo Ovando produced and directed La cueva (‘The Cave’). It was about the first human dwelling in prehistoric times and it featured a popular TV character, Primerito, who featured in commercials promoting a savings and loan company. Ovando then directed Siempre amigas (‘Always Friends’) and Los cinco sentidos (‘The Five Senses’), against child drug abuse. Cuidado mamá (‘Take Care, Mother’) is a short film about motherhood. Ovando then became involved with Derecho a la diversidad (‘Right to Diversity’), and Derecho a la identidad (‘Right to Identity’), about the rights of indigenous peoples. They were both part of the global campaign Our Rights, convened by UNICEF. An important professional animation workshop was driven by the Embassy of Denmark and producer Hanne Pedersen and supported by local associations Diakonia in Santa Cruz and Nicobis in La Paz. Young Bolivians took their degrees and made three films based on the mythology books by Liliana De la Quintana (b. Sucre, 1959), a screenwriter and author of children’s literature. The films were La sorpresa de Lucas (‘Lucas’s Surprise’), Ñamandu (id.), and El origen de la sombra (‘The Origin of the Shadow’). In 2006, Ovando made four chapters of the international project El trabajo infantil (‘The Labouring Children’) promoted by the CARE institution. Its target was child labour, still a plague in Bolivia, and especially in mines. La casa azul (‘The Blue House’, 2007) was a TV travel series, covering national parks and protected areas, with a cartoon toucan guide.

In 2009, the Embassy of Denmark invited Ovando to organize an animation course supported by Hanne Pedersen and Iván Castro. Ovando also directed La abuela Grillo (‘Grandmother Cricket’), from a novel by Liliana De la Quintana about a myth of the indigenous people of the Ayoreos. It involved Luzmila Carpio, an internationally famous indigenous (Quechua) singer and songwriter. Marisol Barragán continued her creative career with Hablan las animas (‘The Souls Speak’, 2007), about the high mountains surrounding La Paz, the country’s capital. The previously mentioned Iván Castro (b. La Paz, 1971) made the Plasticine short Pequeña Historia (‘Little Story’, 1988). It is a melodrama about an orphaned child wrongly charged with theft and his dog, who saves him. La Navidad (‘Christmas’, 1999) shows the dire lives of many children during the festive season. In the late 1990s, Iván Castro became leader of the group Jicha, which ran the animation workshop Demiurgo. Demiurgo was responsible for The Animartes, screenings of animated films of various techniques, genres, and countries on Tuesdays – ‘Martes’ in Castilian. Mauricio Ricaldi (b. Saanen, Switzerland, 20 January  1974) studied animation in Montreal (Canada) in 1999–2000, where he made his graduation film Titicaca (id., 2000). Soon after, he went to Bolivia. In La Paz he made the video clip Phutu  & Bass for the band Octavia, which was a great success. His most ambitious project was a feature called La portada mágica (‘The Magic Cover’), which couldn’t attract enough funding to get past preproduction.29 In the meantime, Ricaldi produced a medium-length feature, Dr. Senka (id., 2003), directed by Camilo Maldonado, in which CGI animated robots interact with real actors. In 2004, he started the series Las fabulas de Esopo (‘Aesop’s Fables’). Many colleagues contributed, on his invitation, and ten parts were completed and broadcast on state television. Then Ricaldi moved to Santa Cruz, where he worked for several channels (Unitel, Pat) doing corporate images and news but also animating characters for children’s programmes. These included Chicostation (which was nominated for best children’s program, 2007), Animania, and El circo de narices (‘Circus Noses’). Ricaldi’s most famous work was a series of very short films for the anniversary of the city of Santa Cruz, based on photos. Afterwards, he went to work in Vancouver, Canada.

By Liliana De la Quintana. ‘Yet I haven’t abandoned it; either sooner or later I want to come back to it, and make it.’ (Mauricio Ricaldi, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 22 July 2012.) 28 29

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Joaquín Cuevas (b. La Paz, 1980) made many TV commercials as a freelance artist and two interesting music videos, for Ciudad Líquida and Vadik. Jorge Cuéllar Rendón (b. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 1988) made Playa explosiva (‘Explosive Beach’, 2008) and Cat Out (id., 2009). He formed a small production company in Santa Cruz called Ecat. In 2011, Cecilia Delgado (b. La Paz, 1983) made El secreto de Keila y Keysi (‘The Secret of Keila and Keysi’), which was animated in parts. That was followed by Historia para una niña bien (‘Story for a Good Girl’, 2011), about gender violence, and El camino (‘The Way), against exploitation at work.

Paraguay The most famous Paraguayan animation director was Joaquín Baldwin, whose Sebastian’s Voodoo was nominated for an Annie Award in 2008 and won the Short Film Corner Online Competition in 2009 at Cannes. ‘Paraguayan animation is something very new, so animators are approximately all my age or younger,’ wrote the artist.30 Baldwin was born in 1983. When he was about 15, he decided to experiment with computer graphics and taught himself some basic 3D animation. Then he met Christian Chena, who ran the multimedia magazine Hypermedia, the first of its kind in Paraguay. He worked for the magazine and then for Chena Ventures Inc., mostly as a Web designer. In 2002 (age 19) I  moved to the US to study at the Columbus College of Art  & Design in Ohio, of all places. I was going to major in advertising and graphic design, but my interest in animation came back to me strongly. I  changed my major to video and animation and have since focused completely on film-making. After finishing my degree at CCAD, I  moved on to get an MFA in animation at UCLA, which I finished in 2010.31 Using Autodesk Maya, along with Adobe After Effects for compositing, Baldwin made such shorts as The Garden of Proserpine (2004), Alphamorphosis (2006), Placenta (2006), Papiroflexia (2007), Sebastian’s Voodoo (2008), and The Windmill Farmer (2010). The last two are near-masterpieces of

drama and sensitivity. Baldwin is one of the few filmmakers who professes to love poetry and finds inspiration in it. Papiroflexia started as a sonnet he had written years before. After his run on film festivals, Baldwin went on to work for Walt Disney Feature Animation as a layout artist, and later as a layout supervisor, working on films such as Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Frozen (2013), and Big Hero 6 (2014). Another Paraguayan émigré, Guillermo Careaga, worked as a DreamWorks animator and directed his own Sugar Rush (2007), depicting the delicious dangers lurking in vending machines with bouncy and colourful CG animation. Hugo Cataldo Barudi (b. Asunción, 1978) said: ‘I draw since I  can remember. I  studied animation in England (having Bob Godfrey and Daniel Greaves as mentors) and illustration, and then worked in Europe as an animation character designer. Since I  came back to Paraguay (in 2006), I freelance, illustrating, directing and writing scripts for film and TV commercials.’32 Cataldo also wrote and directed live-action features and was an illustrator and visual artist. Cataldo directed such animated shorts as The Urutaú Legend (2002) and A Fairly Tale (2004). The first, made in the UK, retold an ancient Paraguayan legend about the Urutaú bird and its haunting song. A Fairly Tale – made in Germany and blessed with many awards – mocks fairy tale love; a frog woos girls saying he’s a prince. Despite being a multi-award-winning filmmaker, Cataldo didn’t disdain doing commercial work as a character designer for low-budget series. Pablo Meilicke (b. Asunción, 1973) taught himself clay animation. His works are completely handmade. Sin fin (‘Without an Ending’, 2001) shows a teenager watching television in a maze of deferred reality. Capibara (‘Capybara’, 2008)33 is about an alligator hunt. José Pedersen (b. Asunción, 4 March 1982) started his professional career in 2001 at Canal 4 and founded his own company (Bulbo) in 2004. His output is typical of his generation: commercial work on one side, personal films on the other. The latter included Dr. Neuron (id., 2003), Emuhno (id., 2004), and Ninja Square (id., 2007, broadcast on the Web). The apex of his commercial work came in 2011: La mansión de los políticos (‘The Mansion of Politicians’). Pedersen’s Emuhno won first place in the video art competition at the Washington DC Biennial. The subject is

Joaquín Baldwin, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 8 March 2012. Pixel Nitrate – Joaquín Baldwin’s Portfolio, http://www.pixelnitrate.com/, retrieved on 7 April 2012. 32 See http://www.portalguarani.com/autores_detalles.php?id=1207. 33 Capybara means ‘the owner of the grasses’ in the Guaraní language. 30 31

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the world’s creation according to one of the innumerable native South American communities, in this case the Tomarahos. The story is narrated by shaman Wylky Dohoratas in the Chamacaco language; the original artwork is by a Chamacaco artist called Owa; and the excellent music is also traditional. Pedersen opted not to show off his own design talent, and marvellously gave life to his compatriots’ worldview. The Mansion of Politicians is an animated (and lively) reality show, jointly produced by Pedersen and TV emcee José Ayala. The former was responsible for the caricatures and animation; the latter developed scripts, records and edits them. Like most nations, Paraguay has animators but has no animation industry. Paraguayan professionals are young, gallant, and above all globalized, not necessarily working in their home country.

Chile Among the filmmakers who returned home after the restoration of democracy was Vivienne Barry (b. Santiago de Chile, 19 May  1947). Between 1978 and 1980, she studied at the DEFA studio in Dresden (then the German Democratic Republic). Returning to Chile in 1990, she organized and conducted numerous animation workshops in Latin America and Europe and presented her films at festivals. She made many commercials and sixteen parts of the series Tata Colores (puppet animation, objects, clay, and paper cut-outs, 1991–1994) for the Televisión Nacional de Chile.34 Barry also directed the shorts Nostalgias de Dresden (‘Homesickness for Dresden’, 1991, a delicately drawn animation), Deriva (‘Drift’, 1995, collages and photos in black and white), and La Salsa (id., 1999, with dolls made of latex and clay). Como alitas de chincol (‘Like Sparrow Wings’, 2002, animation of embroidery and patchwork, 2002) won several awards. It brought to life the stories that Santiago women wove in burlap in the 1970s, telling what was happening in that time. According to Barry, ‘the film is a tribute to women who embroidered the story on burlap during the

dictatorship [.  .  .] though much burlap was seized and some newspapers called that anti-Chilean propaganda’.35 Between 2003 and 2005, Barry made Resuscita, rey Orelie (‘Revive, King Orelie), animating the drawings of Chilean artists Andrés Gana and Hernando León and combining them with old graphics. The film recounts the life of Orélie Antoine de Tounens, an aristocratic French adventurer. Between 2005 and 2006, Barry made the children’s series Ene Tene Tu in clay animation. It was broadcast by Televisión Nacional de Chile. The Cantamonitos children’s series followed, shown on Television Nacional in 2010 and Plastilino in 2012. Elsewhere, new companies were born in Chile. Independent animators found financial backing from the newborn governmental Fondart, and national film festivals established sections and awards for animated films. Klaudia Kæmper’s M, for instance, was awarded first prize at the tenth French-Chilean Video-Art Festival in 1990. Tomás Welss was born in Santiago de Chile on 25 June  1963. He studied fine arts in his hometown and animation in Stuttgart, Germany, under the guidance of Heinz Edelmann, the designer of Yellow Submarine. The military putsch kept Welss abroad for many years. Back in his country in 1993, he developed a personal style of animation based on metaphors. His design was intentionally neither accurate nor detailed. Reunión (‘Meeting’, 1994) is an attack on the world of advertising agencies, showing the arrogant behaviour of bosses towards their secretaries and employees. Noche (‘Night’, 1997) shows a nocturnal encounter between a man and a woman. It vanishes like a dream with daylight. Manos libres (‘Free Hands’, 2000) tells the story of a woman whose husband doesn’t care for her and focuses on his mistress instead. The woman becomes a machine to have children, her only remaining weapon left to keep the family together. Welss’s Verde que te quiero (‘Green How I  Want You’,36 2003) is a purely graphical fight between a little black man and a green spot. One triumphs over the other and vice versa. Welss directed Paraíso Terrenal (‘Earthly Paradise’) in 2010, which won the award for best Latin-American animated film at the Havana Film Festival of 2010–2012.37 He then embarked on an animated feature film.

Every night the puppet Tata Colores wished the children goodnight. Among Barry’s collaborators were Chantal de Rementería, Marta Carrasco, and Carolina del Piano. 35 Marco Fajardo, Homenaje a las arpilleras y a la memoria, Internet site Primera Linea, 2003. 36 The title comes from the beginning of Federico García Lorca’s poem, ‘Romance sonámbulo’ (1928). 37 Synopsis: An older man walks through a grey city. While waiting for the bus, he notices a poster that invites him to a better world. So his journey begins. 34

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Ariel Pereira (b. Concepción, 1953) directed collective films by his students in the arts faculty at the Universidad de Playa Ancha, including Esténcil de Valparaíso (‘Valparaíso Stencil’, 2007), Todas las manos (‘All Hands’, 2008), and Retratos (‘Portraits’, 2009). Pereira is a founding member of the Anima Project, a group of graphic artists, visual artists, musicians, and computer experts who organize exhibitions and meetings about animation all over Chile. The TV channel Animachannel collaborates with Anima, and some broadcasts are connected with its exhibitions and productions. In 2002, Pablo Alibaud founded Valpoanimación. The company specialized in 2D computer animation and made TV programs. Among Alibaud’s shorts, Una historieta de ciencia fixión (‘A Little Science Fixion Story’, 2005) is about a man angry at the Americans for putting their flag on the moon. He goes to the moon in his own rocket, destroys the flag, and goes back to bed. When he switches the light off, the moon goes out, too. In V al Paraíso (‘V to the Paradise’,38 2007), a ghost ship’s crew enters a town, mingling with their loved ones. In 2002 Alejandro Rojas Tellez (b. Santiago de Chile, 19 June 1958) released the first animated Chilean feature: Ogu y Mampato en Rapa Nui (‘Ogu and Mampato in Rapa Nui’). Based on Themo Lobos and Eduardo Armstrong’s comic, it features little Mampato and his faithful caveman friend Ogu. Klaudia Kæmper (a painter and animator with a colourful style) made M (id.) and Links (id.). Erwin Gómez Viñales (b. Santiago de Chile, 21 June 1966), a specialist in digital techniques, made the 3D CGI short Señores de Sipán (‘Lords of Sipán’, 1999), based on stories of North Peru’s Mochica culture between the first and eighth centuries. At the Havana Film Festival in 2002, Gómez Viñales won a special award for the short Rokunga, el último hombre pájaro (‘Rokunga, the Last Bird-man’), which recreated the last Tangata Manu ceremony on Easter Island in 1866. Viñales followed this with the TV series Patagonia, los hombres del confín (‘Patagonia, the Men of the Frontiers’, 2008). In six parts, it explored the spiritual world of the indigenous people of the Far South and their reaction to the conquistadores. The puppet animation specialist Hugo Covarrubias Álvarez (b. Santiago, 2 November 1977) made shorts tied

to theatre, including El almohadón de plumas (‘The Feather Pillow’, from Horacio Quiroga, 2007), El pelícano (‘The Pelican, from Strindberg’, 2008), and La noche boca arriba (‘The Night Face Up’, from Julio Cortázar, 2012). Álvarez also directed some TV series, including El ogro y el pollo (‘The Ogre and the Chicken’, 2009).

Argentina39 In the 1990s there was a rise of TV and cinema animation. Some features came out in the 1980s, but shorts were virtually nonexistent – probably because of the high prices of materials. In the 1990s, there was a significant quantity of independent shorts made, alongside some quite good feature films.

Features In 1999, 21  years after Ico, el caballito valiente, Manuel García Ferré presented Manuelita (id.), which he wrote and directed. It was inspired by a children’s song by María Elena Walsh, a poet, singer-songwriter, and 1960s icon. The reviews weren’t very good, but the public loved it. It was also successful in Spain (the film had Spanish coproducers), where the film opened in cinemas in 2000 and played in cinemas for several months. Manuelita tells the story of a turtle who leaves her home but finally understands that what really counts is in her birthplace. In 2000, the same studio presented Corazón, las alegrías de Pantriste (‘Heart, the High Spirits of Pantriste’), about tree fellers and a boy with more talent for the violin than for the axe. ‘Ferré decided to gamble, hoping to repeat the success of Manuelita, but, even if Pantriste’s style was much finer, it was a critical flop.’40 Manuel García Ferré died in Buenos Aires on 28 March 2013. The day Pantriste premiered, Patagonik Film Group presented its own full-length animated movie: Los Pintín al rescate (‘The Pintíns’ Rescue’), about a family of penguins. The director was the young and talented Franco Bíttolo (b. Buenos Aires, 14 January 1970). He had devoted himself to animation since 1987, working for some TV series and later in advertising.

There is a pun – the expression ‘V al Paraíso’ (V to the Paradise) sounds like the name of the town of Valparaíso. By Giannalberto Bendazzi and Francesca Guatteri. Alejandro R. Gonzalez provided Giannalberto Bendazzi with precious information for the drafting of this section, with generosity and friendship. 40 Raùl Manrupe to Giannalberto Bendazzi, based on his dossier ‘Thanks, Ferré’, published in the magazine The Thing – Fantastic Film, Buenos Aires, April 2000. 38 39

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In 1996 Susana Tozzi presented the feature SOS Gulubú (id.), also inspired by the songs of María Elena Walsh (see above). The film contains several songs in animation and the plot is told through live-action scenes. Each animated segment is made by different people with different techniques (puppets, cut-out figures, cel animation) and aesthetic choices. The film was made thanks to financing granted by the Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA: National Institute of Cinematography and Audio-visual Arts), a state organization that was the main film producer in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, Dibu, la película (‘Dibu, the Film’) opened in cinemas. Directed by Carlos Olivieri, it was based on a TV series broadcast between 1996 and 1998 entitled Mi familia es un dibujo (‘My Family Is a Drawing’). Both versions concern a family in which one of the sons (Dibu) is an animated character, alongside real actors. The animation manager was Rodolfo Mutuverría, Dibu’s creator. The costs were estimated at three million dollars, but the film was hugely popular. In 1998, Dibu 2, La venganza de Nasty (‘Dibu 2, Nasty’s Revenge’) was directed by Carlos Galettini. Dibu meets his sister, Buji, and must save her from the villain, Nasty. Rodolfo Mutuverría returned as animation director. In July  2002, Patagonik Film Group and Telefé presented Dibu 3, la gran aventura (‘Dibu 3, the Great Adventure’), directed by Raúl Rodríguez Peila, in which Dibu goes to Mars to save the Earth. Besides the combination of 2D animation and real actors, Dibu 3 includes computer 3D animation in backdrops and martian aliens. Cóndor Crux (id., 1999) was directed by Juan Pablo Buscarini, Swan Glecer, and Pablo Holcer. Also produced by Patagonik Film Group, Cóndor Crux combines 3D CG backgrounds with 2D computer-animated figures, though the mix is flawed. Set in the future, the film mixes action, science fiction, and family problems. In 2002 Juan Antín made Mercano, el Marciano (‘Mercano, the Martian’), about a little green alien who arrives in Buenos Aires but ends up lonely and rejected. Rodrigo Seijas comments:41 ‘The Buenos Aires in which Mercano walks around is an apocalyptical city, in which it is possible to spot designers and fat trigger-happy policemen. [. . .] The movie attacks everybody: adults, humans, multinational

companies, globalization, Martians, to end with young people always ready to start a social revolution . . . if they weren’t always busy drinking a beer.’ Other features of the time included Micaela, una película mágica (‘Micaela, a Magic Film’, 2004), directed by Rosanna Manfredi; Patoruzito (id.) by José Luis Massa; El colour de los sentidos (‘The Colour of the Senses’) by Norman Ruiz and Liliana Romero; and Teo, cazador intergaláctico (‘Teo, Inter-galactic Hunter’). The latter is a 50/50 coproduction between Spain and Argentina, though it was made in Argentina. Juan Pablo Buscarini (b. Rosario, 1962), one of the creators of Cóndor Crux, made two features. Pérez, el ratoncito de tus sueños42 (‘Pérez, the Little Mouse of Your Dreams’) was released in 2006 and seen by 700,000 people. El Arca (‘The Ark’, 2007) is a comedy about what happens on Noah’s ark among humans, animals, and insects. It was shown at the Montevideo and Annecy festivals in 2007. Another film by José Luis Massa was also released in 2007 – Isidoro, la película (‘Isidoro, the Film’). Martín Fierro, la película was based on the poem by José Hernández with drawings by Roberto Fontanarrosa, directed by Liliana Romero and Norman Ruíz. Hydra (id., 2009) was a horror animated film by Pablo Rabe and Leandro Jase. Plumíferos (‘Free Birds’) was directed by Daniel De Felippo. This was a computer-animated film by Manos Digitales Animation Studio and used Open Source software for all 3D models, animation, lighting, and rendering, under the Linux operating system. Illusion Studios made Valentina, la película (‘Valentina, the Film’), a feature directed by Eduardo Gondell and aimed at girls; Gaturro (id.), directed by Gustavo Cova, is a computer-animated family film; and the same director’s Boogie, el aceitoso (‘Boogie, the Oily’) was inspired by a comic-strip character by Roberto Alfredo Fontanarrosa. The latter combines black humour, a sharp screenplay, drawings on real backdrops, and 3D graphics. Cuentos de la selva (‘Tales of the Forest’), released in summer 2010, was an ambitious work based on the famous children’s stories by Horacio Quiroga. It was directed by Liliana Romero and Norman Ruíz, who had already directed ‘The Colour of the Senses’ (see above). The film uses 3D CG characters on watercolour painted backgrounds and explores nature preservation.

http://www.cineismo.com/criticas/mercano-el-marciano.htm. This film, and the subsequent El Ratón Pérez 2 (‘The Mouse Pérez 2’, 2009), are based on the character of the Mouse Pérez, created by Andrés Schaer (b. Buenos Aires, 15 October 1971). It is a ‘tooth fairy’ figure that collects baby teeth and leaves a coin. The Mouse Pérez 2 was directed by Schaer himself. 41 42

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Short Films In the last decades of the twentieth century, Argentina’s most vigorous talent was Oscar Grillo, a designer and painter who never had the occasion or nerve to focus on a single subject and produce a masterpiece. Grillo was born in Buenos Aires on 23 August  1943. In 1960 he started working on animated adverts and moved to the United States. In 1969, he went to Spain. In 1971, he left for Britain, planning to stay for two weeks. Instead, he settled there for life. He made three videoclips for Linda McCartney: Seaside Woman (1979, Golden Palm for best short film at Cannes in 1980); Wide Prairie (1997); and The Light Comes from Within (1998). After Linda’s death, her husband Paul completed the project that she and Grillo had started – Shadow Cycle (‘Círculo de sombra’, 2001), a romantic elegy for life and time passing. In 1990, Rubén Pergament released the short Margarita (id.) in cinemas. The film was pacifist and ecological, featuring a daisy, an ant, an anteater, the moon, and a sparrow. Previously, Pergament had made shorts: El inquieto universo (‘The Restless Universe’), El hombre del colchón (‘The Man of the Mattress’), and La puerta (‘The Door’). Carlos Nine made Creole Love Call, a voiceless black and white romance between a man and a (stripper) female mouse. El show de los perrolotuditos (‘The Show of the Dogs’) shows dogs in ‘taboo’ situations, reminiscent of Beavis and Butt-head.43 Other shorts include El Pibe (‘The Kid’, 1993), Pamela (1994), La noche de los feos (‘The Night of the Ugly Ones’, 1995), Tanto te gusta ese hombre (‘You Like That Man So Much’) and La señora calabaza (‘The Pumpkin Lady’), both 1996, D-mente (‘D-mented’, 1999), El niño malcriado (‘The Bad-Mannered Boy’, 1997–1999), and El Salavavidas (‘The Lifeguard’, 1999). Between 1999 and 2000, Nine made Los reparadores (‘The Fixies’), Como jugar con la muerte (‘How to Cope with Death’), and El Trio (‘The Triplets’). Hacia adentro (‘Inwards’) and Sexteens (id., 2006) were made by Juan Pablo Zaramella (b. Buenos Aires, 7 April 1972). Zaramella won acclaim for his multi-awardwinning 2D film Lapsus (‘Lapse’, 2008), then returned with Luminaris (‘Teaser’), which won the Audience Award and FIPRESCI Award at Annecy. The end of the 2000s saw Trapitos al sol (‘Hung Out to Dry’), conceived and produced by Damián Emilio

43 44

Caro; Canción de Jazz (‘Jazz Song’), a joint work by Jorge González Varela, Emilio de la Rosa, and Emilio Luján; El Brote (‘The Sprout’) by Pablo Goitisolo, and Catalina and El Empleo (‘The Employment’) by Santiago Bou Grasso.

Appearance of Schools There was a rise in animation training institutes, both public (free, state-aided) and private. This was very important. Previously, anyone who wanted to work in animation had to be self-taught or work as a studio trainee. The rise of schools also gave Argentinean independent animation equilibrium in the 1990s. In 1990, the Animation Cinema and Graphic Design Chair was created at National University in Córdoba. In 1994 the university set up an experimentation and research centre (Centro Experimental de Animación – Animation Experimental Centre). Year by year it produced many short films, started many animation courses, and analyzed Argentinean animation history. One of the shorts it produced that stands out is Capitulación by Alejandro R. Gonzalez, who coordinated the members of the plastic laboratory of the local neuropsychiatric hospital. The centre also organized animation shows. There was an annual international festival as well as an event devoted to Argentinean independent animation, called the Jornadas de Animacion Independiente and held in 2001 in Córdoba. Back in the mid-1970s, the illustrator Luis Bras had founded El Sotano, an animated design laboratory in the city of Rosario. There, illustrators, filmmakers, art students, and various artists could all meet. Bras devoted himself to animated commercials, but in his spare time he experimented. His Bongo Rock (1974) is in two parts. In the first, which is in black and white, a couple dances to a rock theme and the graphics follow the funny and bizarre rhythm into surreal situations. This first part concludes with ‘the end’, but one character cranks up the gramophone and the dance begins again in full colour. After Bras’ death in 1995, two of his students, Paul Rodriguez and Esteban Jáuregui Tolj, took over the laboratory. In Rosario, Pablo Rodríguez Jáuregui worked independently. ‘In my opinion,’ writes Alejandro R. Gonzalez,44 ‘Jáuregui is the most talented and creative artist nowadays in Argentina. Among his movies, we should mention: El

Alejandra Portela and Socorro Villa, ‘Another Story for the Animated Film in Argentina’, in leedor.com, April 2000. Alejandro R. Gonzalez, letter sent to Giannalberto Bendazzi in the summer of 2002.

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gordo (The Fat One, 1992), El Pibe (The Boy, 1993), Capitán Cardozo (1994), La noche de los feos (The Night of the Ugly Ones, 1995). In 2001 Pablo Rodríguez Jáuregui directed The Planet, an animation feature totally independently produced and distributed. The Planet at the start was a soundtrack composed by the musician Fernando Kabusacki. A  group of animators decided to get inspiration from the music (as Disney did with Fantasía). The Planet is a very beautiful film, in which various animated frames by different animators with different techniques and styles are combined.’

Uruguay From 1990 to 2012, the work of Walter Tournier was rich and varied, perhaps even more than in the previous two decades. The 1990 workshop, in which the project Madre Tierra (‘Mother Earth’) was produced, was especially remarkable. The project consists of nine stories lasting 36 minutes in total, coproduced with the support of Sweden and Denmark. Conceived for children, Madre Tierra explores the ecosystem. Although some segments are more successful than others, it was a nationally honourable endeavour. The animators were led by Tournier and two Danish women, Maria MacDalland and Malene Vilstrup. It mixes diverse techniques, including cutouts, drawing, and Plasticine or wooden puppets with similarly diverse music. The TV series Los Tatitos (‘The Tatitos’), produced by Diego Silva and directed by Tournier, brought the author to the international scene. Thirteen parts were made between 1997 and 2000 for Uruguayan television, and 15 more were made for Argentine television. Again, the music and images seem inseparable. There is no dialogue, but the songs focus on the subjects. Tournier was also the director and animator on El Jefe y El Carpintero (‘The Boss and the Carpenter’, 2000, 12 minutes), from the Animated Tales of the World produced by the Welsh channel S4C. ‘The Boss and the Carpenter’ is about an eccentric Caribbean governor who wants to build a tower to touch the moon. Scripted by Francisco Hinojosa, the film won an award at the Festival of New Latin-American Cinema in Havana. Around this time, eleven 90-second segments were made about the Rights of the Child. They were produced by the Inter-American Children’s Institute, the Girl and the Adolescent. The titles were Yo quiero (‘I Want’), Yo soy (‘I Am’), Mi familia (‘My Family’), Yo participo (‘I Take Part’), Yo quiero que me quieran (‘I Want Them to Love Me’), Quiero

jugar (‘I Want to Play’), Que nos oigan (‘Let Them Hear Us’), Queremos al agua (‘We Love Water’), Quiero aprender (‘I Want to Learn’), Queremos vivir (‘We Want to Live’), and Cerca lejos (‘Close Far’). Navidad Caribeña (‘Caribbean Christmas’, 2001) was a 24-minute TV special for S4C that brought back the characters from ‘The Boss and the Carpenter’. This time the governor prepares a surprise for visiting relatives – snow in the Caribbean. Disasters follow. The six-minute A pesar de todo (‘In Spite of Everything’, 2003) was produced by Tournier at his own company, Tournier Animation. It’s the story of human creativity, interrupted by the destruction of war. It won several prizes in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Cuba, and Tunisia. Among the series that Tournier directed, 2009’s Tonky (id., 26 chapters of 90 seconds each) was coproduced with TVE (Brazil), KRO (The Netherlands), and Canal 1 Encuentro (Argentina). Aimed at children between the ages of one and four, it introduces Tonky and his sister Mica. The creative children play and learn, using a new object in every episode. Mi familia (‘My Family’, 2010, 18 parts of 90 seconds each) was produced by Pakapaka (Argentina) and was about diverse families and their situations. By far Tournier’s boldest endeavour was the 80-minute Selkirk, el verdadero Robinson Crusoe (‘Selkirk, the Real Robinson Crusoe’, 2012). This puppet animation was based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a brilliant Scot whose four years on a desert island inspired Daniel Defoe’s novel. Selkirk’s lively spirit enables him to adapt the island to his needs so that he can survive. Although the plot is fractured into two parts, the protagonist is well defined so the audience sympathizes with him. The puppet design is rich, the animation fluid, and scenes involving many characters are choreographed with rare skill. Selkirk, el verdadero Robinson Crusoe was the first Uruguayan animated feature presented at an international animation festival (Annecy, 2012). Then again, it was almost a pan-South American coproduction as it collected money and crafts from Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. It was eight years in preproduction and two years in production. One notable graduate of Tournier’s studio was Pablo Turcatti (b. 1963). Through the years he refined his skills and devoted himself principally to puppet animation. He worked on commercials and Tournier’s films. During the making of ‘Caribbean Christmas’ (on which he was director of animation), Turcatti began to conceive a personal project. This was the short Dulces sueños (‘Sweet Dreams’). With very few resources, but with the help and support of Tournier, who offered him some equipment and a place

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at his studio where he could work freely, Turcatti made the film by 2003. It was five minutes long and gently told the nightmares of a child scared of the dark, using the blue/ red lighting of horror films. Turcatti has worked in several fields as a director, illustrator, sculptor, and animator. He participated in the making of shorts and commercials for Uruguay, Chile, Great Britain, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico. His style reflects the classics of animation. He also contributed special effects work to the Uruguayan live-action films El hombre de Walter (‘Walter’s Man’, 1993, directed by Carlos Ameglio) and Otario (id., 1997, directed by Diego Arzuaga). In 1995, Carlos ‘Tato’ Ariosa made the series Tabaré. It consisted of fifty 30-second chapters caricaturing the draughtsman Tabaré, a Uruguayan in Argentina. It’s a pure example of the region’s humour, cruel yet warmhearted. The Coyote Animated Society was founded in 1994. Cartoons constitute the principal part of its production, which adapt educational texts. Catalina y un mundo de niños (‘Catalina and a Children’s World’, 2003) is a TV campaign, comprised of eight films of one minute each. Children are shown in practical daily situations teaching values such as friendship, tolerance, responsibility, and solidarity.

Consumo Cuidado (‘Consumption Cautiousness’, 2008) was aimed at reducing the damage caused by alcohol. Matías Bervejillo (b. Montevideo, 1962) was one of Coyote’s founders. He devoted himself principally to 2D animation for TV commercials, and to mixing digital and traditional techniques. After leaving the group, he made the short episodes of the series Oveja Negra (‘Black Sheep’), with designs and scripts by Peirano and Cardozo. Bervejillo continued with experiments, such as El Jazmín del País (‘The Jasmine of the Country’), about impossible love during war. Bervejillo uses limited animation with flair. From 1977 on, the multitalented artist Tunda Prada worked as a freelance illustrator but occasionally returned to independent work. He was a cofounder of satirical magazines and the director of the animation company Lamanoestudio, which produced TV animation, short films, and graphic commercials. The studio made more than 300 commercials and the ten-minute El Viejo Calefón (‘The Old Radiator’), which ran through the festivals picking up awards. Meanwhile, in 2000, Prada created and directed the TV program La mano que mira (‘The Hand That Watches’). This went on to win several awards as Uruguay’s best cultural TV program.

7

OCEANIA

Australia While the animation ‘industry’ in the strict sense of the word remained small and home-oriented,1 Down Under bloomed at international festivals, where many independents made a name for themselves and their country. Australia is almost as large as the United States but is inhabited by little more than 23  million people. For a film producer (live-action and animation alike), it was a reservoir of talented filmmakers but not a profitable market. Too few people, too few theatres. The film industry relied on financial support from the federal government in the form of three organizations. The Australian Film Commission primarily dealt with the funding of short films; the Film Finance Corporation basically funded features; and Film Australia, over the years, became fundamentally responsible for documentaries. In July 2008, the three agencies merged into a single funding body, Screen Australia.2 The independent animation filmmakers were at the bottom of the list. They came home with trophies, but finding money for the next project was a struggle. The larger commercial TV networks weren’t interested in

independent animation, so animators turned to SBS (Special Broadcasting Service).3 SBS commissioned series such as Home Movies (2002) or Swimming outside the Flags4 (1998). Both were coproduced with the Australian Film Commission and the states’ funding bodies. These series were actually anthologies of auteur films and allowed many artists to show their talent. Sarah Watt (Sydney, 30 August  1958–Melbourne, 4 November  2011) began working in the early 1990s and won praise for Local Dive (1998), an everyday story (with bright colours and vigour) of a woman swimming in a municipal pool in a small town. In 2001, Watt made Living with Happiness, based on the idea that happiness is fragile. A young mother obsessively fears that her child might suffer in any way. Watt’s films are very ‘Australian’, visually (the landscapes, the shining colours and light) and in their humour. Kathy Smith (b. Taree, NSW, 8 June  1963) is one of many Australian artists who wandered the world (especially the US). Her imagery is brilliantly eclectic. She combines abstract and representational artwork and various techniques, including painting, collage, and digitally manipulated imagery. However, her style is consistent, the

1 A seeming asset was actually a drawback. British and American audiences didn’t tolerate the Australian accent, so voice actors were supposed to dub soundtracks three times over, with all three accents. 2 This is relevant for the federal government only. The separate Australian states had their own funding authorities – for example, Screen NSW (New South Wales). 3 SBS (created in 1975) was a federal government-funded television station with a charter to reflect multicultural Australia. Its section SBSI (the ‘I’ stood for Independent), established in 1994, was the primary source of money and encouragement for animators. All productions were commissioned in association with the independent sector of the Australian film and TV industry. 4 The name might be explained this way: ‘On Australian beaches, the lifesavers/lifeguards like the surfers/swimmers to swim “between the flags”: that is, between two flags that are stuck in the sand 50–100 metres apart. This means that they have a smaller, more controllable area to patrol, to watch for drowning people or any hungry sharks. So I suppose “swimming outside the flags” means doing something that is unusual and perhaps dangerous or foolish, outside the norm; perhaps going where live-action cannot.’ (Dennis Tupicoff, e-mail message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 4 October 2000.)

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expression of a sincere inspiration and (like Watt) a very Australian palette. Despite their differences, Change of Place (1985), Delirium (1988), Living on the Comet (1993), and Indefinable Moods (2001) are all related, exploring inner and external worlds through sight and sound. The images always move and change but don’t ‘dance’. In other words, Kathy Smith doesn’t aim at pleasing the audience, at making art for the sake of art. With travelling shots and pans, she prefers to look into computer-generated interiors, or photographs, or her own paintings; or to refer to Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Norman McLaren; or to look at the possibilities that the digital technique gives her to select and fix those suggestions she finds meaningful and worth communicating. As a painter she doesn’t refuse any hue, but her use of blue, red, and orange-red is inspiring and effective. Lee Whitmore made a small masterpiece in On a Full Moon (1997), an inner journey of a woman who loses her mother and shortly after gives birth to her first child. Wendy Chandler (b. Sydney, 20 October  1962) is the author of the glorious little film Union Street (1990), about the friendship and enmity between neighbours on a ‘typical’ Australian inner-city street. The Summer of ’77 (2001) combines digital animation and real actors with a fine sensitivity for details and shades of feelings. The same can be said of her animated documentary series Heirlooms (2009). The latter explores the internal landscape of heirlooms and their owners. The episodes bring to life the emotions aroused by each heirloom, based on ten interviews with men and women from diverse cultural backgrounds. In 2013 Wendy Chandler completed the animated documentary Jose nia istoria / Jose’s Story, codirected with East Timoran Jose Da Costa. It’s the account of the personal and public life of this patriot, and of the fight (eventually successful) of the people of East Timor for independence. It’s also the film with which this young Pacific country enters the group of nations having animators and animated films in their territory. An Aussie in England, Sabrina Schmid, made Evariations (2009). In it she experimented with variations of ‘dots and lines’, abstract marks made by a digital pen and tablet though aiming at a handmade aesthetic. Abstracted Reflections (2011) uses digital photography, image processing, and animation. Two observations were chosen to construct the film. One is an observation of light reflecting on water that creates a moving pattern of circular shapes. Another is an aerial view of a mountain terrain, displaying a distinct 5 6

pattern of lines. Both were photographed as series of stills; these images were digitally processed and manipulated to abstract their forms, and then animated. Susan Danta (née Kim), a former student of Wendy Chandler from the University of Western Sydney, was codirector on Heirlooms. Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1972, she emigrated with her family to Australia in 1979. Among her many shorts, Mother Tongue (2002) is a computer-generated film in the style of pastel drawing. An autobiographical film, it tenderly depicts the separations and loss of native culture when the artist emigrated.

Volumetric Leunig The producer Deborah Szapiro teamed with director Andrew Horne to create a series of one-minute episodes. They are based on the vignettes of Michael Leunig (b. East Melbourne, 1945), ‘known as a cartoonist, philosopher, poet and artist. His commentary on political, cultural and emotional life spans thirty-five years and has often explored the idea of an innocent and sacred personal world. [. . .] In 1999 he was declared a national living treasure by the National Trust and awarded honorary degrees from La Trobe and Griffith Universities for his unique contribution to Australian culture.’5 Szapiro and Horne’s brainwave was to transform Leunig’s drawings into animated puppet shorts. The third dimension and the colour added a lot of ‘information’ to the original purity of the flat stroke. They gave back the details, the atmosphere, and the subtleties which live-action would have erased.

Death Becomes Him Since his first international success, Dance of Death (1983), Dennis Tupicoff (b. Ipswich, Queensland, 23 March 1951) always made films where the Grim Reaper played a key role. The role changed every time, showing this was an artist’s theme, not a juvenile pose. The Darra Dogs (1993) is as tragic as Dance of Death was comic. The death of pets and fear of loss dominate childhood memories in a peripheral, colonial village.6 Four

From the Michael Leunig Web site, http://www.leunig.com.au/biography/. Darra used to be a village around Brisbane, and now it is a part of the expanded town. Tupicoff spent some years of his childhood there.

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years later, Tupicoff made the outstanding His Mother’s Voice, based on a mother’s monologue-interview about her son, who had been shot dead. Her words, their tone and their hidden feelings, are the pillar; the visual narration, respectful, and nonpartisan (we’ll never know why or how the young man was killed), is the rest of the building. Tupicoff showed that a really talented director knows when to hide his talent. In Into the Dark (2001), a dying elderly man recalls his fear of death during childhood. ‘In imagining his experience of death, I was imagining my own, combined with what I  can remember of my thoughts from childhood about death and nothingness.’7 It’s probably the best film of his career. ‘Tupicoff’s unflinching honesty and his positioning of the viewer with the eyes of the boy and man prevent the film from entering schmaltzy territory. This subjective experience shifts death – and even life – from an anonymous and distant experience to something inevitable and universal.’8 Chainsaw (2007) is the name both of a powerful but dangerous tool and of a great bull, the champion of the Australian rodeos and no less dangerous. The film features Luis Miguel Dominguín, the Spanish great torero, killer of bulls, a giant who probably lived in the wrong century. An ordinary married couple have the names of Hollywood stars: Ava Gardner (Dominguín was the actress’s lover) and Frank Sinatra. In Chainsaw, Ava the common woman commits adultery and Frank the common tree-cutter commits

Figure 7.1  Dennis Tupicoff, Chainsaw, 2007.

suicide. Chainsaw is powerful and suggestive – a portrait of a century, destiny, love, death, courage, fame, and solitude. Tupicoff has no background in design, which makes him exceptional among animators. He is not actually a good draughtsman or colourist. The movements of his characters are quite commonplace and even rotoscoped. Had he been better, he wouldn’t have been the great filmmaker he is. His stories need this style. Death is not beautiful to see, experience, or tell. Moreover, the other major Tupicoff theme is memory, which does not present neat and well-crafted faces and backgrounds to the human mind. The mind’s eye is rather gross and emotional. In Requiem for a Nun, one of William Faulkner’s characters says: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Tupicoff had planned to use this quote as a prologue for Into the Dark. In The Darra Dogs, the director’s voice says, ‘The dead dogs of my childhood are still alive within me.’ Love is death’s mortal enemy but never wins. Memory does, because only memory can kill death.

Adam Elliot Harvek Milos Krumpetzki was born in Poland in 1922. Withdrawn from school (where he suffered bullying), he was educated by his mother who, though illiterate, taught him the facts of life. Krumpetzki would never stop collecting facts in a notebook. After the start of World War II and his parents’ deaths, he took refuge in Australia, where he was renamed Harvie Krumpet. He was struck by lightning, and he ended up in hospital several times, but optimism and joie de vivre allowed him to overcome all difficulties. He eventually found a job, a wife, and an adopted daughter (handicapped), whom he and his wife sent to university and saw become a successful lawyer. On his sixty-fifth birthday, Harvie became a widow. Depressed and affected by Alzheimer’s, he went into a retirement home until an encounter with a dying person restored his peculiar optimism. This biography, narrated by actor Geoffrey Rush9 and directed by Plasticine specialist Adam Elliot, became one of the funniest and most awarded animated films of all time: the 22-minute Harvie Krumpet (2003).10

Dennis Tupicoff, in Chris Robinson, Unsung Heroes of Animation, John Libbey, London / Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 2005. 8 Chris Robinson, Unsung Heroes of Animation, John Libbey, London / Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 2005. 9 Geoffrey Rush (b. Toowoomba, 6 July 1951) was one of the best film actors of his generation. His outwardly impassive delivery adds as much quality to the film as the best musical accompaniment. 10 Coincidentally, this name sounds like Bobe Cannon’s character Christopher Crumpet. Elliot was unaware of this character. 7

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Jean-Pierre Coursodon defined the comic hero: ‘a handicapped man, only saved from annihilation by incessant stratagems typical of the oppressed, and paradoxically enormous luck’.11 It applies to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Jacques Tati, Woody Allen, and so on. The list is endless. But Harvie Krumpet is the ultimate comic hero. The others are generally outcasts, eccentric, slightly handicapped. Harvie is a really ill, really handicapped, man – a real outsider. In Elliot’s reality we are ill but we follow our treatments; we are loveless but chance might give us a wife and child; we may lose our hopes but at that point realize that we are entitled to seize the day. In short, we are alive, in this life, at this time. Adam Benjamin Elliot was born in Berwick, Victoria, on 2 January 1972 and spent his childhood in the countryside. Later his family moved to Melbourne. Adam was a very shy child and loved to pass hours drawing in his room. At school he excelled in art, English literature, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In 1996 he decided to study animation at the Victoria College of the Arts. There he created his first film, Uncle. After graduating, in 1997, he completed the other two parts of the trilogy, Cousin and Brother. Uncle is the story of a humble man, his lemon tree, his Chihuahua, and his scones. The film depicts his increasingly bleak life after his wife’s suicide and his dog’s death. Childless, he ends up dying in a home on a beautiful sunny morning, with a cup of tea in one hand and a crumpet in the other. The protagonist of Cousin (1998) is a young man suffering from a serious disease and disorders of aggression. But he has a creative mind and makes culinary creations and collects different objects. Brother (1999) is the story of two brothers with a paraplegic father. The elder brother shields the younger from bullies but drags him into transgressive acts towards their parents and animals. These films fed into Harvie Krumpet and its successor. In 2009, Elliot released the puppet animation feature Mary and Max. An eight-year-old Australian girl becomes the pen pal of a 44-year-old obese man who lives in New York.

Their exchange of letters lasts twenty years, in an unlikely but deep friendship. Mary and Max explores friendship, autism, psychiatry, alcoholism, sexual and religious differences, and much more. As an animator, Elliot was sometimes criticized for the stiffness of his characters, which have very little ‘animation’. The most important of their movements is the blinking of their eyes. The answer to such criticism is easy. If the film works with limited animation, then any more animation would be superfluous. But it’s also notable that the stiffer a character is, while his or her adventures are narrated by a voice-over, the more the film has a picture-album quality that tempers emotion and sadness.

Anthony Lucas In 2002, the ‘glorious year’ for Australia at the Annecy festival, the short Holding Your Breath, directed by Anthony Lucas (b. Melbourne, 27 February  1965) was screened in competition. It drew only a mild reaction from viewers looking for sensation but great interest from connoisseurs. The film is a gritty insight into the changing life and relationships of a girl growing up in an industrial town. Holding Your Breath had a special atmosphere and stood out for its reinvented silhouette process, giving corporality to the normally flat and sharp black figures.12 The film’s plot (by a poet, Stuart Page) was largely indefinite, leaving the viewer’s intelligence wandering among suggestive imagery and countless subtleties. It was not a surprise, then, that Lucas won the Grand Prix in 2005 for The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. The silhouette of a Victorian-era gentleman stands on a cast-iron platform high in the sky, looking out at dirigibles flying. The setting is a world of steam, revolving cogs, and gears. The beginning is visually enchanting, depicting a future-as-imagined-in-the-past.13 The rest is a relative disappointment, as the suggestiveness and originality give way to a quite predictable science-fiction plot.

Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Keaton & Cie – Les burlesques américains du ‘muet’, Seghers, Paris, 1964, p. 53. Lucas was previously best known for his clay short Slim Pickings. It is a black comedy about a starving ‘snork’ creature on a planet made of rubbish, which has to sacrifice a friendship to survive. Holding Your Breath was shot using silhouette miniatures made of sticks, leaves, aluminium foil, and glue. Lucas called this technique ‘The Shadowlands’, which he first developed while studying film at the Swinburne Film School, Melbourne. ‘The Shadowlands’ is a silhouette world of Gothic horror in which spindly figures are dwarfed by stark windswept landscapes. 13 This genre is sometimes called ‘steampunk’. Largely inspired by Jules Verne, it pervades much of the animation of Karel Zeman and Hayao Miyazaki, among others. 11 12

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And Many More In 1998 the Queensland animator Max Bannah designed and directed the memorable Winging It. A young Australian backpacking in Jordan discovers that more ties him to his family than the letters he writes. An innocent abroad, he has a minor crisis. Childhood memories of his grandfather and a sideshow alley shooting gallery guide him through. Darren Burgess (b. Adelaide, 19 June  1972) was basically an animation director for other people’s projects14 and Adam Elliot’s animation teacher. As a director, he made the sarcastic but tragic clay puppet short Tales from the Powder Room (2002). Anthony Lawrence (b. Melbourne, 20 December 1960) made various films about Plasmo (for instance, Plasmo the Bookworm, 1993), an innocent shape-changing alien. In 1996, his Plasmo: The Series was broadcast for children by the ABC and was a success. His best work was probably the bittersweet Looking for Horses (2001), about two children holidaying on a French island, surrounded by muddy sea, with their parents in marital crisis. Peter Cornwell began as a sound recordist at ABC television in Sydney. Later he moved to a small studio space and finished Ward 13 (2003). Cornwell said, ‘Hospitals are scary places, which helps make Ward 13 a little disturbing, even as I aimed to make people laugh and thrill to the hapless patient’s desperate bid to escape.’15 The success of this extremely funny slapstick short led to Cornwell directing the live-action feature The Haunting in Connecticut. The animator, sculptor, and interactive media artist Hobart ‘John’ Hughes (b. Sydney, 3 November 1954) directed Crust in 1986 and received many accolades. Two half-made, half-baked protagonists engage in a battle of ill will to be the most polite. The film is a gradual build-up of tension, hallucination building on hallucination. In 1994, Hughes directed the puppet animation series Mingo and Brutus.

Since 1987, Ann Shenfield (b. Melbourne, 21 September  1959) has made films with a distinctive lyrical and handmade quality. A Saucer of Water for the Birds (1993) is about a girl seeking to understand her grandmother’s difficult past.16 Episodes in Disbelief (1999) presents the world from a child’s perspective on time and space, sight and sightlessness, trauma and hope. Unravelling (2002) received a Certificate of Appreciation by the National Poetry Association (USA) for Splendid Use of Poetry in Film. Shenfield actually turned poet herself, writing the book You Can Get Only So Close on Google Earth (2010). Bruce Currie (b. Salisbury, Adelaide, 11 October 1957) made the much-awarded Love Song in 1999. A  rat tries its luck in the great game of love. Currie had begun his career as an independent animator in 1980, winning the AFI award for best animation in 1982 for his cut-out film Flank Breeder. Tiga (directed by Lucinda Clutterbuck, 1989) is a stunning animation about the now-extinct Tasmanian Tiger (a striped, dog-like ferocious marsupial), based on documentary footage shot in the 1930s. Clutterbuck (b. Hornsby, New South Wales, 14 September  1960) made over 20 short animations, including Walnut and Honeysuckle (2001, about the memories and poems left by a grandmother), a ten-minute personal film for the SBS Home Movies initiative. Peter Moyes (b. Sydney, 1 August  1961), a professor and essayist, was director of the Brisbane International Animation Festival for four years. His film Sunday (1992), a stylized and well-timed macabre comedy, was successful at various festivals. John Skibinski (b. Geelong, Victoria, 28 February 1957) was a Walt Disney fan as a child, which is reflected in the fluidity and detail of his style. After working a long time in London, Skibinski set up his studio in Saint Kilda (Melbourne) and produced many commercials. His personal

He worked in England too, for Aardman. Peter Cornwell, e-mailed message to Giannalberto Bendazzi, 20 January 2011. 16 ‘The film was originally to be entitled Of a World That Is No More, a reference to the book of the same name by I. J. Singer [. . .]To a large extent my own identity has been unconsciously moulded by the experience of my parents and grandparents during World War II. This trickle-down effect of the Holocaust is what I was interested in: the psychological and emotional scars that would indelibly imprint themselves on the post-Holocaust generation. [. . .] Like Caroline Leaf, I work directly under the camera and find that this enables me to have a greater degree of spontaneity and flexibility than traditional animation and also enables me to make more fluid metamorphoses between images. These metamorphoses were often only the result of things coming to mind as I sat and worked, unlike the usually stringent task of working entirely to a storyboard. I like this unpredictability as well as the relative roughness of the animation. For instance the nightmare sequence towards the end of the film where images rapidly change from abstract form to bird to swastika, etc. was almost entirely the result of unconscious associations which I made while playing with the sand at the time under the camera.’ (Ann Shenfield, ‘A Saucer of Water for the Birds’, in Cantrills Filmnotes 73, no. 73, May 1994.) 14 15

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films include The Emu and the Sun (1989), an aboriginal legend about how the emu became flightless, and the jolly Lizard (2009), in which an Australian frilled-neck lizard’s simple attempts to get a meal escalate into a quest to stay alive.

New Zealand17 In 1990, the New Zealand government sold the National Film Unit and almost the entire staff was made redundant. However, New Zealand’s animation production continued and gradually increased. Studios of digital animation and visual effects were founded. Many studios started producing TV series and music videos, both for New Zealand and foreign markets. Meanwhile a good number of independent animators made narrative and/or experimental shorts, creating an interesting and varied panorama for such a small country. Based in Wellington, Weta Digital was founded in 1993 by a team of young directors including Peter Jackson (the world-famous director of the blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy), Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk. The company eventually split into two parts: Weta Digital, which made visual effects, and Weta Workshop, working on physical effects. One of the studio’s first projects was creating the visual effects for Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. As the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Jackson’s remake of King Kong reached world audiences, Weta established itself as a leading visual effects company. Weta’s other Hollywood credits included I, Robot; X-Men; Bridge to Terabithia; and James Cameron’s Avatar (2010), and the studio collected a long series of Academy and BAFTA awards for visual effects. Many other studios developed CGI animation and videogames: Firehorse Films, Huhu Studios,18 Animfx NZ, Animation Research, and Another Planet. New Zealand studios and professionals are often involved in international productions. One example of this is the internationally successful Flight of the Conchords television series, produced by America’s HBO network, which had integrated animation sequences. Animation inserts also appear in the feature films by the New Zealand director Taika Waititi, such as the puppet animation scenes in Eagle Vs. Shark (2007, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival).

The first prime-time animated series in New Zealand was Bro’town, produced by Firehorse Films and funded by New Zealand on Air.19 It ran from 2004 to 2009. Designed in traditional 2D, it features a crew of Maori and Pacific Island guys living in the suburb of Morningside, Auckland. The series contains many references to New Zealander culture and was written and voiced by members of the comedy team The Naked Samoans. The role of the National Film Unit was partially taken over by the New Zealand Film Commission. Founded in 1978, the NZFC was a state organization that promoted New Zealand cinema, both at production and distribution levels. It had a section devoted to short films, including animated shorts. Many independent New Zealand animators received support from the organization. After the National Film Unit was sold, Bob Stenhouse moved from Wellington to the Lake Taupo area. Subsequently he produced animated inserts for other people’s works and five animated shorts for children. The Orchard (1996), winner of the Best Animated Short Film Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, was a traditional animation on film. His next shorts (Incredible Creature, 2001; Fisherboy, 2003; The Cheese Trap, 2007; and Captain Felonius, 2008) were made in cooperation with New Zealand on Air. They combine drawn animation with CG backgrounds. Bob Stenhouse’s son, Peter Stenhouse (1981–2011), was an animator too. Based in London, he made music videos and then animation for live stage shows. The video he made for the 125th Gala of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York was a huge success. Euan Frizzell (Canterbury Plains, 1954–Wellington, 23 September 2012) worked from 1982 to 1997 through his company, Gnome Productions. In 1992, his ten-minute The Great White Man-Eating Shark won prizes, including the Best Children’s Production at Ottawa. It’s based on a story by a children’s writer, Margaret Mahy; Frizzell also made other shorts inspired by her. In the following decade, Frizzell went back to freelancing, working on short films, documentaries, and features. A new generation of animators included James Cunningham (b. Auckland, 1973). His most famous film, Infection (2000), is the most successful short produced by the New Zealand Film Commission in terms of A-list festival

By Fabia Abati. New Zealander animators never forget their land, even when they choose a name for their production company. For example, Weta is an insect and the word in the Maori language means ‘god of ugly things’. Huhu is the largest beetle in the country. 19 NZ on Air is an independent government broadcast funding agency. Its aim is to fund innovative, visible, and valued local content. 17 18

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selections and sales. (The creatures that populate Infection had already been experimented with in Delf [1997] and Blinder [1998].) Cunningham’s Poppy won the Jury Award at SIGGRAPH 2010. It was shot on the Weta Digital motion capture soundstage.20 In Cunningham’s words: Making a computer animated short film, like anything, has its ups and downs. The most prevalent downs are the tedium (some of the work involves dull mechanical repetitious processes); loneliness (working alone all day for months on end) and having bad computer or software days where nothing seems to go right. But I definitely think these are outweighed by the ups – making one thing kick something else; being my own boss and listening to CDs all day.21 In Poppy, two New Zealander soldiers fighting in France find a little girl. One of the two wants to save her, the other doesn’t. The technology of motion capture fits the sentimental story well. The representation of the world during the conflict is simplified to essentials and the characters’ passions are expressed in all their shades. Tom Reilly (b. Auckland, October 1977) is an acclaimed director of commercials and shorts, working with clay and puppet animation. In the clay-animated commercial Thank You, Santa Claus is imprisoned in an ice block. He receives a phone call, the vibrations break the ice, and he flies off in his sleigh to give presents to children. The short Man with Issues (2004) is about an imprisoned man wearing a straitjacket. He begins a monologue in a soft tone but becomes louder and louder; finally his mobile phone rings and the man answers, revealing that he’s not a patient but a psychiatrist. The Ambassador’s Brain is a dark sci-fi comedy in clay animation. A prolific maker of music videos, Greg Page is known for Decaff, a short movie that became a cult. Decaff is a bad-tempered man who does ‘what you wish you could but never would’. Its success in 1994 led to the clay man returning in Decaff II (1997). Several filmmakers and artists choose animation to develop their aesthetics. Soaring, Roaring, Diving by Miriam

Harris won the Best Experimental Film Award at the Brooklyn International Animation Film Festival in New York (2009). ‘It comprises loosely associational images in a seemingly casual or poetic relation to one another, thereby encouraging a free play of the mind outside of linear structures.’22 Combining drawn animation, 3D CGI, and Super 8, it explores childhood memories on a South Pacific island. Water is used as a metaphor, an essence where memories emerge and sink, set to the beautiful sound design: a carillon song, washing, the sounds of a day at the beach. Dan Inglis (b. Te Awamutu, 16 November 1974) made experimental films mixing video footage, animation, and visual effects. His most famous titles are Shall I Be Mother? (2006), Mind Your Eyes (2007), and The Ballad of the Flaxford Girl. Facsimile (2009) ‘represented the human receptor as a distanced, alienated subject caught somewhere between technology and self. Made in wide-screen 16.9 aspect ratio as a technological approximation of the human field of vision, Facsimile progressed through associations of sound, vision and text, each commenting on the other to create something intangibly recognizable.’23 X.O.Genesis, by artists James Robinson (b. Christchurch, 1972) and Rowan Wernham (b. 1980) is ‘an interplanetary creation and destruction myth’.24 The Parasitic Fantasy Band is an artist performance duo composed of Eve Gordon and Sam Hamilton. Their work combines live performance, music, and film projection. Lively Lovely (and the Rest) mixes puppet animation and sewing machine holes in 16mm. Their most successful work is Blue Tide, Black Water, about the chemical reaction between molecules – a poetic representation of a natural microcosm. Rip, Drip, Tear, the first non-student film by Janette Goodey (b. 6 October  1973) interprets the atonal string quartet piece Gnarled by composer Claire Scholes. Made in three movements, the film uses the material properties of paper and ink to explore the theme of creation and the textural relationship between sound and visuals. Raewyn Turner is an interdisciplinary artist. The focus of her work is the investigation of human senses; her exhibitions are based on cross-sensory perception. They

Cunningham is highly qualified in CG animation, having been the technical director at Weta for the production of The Lord of the Rings. He is also 3D course leader at Media Design School, an important animation and visual effects new media school in New Zealand. 21 Infection press kit, sent from NZFC, 2000. 22 Martin Rumsby, ‘Diary of a Viewer: Part 4’, Illusions, July 2010. 23 Rumsby, ‘Diary of a Viewer: Part 4’. 24 Rumsby, ‘Diary of a Viewer: Part 4’. 20

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involve video, colour, smell, objects, and live performance. Her works have been shown at many national and international events. The animated trilogy New Educational Series (2006–2009), directed by Jill Kennedy (b. Glasgow, UK, 1981) is comprised of the shorts Canaries in Colour (2007), Better Military Modelling (2008), and At Home With the Ants (2009). They are a cooperation between the Norwegian Museums Sørlandets Kunstmusem and  Agder naturmuseum og botanisk hage. The films, educational films with artistic and experimental elements, look for common ground between an

25

Miriam Harris, notes sent to Fabia Abati, 2010.

art museum and a museum of natural history. Kennedy’s eclectic, ironic work uses illustrations, live action, photos, and music. Her other films include Recent Discoveries (2009), Pop Party (2008), and One Minute Enlightenment (2010). Lisa Reihana is one of New Zealand’s most famous contemporary artists. In her works she investigates indigenous identity and bicultural living. Her installations are collages of diverse media: animation, video, sculpture, and photography. Her film Wog Features (1990) ‘uses animation and live-action to address racism in culture and gender. This politicised look at culture is almost on the edge of profanity.’25

8

ISSUES

Music Videos1 Music videos changed the way we listen to songs. Since their beginnings, traced back to the three-to-eight-minute mini-features showcasing Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Bing Crosby,2 music videos were meant to be interpretations of a song and they were meant to be art. There are performance-driven videos, narrative videos, gothic videos, classic portraiture; there are futuristic videos and personal home movies; and there are animated music videos. Early examples include Talking Heads’ And She Was (  Jim Blashfield, 1985). It seems to visualize a girl’s drug trip, probably on LSD, as she sees a neighbourhood from above (her feet are often visible). The film uses paper cut-out objects. The same year saw Joni Mitchell’s Good Friends, also made by Jim Blashfield in a similar style. A-ha’s Take on Me (Steve Barron, 1985) takes a real girl into a comic-strip world, turning her and the male singer into monochrome, rotoscoped drawings. Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing (Steve Barron, 1985) used early computer-animated characters. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer (1986) was a collaboration between Stephen Johnson, the Brothers Quay, Nick Park, and Aardman Animations. It won many prizes at the MTV Video Music Awards.3 The video ends with a

crowd of people rotating around Peter Gabriel, including Gabriel’s daughters Anna and Melanie, the animators themselves, and director Stephen Johnson’s girlfriend. The two oven-ready headless turkeys dancing to a flute were animated by Nick Park. In 1972, the young Ian Emes (b. Handsworth, UK, 1949) made4 his first animation, inspired by Pink Floyd’s song One of These Days, called French Windows. Two years later, Emes was invited by the band to work on their first animated film, based on the music of the album The Dark Side of the Moon, to be displayed at the concerts (still remembered by Pink Floyd fans for the ‘Time’ sequence). At that time, Emes was a young artist with a degree from Birmingham College of Art; he was also a self-taught animator. In 1976, he provided animations of Tubular Bells for Mike Oldfield and Heart’s Right for Roger Daltrey. He also made the sophisticated, hand-animated Oriental Nightfish (1977), based on the song by Linda McCartney and Wings. Its visual dynamism and metamorphosis anticipate the animated sequences of the Pink Floyd feature The Wall (1982)5 by Alan Parker and Gerald Scarfe. The ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part II’ sequence features rows of marching red and black hammers. Beginning in the early 1980s, the London-based Giblets was an animation collective specializing in short films,

By Cinzia Bottini. J. Ayeroff, ‘Foreword’, to S. Reiss, N. Feineman, eds, Thirty Frames per Second: The Visionary Art of the Music Video, Abrams New York, 2000, p. 13. 3 In 1987, it won nine MTV Video Music Awards, which was a record. MTV announced that Sledgehammer was the most played music video in the channel’s history and it was declared as MTV’s number-one animated video of all time. (MTV: Top Ten Animated Videos Countdown, 28 June 1998.) 4 ‘With no thought to its prospects other than the joy of making it.’ http://www.ianemes.com/film/french_windows/. 5 In The Wall (1982) feature, the animation is used to give life to the protagonist’s nightmares that refer to his past, present, and future. Particularly beautiful is a flower sequence that metaphorically depicts sexual love between a woman and a man or, more correctly, the dominance of the female physical organ over the male. 1 2

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music videos, and motion graphics. The group had success with Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite (1988), made in clay animation. Among the most original music video directors of the 1980s is the Pole Zbigniew Rybczynski (the Oscar and Annecy Festival winner for Tango), who won prizes such as the MTV Video Music Award and Billboard Music Video Award. He made several music videos: Art of Noise’s Close – To the Edit (1984); Pet Shop Boys’ Opportunities – Let’s Make Lots of Money (1985); The Alan Parsons Project’s Stereotomy (1986); Lou Reed’s The Original Wrapper (1986); and Supertramp’s I’m Beggin You (1987). Rybczynski rarely used hand-drawn animation, preferring the rhythmic cutting of live-action and photos. From the 1990s, many musicians asked video directors to use animation. Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms (1985) has charcoal drawing images of soldiers and war, and a field of crosses dominated by two hands playing a guitar in the sky. Radiohead’s Paranoid Android (1997) was animated by Magnus Carlsson, the Swedish creator of the series Robin (Radiohead were fans of the show). Paranoid Android features Robin and his friend Benjamin venturing into the world and running into miserable EU representatives, bullying pub patrons, a sort of man-ventriloquist, tramps, deranged businessmen, mermaids, and a tennis-playing angel. The main theme of the video seems to be violence all around, culminating in pieces of flesh being cut from a fat man. The simple style and bold colours underline the nonsense of it all. MTV vice president of music Lewis Largent told Spin Magazine that ‘you can watch Paranoid Android a hundred times and not figure it all out’.6 U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me (Kevin Godley and Maurice Linnane, 1995), from the Batman Forever soundtrack album, animates the Irish band performing in Gotham City (interspersed with clips from the film). Run Wrake made the animation accompaniment for U2’s PopMart Tour in 1997, mixing a retro style with Pop art and graffiti. Wrake also worked for U2’s Vertigo tour (2005),

George Michael’s Live 25 tour (2006), and maintained a special relationship with DJ and producer Howie B, making a series of videos: Music for Babies (1996), Buttmeat (1996), Angels Go Bald: Too (1997), and Maniac Melody (1998). Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ Runnin’ Down a Dream (1989) has the singer enter the dream world of Winsor McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo. In 1995, the famed Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao made a six-minute music video for the Japanese singers Chage  & Aska called On Your Mark7 (Miyazaki Hayao, 1995). Made by his Ghibli Studio, it has its usual high production values. In a giant future city, two policemen discover an unconscious winged girl, whom they try to save. At one point, they all seem to perish, but the story resets and gives them another chance. The final shot has the girl flying ecstatically into the sky as the policemen wave her farewell. Studio Ghibli also animated three music videos for the electronic Japanese duo Capsule,8 which work as a trilogy: Portable Airport (2004), Space Station No. 9 (2004), and A Flying City Plan (2005). The director was Yoshiyuki Momose, who portrays a future Japanese woman travelling through city streets, portable airports, space stations, and fashion shows. The colours are soft and light, the animation quite delicate. More elegant and refined, though, is the CG animation in U2’s I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight (2009)9 made by the Irish filmmaker David O’Reilly. The story involves several characters, including a nurse, a tramp, and a dog, with a great level of humanity and empathy. Kid Koala’s Basin Street Blues (2006)10 is a 2D animation directed by Monkmus, paying tribute to the red light district in New Orleans. The people slow-walking in the streets, the crows flying in the sky, as well as the emergence of cockroaches, are all perfectly matched to blues rhythms. Korn’s Right Now (2003)11 portrays disgusting things in far more detail than live-action. There are scenes of a man doing harmful and gross things to his body: squeezing his eyeball, removing his fingernails, scratching his bottom

Pat Blashill, ‘Radiohead: Band of the Year’, Spin, January 1998. The song is in Japanese, but the animated video was sometimes shown with an alternative English-language version by the same singers, called Castles in the Air. 8 Capsule consists of vocalist Toshiko Koshijima and producer Yasutaka Nakata. 9 Two music videos were made; the live-action one is by Alex Courtes. 10 The song was originally composed by Louis Armstrong in 1959. 11 The grotesque animation comes from Lloyd’s Lunchbox, a series of cartoons created by Spike&Mike’s Animation. A similarly grotesque music video was made for The Carpal Tunnel of Love (2007), by Fall Out Boy. Kenn Navarro directed the video, which features the cute animal characters (and splatter-heavy violence) from his Internet cartoon series Happy Tree Friends. 6

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and smelling his finger, and eating the pus from his acne. He sneezes out his lungs and finally pulls out his own skull. Interstella 5555 – The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003) is a feature-length Japanese animated musical film,12 produced by Daft Punk, Cédric Hervet, and Emmanuel de Buretel with Toei Animation, supervised by Leiji Matsumoto.13 The film is set to Discovery, an album by Daft Punk. Each track from the album is animated as an episode in a story of the abduction and rescue of an interstellar blue-skinned pop band. (It includes four separate music videos made in 2001: One More Time, Aerodynamic, Digital Love, and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.) It includes many elements from Matsumoto’s animation, such as romanticized noble sacrifice. The Gorillaz were more a musical project than a simple band. They were created by British musician Damon Albarn and the British cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, the cocreator of the ‘Tank Girl’ strip. Gorillaz consists of the music itself and an extensive fictional universe. The band consists of four animated members: 2D (lead vocalist, keyboard), Murdoc Niccals (bass guitar), Noodle (guitar, keyboard, and occasional vocals), and Russel Hobbs (drums and percussion). Their fictional universe is explored through the band’s Web site, music videos, and other media. Among their most popular videos is Clint Eastwood (Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland, 2001). The band plays in a cemetery while zombie gorillas awake. Gothic elements and in-jokes are common in Gorillaz videos. Feel Good Inc. (2005) suggests mental prisons and how to escape them. 2D, Russel, and Murdoc play while trapped in a looming tower resembling a cigarette. Noodle plays an acoustic guitar while flying on a small floating island, seemingly kept aloft by a windmill.14 According to a DVD commentary, the creators wanted to ‘make the island seem as if it sprung from the mind of a child’.15 In Radiohead’s 2+2=5 (2003)16, the video depicts cutout paper people walking in a cut-out paper city. The frantic animation matches the crescendo of the song. Talvin

Singh’s Ok (Paul Donnellon, 1998) used animated photomontage. Clay animation figured in Green Jellÿ’s Three Little Pigs,17 directed by Fred Stuhr, with smoking pigs, an appearance by Rambo, and a Harley Davidson-riding wolf. Stuhr is also the director of Tool’s Sober music video (1993), which has a strong resemblance to the work of the Brothers Quay. The characters were designed by Adam Jones. A small humanoid lives in an old room in an abandoned mansion. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and enigmatic. Chevelle’s Mia (1999) resembles Tool’s video, though the scenery is less dark. Other clay animated videos are The Housemartins’ Happy Hour (1986), Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite (1986), Michael Jackson’s Speed Demon (1987), ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s Jurassic Park (1993),18 and Pain’s Just Hate Me (2002). The melancholy Kenna’s Hell Bent (2003)19 depicts a factory worker in a grey world full of skyscrapers. He finally invents glasses through which the world appears to be full of colours and joy. New Found Glory’s All Downhill from Here (2004) also used clay and was directed by a group of French animators, along with Meiert Avis. The band is on a platform, gradually rising until they reach an odd representation of heaven. The Lovely Sparrows’ Take Care (Eric Power, 2009)20 is a sweet and delicate music video in which small objects convey a deeper meaning. Judas Priest chose an animated puppet skeleton for two of their videos: Locked In (2003) and Turbo Lover (2003). Placebo’s English Summer Rain (2004, Grégoire Pinard) shows the pain of a sad puppet. Rotoscoping is used in the above-mentioned Take on Me by A-ha, in Howard Jones’ You Know I Love You . . . Don’t You? (Wayne Isham, 1986), and in Everything but the Girl’s Driving (Michael Geoghegan, 1990). Linkin Park’s Breaking the Habit (Joe Hahn, 2004)21 rotoscopes the band in the style of anime. Duran Duran’s Someone Else Not Me (Fullerene, 2000) is the first video that uses Flash animation. It was followed

In 2003, the film was screened at the Cannes Festival in the section Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. Other team members were Kazuhisa Takenouchi, Hiroshi Nissen, and Daisuke Nishio. 14 The flying island was inspired by Miyazaki Hayao’s 1986 animated feature Laputa Castle in the Sky. 15 The Demon Days limited edition album DVD. 16 The song’s alternative title is ‘The Lukewarm’. 17 The video was a hit on MTV, receiving an MTV Music Award and a Billboard Music Award nomination. 18 The animation is done mostly with clay animation by Mark Osborne and Scott Nordlund. It is in the style of Will Vinton’s Dinosaurs! – A Fun-Filled Trip Back in Time! It’s also a parody of the 1993 live-action blockbuster and was approved by that film’s director, Steven Spielberg. 19 The clay animation was originally an Oscar-nominated short called More by Mark Osborne. 20 Eric Power also directed The Lovely Sparrows’ Year of the Dog (2008), another touching music video. 21 Kazuto Nagasawa, who had previously directed the animated segment of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1, supervised the video. It was a favourite amongst MTV viewers and won the 2004 MTV Viewer’s Choice Award (VMA). 12 13

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by The Corrigan Brothers’ There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama (2008) and the same band’s An Irishman Invented Rock & Roll (2009). Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun (Howard Greenhalgh, 1994) uses sophisticated computer effects underlining the video’s sinister atmosphere. Mouths, eyes, and other features all extend and contract. One expert in digital technology is the French group H5, a graphics and animation studio consisting of Ludovic Houplain and Antoine Bardou-Jacquet. Their works include Royksopp’s Remind Me (2002),22 Goldfrapp’s Twist (2003), Audiobullys’s The Things (2003), and Massive Attack’s Special Cases (2003). Pixilation is used in Junior Senior’s Move Your Feet (Shynola, 2003)23 and in Architecture in Helsinki’s Do the Whirlwind (Paul Robertson, 2005). Shynola is a group of four visual artists (Gideon Baws, Chris Harding, Richard Kenworthy, and Jason Groves)24 based in London. It has collaborated on acclaimed music videos for several pioneering artists. They include Quannum’s I Change My Mind (featuring Lyrics Born  & The Poets of Rhythm, 1999), U.N.K.L.E.’s Eye for an Eye (2001), Morcheeba’s Otherwise (2002), and Blur’s Good Song (codirected by David Shrigley, 2003). Shynola’s minimalist style is mostly made of black lines on a white background. Shynola’s most demanding project was making many i-blip for Radiohead’s Kid A album (2000). These were very short clips, 20 to 40 seconds long, for Web users: Everything In Its Right Place, Kid A, In Limbo, Idioteque, Morning Bell, Motion Picture Soundtrack, Greenchildren, The National Anthem, How To Disappear Completely, Treefingers, and Optimistic. They are absorbing thanks to their evocative atmospheres, which are aesthetically near video art. Faithless’ Music Matters (Luis Nieto, 2007) is a beautiful abstract music video. Against a black background, animals, humans, and skeletons dance and run to the music. Samantha Fox’s I Promise You (Get Ready) (1987) and INXS’ New Sensation (1988) draw directly on film in some stills.

Japan’s Studio 4°C made anime-style music videos: Ken Ishii’s Extra (1996), The Bluetones’ Four Day Weekend (1998), Glay’s Survival (1999), Ayumi Hamasaki’s Connected (2002), Hiraku Utada’s Passion (2006), and the Russian hip-hop artist Ligalize’s Pervyi Otryad (First Squad, 2007). 3D computer animation was used in Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication (2000), which takes the form of a PC video game. The band members meet at the centre of the Earth. Arcade Fire’s Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) (2005) was produced by Plates Animation. Several youngsters wearing hooded jackets try to cut power lines to a snowy 1920s city while old men chase them. Plates Animation also made The Shins’ So Says I (2003), in which communist penguins fight their capitalist counterparts. Jamiroquai’s (Don’t) Give Hate A Chance (2005) pays homage to Cavandoli’s La Linea. So does Gigi D’Agostino’s 3D CGI The Riddle (2000); his Silence (2004) portrays a classic duel between two gunfighters. Crazy Frog, originally called The Annoying Thing, is a computer-animated character25 by Erik Wernquist. It became successful with the single hits Axel F (2005), Popcorn (2005), and We Are the Champions (Ding a Dang Dong) (2006). The character spawned merchandise, toys, and two video games. The characters and story of Creed’s Bullets (2002) were developed by Vision Scape Interactive.26 A  computergenerated winged angel fights demons. The video has the typical Creed stamp of Salvador Dalí surrealism. Morcheeba’s27 Enjoy the Ride (2008) is a beautiful turquoise-coloured computer short featuring mythical creatures. Since Paranoid Android, Radiohead has often chosen to have animated music videos. Go to Sleep (Alex Rutterford, 2003) is a CGI animated video with buildings crumbling into pieces and reassembling themselves. Pyramid Song (Collective Shynola, 2001) combines computer and hand-drawn animation, based on a dream by singer Thom Yorke. A flood survivor dives into a sunken, ruined city.28

It won the MTV Europe Award for Best Video in 2002. It shows low-resolution pixel art, produced using Deluxe Paint. 24 They met in 1994 at the Kent Institute of Art and Design. They collaborated on art projects during their time at college, including organizing a show at a London gallery in 1996 called ‘Shynola’. Gideon Baws died in 2008. 25 The animation was originally created to accompany a sound effect produced by Daniel Malmedahl while attempting to imitate the sound of a two-stroke moped engine. 26 The same team made games such as Twisted Metal 4. 27 Featuring Judy Tzuke. 28 The story is similar to the one in Kunio Katoˉ’s Tsumiki no Ie (‘The House of Small Cubes’), Oscar 2008, Crystal d’Annecy 2008, made seven years later. 22 23

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There There29 (Chris Hopewell, 2003) uses model animation. Yorke enters a forest at night, witnessing a cat marriage and squirrels in a living room. He is tempted by a golden jacket but ends up transformed into a tree with a screaming face. The Icelandic singer Björk started collaborating with French director Michel Gondry in 1993 with Human Behaviour.30 It features a stunning hand-built forest, combining animation with rear-screen projection. Björk’s I Miss  You (1997) was directed by John Kricfalusi and is an homage to classic Hollywood animation. Other Björk videos include the surreal Bachelorette (Michel Gondry, 1997), the erotic All Is Full of Love (Chris Cunningham, 1999, in which Björk is a CGI android), and the multi-changing forms of Nature Is Ancient (LynnFox, 2002) The same singer’s Earth Intruders (2007) is by the French director Michel Ocelot and uses silhouette animation. Tribal warriors march and dance on the savannah, with Björk’s face floating in the background. Wanderlust (2008)31 was directed by Encyclopedia Picture in New York in stereoscopic 3D. It has large-scale puppets, live-action acrobatics, miniatures, and CGI. Björk is in ancient Mongolian tribal costume, floating with yaks down a river she creates. Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 1996) is an amazing video inspired by Georges Méliès’ silent Le Voyage dans la lune. It uses theatre-style backdrops and primitive special effects, better called visual tricks. The directors used a combination of an antique hand-cranked camera and modern technology. Dayton and Faris also directed Oasis’ All around the World (1997), parodying the Beatles fantasy Yellow Submarine. The White Stipes’ Fell in Love with a Girl (Michel Gondry, 2002) animated Lego bricks. Steriogram’s Walkie Talkie Man (2004), another Gondry video, has children knitting instruments and equipment while the band is terrorized by an enormous wool hand. Sezen Aksu’s Kalasnikof (‘Kalashnikov’) consists of beautiful animated drawings by Meral Okay, Goran Bregovic, and Cemal Erez. In Regina Spektor’s Us (Adria Petty, 2006), the singer plays the piano, walks amid newspaper cutouts, and has fun with animated objects. The background colours and some references in the cut-out figures

echo Jan Lenica’s style. Petty also directed Regina Spector’s Laughing With (2009), referring to Magritte and Dalí. The above-mentioned Eric Power directed AM Syndicate’s To the Peasants of the Emperor (2007), animating wool puppets, and Marquis of Vaudeville’s Bright Star Hope (2009). In the latter, a boy and girl run through a world of rocks, mountains, clouds, trees, and magical creatures. Coldplay’s Strawberry Swing (Shynola, 2009) depicts singer Chris Martin as a superhero, humorously battling through a chalk-drawn world (and past a monster squirrel) to save a girl, another drawing. Kerry from Shynola comments: First and foremost we really wanted it to be nonsensical and almost dream-like. We also knew the technique itself would also be a lot for the eye to take in. So when we had the idea of a day with a superhero on some weird adventure, we chose to frame the journey with a very simple, easy-to-understand narrative: superhero saves girl from baddy.32 In the first decade of the new century, new creators included Jonas Odell (b. Stockholm, 1962), whose graphic, coloured, and cut-out style is harmonized with the rhythm and sounds of pop music (Goldfrapp’s Strict Machine, 2003; Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out, 2004; Audio Bullys’ Shot You Down, 2005). Chris Milk was probably the most innovative video director working at the time. His Johnny Cash Project allowed everybody to animate the video on the Internet, while 3 Dreams of Black rendered everything in real-time 3D. Weweremonkeys, established by Mihai Wilson (director) and Marcella Moser (producer), made videos of astonishing beauty and visual clarity: Coheed and Cambria’s The Broken, 2010; Land of Talk’s It’s Okay, 2010; and Of Monsters and Men’s Little Talks, 2012.

Stereoscopy33 The origins of stereoscopic film can be traced back to the 1920s. However, it became a fad (and an anti-TV weapon

The video was filmed at one-quarter regular speed. It looks jumpy, as if some of its frames are missing. It received an award for art direction at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards. 30 The video is loosely based on Goldilocks (Björk is hunted by a bear) and also comparable to Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog. 31 The video was choreographed by Chris Elam, artistic director of Misnomer Dance, and features Brynne Billingsley and Coco Karol. It won Best Art Direction, Best Alternative/Indie Video, and Video of the Year at the 2008 UK Music Video Awards. 32 Interview with Kerry, http://www.coldplay.com/newsdetail.php?id=448, 16/11/10. Retrieved on 10 March 2012. 33 By Sahra Kunz, Maureen Furniss, Lara Ermacora, Michal Husák, Giannalberto Bendazzi, and Dennis Tupicoff. 29

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of cinemas) in the 1950s, mainly in the creation of horror and sensational productions.34 But stereoscopy also died in the 1950s and didn’t revive until the 1980s, when a few films launched a new ’3D mania’. Once again, the titles were mostly horror or suspense productions: Friday the 13th Part III (1982), Jaws 3D (1983), and Amytiville 3-D (1983), the latter directed by Richard Fleischer. In earlier decades, most stereoscopic work was liveaction. In the twenty-first century, though, animation led the way. This is not so surprising, given the growth of CGI animation techniques in the 1990s and the development of visual effects through motion capture. Stereoscopy can be seen as an extension of these kinds of three-dimensionality, heightening the fantasy element of that space. Motion pictures have been given this extra dimension in various ways. Some have been originally created in stereo, but in other cases they were converted after initial production. Disney has converted several of its titles, both model animation (Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, converted in 2006) and traditional animations such as Beauty and the Beast (converted in 2012) and The Lion King (converted in 2011). Pixar, like other major Hollywood studios specializing in CGI animated features (DreamWorks, Blue Sky, etc.), eventually began releasing its new films in stereoscopic versions on some screens while releasing ‘flat’ versions to others. The first ‘new’ Pixar film to be handled this way was Up (2009). The studio’s previous films have also been reissued in stereoscopic form, such as the first Toy Story in 2009.

The Audience’s Literacy Fraser McLean notes: While many of the 3D movies produced in the 1950s played primarily on the novelty of the technique, the visual grammar understood by contemporary audiences extends far beyond both television and advertising, into the more dimensional and immersive worlds of gaming and full-scale computer simulation.35

This contemporary audience demands a fully immersive and cinematic experience, not just the thrill of some object exploding or flying across the screen. Revenue from such films rose visibly from the mid-2000s. Disney released two films in stereoscopic 3D, Chicken Little (2005), directed by Mark Dindal, and Meet the Robinsons (2007), directed by Stephen J. Anderson. Although they were released only two years apart, it is interesting to see the increase in box office results. Chicken Little was released on 84 screens, and 5.5  percent of its gross came from 3D screens (which only represented 2.1  percent of total screens). Meet the Robinsons was released on 581 screens, of which 14 percent were in 3D, and the film managed to get 31.6 percent of its revenue from this format.36 Subsequent animated films grossed more and more in stereoscopic 3D.

Optical Perception and Film Language From an aesthetic point of view, one problem is that stereoscopy does not actually recreate the sensation of a ‘real’ environment. Its images are clear on all planes of action, as opposed to the soft focus that humans experience as they shift their vision through space.37 This may account for the fact that stereo has been used increasingly for animation and in films employing sensational effects (such as horror, science fiction, and – predictably – pornography). It is less common to see dramas and documentaries in stereo. A sign of a real breakthrough in the production of stereoscopic animation, which could foreshadow a shift in the creation of animated movies, was announced in January 2012 by a Canadian company, Janro Imaging Lab, in conjunction with IMAX. The software these companies developed, called SANNDE (Stereoscopic Animation Drawing Device) lets animators draw in three dimensions using a motion-tracking pen, or ‘Wand’, and watch their drawn creations come to life in real-time stereoscopic 3D. The result is a complete stereoscopic effect with the graphic charm of hand-drawn animation. Although this software was developed originally by IMAX in the early

Examples from the early 1950s include House of Wax (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), 35 Fraser McLean, Setting the Scene: The Art & Evolution of Animation Layout, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2011, p. 210. 36 Ron Gillen, The Hybrid Theatre, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Burbank, California, 2008, p. 5. 37 Donald E. Simanek, ‘The Illusion of Reality in Stereoscopy’ in Lock Haven University. Online at http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/3d/ stereo/reality.htm. Retrieved on 12 February 2012. 34

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1990s (and used to create one IMAX short, Paint Misbehavin’), the company licensed it to the National Film Board of Canada for use and future development. There at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, Munro Ferguson (b. New York, 12 December 1960) directed the short Falling in Love Again in 2003. It is about a man and a woman who jump into space because of a car crash; they fall in love falling to the ground. This short relies strongly on the use of depth. The two characters are always shown in long-shots; the audience sees their whole bodies coming from the screen and flying over their heads. Towards the end of the movie there are two other remarkable shots. The first shows the two characters falling down upon the camera (and thus upon the audience). The second shows the two characters falling to the ground towards the shot’s vanishing point. The director commented: ‘This technique, drawing in space, it will be a new form of art, halfway between the picture and sculpture.’ Ferguson made another film, June, before beginning to teach SANDDE’s operation at the NFB. Paul Morstad (b. Edmonton, Alberta, 24 October 1970), influenced by Ferguson’s achievement, created New Moon (2004) using SANDDE. In the first shots we see a small wooden house on the top of a cliff over the sea and an old sailor on his boat; the images are peaceful. Suddenly, a three-dimensional seagull breaks into the image. This is a new way to speak to the audience; the director is saying that stereoscopy needs us to ‘interact’ with the scenes. Outside Canada, other directors also worked with stereoscopy. Michal Husák (b. ceské Budeˇjovice, Czech Republic, 1967) taught computer graphics at the Prague Institute of Chemical Technology. He also worked on the stereoscopic visualization software R&D for Lightspeed Design Company in Seattle. In addition, he was the technical director of GALI-3D Inc., a Czech company specializing in 3D stereo visualization technologies supply and filmmaking. Since 2007, GALI-3D has organized the stereoscopic section of the international festival ANIFEST. Mr Egg the Great Magician (2008), a two-minute film from the Czech Republic directed by Bronislav Vavrˇinka (b. Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, 17 November  1987) was rerendered in three-dimensional form by GALI-3D. Vavrˇinka worked on short animated films; he was also involved in game graphics, CGI, 3D modeling, and 2D rendering. Originally Mr Egg the Great Magician was made in a two-dimensional CGI version; only later did Michal Husák give it stereoscopic form. In the film, an egg works as a conjurer and unsuccessfully tries to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Everything but the rabbit comes out; only when Mr. Egg turns his back does it appear. In the stereoscopic

version the objects from the hat also come out from the screen. Pump Action – An Animated Story of Corrupting Power, Sickening Abuse  & Paralysing Fear (2000) was made by Phil ‘Captain 3D’ McNally (b. Belfast, Northern Ireland, 4 February 1967). McNally was introduced to stereoscopic photography in 1990 while studying at the Royal College of Art in London. This hobby became his passion and developed over the years through a range of creative projects, from Viewmaster promotional reels to gallery installations. He finished Pump Action after 14 months working alone, using Cinema 4D XL software and an Apple PowerBook G3 400. In 2001, after the success of Pump Action, McNally moved to California to work as an animator at Industrial Light & Magic. His stereoscopic experience was rewarded when Disney gave ILM the task of converting Chicken Little into a 3D release. Later McNally supervised the stereoscopic work on Disney’s Meet the Robinsons (2007, directed by Stephen J. Anderson) and advised on the conversion of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (3D version 2006, directed by Tim Burton). He then worked at DreamWorks Animation as global stereoscopic supervisor, overseeing the production of its animated films from Monsters vs. Aliens (2009, directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon). Space News (2005) is a funny short by Enrique Criado (b. La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, 13 January  1969), the cofounder and stereoscopic supervisor of Enxebre Entertainment. The film was particularly strong in exploiting the possibilities of three-dimensional spatial language. Criado was a stereographer, a stereoscopic supervisor, and a 3D technology consultant. For him, stereoscopic images were both a passion and a challenge. A self-made man, he advised both Lucasfilm and the Spanish government. Scalable City (2008) was made by Sheldon Brown (b. USA, 1962). It is a collage from satellite imagery, morphing images with algorithms and mixing the results over a stereoscopic terrain. Brown directed the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). There he was a professor of visual arts and head of new media arts for the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies. He made Scalable City at the Experimental Game Laboratory, in various art forms: as digitally produced prints, digital video installation, a sculptural piece, and a super-high-resolution cinema version. The film won Best of Show at the 2009 Stereoscopic Display and Application Conference. Ben Stassen graduated from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television and

346  Chapter 8: Machinima, Real-Time Animation

produced one of the first high-resolution computer graphics films for the big screen, Devil’s Mine Ride. In 1992 he founded Wave Picture with Eric Dillens, which became the world’s leading producer and distributor of ride and attraction films. In 1997, Stassen became interested in large-format films screened at IMAX theatres, blending computer-generated digital imagery and live-action photography in 3D. His successful works include Thrill Ride: The Science of Fun (1997), Alien Adventure (1999), and Haunted Castle (2001). In 2008, he released a stereoscopic animated feature, Fly Me to the Moon. Facing Champlain (2008), directed by Jean-François Pouliot, depicts the history of Canada. It was the first film to integrate live-action, special effects, and traditional animation. The Wobble Incident (2009), by Claire Blanchet and Sam Vipond, is a humorous look at what happened to the silent cartoon world when sound was first introduced. Phil ‘Captain 3D’ McNally speculates on the future of stereoscopic films: Here’s the bottom line: 3-D isn’t going away until we stop seeing with two eyes. Whether it’s successful now or later, 3-D will be part of visual entertainment. It’s not whether 3-D is a fad; it’s whether the technology is good enough to deliver what’s obviously the way we see the world. Do we ultimately want glasses-free, holographic, Star Trek hologram-type experiences? Well, probably, but that just confirms that in the future it’s likely going to be in an even more immersive environment. So, is it a fad? Yes. Is it going to stay forever? Yes.38

Machinima, Real-Time Animation39 The idea of identifying new technology with innovation is as common as it is wrong. It often leads to a trivial misunderstanding, according to which everyone toying with a new medium is an innovator. In fact, there are few artists capable of truly innovative use of the new tools, and only rarely does it lead to results of quality. Paul Marino, author of the first book dedicated to the Machinima, defines this type of production as ‘created

by recording events and performances (filmmaking) with artistically created characters moved over time (animation) within an adjustable virtual environment (3D game technology platform or engine)’.40 Expanding this definition, Machinima represent the convergence of filming techniques, animation, and video game technology. It is the application of live-action cinema techniques within a virtual space. Instead of having an animator who draws a falling apple, in Machinima it is the game engine that simulates the movement. The technology allows for improvisation, as in live-action cinema or theatre. One of the main limits of Machinima lies in their origin. The exclusive use of elements taken from the gaming environment means the quality of the result is strongly anchored to the game engine. Of course they might be improved, but they still couldn’t compete with the visual quality of traditional and digital animation. The work of Machinima’s creators is closer to that of puppeteers. Most of Machinima is produced through actions and poses that the characters and digital setting were created to assume. The artist has to exploit the elements through his own creativity and skills, even if this breaks the game’s conventions. The primitive roots of Machinima can be traced to the Demoscene, which developed in computing in the late 1970s. It was an artistic subculture derived from computer science. The name refers to the production of demos, or short animations accompanied by sound effects and sometimes a real soundtrack. Another starting point was 1993, when Doom was released. The video game let players record their performance and review it later, as in a TV replay. The first true example of Machinima emerged in 1996, using the engine at the base of another game, Quake.41 Diary of a Camper was created by a group of professional players under the name of United Ranger Films. It was the first time that a dose of carefully ‘orchestrated’ fiction had been placed in a simple replay of a performance. The purpose was not to record the game, but rather to use the game graphics to tell a story through a precise choice of shots. Diary of a Camper is rough, using the crude graphics of a First Person Shooter from the early 1990s. For those who

Austin Carr, ‘DreamWorks’ Phil “Captain 3D” McNally on Megamind, James Cameron, and the Third Dimension Fad’, 4 November 2010, fastcompany.com, http://www.fastcompany.com/1699988/. 39 By Alessandro Cavaleri. 40 Paul Marino, 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima, Paraglyph, Phoenix, Arizona, 2004. 41 Quake and Doom are both classed as First Person Shooter. The player’s point of view coincides with the combatant in the game world, so the experience is mediated through an exclusively subjective shot. 38

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have no experience with the game, it is difficult to recognize Diary of a Camper as a short film, even in its intention. It represents the ‘zero grade’ of Machinima. However, it was a revelation. Many gamers tried to create short films using Quake’s game engine; these early works were called Quake movies. It was only in January 2000 that Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey invented the term ‘Machinima’, covering works created through any game, not just Quake. The phenomenon’s popularity grew, even outside video game fandom.  Influential events, such as the Sundance Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, created retrospectives devoted to the hybrid. In March 2002, the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences was founded, with the aim of developing and promoting Machinima. From 2002 to 2008, the academy ran an international festival, establishing a meeting point for the authors and more visibility for the works. Over these years, there were two trends in Machinima. Some were by players and fans of particular games titles and shared with other players and fans. Most are weak artistically, while their frequent appeals to games conventions and slang restricts their appeal. Other Machinima, though, use games as a starting point for the artists’ ambitions. Edge of Remorse, created by the young American filmmaker Jason Choi, won the World of Warcraft Summer Movie Contest 2006. In eight minutes, the film depicts the friendship between two men and a woman, which degenerates into deep rivalry. Choi built a touching and moving narrative, using the game’s aesthetic and technical limits to his advantage. There is no cloying dialogue; it is a deeply moving pantomime.

An Unfair War, directed in 2006 by the Australian filmmaker Thuyen Nguyen, avoids the frenetic MTV-like montages and soundtracks that characterize too many Machinima. Nguyen took a minimalist, direct approach to comment on the Iraq conflict. A similar film is Vietnam Romance by Eddo Stern (born in Tel Aviv but based in San Francisco), with a soundtrack of hits from the 1970s. Other shorts are funnier, such as Male Restroom Etiquette and What I Love about Xmas by Phil ‘Overman’ Rice, with intelligence and good timing. Meanwhile, Friedrich Kirschner, a German visual artist and software developer, exploited the deep essence of Machinima and made hilarious interactive performances with an open-source real-time animation tool, Moviesandbox. From 2008, however, Machinima’s popularity declined. The introduction of new game engines failed, so most Machinima stayed glued to the engines behind such games as World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, Halo 3, Second Life, and dedicated software such as Moviestorm. Most of the specialist festivals vanished; even the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences stopped its activities. The surviving events were held in online communities such as Second Life, where Machinima are a mere appendix. Finally, many good Machinima authors were recruited in the games industry to implement cut scenes,42 the narrative element of video games. For example, Paul Marino, the American author of the music video I’m Still Seeing Breen, and Michelle Pettit Mee, British author of the shorts The Snow Witch and A Mermaid’s Tale, are both employed as cinematic designers at Bioware, a Canadian software house.

The cut scenes – also known as in-game cinematics or movies – are noninteractive animated sequences in a video game. In these instances, the user cannot exercise any control over the presentation of the events by the authors (the game designers). 42

Index

1895 (Pärn/Põldma) 138, 143 1925 aka Hell (Hattler) 119 1998 (Ottoni) 180 2000 Miles ands Thirteen Years (Economou) 171 24 (TV show) 5 25 Ways to Quit Smoking (Plympton) 50 3 Dreams of Black (Chris Milk) 343 3 Misses (Driessen) 113 3 sogni (3 Dreams) 180 3 Ways to Go (Cox) 88 3, 2, 1 Cortometrajes foto a foto (3, 2, 1, Short Films Shot by Shot) 319 4000 images foetales (4000 Fetal Images; Girerd) 100 458nm (Weber/Bitzer/Brunck) 117, 122 6 Days Goodbye Poems of Ophelia (JoWOnder) 82 60 Seh-Kunden (Anibas) 126 627 Romans dz˙entelmena (627th Novel of a Gentleman) 151 64 Zoo Lane (Vrombat) 80 78 tours (78 R.P.M.) 127 8 Bot (Youssef Bahji) 291 A.Li. Ce (Maejima) 237 Aaberge, Aage 133 Aahhh!!! Real Monsters 52 A + E (Nikolova) 170 Abad, Javier 187 Abashar, Nisren 295 Abdelnour, Nashla 316 Abdraimov, Izat 265 Abductees (Vester) 36 Abdulhafiz, Amed 254 Abenobashi maho shotengai (Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobshi) 225 A Biahme Krushi (And Pears We Were) 169 – 70 Abrahams, Camille Selvon 314 Abreu, Alê 322

Abrimos los domingos (Let’s Open the Sundays) 311 Abstracted Reflections (S. Schmid) 332 Abulafya, Yossi 249 Accordéon (Accordion; Cournoyer) 56 Ace o nerae! (Aim for the Ace!) 228, 229 Acero inoxidable (Stainless Steel) 319 Ackerley, J. R. 32 Acrofobia (Taciu) 171 Adagio (Albinoni) 207 Adaimy, Emile 258 Adam et Ramzi (series) 291 Adams, John 34, 60 Adamson, Andrew 14 Adazhio (Bardin) 207 Addis, Mario 184 Adel and Media (Basheer) 291 Adeleye, Mike Steve 299 Adeus (Goodbye) 320 Adewumi, Oluwatoyin 299 Adrar 13 (Basheer) 291 Adult Day Return (Parker) 81 Adventure of Guédé, The (Diabaté) 296 Adventure of Khalfan Looking for Coffee 261 Adventures of Alayo – Wishfood Thinking (Oluwafemi) 299 Adventures of André & Wally B. 14, 19 Adventures of Dr. Kleiman (Klaybow Films) 306 Adventures of El Moran (Mwaniki) 301 Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, The (Nickelodeon animated series) 25 Adventures of Penking and Liking (Baek Sung-kyun/Min Kyung-jo) 268 Adventures of Son Tinh 282 Adventures of Tenali Raman,The (Toonz) 279 Æblet og ormen (The Apple and the Worm) 131 Aeg maha (Time Out) 141 Æon Flux (Chung) 7, 268

350  Index

Aeroplanas (Aeroplane) 148 Aeterna – Requiem Op. KV 626 W.A. Mozart (Carrano) 184 A fény pillanata (The Advent of Light) 163 Affection of Sisterly (Mizue) 246 Africa Animated! Project (UNESCO) 301 Afrika (Andriamirija) 302 Afro Samurai (Studio Gonzo) 226 After Hours (television program) 151 After Oz (Kiyabu) 319 Agam Anakit (Giant Lake) 249 Agha, Akram 256 Agitated Screams of Maggots 240 A hetekik testvér (The Seventh Brother) 162 Ahmed Back Home 261 Aho, Edgar 258 A homok dala (The Song of the Sand) 164 Ahond, A line 105 Ah Pook Is Here! (Hunt) 88 Ahvi aasta (Year of the Monkey) 139 Aida Makoto 238 Aim for the Ace! (Madhouse) 225 Ainutdinov, Sergey 210 A Is for Autism (Webb and Arnall) 79 Aiutdism (Ainutdinov) 210 Aja meistrid (The Kings of Time) 140 Aka no michi (Scarlet Road) 244 Akage no Ann (Redhead Ann) 217, 221 Akai megane (The Red Spectacles) 230 Akbar’s Cheetah (Gardner) 79 Akhundov, Elchin Hami 176 Akira (Otomo Katsuhiro) 225, 231 Åkra, Astrid 135 Akroma 296 Aksak Kulan (Danenov) 263 Akvatoria (Aquatoria) 170 Aladdin (Disney) 12, 13, 22 Alam Simsim (Sesame Street) 259 Alamaya – Garden of Beautiful Creatures (Shock 3D) 284 Alani, Omar Kawan 254 À la recherche d’Adèle (Looking for Adele) 126 Alarcón, Cristian 319 Alassane, Moustapha 293 Albarn, Damon 137, 341 Albatross, The (Bush) 74 Albie (Cosgrove Hall Films) 90 Alcock, Bruce 58 – 9 Alcolin Glue (van Blerk) 307 Aldashin, Mikhail 199, 201 – 3 Aldrich, Robert 48 Ale I Bauci (Ogres and Bogies) 168

Alemu, Yohanes 395 Al encuentro con Jesús (Encountering  Jesus) 319 Alex (Motion Pictures) 188 Alexander 268 Alexeev, Alexey 165 Alexeieff, Alexandre 63 – 4, 183, 211 Alf Youm wa Youm (1001 Days) 258 Al-Fatiha Musulmanskaya Mulitva (Alfatiha. The Muslim Prayer) 207 Algeria Is History & Civilization (Basheer) 291 Algorithmen (Algorithms) 124 Algozhin, Samat 263 Ali et Bibi (Ali and Bibi) 296 Alias/Wavefront 63 Alibaud, Pablo 326 Alibekov, Sergey 264 Alice i Plasmalandet (Alice in Plasmaland) 131 Alice in Wonderland (Burton) 27 Alien Adventure (Stassen) 346 Alimorad, Abdollah 261 Aljassani, Laith 259 Alkabetz, Gil 112, 117 – 18 Alkalbi, Said 261 All around the World (Oasis) 343 All Dogs Go to Heaven (Sullivan Bluth Studio) 90, 253 All Downhill from Here (New Found Glory) 341 All Is Full of Love (Björk) 343 All My Relations (Priestly) 46 – 7 All People is Plastic (Hund) 126 All the Wrong Reasons (Scher) 39 Allah’ın Sadık Kulu-Barlai (Allah’s Loyal Subject-Barla) 255 Allegro ma non troppo (Sowa) 151 Allegro Vivace (Reisenbüchler) 163 Allers, Roger 12 Allra mest tecknat (Most Drawn) 131 Al Manouri, Mouhssin 291 Almas Chamas (Soul in Flames) 321 Al Najm 256 Alois Nebel (Lunˇ ák) 161 À l’ombre du voile (In the Shadow of the Veil; Demuynck) 104 Alosha Popovich i Tugarin Zmey (Alosha Popovich and Tugarin Dragon) 206 Alpamayo 319 Alphamorphosis (Baldwin) 324 Alpomysh (Tulakhojaev) 264 Al-Rajoul Al-Hazeen (SadMan) 258 Al Shaqsi, Mohamed 261 Als je begrijpot wat ik bedoel (Dexter the Dragon & Bumble the Bear) 112

Index  351

Alternative Fringe (Guard) 70 Alt, Sander 113 Altman, Vivian 302 Álvarez, Hugo 326 Al-Watwat wa Al-Sununu (The Bat and the Swallow) 258 Al-Yasiri, Faisal 258 Am Land (On the Land) 126 Amano Yoshitaka 230 Amarcord 53 Amazing Nuts (Studio 4°C) 223 Ambani, Anil D. 279 Ambassador’s Brain, The (Reilly) 337 Ameglio, Carlos 330 Ambvi Aleksandre makedonilis cxenisa (The Story of Alexander the Great’s Horse) 174 Ame no hi (Imagination) 242 American Dad! 9 American Dog 22 American Tail, An: Fievel Goes West (Amblimation) 320 Amerykan´ski Sen (American Dream) 152 Amok (Amuck) 128 Among Strangers (Wilson) 96 Amore Baciami (Harrison) 80 Amourette (Lust to Dust) 129 Amytiville 3-D 344 An Anna Blume’ (‘To Eve Blossom’; Schwitters) 298 An Bonnán Buí (The Yellow Bittern; Pieperhoff) 95 An Cailleach Bhéarra (The Old Woman of Beara; Wilson) 91, 96 Ana (Carrera) 311 ANA 747 (Soto) 319 Anahit (Robert Sahakyants Production Studio) 174 Anak-anak Sidek (Sidek’s Kids) 284 Analyse (Analysis) 108 Anam an Amhráin (Soul of the Song; Cartoon Saloon) 92 Ananiadis, Iordan 177 Ananse Tales (Animation Africa) 297 A napok, melyeknek értelmet adott a félelem (Days Filled with a Sense of Fear) 165 Anatomy for Melancholy, An (Kaplan) 81 And She Was (Talking Heads) 339 Andaluz (Priestly/Aqua) 40, 47 Andante (Kakharov) 266 Andares in Time of War (Bringas) 89 Andavabiby (Andrianasolo) 303 Anderson, Darla 21 Anderson, David 81 – 2 Anderson, Stephen J. 344 – 5 Anderson, Yvonne 40 András, Erkel 164 – 5

András, Wahorn 165 Andrei Svislotsky (Kovalyov) 52 Andrews, Kristian 88 Andriamirija, Raberanto Ramaherison 302 Andrianasolo, Thierry 303 Android Sisters, The 49 Angel (An Angel) 264 Angelika and Ferdinand (Neubauer) 123 Angry Kid (Aardman) 85 Ani Kuri (Kon) 231 Anibas, Martin 126 Anijam (Newland) 63 Animal Behaviour (Synnos) 171 Animal Logic 24 – 5 Animales de alquiler (Animal Rental) 316 Animalia (Cerasuolo) 185 Animania 323 Animated Conversations (Aardman) 85 Animated Haggadah, The (Oren) 250 Animated Shakespeare (Grace) 71 Animated Still Life With Dogs 33 Animated Tales of the World (Christmas Films) 198, 210, 239 animation software 4, 15, 17, 19, 44, 63, 66, 85, 87, 96, 122, 124, 128, 162, 186, 194, 214, 222, 249, 251, 270, 274, 279, 283, 292, 294, 298, 299, 304, 308, 315, 327, 337, 344, 345, 347; Anime Studio Pro 299; CelAction software 128; Frameboxx Animation and Visual Effects 299; MAX/MSP/Jitter software 66; Revolutionary Total Animation System (RETAS) 214; REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw) 15; Toon Boom software 294; TV Paint Animation 298; see also 2D animation; 3D animation; CGI (computergenerated images) animation techniques: 2D animation 73, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89, 90, 96, 101, 106, 113, 188, 237, 242, 261, 273, 275, 292, 293, 295, 298, 299, 304, 308, 316, 317, 318, 319, 326, 327, 330; 3D animation 17, 29, 44, 77, 80, 81, 82, 84, 90, 92, 96, 100 – 2, 106, 111, 113, 122, 126, 133, 165, 237, 242, 273, 282, 284, 287, 291, 292, 293, 295, 299, 303, 304, 306, 308, 314, 318, 319, 327, 337, 342; abstract 117; acrylic painting on cel 127; airbrush 116; animated engravings 128; animation installation 34; brush drawing 57; cel animation 17, 132, 266; celluloid painting 219; chalk animation 165; chalk on blackboard 295; charcoal animation 247; clay animation 73, 82, 85, 86, 152, 244, 250, 292, 293, 306 – 7, 312, 316, 325, 335, 337, 341; collage 31, 34, 39, 41, 56, 96, 240, 242, 246; computer animation 17, 18, 85, 96, 112, 113, 164, 165, 237, 244, 273,

352  Index

327; computer graphics 19, 42, 53, 81, 82, 90, 226; crayons on paper 95; cut-outs 27, 29, 99, 131, 135, 148, 165, 240, 267, 276, 300, 329, 343; digital 47; DVE 295; drawing on film 82; drawing on paper 177; drawing on sand 96, 107; drawn animation 159, 190; engraving technique 65; experimental 31, 151; Flash animation 9, 32, 129, 162, 165, 185, 251, 252, 260, 261, 270, 293, 294, 299, 314, 319, 320, 341; flashlight drawing 245; flat 92; found footage 39, 151; found media 31; frame-by-frame animation 179; hand-drawing 254; Inscriber 295; Japanese model of 102; model 95; laser light 42; live-action drawing 73; model animation 95, 306, 343;‘new serial animation’ (NES) 233; object animation 148; oil on glass 95; paint animation 152; painting on film 31, 74; pencil on paper 89; photographic sequences 83; pinscreen technique 59, 63 – 4; pixilation 74, 96, 102, 112, 138, 177, 209, 271, 342; plaster boards 211; plasticine animation 100, 102, 131, 146, 178, 183, 191, 195, 250, 263, 300, 321, 329, 333; real-time 346 – 7; rostrum camera 101; rotoscoping 34, 39, 57, 276, 341; sand animation 173, 189, 255; scratching on film 31, 74, 81, 82; silhouettes 31, 81, 118, 292, 312; smoke trails 101; special effects 4, 14, 90, 100; stereoscopy 44, 286, 284, 343 – 4; Super 8 animation 82, 94, 118, 125, 241, 337; superlivemation 230; time-lapse 81; video animation (OAVs) 225; water colour 104; woodblock printing 238, 271; see also CGI (computer-generated images); puppet animation Animation X 122 Animatograph Study Notes (magazine) 196 Animator’s Survival Kit, The: A Manual of Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Cames, Stop Motion, and Internet Animators (Williams) 75 Animator’s Survival Kit – Expanded Edition (Williams) 75 Animoses (Rubak) 104 Anizo (Oyama) 246 Anna (live-action plus animation) 316 Anna Blume (Okoye) 298 Anna og skapsveiflurmar (Anna and the Moods) 137 Anna, Bazil et la petite Anima (Anna, Bazil and Little Anima) 297 Anna, Bazil et le masque sacré (Anna, Bazil and the Sacred Mask) 297 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery) 217, 221 Annerida Tantuelin (Dancer of the Vermicular) 246 Annie (musical) 12 Annoying Thing, The 342 A Noite (The Night) 189

Anong Tragaho ng Nanay Mo? (What Is Your Mother’s Job?) 287 Another Planet 336 Antagonia (Brault) 57 Antebi, Antoan 256 Antín, Juan 327 Antz 23 Anyway (Wrake) 82 Ao no rokugo (Blue Submarine No. 6) 226 Aoshima Chiho 239 Aoyama Goshô 225 Ape (Bresnihan) 96 A pesar de todo (In Spite of Everything) 329 A Ping (Agrippina) 273 Apple (Shedaei) 262 Apple Incident (Katô) 245 Apprentice Astrologer (Maharramov) 176 Aprikoser (Apricots) 131 Aptumsums (Eclipse) 147 Aqua, Karen 40, 47 Aquarela (Watercolour) 322 Aquarelles (Sorensen) 43 Aquarium (Pavlátová) 158 Arakawa Himoru 226 Aram, Mohamed 291 Ärasõit (Departure) 137 Arc (Face) 164 Archie’s Concrete Nightmare (Park) 86 Ǻret gjennom Børfjord (The Year Along the Abandoned Road) 132 Argument in a Superstore (Hilton) 83 Arias, Michael 224, 232 Ario the Little Hero (Saba) 261 Arite Hime (Princess Arete) 223 Arkliavagio gudrybe˙ (The Rustler’s Trick) 148 Armageddon (Lee Hyun-sei) 268 Armastuse võimalikkuses (On the Possibility of Love) 138 Armstrong, Eduardo 326 Armstrong, Louis 169 Aroma of Tea, The (Dudok de Wit) 116 Áron, Gauder 165 Aronnax 320 Aronowitsch, David 131 Arrugas (Wrinkles) 187 Art of the Fugue, The (Ishida) 238 – 9 Art Romani (Art Novel) 173 Arthur, Sally 88 Arthur et les Minimoys (Arthur and the Invisibles; Besson) 98, 100 Artifact (Barsamian) 34

Index  353

Artist, An 56 Arulepp, Meelis 138 – 9 Aru tabibito no nikki (The Diary of Tortov Roddle; A Traveller’s Diary) 245 Arupasu no shojo Haidi (Heidi, Girl of the Alps) 217, 221 Arzuaga, Diego 330 Asahara Shoko 214 Asefa, Getahun 295 Ashita no Jo (Tomorrow’s Joe) 228 Ashkharagrutyun ereghaneri hamar (Geography for the Children) 174 Ashurian (Saba) 261 Ashworth, Joan 77 Así vivo yo (Tht’s the Way I Live) 318 Asiana-Wang 287 Aškinis, Valentas 147 Assault Girls (Oshii) 230 Assembly of the Wise, The (Tuguldur) 267 Asterix et le Vikings 98 Astérix et Obélisk contre César 98 Asterix og Vikingerne (Astérix and the Vikings) 130 Astghagitutyun Ereghaneri hamar (Astronomy for the Children) 174 Astley, Neville 74 Astro Boy (Imagi) 25, 228 Astrologer’s Apprentice, The (Quliyeva) 176 Astronomer’s Dream, The (Sutherland) 58 A Suspeita (The Suspect) 191 A szentjánosbogarak nemi élete (The Sexual Life of Fireflies) 164 At Home With the Ants (Kennedy) 338 At the Beginning (Oren) 250 At the Quinte Hotel (Alcock) 59 At’žije myš (Long Live the Mouse) 159 ATA Adventures 258 Atamanov, Lev 220 Atamayama (Yamamura) 242 Até ao Tecto do Mundo (To the Top of the World) 191 Atlantis: The Lost Empire 22 Atlas (The Atlas) 168 aˉ traˉ k, Minhauzen, aˉ traˉ k! (Hurry Up, Münchhausen, Hurry Up!) 145 Attention (Agha) 256 Attractive (Y. and M. Nathan) 251 Attraktsion (The Attraction) 208 Aubier, Stéphane 111 Au Ching’s United 276 Au Co-Lac Long Quan 282 Audition (Y. Nathan) 251 Audun og isbjörninn (Audun and the Polar Bear) 136

Audus, Hilary 80 Aufort, Didier M. 296 August Afternoons (Morse) 46 Aukrust, Kjell 133 Aunt Bridget (Dinkelbach) 95 Au premier dimance d’août (Miailhe) 107 Aurinko on keltainene kirahvi (The Sun Is a Yellow Giraffe) 135 Aurora (Ushev) 57 Aus der Luft Gegriffen (Taken by the Wind) 125 Austin, Daniel 80 Autism (Ainutdinov) 210 Autofoto (Ofer) 251 Autumn Leaves (Oren) 250 Avagyan, Ella 175 Avatar (Cameron) 24, 336 Avedikian, Serge 104 Aventurat e reja te Pikut (New Piku’s Adventures) 179 Aventurile lui Piccolo ¸si Saxo (Piccolo, Saxo & Company) 171 Aviary (Pavlátová) 158 Avinu Malkenu (Kranot and Kranot) 251 Avis, Meiert 341 Avtoportret (Self-Portrait) 173 Awakening (Limbu) 281 Axe, The (Sahakyants) 175 Ayala, José 325 Aylentrank (Alternative) 175 Ayn Ore (That Day) 174 Ayoosh & Nahool (short flash animation) 261 Az ember tragéduája (The Tragedy of Man) 162 Az én kis városom (The Small Town of Mine) 163 Az id˝o látképei (Time Sights) 163 A – Z of Love and Sex (Ensby) 79 Až opadá lístí z dubu (When the Leaves Have Fallen Down From the Oak) 160 Azur et Asmar: The Princes’ Quest (Ocelot) 98, 106 Babakhina, Elizabeta 198 Babalon (Baballoon) 160 Babble on the Palms, The (Woloshen) 60 Babiole, Cécile 101 Babouche, Cédric 105 Babushka (Grandma) 210 Baby Blue (Studio 4°C) 224, 235 Baby Dinosaur Dooly – The Great Adventure on Iced Star (Kim Soo-jung) 269 Baby Hedgehog and an Apple (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Baby’s Adventures, The (Kunchev) 170 Babylon (Aardman) 85 Bach, Johann Sebastian 203 Bachelorette (Björk) 343

354  Index

Back, Frédéric 55 Back Brace (Londons) 36 Back to Gaya 122 Bad Influence (Chung) 314 Badly Drawn Boy (JAM Media) 94 Badrakh 266 Bagnall, Louise 94 Bahador (Alimorad) 261 Bahaeddine, Ahmed Attia 292 Bahji, Youssef 291 Bailey, Anthony 347 Bajo la almohada (Under the Pillow) 188 Bakalov, Slav 169 Baker, Bob 86 Baker, Mark 74 Bakhram and Dilaram (Makhmudov) 264 Bakunovich, Vitaly 148 Bal, Orhan 254 Bal, Vincent 113 Balada e druvarit (The Woodsman Ballad) 179 Balada o zeleném dr ˇevu (A Ballad of the Green Wood) 158 Balance (Lauenstein and Lauenstein) 117, 121 Balances, Alex 73 Balázs, Pál 165 Baldy Heads (Meshulam) 249 Baldwin, Joaquín 324 Balej, Jan 157 – 60 Balet (Ballet) 175 Baleuko 188 Balgar (Bulgar) series 170 Ballad of Archie Foley, The (Kugel and Cafarelli) 36 Ballad of the Flaxford Girl. Facsimile (Inglis) 337 Balloon (Lidster) 78 Balloon, The (Herguera) 188 Ballybraddan 92 (Tammemägi) 92 Baltaˉ (The White One) 147 Balto (Amblin) 253 Bambi (Disney) 12 Bana Boul (Paluku) 302 Banakan kyanqi nshannere (Signs of the Reasonable Life) 174 Banderas, Antonio 23, 187 Bang! (Breer) 34 Banh Chung-Banh Giay (Square Cake and Round Cake) 282 Bani Adam (Zarrinkelk) 262 Bannerman, Alex 295 Bany (CAM Solutions) 287 Bao lian deng (Lotus Lantern) 272 Bapu 280 Barahona, Ricardo 315

Baran, Baran 254 Barbarid (Barbarians) 139 Barber, Vladlen 199 Barber Shop (O’Sullivan) 93 Barcarolle (Offenbach) 178 Barcode (Lokman) 112 Bardin, Garri 206 Bardou-Jacquet, Antoine 342 Barhouma (television series) 292 Bari Hogineri Nor Arkatznere (New Adventures of Kind Ghosts) 175 Barinova, Galina 198 Barker, Cordell 56 Barker, Mike 9 Barragán, Marisol 323 Barras, Claude 129 Barry, Vivienne 312, 325 Barsamian, Gregory 34 – 5 Barta, Jirˇí 158, 160 Bartlett, Craig 63 Bartosch, Bertold 183 Bartzis, Iannis 178 Barudi, Hugo Cataldo 324 Bas, Murat 254 Basat and Tepegoz (Maharramov) 176 Basheer, Altayib Sharif 291 Bashta (Father) 170 Basin Street Blues (Kid Koala) 340 Basket Fever – Lodos por el basket (Basket Fever – Crazy for Basketball) 186 Bassovskaja, Mari-Liis 139 – 40 Basti, Salah Eddine 291 Basulto, Rita 312 Batallón 52 (Battalion 52) 312 Bathtime in Clerkenwell (Budovsky) 38 Batirova, Delva 264 Batman (animated series) 7 Batman (Burton) 27 Batman Beyond (animated series) 7 Batman Forever soundtrack 340 Battaglia, Skip 39 Bauhaus Mirage 298 Baumane, Signe 38 – 9, 145 – 6 Bavasso, Charlotte 80 Bavel no hon (Bavel’s Book) 242 Baws, Gideon 89, 342 Ba Xian De Chuan Shuo (The Legend of the Eight Immortals) 274 Beano, The 86 Bear, The (Audus and Harrison) 80

Index  355

Beautiful Fatima, The (Gubara) 294 Beauty and the Beast (Disney) 12, 13, 15, 21, 22, 344 Beavis and Butt-Head 7, 10, 317, 328 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (animated film) 7 Bebe Rico (Baby Rico) 302 Beckoury, Amine 291 Bedoshvili, Vasiko 199 Beertje Sebastiaan (Sebastian Star Bear: First Mission) 112 Beetlejuice (Burton) 26, 27 Befreiung der Hauptperson (Liberation of the Main Character) 109 Begiashvili, Nodar 174 Beginning, Middle and End (Greaves) 89 Beijer, Evert de 112 – 13 Beijing Flipbook (Newland) 63 Beine, Constantin 110 Bekele, Asres 295 Belhedi, Abdelkader 292 Believe in It (Yonesho) 243 Bellows (Dyer) 34 Belorusskie pogovorky (Belarusian Proverbs) 150 Belov, Viacheslay 264 Belowars (Munhoz) 322 Belzer, Violette 113 Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom (Astley Baker Davies Ltd) 74 Ben & Izzy (Chaika) 256 Ben 10 (Tiny Island Productions) 286 Bendito Machine (Malis) 320 Beowulf (Christmas Films) 198 Berenson, Ted 306 – 7 Beresheet bara … (Oren) 250 Beretta, Marco 102 Bereznickas, Danas 148 Bergman, Ingmar 229 Bergs, André 112 Berluscomic (Verger) 185 Bermuda (Pikkov) 139 Bermuda Shorts 72 Berni (BRB) 188 Berni’s Doll (Jouette) 101 – 2 Beroemde Schilderijen (Famous Paintings) 113 Berqvist, Stig 133 Beˉ rzin, Ansis 145 Bese ujku (The Wolf ’s Promise) 178 Beskrylyj gusyonok (The Wingless Gosling) 204 Bessmertnyi (Immortal) 203 Bestiák (Beasts) 165 Better Military Modelling (Kennedy) 338 Beul, Steven de 111 Bey Dubinka (The Club Hit) 263

Beyond (Morimoto) 248 Beyond’ (from Animatrix) 232 Bezmiegs (Insomnia) 146 Bezu, Workneh 295 Bibat e Mbreti i Bretkocave (Bida, the Frog King) 179 Biblical Tales (animated series) 175 Bicˇiu˛ piemuo (The Herd of Bees) 148 Bierrewaerts, Vincent 110 – 11 Big Bang Big Boom (Blu) 185 Big Big Friend series 322 Big Hero 6 (Disney) 324 Big Knights, The (Astley Baker Davies Ltd) 74 Big Train (Shepherd) 84 Bikic´, Veljko 168 Bilbizi dhe nibreti (The Nightingale and the King) 179 Bild 15/16 (Image 15/16) 126 Bilin´ ski, Marek 207 Billiardnaya istoriya (History of Billiards) 264 Billy’s Balloon (Hertzfeldt) 36 Bima 2000 (Yuwono) 286 Bimbo’s Books (Klaybow Studios) 306 Bingo (Landreth) 63 Bino and Fino (Waziri) 299 – 300 Bionic Six (Dezaki/Sugino) 228 Biramel (Snooper) 179 Bird, Brad 16, 20 – 1, 25 – 7 Bird Becomes Bird (Lee) 83 Bird Idol (Goel) 281 Bird in the Window (Kovalyov) 52 – 3 Birdcalls (Sutherland) 58 Birds (Wan) 314 Birth (Baumane) 39, 146 Birth (Sawadogo) 297 Bisbano, David 319 – 20 Bisclavret (Mercier) 103 Bisco Dance-1 and 2 (Yonesho) 243 Bishojo senshi Sailor Moon (Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon) 215 Bishtëprerat (Cut Tales; The Tailless Fox) 178 Bisso, María Gracia 320 Bitlis (Muradyan) 175 Bitlis (Saroyan) 175 Bíttolo, Franco 326 Björk 137, 343 Björk, Christina 131 Blackburn, Maurice 64 Black Cauldron, The (Disney) 13 Black Dog, The (De Vere) 68 Black Hole Sun (Soundgarden) 342 Black Ink on Sky Blue (Dufour-Laperrière) 58 Black Jack OAV series (Dezaki) 229

356  Index

Black Jack: The Movie (Dezaki) 229 Black Power (Sajtinac) 109 Black Soul (Chartrand) 56 Blackboard (Roger Ho) 276 Blackfly (Hinton) 56 Blackley, Kaja 29 Blad Skizo (Chirour/Beckoury) 291 Blanc Murmure 111 Blanche neige la suite (Snow White: The Sequel) 110 Blanchet, Claire 346 Blanco, Jorge 187 Blanquet, Stéphane 98 Blashfield, Jim 339 Blechman, R. O. 31 Blésin, Eric 111 Bley, Aija 146 – 7 Blind Man’s Eye (Talbot-Kelly) 96 Blinded By Light (Pummell) 84 Blinder (Cunningham) 337 Blok (Prefabricated Housing Building) 151 Blood: The Last Vampire (Production I.G) 226 Blu 185 Blue Arrow, The (D’Alò) 182 Blue Seagull (O Joong-il) 268 Blue Tide, Black Water (Parasitic Fantasy Band) 337 Bo & Tami series (Adewumi) 299 Bob and Margaret (Snowden/Fine) 76 Bob’s Birthday (Snowden/Fine) 76 Bobby’s Body (television series) 112 Bobe-Maices (Grandmother’s Stories) 172 Bobio Boy 284 Boborul (Igazság) 171 Bodude, Ade 300 Body Beautiful (Quinn) 69 Bodysong (Pummell) 84 Bogdanov, Ivan 170 Bogdanov, Nedelcho 170 Boklutsite (The Junk) 170 Boldog világvége (Merry Apocalypse) 163 Bollongexpeditionen (Expedition on a Balloon 131 Bolt 22 Boltya, Daughter of the Nile (Moatasim) 294 Bond, Rose 34 Bonen no Zamudo (Xamd of the Lost Memory) 237 Bongo Rock (Luis Bras) 328 Bonjour (Lieban) 322 Boogie, el aceitoso (Boogie, the Oily) 327 Book Box: Animated Tales of the World (Grace) 71 Book of Kells, The 92 Book of the Time, The (Basheer) 291

Boom and Reds (Motion Pictures) 188 Boontown (song) 49 Booth, Timothy 95 Borenstein, Joyce 59 Borthwick, Dave 84 – 5 Borysfen-Lutes 172 Bothof, Colette 113 Bouchard, Patrick 57 Bouche cousue (Sewn Mouth; Gréco/Buffat) 103 Bouchon, Pierre 191 Bouftass, Said 291 Boulbés, Jérôme 101 Boundin’ (Luckey) 16n47 Box Age (Kurosaka) 240 Boxe (Boxing) 180 Boy who didn’t look for a safe place to cross, The (Taylor) 80 Boy who didn’t stop to look and listen, The (Taylor) 80 Boyarsky, Aleksandr 198 Boyd, Claudio Biern 185 Bozhestvo (The God) 206 Bozzetto, Bruno 50, 185 Brainwashers, The (Bouchard) 57 Brakhage, Stan 31 Brand, Bill 34 Branea, Matei 171 Braniff 9n23 Brannon, Ash 24 Brännström, Maria 131 Bras, Luis 328 Braške˙s ant egle˙s (Strawberries on a Fir) 148 Brassens, Georges 183 Brat’ya Piloty gotovyat na zavtrak makaronchiki (Brethren Pilots cook Little Macaroni for Breakfast) 196 Brault, Nicolas 57 Braun, Frank 128 Braune, Lucette 113 Brave Little Toaster, The 19 Breakfast on the Grass (Manet) 142 Breakfast on the Grass (Pärn) 142 Breaking the Habit (Linkin Park) 341 Breathing Room (Morse) 46 Breer, Robert 34 Bregovic, Goran 343 Breitman, André 322 Brekte, Patrıˉcija 147 Brendan et le secret de Kells 110 Bresnihan, Rory 96 Bresson, Robert 51, 154 Bret, Michel 101 Bridge to Terabithia 336

Index  357

Brief an die Produzentin (Letter to the Producer) 120 Briggs, Raymond 80 Bright Star Hope (Marquis of Vaudeville) 343 Brillowska, Mariola 117 – 18 Bringas, Sylvie 89, 177 Brinkmanis, Mˉaris 145 Briquet, Luiz 320 Britannia (Quinn) 69 Brizzi, Paul and Gaëtan 100 Bro’town (animated series) 336 Broken Jaw, The 84 Broken, The (Coheed and Cambria) 34 Bronze Bear, The’ (Hans Christian Andersen) 170 Bronzit, Konstantin 198, 206 Brooch Pin and the Sinful Clasp, The (JoWOnder) 82 Brooks, James L. 6 Brother (Elliot) 334 Brother Bear 22 Brothers in Arms (Dire Straits) 340 Brothers Quay 82, 339, 341 Broucˇci (Beetles) 160 Broucˇkova rodina (Broucek Family) 160 Brown, Sheldon 345 Bru Ha Ha (Woloshen) 60 Brunck, Ilija 117, 122 Brushstrokes (Woloshen) 60 Buatel (Boitelle) 209 Bubnov, Alexandre 172 Buck, Chris 24 Buck’s Worth, A (Keret) 253 Budak Lapok (The Raggedy Boys) 284, 287 Buddha’s Palm 276 Budinov, Vladislav 170 Budinský, Peter 162 Budovsky, Alex (Aleksey Budovskiy) 38 Buffat, Catherine 103 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show) 5 Bug’s Life, A (Pixar) 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 287 Bukashki (Bookashkis a.k.a. Bugs) 203 Bullets (Creed) 342 Bunny (Saldanha) 321 Bunokait˙e, Ieva 148 Bunt (Colored) 126 Buretel, Emmanuel de 341 Burevestnik (Stormy Petrel) 209 Burgess, Darren 335 Buriswara (Piliang) 287 Burlet, Raymond 297 BURN-E (MacLane) 16n47 Burns, Charles 100

Burlet, Raymond 297 Burns, Charles 100 Burovs, Arnolds 144 Burroughs, William S. 88 Burton, Tim 25 – 30, 110 – 11, 344 – 5 Burya (The Tempest) 207 Busby Berkeley’s Tribute to Mae West (Bush) 75 Buscarini, Juan Pablo 327 Bush, Paul 74 – 5 Butcher’s Hook (Pummell) 83 Butiga, Paul 301 Butterfly (Marshall) 96 Butterfly Collector, The (Bresnihan) 96 Butterfly Lovers, The (Shanghai Film Studio) 273, 274 Bychkovsky, Aleksandr 148 Bye Bye (Bringas) 89 Byosoku 5 centimetres (Five Centimetres per Second) 237 Bzz 110 Cabbie Chronicles 314 Cabeza de mono (Monkey Head) 317 Cache-Cache d’Amour (Aufort) 296 ˇ adezˇ, Špela 166 C Cafarelli, Vincent 37 – 8 Café de Wereld (Café the World) 113 Cage of Flame (Parker) 81 Cahincaha (Bret) 101 Caicedo, Pedro 316 Caillou, Marie 100 Cai Wei (Picking Osmund) 271 Cakó, Ferenc 164 Calder, Emma 89 – 90 Californication (Red Hot Chili Peppers) 342 Calls, Diana 223 Calypso (Sorensen) 43 Calypso Is Like So (Collet) 103 Cameras Take Five (Woloshen) 60 Camouflage (Hodgson) 72 Campbell, Joseph 18 Camp Rock 10 Çanakkale Geçilmez (Chanakkale the Unpassable) 254 Canaries in Colour (Kennedy) 338 Canción ancestral (Ancestral Song) 319 Canción de Jazz ( Jazz Song) 328 Candeland, Pete 341 Candido (Cavalhiero ‘Zepe’) 190 Candy Candy (Tôei Animation) 222, 287 Canlandırm Servisi 254 Cante de ida y vuelta (Song of a Round Trip) 188 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 70

358  Index

Canterbury Tales (Christmas Films) 71, 198 Canterbury Tales, The [Wife of Bath’s Tale] (Quinn) 70 Canvas of the Fallen (Bulawayo) 304 Capibara (Capybara) 324 Capitán Cardozo ( Jáuregui) 329 Capitán Fracase (D’Ocon) 188 Capitulación (Gonzalez) 328 Captin Felonius (Stenhouse) 336 Car Craze (De Beijer) 113 Carambolas 112 Carbajal, Irene 302 Carcasses et crustacés (Carcasses and Shellfish) 128 Cardoni, Paolo 182 Careaga, Guillermo 324 Carias, Omar 315 Carlesi, Enrico 182 Carlsson, Magnus 131 – 2, 340 Carmen (Bizet) 247 Carmen Habanera 150 Carmen Suite 150 Carmen Torero 150 Carmen, The – In Fantastic Cell (Mizue) 247 Carnaval des animaux (Saint-Saëns) 158 Carnavallée (Masquerade; Ahond) 105 Carnet noir (Little Black Book) 297 Carnival (Ghazala) 293 Carnival of the Animals (Saint-Saëns) 12 Carnivalé 91 Carny, The’ (Nick Cave) 88 Caro, Marc 101 Carrano, Leonardo 184 Carrera, Carlos 311 Carrie (De Palma) 50 Carrión, Cayetana 320 Cars 20, 25 Carte de Visite (O’Flanagan) 93 Cartoon Cartoon Show, The 8 Cartoon Sushi 7 Cartooned Chinese Fables and Parables 277 Cantamonitos (animated series) 325 Cassiopéia (Cassiopeia) 322 Castañeda, Karla 312 Castelain, Michel 297 Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum (TV program) 321 Castillo, René 312 Castro, Hans 315 Castro, Iván 323 Cat Came Back, The (Barker) 56 Cat Out (Cuevas) 324 Cat with Hands, The (Bringas) 89

Cat, The (JoWOnder) 82 Catalina (Santiago Bou Grasso) 328 Catalina y un mundo de niños (Catalina and a Children’s World) 330 Catani, Roberto 180 – 1 Catmull, Ed 14, 16, 19 – 21 Catrina Posada y a gran piedra 323 Cats’ Benefits (al-Dakheel) 260 Catunda, Celia 323 Cauraˉ maˉ ja (Leaky House) 145 Cavalheiro, José Pedro 190 Cavandoli, Osvaldo 50, 70, 342 Ceda el paso (Yield) 320 Celebrity Deathmatch 7 Celik, Murat 254 Cell no koi (Katô) 245 Celsys 214 Celtic Maidens (Twomey) 93 Cene, Adrian 179 Cerasuolo, Tommaso 185 Cerca lejos (Close Far) 329 Cerchi nell’acqua (Circles in the Water) 185 Cerraduras (Keyholes) 311 Cerri, Mara 180 C’est la Vie (That’s Life) 173 C’est Môa (Ego) 178 C’est Môa (It’s Mee; Sifianos) 104 Çevik, Ridvan 254 CGI (computer-generated images) 16n47, 17 – 19, 20 – 2, 24 – 5, 29, 41, 42, 80, 88, 90, 97, 122, 171, 176, 188, 190, 228, 229, 230, 254, 256, 260, 261, 266, 270, 282, 284, 287, 292, 293, 302, 303, 304, 309, 315, 317, 318, 320, 323, 336, 337 Chacha Chaudhary (comic strip) 280 Chagall, Marc 203 Chage & Aska 216, 340 Chahut (Uproar; Cuvelier) 104 Chaika, Glenn 256 Chainsaw (Tupicoff) 333 Chair/Screen (Ishida) 232 Chalet, François 129 Chameleon, The (Bresnihan) 96 Chamodi Chemi Ghrublidan (Get Down from My Cloud) 174 Champagne (Sporn) 37 Chandamama 280 Chandler, Wendy 332 Chang, Joe 270 – 1 Chang Guang-Xi 271 – 2 Change It Up (music video) 303 Change of Place (K. Smith) 332

Index  359

Changes (Finnegan) 96 Changing Evan (Woloshen) 60 Channel 4 News 69 Chao Jook 282 Chapman, Brenda 14 Characters with Long Ears (Pavlátová) 158 Charleston Home Movie (Morse) 46 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Burton) 26, 27, 29 Chartrand, Martine 56 Chase, Dreams… . Dreams (Quliyeva) 176 Chavchavadze, Shadiman 173 Chea, chea (Kakharov) 266 Cheese Trap, The (Stenhouse) 336 Chef de Sound (Oluwafemi) 299 Chekhov, Anton 209 Chelm Tales (Jewish) 56 Chelovek s Luny (The Man From the Moon) 205 Chena, Christian 324 Cheng, Bob 277 Cheng Shang (Sorrow for a City) 276 Chen-Yi Chang 274 Chéri viens voir! (Come and See, Darling!; Fouquet) 104 Cheritera (Legends) 287 Cherkasova, Oksana 198 – 9, 203 – 5 Cherkassky, David 195 Cherno Na bialo (Black on White) 170 Chernysheva, Natalia 172 Chiaki, Konaka 234 Chicago (Marshall) 12n34 Chicken Little (Disney) 22, 344 Chicken Run (Aardman) 25, 85, 87, 96, 110 Chicostation (Ricaldi) 323 Chidhanana (Baramba) 304 Chiec Gieng Thoi Gian (The Time Well) 282 Chienne d’histoire (A Dog’s Story; Avedikian) 104 Chiesa, Elena 180 – 1 Chihab, Khaled 291 Chikina, Olga 148 Chikyu rokkotsu otoko (Mr Rib Glob) 242 Chikyu shojo Arjuna (Earth Girl Arjuna) (Kawamori) 232 Child’s Metaphysics, A (Yamamura) 243 Children of al-Rashid (Saba) 261 Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below 237 Chinese Ghost Story, A (Siu-Tung Ching) 277 Chinese Ghost Story – The Tsui Hark Animation 277 Chin-tu Hsieh 277 Chip y Charly (Chip and Charlie) 186 Chitbatona (Goldfinch) 174 Chivalrous Man, A – Red Hawk (Sim Sang-il) 268 Choetu sekai (Transcendental World) 214

Choi, Jason 347 Choi Ming-yum 277 Chojiku yosai Macross (The Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross) 215, 231 Chomet, Sylvain 55, 100, 146 Chong, Vanessa 29 Chorlton and the Wheelies (Cosgrove Hall Films) 90 Chors Erg (Four Songs) 174 Chow, Stephen 278 Chrapaczkow, Wadim 156 Christie, Julie 71 Christies, The (Mulloy) 73 Christina Posada and the Big Stone 323 Christopher Changes His Name (Sawadogo) 297 Chronicle Reconstructions (Woloshen) 60 Chrysanthemum Leaf, A (Maharramov) 176 Chu Kou (Exit) 274 Chuang Bian De Xing Xing (Stars at the Window) 274 Chu-Cha (Choo-Choo) 206 – 7 Chudaki (The Cranks) 208 Chudesnyi Chemodanchik (A Magic Suitcase) 264 Chufarnov, Sergey 263 Chuíto’s Machine (R & TV Productions) 318 Chung, Peter 7, 247, 268 Churikova, Alla 172 Chuyen Co Loa Thanh (The Loa Citadel Story) 282 cˇigonas ir drakonas (The Gipsy and the Dragon) 148 cˇikorja an’kafe (Chicory and Coffee) 166 Cille (Cordoba) 254 – 5 Cimermanis, Jˉanis 145 Cin Cin (TV show) 6 Cinque stanze (Five Bedrooms) 180 Circuit Marine (Favez) 128 Circus Drawings (Williams) 75 Circus, The (Brault) 57 C´ iric´, Iva 168 C´ iric´, Rastko 168 City Nocturne (Harada) 240 City Paradise (Denis) 72 CJ7: The Cartoon (Toe Yuen) 278 Cjuganjska (Gipsy Song) 167 C kéma? (Sindo) 296 Clandestino (Stowaway) 189 Clapin, Jérémy 105 Clarke, Andy 97 Clements, Ron 11 – 12, 16 Cleveland Show, The 9 Clever Princess, The (Calls) 223 CLIMAX 3D 315 Clocks (Winter) 117

360  Index

Cloison (Bulkhead; Bériou) 101 Close Shave, A (Park) 87 Closed Zone (Goodman) 252 Close – To the Edit (Art of Noise) 340 Cloutier, Claude 57 Clown (Lidster) 78 Clutterbuck, Lucinda 335 CMYK (Newland) 63 cNote (Hinton) 56 Coalition (Rad/Sadeghi) 262 Cobi Trouppe, The (BRB International) 185 Cocchiglia, Brunella 96 Cocktail Molotov 311 Code Geass (Sunrise) 225 Code Lyoko (TV series) 102 Codsi, Fulvio 258 Coelho, Cesar 321 Cohl, Emile 183 Colburn, Martha 35 Colchique (Colchicum; Gréco/Buffat) 103 Colin (Lindhout) 113 Collet, Bruno 103 Collision (Hattler) 119 Color Story (Sorensen) 45 Colour Contamination (Bagnall) 94 Colour of the Senses 327 Coma (Taleb) 292 Coming Back (Habash) 255 Command Z (Kugel and Cafarelli) 36, 37 Comme un poisson dans l’eau (Like a Fish in the Water) 104 commercials 18, 19, 24, 31, 37, 49, 55, 58, 68, 71, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 103, 111, 116, 121, 132, 137, 138, 150, 161, 162, 164, 168, 171, 177, 178, 186, 188, 216, 243, 245, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 260, 266, 267, 276, 279, 281, 284, 286, 287, 296, 299, 303, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 315, 317, 320, 322, 323, 324, 325, 328, 329, 330, 331, 335, 337; see also advertising Commute (Mosley) 42 Como alitas de chincol (Like Sparrow Wings) 325 Como jugar con la muerte (How to Cope with Death) 328 Cómo preparar un sandwich (How to Prepare a Sandwich) 312 Concerto grosso (Volchek) 149 Concurrents (Sorensen) 44 Condie, Richard 63 Cóndor Crux (Patagonik Film Group) 327 Confutatis (Carrano) 184 Connected (Ayumi Hamasaki) 342 Conservfilm (Radev) 170 Conspiración Roswell (D’Ocon) 188

Consuming Spirits (Sullivan) 35 Consumo Cuidado (Consumption Cautiousness) 330 Conte, Paolo 182 Conte de quartier (A Neighbourhood’s Tale; Miailhe) 107 Continuation of Genesis (Samoladás) 177 Contra el águila y el león (Against the Eagle and the Lion) 313 Control Master, The (Wrake) 83 Coonstruction of Citizens (Michalis) 177 Copenhagen Cycles (Dyer) 34 Cora Player, The (Sawadogo) 297 Coraline 29, 78 Corazón, las alegrías de Pantriste (Heart, the High Spirits of Pantriste) 326 Corbisier, Michelle 66 Cornwell, Peter 335 Corpse Bride (Burton) 26, 27, 30, 96, 110 Cortázar, Julio 326 Corte Ele˙ctrico (Black-out) 317 Cory the Son of a Sorcerer (Lee Hak-bin) 268 Cosgrove, Brian 90 Cotte, Oliver 101 Couch Potato (Moore) 92 Coulibaly, Mambaye 292 – 3 Count Duckula (Cosgrove Hall Films) 90 Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas) 226 Courage the Cowardly Dog (Dilworth) 8, 38 Courlaender, Norma 318 Cournoyer, Michèle 55 Courtesy and Etiquette for Young People and Parents (Animation Africa) 297 Courtney, Steven 96 Couturier, Andrés 313 Cousin (Elliot) 334 Cova, Gustavo 327 Cow and Chicken 8 Cowboy Bebop (Sunrise) 225, 233, 234, 235 Cox, Arthur 87 – 8 Cox, Sarah 87 – 8 Crac! 61 Cracking Contraptions (Park) 87 Crafts, Lisa 39 Crama, Nico 113 Cramp Twins, The (Wood) 80 Crap Rap (Phelan) 92 Craste, Marc 88, 97 Crayon shin-chan (Yuasa/Hongo) 236 Crazy Glue (Rosenthal) 253 Crazy Works (Ghazala) 293 Creature Comforts (Park) 86 Crécy, Nicolas de 100

Index  361

Creole Love Call (Carlos Nine) 328 Criado, Enrique 345 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) 210 Crime and Punishment (Dumala) 210, 211 Crisán, Remus 316 Cristóbal, Manuel 187 Cromosoma 185, 186, 188 Crossing the Stream (Battaglia) 39 Crow and the Fox (Kraus) 263 Crumblegiant, The (McCloskey) 92 Crust (Hughes) 335 Cruz, Ángel de la 186, 191 Csaba, Varga 164 – 5 Csupo, Gabor 7, 52 cˇtyrˇi lásky (Four Loves) 159 Cuatro maneras de papar un hoyo (Four Ways to Stop a Hole) 311 Cuckoo Mr Edgar! (Trudeau) 59 Cuentos de Cipotesi (Chidren’s Stories 315 Cuentos de la selva (Tales of the Forest) 327 Cuevas, Joaquín 324 Cuidado mamá (Take Care, Mother) 323 Cuijlenborg, Oerd van 112 Cúilín Dualach (Backward Boy) 93 Cˉukas laime (Pig’s Happiness) 145 Cullen, Robert 93 Cumberton, Mark 94 Cunningham, Chris 343 Cunningham, James 336 Cunningham, Phil 303 Cunning Little Vixen (Dunbar) 78 Cuore (De Amicis) 217 Cupotea (Arthur) 88 Curriculum vitae (Koutský) 159 Currie, Bruce 335 Curse of the Voodoo Child, The (Woloshen) 60 Cutie Honey (Anno) 235 Cuvelier, Gilles 104 Cypriot Trahsfigurations (Demitriadis) 171 Czarna burleska (Black Burlesque) 151 D.I.M. (Skrobecki) 150 Dabizha, Natalia 198 Dad’s Dead (Shepherd) 84 Dad’x (D’Ocon Films) 186 Dada Qorqud (Maharramov) 176 Dadarabe (Razafindralambo brothers) 303 Daddy and I 269 Dagger of Kamui (Madhouse) 225 Dagli Appennini alle Ande (Edmondo De Amicis) 217

Dahl, Roald 28 Dahlbeck, Jonas 131 Dai on-air (animated series) 257 Daiku to Oniroku (Carpenter and Oniroku) 288 Daily Cartoons (Al Qaseer) 260 al-Dakheel, Khalid 260 Dalet, Pascal 104, 178 Dali, Salvador 83 d’Almeida, António Vitorino 191 D’Alò, Enzo 181 Damnation of Faust, The (Berlioz) 127 Da möb (Carlsson) 132 Dance of Death (Tupicoff) 332 Dance of Mass (Savva) 172 Dancheva, Vessela 170, 298 Dancing (Y. and M. Nathan) 251 Dandy, The 86 Danenov, Zhaken 263 Danger Mouse (Cosgrove Hall Films) 75, 90 Daniels, Greg 7 Danny Boy (Skrobecki) 150 Dans la vie (In Life; Roger) 60 Danse Macabre (Saint-Saëns) 92 Danta, Susan 332 Da Pupu 287 Darazsak, ludak, körtefa (Wasps, Geese, Pear-tree) 165 Daria 7 Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd) 339 Dark Town (Blackley and Chong) 29 Darra Dogs, The (Tupicoff) 332, 333 Darragh, Matthew 91 Das dritte Fenster (The Third Window) 118 Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart) 119 – 20 Das Kleine Arschloch (The Little Bastard) 121 Das Rad (The Wheel) 120 Dashuri ne kater stinet (Love in Four Seasons) 179 Dastan o Jalaladdine (Manguberdi) 264 Data City (animated series) 257, 259 Datou Erzi, Xiaotou Baba (Big Head Son, Small Head Father) 272 Dauka 144, 145, 146 Dauti, Artur 179 Davies, Phil 74 Dawson’s Creek (TV show) 5 Dayo (Quilao) 288 Dayton, Jonathan 343 Dead Comic (Schnall) 39 Dead Murphy (McCollum) 95 Deadsy (Hoban/Anderson) 81

362  Index

Dear Diary (Arthur) 88 Death and the Mother (Lingford) 77 Death Note (Madhouse) 225 De Beichte (The Confession) 120 DeBlois, Dean 24 Decaff (Greg Page) 337 Decaff II (Greg Page) 337 Decheva, Kalina 170 De Dans 287 De˙de˙ Miegas (Uncle Sleep) 147 Dedication (Najafzada) 176 Dedicator Taher, The (Basheer) 291 Deep Imagination (Studio 4°C) 223 Deeper: Shadow Song (Singer) 314 Defali, Youssef 291 De Felippo, Daniel 327 De Grobbebollen maken lol (The Furryburbles Have Fun) 114 Dehors novembre (Bouchard) 57 Deido Boy (Menga) 300 Deja, Andreas 253 De Karakters (The Characters) 113 De Kat van Oblomov (Oblomov’s Cat) 113 Del amor y otras demonios (Of Love and Other Demons) 315 De La Quintana, Liliana 323 Del Carlo, Flavio 321 Delf (Cunningham) 337 Delfy y sus amigos (Delfy and Friends) 186 Delgado, Cecilia 324 Delgado, Cruz 185 Delicious 9 97 Delirium (K. Smith) 332 Dell’ammazzare il maiale (About Killing the Pig) 181 Dellers, Kilian 127 Delo proshloe (Let Bygones be Bygones) 204 Dem Bones Wiggle (Pepi) 40 Demidova, Birgit 138 Demin, Alexei 198 – 9, 203, 208 – 9 Demitriadis, Spyros 171 Demon (Yevteyeva) 209 Demuynck, Arnaud 104, 110 Den danske dikteren (The Danish Poet) 134 – 5 Den grimme ælling og mig (The Ugly Duckling and Me) 130 Den hwvite streken (The White Line) 132 Denis, Gaëlle 72 Den kæmpstore bjørn (The Giant Bear) 131 Dennis, Bill 288 Denno Coil (Coil – A Circle of Children) 225 Dentist (Baumane) 146 De Palma, Brian 50 Depository, The (Klimowski) 94

De Profundis (Dóra) 163 De profundis (Prado) 187 De raiz (From the Roots) 311 Der Erlkönig (The Erlking; Rall) 119 Der falsche Spieler (The Wrong Player) 118 Der grosse Bruder (The Big Brother) 129 Der Hahn (The Cock) 120 Der Kleine Dodo (Gezen) 254 Der kleine Eisbär 1 and 2 (The Little Polar Bear) 121 Der Kloane (The Runt) 119 Der Meister (The Master) 109 Der Peitschenmeister (The Whip Master) 120 Der Raben (The Raven; Rall) 119 Derecho a la diversidad (Right to Diversity) 323 Derecho a la identidad (Right to Identity) 323 Deriva (Drift) 325 Desai, Dhvani 281 Desai, Upendraa 280 Descalzi, Marco 319 De Slaapkamer (The Bedroom) 113 Desmond & träskpatraskfällan (Desmond & the Swamp Barbarian Trap) 132 Desmond trashade äppelträd (Desmond’s Trashed Appple tree) 132 Desperate Housewives (TV show) 5 Despodov, Boris 170 Dessetiat Krag (The Tenth Circle) 170 Destino (Monféry) 103 Destiny (Kraus/Khaidarov) 263 Det oppørska alfabetet (The Rebellious Alphabet) 132 Detective Story (Watanabe) 235, 248 Deˇti noci (Night Owls) 157 Deus é Pai (God Is My Father) 322 Deviat s polovinoy (Nine and a Half) 172 Devil Went Down to Georgia, The (Johnson) 30 Devil’s Book (Kravitz) 40 Devil’s Mine Ride (Stassen) 346 De Vincenzi, Diego 183 Devorador onírico 312 Devotchka so spitchkamy (The Little Match Girl) 149 Devour Dinner (Mizue) 247 Dew Line (Priestly) 47 Dexter (TV show) 5 Dexter’s Laboratory 8 Dezaki Osamu 228 – 9 Dhe Nderroi lekure (And the Skin Was Changed) 178 Diabaté, Idrissa 296 Diary 1: ReAnimacja (Oren) 250 Diary 2: Feelings (Oren) 250 Diary of a Camper 346 – 7

Index  363

Diary of a Country Priest 52 Diaz, Héctor Caño 188 Dibo (BRB) 188 Dibu 2, La venganza de Nasty (Dibu 2, Nasty’s Revenge) 326 Dibu 3, la gran aventura (Dibu 3, The Great Adventure) 327 Dibu, la película (Dibu, the Film) 327 Dicht/Vorm 110, 113 Dicht/Vorm Klassiekers 113 Dick Terrapin (O’Connor) 96 Didre Novo (Woloshen) 60 Die Drei Räuber (The Three Robbers) 121 Die Konferenz der Tiere (The Animals’ Conference) 122 Die Kreuzung (Crossroads) 119 Die Seilbahn (The Cable Car) 128 Digimon (Tôei Animation) 222 Digital Juice (Studio 4°C) 223 Dijk, Gerrit van 112 Dillens, Eric 346 Dilworth, John 38 Dimitrov, Georgi 170 Dimitrov, Svilen 170 Dinamo Productions 90 Dinda’s (Messias) 320 Dindal, Mark 344 Ding Dong (Muchilwa) 301 Diniz, Fernando 321 Dinkelbach, Stefanie 95 Dinosaur 22 Dinov, Todor 169 Dion, Franck 105 Dir En Grey 240 Dirdy Bird, The (Dilworth) 38 Disch, Thomas 19 Discovery (Daft Punk) 341 Diskžokej (Disc Jockey) 158 Disney, Roy E. 12 – 13 Dispatches (TV series) 69 Disque N para Nascer (Dial B for Birth) 321 Dissociation (Ushev) 57, 58 Dita d fundit (The Last Day) 179 Ditari i një madeje të zezë (Diary of a Black Cat) 178 Ditty Dot Comma (Woloshen) 60 Diversija (Diversion) 146 Divi dhe Gjahtari (The Giant and the Hunter) 179 Divine Comedy (Dante) 74 Djeneni, Amel 291 Dlinnyi most v nuzhnuyu storonu (Long Bridge of Desired Direction) 208 D-mente (D-mented) 328

Do Nothin ‘Til You Hear From Me (Hindsefeldt and Dahlbeck) 131 Do the Whirlwind (Architecture in Helsinki) 342 Dobro Pozhalovat! (Welcome!) 200 Dobrodružství na pasece (Adventures in the Meadow) 160 Dobry printz (A Gentle Prince) 263 D’Ocon, Antoni 185 Docter, Pete 16, 20 – 1 documentary films 12, 36 – 7, 39, 49, 50n161, 51n164, 63, 74, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 92, 94, 117, 131, 139, 140, 147, 282, 294, 302, 317, 318, 319, 332, 335 Dodecaimero (A Dozen Days) 177 Does a Bear Sing? (Ganbaatar) 267 Dog (Templeton) 78 Dognini, Liana 89 Dois (Two) 321 Doktora D sala (The Island of Doctor D) 147 Dokumanimo (Bosek) 152 Dolorosa (Cournoyer) 56 Dolatabadi, Reeza 81 Domecˇku varˇ (Boil, Little House, Boil) 158 Domínguez, Luís 319 Dominós (Schorr) 322 Domtom Salemeen (animated series) 257, 259 Donev, Donyo 169 Don Gato y su pandilla (Top Cat and his Gang) 313 Don Kihot (Don Quixote) 109 Donnellon, Paul 341 Don’t Give Hate a Chance (Jamiroquai) 342 Don’t Let It All Unravel (Cox) 88 Don’t Submit To A Moments Passion With a Stranger (JoWOnder) 82 Don’t You Wish You Were Here? (Yonesho) 243 Dongeng Aku dan Kau (Fables of You and Me) 287 Donkey (Bagnall) 94 Doomsday Clock, The (Hodgson/Young) 72 Door (Hoban/Anderson) 81 – 2 Doraemon 227, 228, 284, 287 Doron, Yehuda 249 Doron, Yigal 249 Dororo to Hyakkimaru (Dororo) 228 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 152 – 3, 196, 200 Dottini suru (Your Choice!) 242 Double Secret (Babiole) 101 Douce nuit (Sweet Night) 126 Doug 7 Dozhd sverkhu vniz (Rain Down from Above) 208 Dr Strangely Strange 95 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Bush) 75 Dr. Neuron (Pedersen) 324

364  Index

Dr. Senka (Maldonado) 323 Dracula Tok Show (Boyd B) 283 Dragon (Kurosaka) 240 Dragon and the Fly, The (Neubauer) 74 Dragon Ball (Tôei Animation) 222 Dragon’s Island, The (Danenov) 263 Dragones, destino de Fuego (Dragons, Destination Fire) 319 Dragons et princesses (Dragons and Princesses; Ocelot) 106 Drakon (Dragon) 266 Drakonat i momcheto (The Dragon and the Boy) 169 Drawing Lesson #2 (Plympton) 49 Drawings for Projection (Kentridge) 309 Drawn From Memory (Fierlingers) 32 – 3 Drawn Together 10 Dream Child (Ofer) 251 Dream Defenders 286 Dreamland Express (Anderson) 81 Dreamless Sleep (Anderson) 81 Dreams and Desires: Family Ties (Quinn) 70 Drengen Der Ville Gøre Det Umulige (The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Bear) 130 Dress Rehearsal (Moore) 92 Dridi, Haykel 292 Driessen, Paul 55, 63, 112 – 13, 117 Drifting Life, A (Tatsumi) 286 Drijver, Ruud den 113 Drop (Bozzetto) 185 Drouet, Fabien 105 Drouin, Jacques 56, 59, 63 – 4 Drugaya Storona (The Other Side) 202 Druids: The Epic (video game) 316 Drux Flux (Ushev) 57 Dualach, Cúilín 93 Dubanaev, Ulan 265 Dublin I 92 (Tammemägi) 92 Duck Ugly 91 Ducks (Kranot and Kranot) 251 DuckTales 10 Dudok, Michael 61, 114 – 16 Due di cuori (Two of Hearts) 180 Duel (Koutský) 159 Duel, The (from Halo Legends) (Oshii) 230 Dufour-Laperrière, Felix 57 – 8 Dug’s Special Mission (del Carmen) 16n47 Duga (Rainbow) 167 Dukov, Stoyan 63 Dulces sueños (Sweet Dreams) 329 Dumala, Piotr 152 – 4, 210 – 11 Dunbar, Geoff 78 Dunie Kezek (Danenov) 263

Dunleavy, John 89 Duran-Dubois 100 Durin, Rémi 110 Dust and Glitter (Ové Pictures) 162 Dust Kid (Joung Yumi) 270 Duval, Jean 85 Dva Jinna (Two Gins) 264 Dvorišcˇe (Courtyard) 166 Dwi Koendoro 286 Dyer, Eric 34 Dygra 185 Dzhumaevna, Charyeva Maral 266 Dzhusupbekov, Bakir 265 Dzkahord Panose (Panos the Clumsy) 175 E=MC? (Kouchnerov) 172 Eagle Vs. Shark 336 Early in Fall, Late in Winter (Ushev) 57 Earth, The Emerald Planet (Lee Hak-bin) 268 Earth Intruders (Björk) 343 Eastern – Kravavý Hugo (An Eastern – Bloody Hugo) 160 Ebode, Paul 300 Ecco è ora (Here, It is the Time) 180 Eche, Lilian 111 Economou, Yiannos 171 Ecstasy (Kovanova & Stoyanovich) 170 Ecotopia (Reisenbüchler) 163 Ed Wood (Burton) 26, 27 Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy 8 Eden of the East (Production I.G) 226 Edge of Remorsei (Choi) 347 Ednopochno (One Way) 170 Eduardo Blanco y la Benezuela Heróica (Eduardo Blanco and Heroic Venezuela) 318 Edward, Roy 13 Edwards, David 71 Edward Scissorhands (Burton) 26, 27 Eesel heliredelil (A Donkey on the Music-Scale) 138 Egg series (Oren and Salama) 250 Ego zhena kurica (My Wife is a Hen; Kovalyov) 52 Egoland (television series) 112 Ehala, Olav 138 Ehrlich, David 40, 267 Eichler, Glenn 7 Eifu (He Was) 185 Eikyu kazoku (Eternal Family) 223 Eine murul (Breakfast on the Grass) 142 Einstein (commercial) 96 Eisner, Michael 12 – 13, 16, 21, 25

Index  365

Ejercicios en lápiz (Pencil Exercise) 129 Éjszakai kultúrtörténeti hadgyakorlat (Culturehistorical Manoeuvre at Night) 164 Ekstremistet (Extremist 178 El agente 00-P2 (Agent 00-P2) 313 Eläköön markkiinatalous (Last Supper) 136 El almohadón de plumas (The Feather Pillow) 326 El amor es una bala en el corazón (Love is a Bullet in the Heart) 317 El Arca (The Ark) 327 El Bosque animado (The Living Forest) 186 – 7 Elbow Room (Obomsawin) 59 El Brote (The Sprout) 328 El camino (The Way) 324 El capitán Fracasse (Captain Fracasse) 186 El carero de don Chi (Jonard) 311 El caricaturista (The Cartoonist) 316 El circo de narices (Ricaldi) 323 El colour de los sentidos (The Color of the Senses) 327 El crimen de Padre Amaro (Father Amaro’s Crime) 311 El cuento de lo que quiero y no quiero (The Tale of What I Want and I Don’t Want) 315 El diablillo (The Little Devil) 188 El Doctor (Pitt) 39 Electric Poem I (music video) 177 Elegant 110 Element of Light (Reeves) 59 Elemi (Nakata) 247 El Empleo (The Employment) 328 Elephant and the Tree (Lee Jin Pyn) 285 Elephant Girl, Part One (Lobser) 42 Elephant, The (Kraus) 263 Életvonal (Lifeline) 165 Elevator, The 242 El fantástico mundo de Fantástico Morales (The Fantastic World of Fantasy Morales) 320 Elfman, Danny 28 El gordo (The Fat One) 328 – 9 El gran viaje (The Great Trip) 312 El Hada (The Fairy) 319 El héroe (The Hero) 311 El hombre de Walter (Walter’s Man) 330 El hombre del colchón (The Man of the Mattress) 328 El hombre invisible 319 Elias og kongeskipet (Fyksen/Osvoll) 135 Eliksir (Elixir) 209 El inquieto universo (The Restless Universe) 328 Elissalde, Serge 104 El Jazmín del País (The Jasmine of the Country) 330 El Jefe y El Carpintero (The Boss and the Carpenter) 329

Ella 254 El Lince perdido (The Missing Lynx) 187 Elles (Quinn) 69 Elliot, Adam 333 – 4 El Macho (Torresan) 321 El Nasr, Mona Abou 292 El niño malcriado (The Bad-mannered Boy) 328 El niño terrible (The Terrible Child) 312 El nuevo mundo de los gnomos (The New World of Gnomes) 185 El Octavio Dia (The Eighth Day) 312 El ogro y el pollo (The Ogre and the Chicken) 326 Elorap (Bret) 101 El origen de la sombra (The Origin of the Shadow) 323 Elosegi, Eduardo 188 El pelícano (The Pelican, from Strindberg) 326 El Pibe (The Kid) 328, 329 El Salavavidas (The Lifeguard) 328 El secreto di Keila y Keysi (The Secret of Keila and Keysi) 324 El show de los perrolotudito (The Show of the Dogs) 328 El Show de Siniestro Mu y las vacas lobotómicas (Sinister Mu and the Lobotomized Cows Show) 316 El show debe terminar (The Show Has to End) 312 El siguiente programa (The Following Program) 317 El Sotano 328 El Toro Azul (Jaroudi) 258 El trabajo infantil (The Labouring Children) 323 El Trio (The Triplets) 328 Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (Life Without Gabriella Ferri) 140, 144 El último golpe del caballero (The Last Blow of the Knight) 317 Elu maitse (Taste of Life) 139 Elutuba (Living Room) 138 El Viejo Calefón (The Old Radiator) 330 Elysian Fields (Conradi) 42 El-Zawawi, Mohamed 292 Ema/Emaki 2 (Votive/Handscroll 2) 239 Emes, Ian 339 Emperor’s Nightingale, The (Hans Christian Andersen) 179 Empreintes (Imprints; Drouin) 64 Empress Chung (Shin) 269 Emu and the Sun, The (Skibinski) 336 Emuhno (Pedersen) 324 En Agosto (In August) 317 End of Code (Duesing) 41 End of Evangelion, The (Gainax) 225, 235 Endoputra, Chandra 287 End, The (Landreth) 63

366  Index

Ene Tene Tu (Barry) 325 Ének a csodaszarvasról (Song of the Miraculous Hind) 162 Engaas, Julie 135 Engel, Jules 27 Engels, Pieter 110 English Summer Rain (Placebo) 341 Enigma (D’Ocon Films) 186 Enjoy the Ride (Morcheeba) 342 Enkinho no hako – Hakasenosagashimono (Perspektivenbox – Researchers Search) 242 Ensby, Sandra 79 Entabi, Antoine 257 Entre la Science et les Ordures (Between Science and Garbage; Hébert) 66 Entrutyunner (Elections) 174 Enzeru: The Place Where We Were (Angel: The Place Where We Were) 247 Ephemera (Sikharulidze) 173 Episodes in Disbelief (Shenfield) 335 Erajshtakan Aybuben (Musical Alphabet) 174 Erato (Spartalis) 177 Ereq Zangak (Three Bells) 175 Erez, Cemal 343 Ergo (Géza) 165 Ergo Proxy (Manglobe) 227 Ergogh Tver (Singing Figures) 174 Eric, Jiva 303 Erik, Novák 165 Eriyat, Suresh 279 Erlingsson, Friðrik 137 Ernits, Heiki 137 – 9, 146 Ertesvåg, Jan Otto 135 Escalle, Alain 101 Escape from Paradise (Broersma) 112 Escapism (Ofer) 251 Escher, M.C. 164 E Shi Yin Xiang (Impression from My Childhood) 274 Escuela Militar (Military Academy) 319 Espantalho (Scarecrow) 322 Espelho meu (Mirror My) 302 Essence, The (Okoye) 298 Essere morti o essere vivi è la stessa cosa (Being Dead or Being Alive Is the Same Thing) 180, 181 Esténcil de Valparaíso (Valparaíso Stencil) 326 Estória do Gato e da Lua (Tale about the Cat and the Moon) 189 Estreal de Oito Pontas (Eight Point Star) 321 Etude (Erlich) 40 Etzenhouser, Shane 296 Europa & Italia (Europe and Italy) 185

Evangelion (Gainax) 225, 233, 235 Evangelion shin gekijoban: jô (1.0 You Are (Not) Alone) 235 Evariation (S. Schmid) 332 Every Child (Fedorenko) 56, 61 Everyone’s Pregnant (Solomon) 39 Everything but the Girl’s Driving (music video) 341 Everything In Its Right Place (Radiohead i-blip) 342 Everything is Fine (Sahakyants) 176 Everything Will Be OK (Hertzfeldt) 36 Evo (Gavin) 89 Evolution (Pummell) 84 Evolution of Intelligence (Adeleye) 299 Ex Machina 100 Ex Memoriam (Bériou) 101 Exciting Life of a Tree, The (Plympton) 50 Ex-enfant (Ex-child; Drouin) 64 Exercises d’animation (Hébert) 67 Exile’s Return, The’ (Rabinyan) 94 Exit (Kuhn) 120 Experiment (Tsuji) 247 Extended Play (Priestly) 47 External World, The (O’Reilly) 97 Extra (Ishii; music video) 232, 342 Eye for an Eye (U.N.K.L.E.) 342 Eye of the Storm (Mulloy) 73 Eža kažicun¸š (The Pricky) 147 Fable of Sase 295 Facing Champlain (Pouliot) 346 Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar, The (Jaroudi) 258 Fado Lusitano (Lusitanian Fado) 189, 190 Fagan, Pádraig 94 Fairly Odd Parents, The 10 Fairly Tale, A (Cataldo) 324 Faja, Ergys 179 Fake (music video) 95 Falling in Love Again (Ferguson) 57, 345 Fallout (Kranot and Kranot) 251 False Saints (Sutherland) 58 Falter 4 (Fink) 126 Family Conversation, A (Parker) 81 Family Dog (Burton) 26 Family Guy 9, 11 Famous Fred (Quinn) 70, 79 Fan and the Flower, The (Plympton) 51 Fantasia (Disney) 12, 329 Fantasia 2000 12; ‘The Firebird’ (Brizzi brothers) 100 Fantasmagorie 2008 (Rastko C´iric´) 168 Fantastic Mister Fox 110 Fantasy (Katô) 245

Index  367

Fantaziy Sidorova (Sidorov’s Fantasies) 149 Fanthomas 133 Farhat, il principe del deserto (Farhat, the Prince of the Desert) 185 Faris, Valerie 343 Farrell, Tom 40 Farrokhzad, Forugh 45 Farthest Shore (LeGuin) 289 Farut (The Lighthouse) 170 Fast Forward Little Red Riding Hood (Rood) 112 Fast Spin Fling (Ensby) 79 Fatenah (Habash) 255 Father and Daughter (Dudok de Wit) 61, 114 – 15, 116 Father Christmas (Unwin and Jackson) 80 Fathi, Ahmed 293 Faton, Jacques 297 Fatty Issues (Guard) 70 Favez, Isabelle 128 Fearnley, Lise 135 Feather’s Tale, A 55 – 6 Federici, Laura 184 Fedor Khitruk. Profession – Animator (Seregin) 197 Fedorenko, Eugene 56, 61 Feeling My Way (Hodgson) 72 Feet of Song (Russell) 71 Fehmers, Frank 112 Feijó, Abi 188 – 9 Feiss, David 8 Fei Yueh Ln Diao (Fly Out Blue) 276 Felicioli, Jean-Loup 108 Felinichita (Boyanov) 170 Fell, Sam 184 Fell In Love with a Girl (White Stipes) 343 Femija im, princ’i bukur (My Son, the Handsome Prince) 179 Ferguson, Munro 57, 345 Feroumont, Benoît 110 Ferrailles (Wrecks; Pouvaret) 105 Ferrara, Ursula 180 Ferré, Manuel García 326 Ferreras, Ignacio 89, 187 Fetišu daˉ rzs (The Garden of Fetish) 147 Feuerhaus (Firehouse; Neubauer) 117, 122 – 3, 124 Fields, W. C. 51 Fiennes, Ralph 71 Fierlinger, Paul 32 Fierlinger, Sandra 32 Fifty Percent Grey (Robinson) 96 Fiksiki 194, 199 Film s djevojcˇicom (A Film with a Girl) 167 Filmen om Bodil (The Film about Bodil) 132

Filmu˛ štrichai 148 Fimfárum 2 156, 159 Fimfárum Jana Wericha (Jan Werich’s Fimfárum) 156, 160, 161 Fimka (Belov) 264 Final Fantasy game franchise 237 Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children 238 Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within 237 – 8 Finale (Pavlátová) 158 Finding Nemo (Pixar) 18, 20 Fine, David 76 Fine, Denis 63 Fink, Tone 125 Finnegan, Lorcan 96 Firebird Suite (Stravinsky) 12 Fireman (Saba) 261 Fireman Sam (3D version) 90 Fireman Sam (Grace) 71 First Person Shooter 346 Fish and Chips (Sorensen) 44 Fish Eye (Marušic´) 167 Fish Never Sleep (Denis) 72 Fish on Soil (Shedaei) 262 Fisherboy (Stenhouse) 336 Fishing Trip (Oluwaseun) 299 Fitzpatrick, Andrew 91 Five Fucking Fables (Baumane) 38, 146 Fix y Foxi (D’Ocon Films) 186, 188 Fjeldmark, Stefan 130 Flåklypa Grand Prix (Caprino) 133 Flank Breeder (Currie) 335 Flat World (Greaves) 88 FLCL (Furi Kuri) 225 Flee (Habash) 255 Fleischer, Richard 40, 227, 344 Fleur de pierre (Stone Flower) 291 Flight (Torabi) 262 Flight of Icarus, The 126 Flight of the Conchords (television series) 336 Flight of the Pierrots (animated series) 175 Flik Flak (Bush) 75 Flintstones, The (TV show) 6 Flockenspiel I-IV (Neubauer) 124, 125 Flooded Playground (Crafts) 39 Florensky, Aleksandr 210 Florensky, Olga 210 Flórez, Wenceslao Fernández 186 Flow (Sakakibara) 245 Fluffy Gardens (Tammemägi) 92 Flushed Away (Aardman) 25, 85

368  Index

Flutura (The Butterfly) 179 Flux (Hinton) 56 Fly Me to the Moon (Stassen) 111, 346 Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir (Selwood) 48 Flying Hairs (Dumala) 211 Flying Nation (Kovalyov) 53 Fogel, Eric 7 Foli & Folaya, the Nuts (Moatasim) 294 Folk of Stars (Mohammend) 259 Folman, Ari 252 Fontanarrosa, Roberto 327 Foot 2 rue (Beretta) 102 Footy My Love (Okoye) 298 Foran, Keith 93 For a Tango (Zucchelli) 184 Forbis, Amanda 62 For the Birds (Eggleston) 16n47 Ford, John 93 Forecast (Lokman) 112 Forest Murmurs (Hodgson) 72 Forming Game (Sutherland) 58 Forrest, Stuart 308 Forsberg, Monika 89 Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (Boulder Media) 10, 93 Fotografitë (The Photos) 179 Fotspor av en kjærlighetshistorie (Footprints of a Love Story) 132 Foulkes, Adam 80 Fouquet, Claire 104 Four Day Weekend (The Bluetones) 342 Fox and the Hound, The (Disney) 19, 27 Fox Book, The (Sahakyants) 175 Foxy Fables (Oren) 250 Fractal Aquarium’ (Kai&Co.) 247 Fractal Cycles (Neubauer) 124 – 5 Frames of Mind (Sorensen) 45 Frank Film (Mouris and Mouris) 40 Frank ja Wendy (Frank and Wendy) 139 Frankenweenie (Burton) 26 – 7 Franklin et le trésor du lac (Franklin and the Treasure of the Lake; Monféry) 103 Frankly Caroline (Mouris and Mouris) 40, 41 Franta Nebojsa (Fearless Frankie) 160 Franz Kafka (Dumala) 152 – 3, 210, 211 – 13 Freeman, Petra 80 Free Radicals (Lye) 60 Freedom of the Leg (Dumala) 211 Freedom Song, The (Famous’s House of Animation) 279 Freise, Johanna 126 Freej (animated series) 260

French Windows (Emes) 339 Fresh Fruit (Sorensen) 43 Friday the 13th Part III 344 Friends Forever (Gezen) 254 Fritz the Cat 8 Frizzell, Euan 336 Frog (D’Ocon) 188 Frog Box (Sato) 244 Frog Seed (Sato) 244 From an Evil Cradling (Kavaleer Productions) 93 From Darkness (Twomey) 93 From the Big Bang to Tuesday Morning (Cloutier) 57 Frooties series 284 Frozen (Disney) 324 Fu, Edward 285 Fuga (Nassenstein) 112 Fugue (Schwizgebel) 127 Fukushima Atsuko 224, 229, 232 Fukutomi Hiroshi 236 Fukuyama Yoji 224 Fulano (Post) 317 Full Moon (Glabicki) 34 Fullmetal Alchemist 25 Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (Studio Bones) 227 Fullmetal Panic! (Studio Gonzo) 226 Función macabra (Macabre Function) 320 Fungus the Bogeyman (Haddon) 80 Funnyfilm 162 Furniss, Maureen 122 Furniture Poetry (Bush) 74 Furo (Bathhouse) 238 Fushigi no umi no Nadia (Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water) 224, 235 Fushigina erebeta (Wondrous Elevator) 242 Futari wa Pretty Cure (We are Pretty Cure) 223 Futurama 10 Fuv (Newland) 63 Fuyu no niji (Winter Rainbows) 244 Fyksen, Espen 135 Gábor, Ulrich 164 Gabr, Sami 256 Gabriel, Peter 86, 339 Gabrielsson, Lisbet 131 Gaffney, Cathal 91 – 2 Gagnol, Alain 108 Gainax 224 – 5, 235 Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea/“Ponyo”) 222 GAKI Biwa hoshi (Yokosuka) 243

Index  369

Galettini, Carlos 327 Gallardo, Rafael 317 Galstyan, Sergey 174 – 6 Galstyan, Stepan 175 Galvão, Arnaldo 321 Game of Razors (Dumala) 210 Game of Rules (Dinkelbach) 95 Game Over (PES) 38 Gana, Andrés 325 Ganbaatar 267 Gankhetqilebis Vashlebi (The Apple of Discord) 173 Gankutsuo (Gankutsuo: The Count of Montecristo) 226 Garbarek, Jan 132 García, Agustín 318 Garcia, Gerry A. 288 García, Raúl 111, 187 García Moreno, José Ángel 311 Garden of Proserpine (Baldwin) 324 Gardner, Iain 79 Gargoyles 10 Garoto Cósmico (Cosmic Boy) 322 Garrido-Lecca, Hernán 319 Gates, Henry 319 Gates of Heaven, The (Lee) 83 Gaturro (Illusion Studios) 327 Gavardnilebi (Outlaws) 173 Gavin, Chris 89 Gay’s Guide to Zombies (Austin) 80 Gedo senki (Tales from Earthsea) 216 Geffen, David 13, 23 Geffenblad, Lotta 131 Gehrig, Maja 129 Geiser, Janie 31 Geisha Grooming (Bush) 75 Gekon 169 Gelashvili, Igor 195 – 6 Geller, Dmitry 205 Gem Mountain (Tatarsky) 191, 194, 196 Gemelos (Twins) 319 Gemma-Yuy: Metodika Uskoreniya Vremeni (Gemma-Yuy: The Methodology of Acceleration of Time) 265 General HukKkokDo (Kim Seong-chil) 268 General’s Boot, The (Agha) 256 Generatio (Mait Laas) 139 Genesis (Samoladás) 177 Geng: Pengembaraan Bermula (Gang: The Adventure Begins) 284 Gengenbach, Pål 132 Genghis Khan (Miagmar) 267 Genius Party (Studio 4°C) 224, 232, 235, 236

Genius Party Beyond (Studio 4°C) 224, 233 Genius Party Extra (musical event) 224 Genji monogatari sennenki (The Tale of Genji) 229 Genkel, Toby 137 Genma taisen (The Genma Wars) 229 Gentinetta, Claudius 128 Gentle Woman, The (Dumala) 210, 211 Geoghegan, Michael 341 Geometrisk dans (Geometric Dance) 132 George and Rosemary (Snowden/Fine) 76 Gepunktet (Dotted) 126 Gerald McBoing-Boing (Cannon) 26n63 Géraldine (de Pins) 105 Gerasimov, Aleksandr 197 Geri’s Game (Pinkava) 16n47 Gerstein, Mordicai 37 Get Happy (Woloshen) 60 Get Real (De Beijer) 113 Getting Over Him in 8 Songs or Less (Solomon) 39 Getting Stoned Again (Y. Nathan) 251 Geva, Dudu 249 Géza, M. Tóth 165 Gezen, Erhan 254 Ghaibeh, Lina 258 Ghalloum, Ahmed 260 Gharibebi Sul Tirian (The Poor are Always Weepy) 173 Ghatothkach – Master of Magic (Rao) 280 Ghazala, Mohamed 261, 293 Ghazi, Nizar 256 Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru/Oshii; Production I.G) 226, 229, 230 Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Production I.G) 226 Giamatti, Paul 51 Gibbons, Tom 42 Giblets 339 Gibson, Mel 85 Gift, The (Mark) 252 Gila-Gila (comic strip) 284 Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models (Purves) 75 Gilded Man, The (Gardner) 79 Gilliam, Terry 86 Gin iro no kami no Agito (Origin – Spirits of the Past; Studio Gonzo) 226 Ginga tetsudô (Rintarô) 229 Ginjas (Sour Black Cherries) 190 Gino il pollo perso nella rete (Gino the Chicken Lost in the Net) 182 Girerd, Jacques-Rémy 99 – 100, 102, 108 Girlin, Jelena 139 – 40 Girl who didn’t dress bright in the dark, The (Taylor) 80

370  Index

Girls in Love (Ensby) 79 Girls’ Night Out (Quinn) 69, 70 Girl With No Head, The (musc video) 177 Gisaburo, Sugii 215 Giuliu Andreotti (Verger) 185 Give up Yer Aul’ Sins (Gaffney) 92 Gjennom mine tyke briller (Through My Thick Glasses) 133 Glabicki, Paul 34 Glass Crow (Kravitz) 40 Glecer, Swan 327 Glenewinkel, Christian 315 Glès, Vincent 296 Glomma, Lasse 132 Glory Horizons 260 Gnarled (Scholes) 337 Go! Go! PikaPika!! (Totchka) 245 Goats (short flash animation) 261 Gockell, Gerd 117 Godbout, Jacques 64 Godfrey, Bob 324 Godley, Kevin 340 God morgon, Gerda gök (Good Morning, Gerda Cockoo) 131 God on Our Side (Kranot and Kranot) 251 Godoy, Alberto 317 God’s Early Work (Bresnihan) 96 Godzilla (Honda) 26 Goindol 268 Going Equipped (Aardman) 85 Goytisolo, Pablo 328 Gold Rush (Chaplin) 206 Golden Shower (Marcondes) 322 Golem (Barta) 158 Golezowski, Richard 86 Golgo 13 (Golgo 13: The Professional) 228 Gömd (Hidden) 131 Gómez, Manolo 186, 191 Gomez, Manuel 109 Gómez, Ricardo 313 Gomila, Pako Bagur 188 Gondell, Eduardo 327 Gondry, Michel 343 Gonzalez, Alejandro R. 328 González, Juan Camilo 318 Gooda, Hazem 293 Goodey, Janette 337 Good Friends (Joni Mitchell) 339 Good Night Baby (Sodnompilin) 266 Good Song (Blur) 342 Goode Family, The 10 Goodman, Benny 60

Goodman, Yoni 251 – 2 Gorbachev, Mikhail 3, 202, 267 Gorbunov, Dmitry 199 Gordon, Eve 337 Gor Ei Gor Gai (Idiom Company) 283 Gora Samocvetov (Gem Mountain) 199, 203 Gorgiard, Laurent 104 Gorgonata (The Gorgone) 169 Gori, gori (Burn, Burn) 148 Gorinstein, Emmanuel 102 Gospodinova, Velislava 170 Gorky Park: Returning 199 Gotlib, Arsen 199 Goto Takayuki 226 Gourmand (Higgins) 79 Graaf, Juan de 113 Grabbit the Rabbit (Oren) 250 Grace, Chris 71 Grace (Pepi) 40 Grade, Michael 68 Grafström, Ulla-Carin 131 Grall, Jean-Yves 101 Grammaticopoulos, Philippe 101 Grand Day Out, A (Park) 86 Grand Masque ET les Junglos (Aufort) 296 Grandma Stories (Boduvision Studios) 300 Grandpa in My Pocket (Dinamo Productions) 90 Grandpa’s Robot (Morpho Animation Studio) 316 Granjon, Pierre-Luc 105 Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (Brown Bag Production) 92 Graphiti 280 Grasso, Santiago Bou 328 _grau (_Grey) 117, 122 Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata) 215, 218 Gravitatsioon (Gravitation) 139 Gravity Rhino 249 Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (Green) 35 Grayaâ, Mohamed Hassine 292 Great British Black Invasion, The (documentary) 90 Great Escape, The 85 Great Mouse Detective, The (Disney) 11, 18 Great White Man-Eating Shark, The (Frizzell) 336 Greaves, Daniel 88, 324 Gréco, Jean-Luc 103 Greece 177 – 8 Green, Brent 35 Greenhalgh, Howard 342 Green Memories (Sorensen) 45 Greno, Nathan 22 Green Space (Sorensen) 45

Index  371

Greenchildren (Radiohead i-blip) 342 Green-Green (El Ouazzani) 291 Grillo, Oscar 328 Grimanis, Alexandra 60 Grimault, Paul 217 Grimm Brothers 179, 288, 289 Gritos en el Pasilo (Screams in the Corridor) 187 Groening, Matt 6, 10 Grosch, Claude 111 Ground Zero/Sacred Ground (Aqua) 40 Group of Friends, A (Zazam) 292 Groves, Jason 89, 342 Grown Up (Priestly) 47 Gruber-Stitzer, Judith 62 Grüezi (Good Day) 128 Guard, Candy 70 Guard Dog (Plympton) 50 – 1 Guardianes del Agua (Guardians of the Water) 318 Gubara, Gadal 294 Gubenco, Alexei 171 Gudri dukte˙ (The Clever Daughter) 148 Guernica (Picasso) 251 Guerra, Adrián 315 Guggen (Sivertsen) 133 Guide Dog (Plympton) 51 Guidi, Magda 180 Guillaume, Samuel and Frédéric 128 – 9 Guillén, Roberto 316 Guinness, Christopher 315 Gul (The Flower) 265 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCCJPI) 259 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 221 Gulubrkvilo Bati Tasikos Tavgadasavali (The Adventures of the Naive Duck Tasiko) 173 Gun Hil 137 Gundam (Sunrise) 225 Guns, Bees and Tadpoles (McCloskey) 92 Gurëgdhendësi (Stonecutter) 179 Gustas? (How Do You like It?) 312 Guyonnet, Daniel 102 Guy’s Dog (Bresnihan) 96 Guzairov, Emil 264 – 5 György, Matolcsy 162 Habanera (Sholev) 170 Hablan las animas (The Souls Speak) 323 Habash, Ahmad 255 Hachimitsu to Clover (Honey & Clover) 234 Hacia adentro (Inwards) 328 Hadacol Christmas (Green) 35

Haddad, Hussam 257 Haddon, Mark 80 Haegele, Thomas 122 Hafan Film Praha 159 Haha o tazunete sanzenri (3,000 Miles in Search of Mother) 217, 221 Hahn, Gerhard 121 Hahn, Joe 341 Hai Zhi Chuan Shuo – Ma Zu (Matsu) 274 Haikas (Haiku) 147 Hail Mary (Selwood) 48 Hair High (Plympton) 50 Hairyman (Kravitz) 40 Hajjaj, Emad 256 Hajj Nakad (El-Zawawi) 292 Hakujaden (Tôei) 217 Halas, John 189 Half-Illuminated (Mohammend) 259 Halife, Usame Ahmed 254 Hall, Mark 90 Hamdan’s Alarm (short flash animation) 261 Hamilton Mattress (Purves) 75 Hamilton, Sam 337 Hammam (Miailhe) 107 Hamu (Ashes) 164 Hana no hi (Day of the Nose) 246 Hancock, Hugh 347 Hand (Morse; 1982) 46 Hand (1978, Hong Kong) 276 Hand Soap (Oyama) 246 Hand, The (Trnka) 94 Hannah Montana 10 Hanne (Magyarósi) 165 Hans Christian Andersen og den skæve skygge (Hans Christian Andersen and the Long Shadow) 130 Hansel and Gretel (Grimm brothers) 289 Hansraj, Jugal 280 Hanuman (Samant/Ukey) 280 Happy and Gay (Pepi) 40 Happy Feet (Animal Logic) 24, 25 Happy Hour (The Housemartins) 341 Happy Life 132, 133 Happy Valley (Dinamo Productions) 90 Hapunda (Jonard) 311 Harada, Hiroshi 240 Haralampieva, Anna 170 Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (music video) 341 Harding, Chris 89, 342 Hare and the Tortoise, The (Aesop) 240 Haret Abu-Hudejan (animated series) 256

372  Index

Harib, Mohammed 260 Harjutusi iseseisvaks eluks (Exercise for an Independent Life) 141 Härkönen, Mariko 135 Harlequin (Kinga) 164 Harmageddon (Rintarô) 225, 229 Harris, Joel Chandler 250 Harris, Miriam 337 Harrison, Joanna 80 Harrison, Oliver 80 Harryhausen, Ray 26 – 7, 86 Harry Rents a Room (Hulsing) 113 Hartman, Butch 10 Haruki Etsumi 217 Haru no shikumi (The Mechanism of Spring) 246 Harvie Krumpet (Elliot) 333 – 4 Haranto, Daniel 287 Hasan Everywhere (Hourani) 94 Hashomer shel Hagan (The Garden’s Guard) 249 Al-Hassan, Salem 257 Hasta los huesos (To the Bones) 312 Hastrup, Jannik 130 Hattler, Max 119 Hau, Herman 277 Hauff, Wilhelm 119 Haunted Castle (Stassen) 346 Haunting in Connecticut (Cornwell) 335 Hauru no oguku shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle) 222 Have a Nice Trip, Sim (Alassane) 293 Havel, Václav 156 Havran (The Raven) 161 Hawkins, Roger 303 Hawvlandedt (Glomma) 132 Hayes, Derek W. 71, 207 Hayots Grer (Armenian Letters) 175 Hayrenner (Hayrens) 174 He & She (Naasan) 256 He (Lotus) 271 Head (Wagner Tang) 7, 277 Head, Space, Earth, Time (Sorensen) 44 Health Brings Joy (Torabi) 262 Heart of Hearts (Baramba) 304, 305 Heart’s Right (Roger Daltrey) 339 Heaven and Earth Magic (Smith) 183 Heavenly Creatures (Jackson) 336 Heavy Pockets (Cox) 88 Hébert, Pierre 55, 64 – 7, 183 Hegner, Michael 130 Heidmets, Rao 138 – 9 Heidsieck, Henri 103

Heilborn, Hanna 131 Heinrichs, Rick 26 – 7 Heirlooms (Chandler/Danta) 332 Heisei tanuki gassen Ponpoko (Pom Poko) 218 – 19 Heit, Laura 40 Hela, Heli, Helo (Yuwono) 286 Hell Bent (Kenna) 341 Hell: Two Kinds of Life (Yeun Sang-ho) 269 Hello and Goodbye (music video) 306 Hello Hamdoon (animated series) 261 Hello Kitty no Cinderella (Hello Kitty’s Cinderella) 227 Helminen, Liisa 71 – 135 Help (Bozzetto) 185 Help! I’m a Fish 91, 130 Hem ljuwa hem (Home Sweet Home) 131 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (animated series) 6 – 7 Hemingway, Ernest 200 Henkei sakuhin no 1 – 5 (Warpoing Compositions) 240 Hens and Roosters (Pavlátová) 158 Herbst, Helmut 116 Hercules (Disney) 12, 22, 253 Here and There (Obomsawin) 59 Herguera, Isabel 188 Her Morning Elegance (Y. and M. Nathan) 251 Hernádi, Tibor 162 Hernández, José 327 Herqueville (Hébert) 66 Herr Bar (Mr Cash) 126 Herr Würfel (Mr Dice) 129 Hertzfeldt, Don 36 Hervet, Cédric 341 Hetjur Valhallar – Þor (Legends of Valhalla – THOR) 137 Hewitt, Nicol 167 Hewlett, Jamie 341 Hickner, Steve 14 Hidaka Masamitsu 233 Hideaki Anno 224, 233, 235 Higgins, Andrew 79 High School Musical 10 Highlander: The Search for Vengence (Kawajiri) 232 Higuchi Shinji 226 Hiilisangolla ratsastaja (Rider on the Bucket) 136 Hijazi, Razam 256 – 7 Hijazi, Sulafa 256 – 7 Hillen, Sean 93 Hillenburg, Stephen 10 Hill Farm, The (Baker) 74 Hill Street Blues (TV show) 5 Hilton, Stuart 83

Index  373

Hin Ashghari patmuyun: Babelon (Ancient World History: Babylon) 174 Hinde, John 93 Hindsefeldt, Pernilla 131 Hin Jraghatsi Bari Voginere (Kind Ghosts of the Old Mill) 175 Hinton, Chris 56 – 7, 63 Hirragi Aoi 216 Hisayuki Toriumi 299 His Comedy (Bush) 74 His Mother’s Voice (Tupicoff) 333 His Passionate Bride (Bringas/Forsberg) 89 Histoire d’eau (Water Story) 127 Histoire du vieux crocodile (Chauveau) 242 Historia para una niña ben (Story for a Good Girl) 324 História Trágica com Final Feliz (Tragic Story with Happy Ending) 189, 190 Historias Nativas (Macuare Producciones) 318 History of Islam, The (cartoon series) 264 History of the Main Complaint (Kentridge) 309 History of the Moscow Tsars 199 Hitchcock, Alfred 25, 140, 205 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The 89, 97 Hjælp! Jeg er en fisk (Help! I Am a Fish) 91, 130 Hlavatý, Vratislav 157 HM HM (Ghazala) 293 Ho, Roger 276 Hoba Hoba Spirit Moroccan band 291 Hocus Pocus Alfie Atkins (Kove) 135 Hocus Pocus! Story Pouch 268 Hodgson, Jonathan 72, 83 Hoffen auf bessere Zeiten (Hoping for Better Times) 128 Hoffmann, Wolfgang 125 Hogane no renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist) 226 – 7 Hohokekyo tonari no Yamadakun (My Neighbours the Yamadas) 219 Hokuto no Ken (Tôei Animation) 222 Holcer, Pablo 327 Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me (U2) 340 Holding Your Breath (Lucas) 334 Holiday (Neubauer) 124 Holly, Alan 94 Holly she*p (Pantela) 172 Holtágban (Dead Water) 165 Holy Garden (Saba) 261 Holy Kings (Saba) 261 Holy Stories (Saba) 261 Home Movies (SBS) 331 Home Movies initiative (SBS) 335 Home on the Range 22

Homeland (Studio Kasatmata) 287 Homestead Act (Woloshen) 60 Ho Minfong 285 Hommage (Gábor) 164 Homoom Motahrika (Animated Concerns) 255 Honayn’s Shoe (Ghazala) 293 Honda Toshiyuki 277 Hong Gil-dong Returns 268 Hong Hai Er Jue Zhan Huo Yan Shan (Fire Ball) 274 Hongmao Lantu Qixia Zhuan (Howie and Landau) 273 Hongo Mitsuru 266, 236 Hooked (Neubauer) 74 Hope, Tim 81 Hopewell, Chris 343 Horne, Andrew 332 Hors-jeu (Off-Side) 126 Horváth, Mária 164 Horváth, Zoltan 128 Hoshi no koe (Voices of a Distant Star) 237 Hoshino Koji 216 Hoshi o ou kodomo (Children Who Chase Stars) 237 Hosoda Marmoru 226, 236, 238 Hosoi Hirokazu 247 Hot Dog (Plympton) 51 Hot Hot Dog (Sahakyants) 174 Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies) 215, 218 Hôtel 12 étoiles (12-Star Hotel) 109 Hotel Narcis (De Beijer) 113 Hotell E (Hotel E) 138, 143 Houplain, Ludovic 342 Hourani, Hasan 94 Hou Ren Lei (Post Human) 275 House M.D. (TV show) 5 House of Memories (Sorensen) 45 House on Dame Street, The (Robinson) 96 How a Liberator is Forged 318 Howard, Byron 22 How it All Began (Pieperhoff) 95 How Long Is A Minute (Pummell) 84 How Mermaids Breed (Ashworth) 77 How to Cope with Death (Ferrera) 89, 187 How to Disappear Completely (Radiohead i-blip) 342 How to Kiss (Plympton) 49 – 50 How to Train Your Dragon (DreamWorks) 24 How Wings are Attached to the Backs of Angels (Welch) 56 Howie B 82, 83, 340 Hrabryj poastushok (The Brave Little Shepherd) 266 Hrbácˇi z Damašku (Hunchback of Damascus) 160 Hreidar heimski (Hreidar the Stupid) 137 Hsieh, Joe 276

374  Index

Huang Yang 27 Huapango De Los Volcanos (Triggerfish Studios) 308 Hubley, Emily 33 Hubley, Faith 31, 33 Hudie quan (Recollection) 271 Hudson, Mathew 315 Hughes, Hobart ‘John’ 335 Hugo 3 – fræk, flabet og fri (Jungo Goes Bananas) 130 Hulsing, Hisko 113 Hulsing, Milan 113 Hulu xiongdi (Calabash Brothers) 273 Human Behaviour (Björk) 343 Human Comes to the Forest, A (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Human Figure in Motion (Bob Cheng) 277 Hump Back Angel, The (JoWOnder) 82 Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) 12, 22, 100, 103 Hund, Harald 126 Hunger Artist, The (Kafka) 42 Hunger Artist, The (Gibbons) 42 Hungry Best 5 (Lee Kyu-hyung) 268 Hungu (Brault) 57 Hunt, Philip 88 Hunting (Usmanov/Algozhin) 263 Hurry-Hurry (Dinkelbach) 95 Husák, Gustáv 156 Husák, Michal 345 Huset på Kampen (One Day a Man Bought a House) 133 Hustle!! Tokitama-kun (Morimoto) 232 Huston, John 12 Huynangtias, Erwin 287 Hu Zhongdao (The Island) 275 Hyakka zukan (Japanese – English Pictionary) 241 Hydra (Rabe and Jase) 327 Hykade, Andreas 112, 117, 119 Hyung-yun Chang 269 I, Robot 336 Iakob Gogebashvili: cxovreba da mogvaceoba (Iakob Gogebashvili: Life and Statesmanship) 173 I & J Stir Fry (van Blerk) 307 I Am So Proud of You (Hertzfeldt) 36 I Am Weasel 8 Ibarra, Luís Téllez 312 I Believe (Kraus/Kahidarov) 263 i-blips 342 Ibn Battuta (Said Bouftass) 291 Icarus’s Drownings (Escalle) 101 Ice Age (Blue Sky) 24 Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (Blue Sky) 24 Ice Age: Continental Drift (Blue Sky) 24

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Blue Sky) 24, 321 I Change My Mind (Quannum) 342 Ice-cream and Other Vegetables (Oren) 250 Ich kann es mir sehr gut vorstellen (I Can Imagine It Very Well) 167 Icha Makrouna (television series) 292 Ichtys (Skrobecki) 150 Ico, el caballito valiente (Ferré) 326 I Dance (Neubauer) 74 Idegen test (Foreign Body) 164 Identity (Zarrinkelk) 262 Idiots and Angels (Plympton) 51 I Do Art (Polychronakis) 178 I Feel a Lifelong Bullet in the Back of My Head’ (Üdi) 143 I fili mu ta diaskimakia (My Friend From Outer Space) 177 Igazság, Radu 171 Iger, Robert A. 13, 16 Igor 98 IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix (Production I.G) 226 Ihatov no Kenso: Kenji no haru (The Vision of Ihatov: Kenjis Spring/Spring and Chaos) 231 Ikaras (Icarus) 148 Ike! Inachu Takkyubu (Let’s Go! Inachu Ping Pong Club) 234 Ikonostasis (Steiner) 126 Il cerchio e la soglia (The Circle and the Threshold) 184 Il Generale e i Fratellini d’Italia (The General and the Little Brothers of Italy) 182 Ilinsky, Igor 209 Ilion Animation Studios 186 I˙lk, Berat 254 I’ll Go, Me Too (Kambou) 297 I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight (music video) 97, 340 Illuminations (Sorensen) 45 – 6 Illusions (Yokosuka) 243 Il Luster 113 Il pesce rosso (The Goldfish) 180 Imaginum (Mar/Sandoval) 313 Imago (Babouche) 105 I’m Beggin’ You (Supertramp) 340 I Miss You (Björk) 343 I’m on Diet (Louisa Ma) 277 I Move, So I Am (van Dijk) 112 Imperial Message, The (Dinkelbach) 95 I’m Still Seeing Breen (music video) 347 In /Between (Hewitt) 167 In /dividu (Hewitt) 167 In Abyssus Humanae Conscientiae/ReconoceR (González) 318 In and Out (Snowden/Fine) 76 InBetweening America (Kugel) 36

Index  375

Incipit vita nova (Volmer) 138 Incredible Creature (Stenhouse) 336 Incredibles, The (Pixar) 20, 21, 22 Indefinable Moods (K. Smith) 332 Independence 05 series 258 Indigo Kids (Toonz) 279 I-Net Bridge (comercial) 308 Infection (Cunningham) 336 – 7 Inferno (Dante) 170 Infuso, Gerlando 111 Inglis, Dan 337 Inner City (Parker) 81 Inoue Takehiko 222 In Search of the Dragon (Schorr) 322 Instinkt (Instinct) 139 Interrogating Ernie (Lidster) 78 Interstella 5555 – The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (animated musical film) 341 Interview, The (Dudok de Wit) 116 In the Sweet Mont Blanc (Mizue) 247 In the Time of Angels (Anderson) 82 In the Woods (Vester) 36 Into the Dark (Tupicoff) 333 Intolerance (Oforeh) 299 Intolerance I (Mulloy) 73 Intolerance III – The Final Solution (Mulloy) 73 Intolerance II – The Invasion (Mulloy) 73 Intra Muros (Bond) 34 Introspection (Yonesho) 243 Invincible Lions, The (Pictoons) 296 Invisible Man in Blind Love (Vuong) 101 Invisible Republic (Marcus) 35 Ioannides, Andis 171 Io so chi sono (I Know Who I Am) 181 I Pagliacci (Leoncavallo) 78 I Pity the Garden’ (Forugh Farrokhzad) 45 I Promise You (Get Ready) (Samantha Fox) 342 Ireland 1848 (documentary) 91, 94 Irishman Invented Rock & Roll, An (Corrigan Brothers) 342 Iron Giant, The 20, 25 Iron Man, The (Hughes) 25 Irusoin 186 Isaacs, Daniel 249 Isaacs, Jason 89 Isabelle (Jaroudi) 258 Isham, Wayne 341 Ishida Takashi 238 Ishikawa Mitsuhisa 226 Ishinomori Shotaro 231 Ishiro Honda 26

Ishulli (The Island) 179 Isiani, Amiran 174 Isidoro, la película (Isidoro, the Film) 327 Iskusenje (Temptation) 109 Island, The (Zerbo) 297 Island of Fugue (Al Qaseer) 260 Island of the Light (Khalifa) 259 Islet (Brault 57 Ismailov, R. 176 Iso Mitsuo 225 I Started Early (Selwood) 48 I Started Early – Took My Dog’ (Dickinson) 48 Istoria odnogo goroda (History of a Town) 198 Istoria odnogo porosionka (Story of a Little Pig) 172 Ito Nobutaka 236 Its Cartoon 273 Itse valtiaat (TV series) 136 It’s Okay (Land of Talk) 343 It’s So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House (Fierlinger) 33 Itsumo no nichiyobi (Usual Sunday) 246 Itziguari (Jonard) 311 Iuga, Dragos 171 Ivanov, Ivan 200, 266 Ivick Von Salza, Little Lumberjack 316 Ivor the Invincible (Audus) 80 Ivu no jikan (Time of Eve) 237 Izubuchi Yutaka 226 Izvor Života (The Spring of Life) 108 – 9 Iz zhinzni trollei (From the Life of Trolls) 175 Jääskeläinen, Leena 136 Jacinta (Castañeda) 312 Jack, Richard 88 Jackal, A (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Jack Jack Attack (Bird) 16n47 Jack Palmer (Fantasia Animation) 273 Jackson, Dianne 80 Jackson, Peter 336 Jackson, Samuel L. 226 Jacobs, Marc 238 Jacobsen, Esben Toft 131 Jacobsen, John M. 133 Jácome, Daniel 319 Jadir, Rachid 291 Jadoul, Paul 110 J’ai bu un café dans un Café (Said Bouftass) 291 Al-Jaili, Moatasim 294 Jam (Mizue) 247 Jam Session (Plucin´ska) 152 James and the Giant Peach (Dahl) 28, 29

376  Index

James and the Giant Peach (Selick) 29, 30 Janat Al atfal (Children’s Heaven) 294 Janauskas, Antanas 148 Jan-Babajan (Sikharulidze) 173 Jancis, Kaspar 139 – 40 Jankovics, Marcell 162, 164 Janne & Mertz (TV series) 131 Janneke (van Dijk) 112 Jansons, Edmunds 147 Jansson, Birgitta 131 Jaˉ n¸taˉ rpin¸š (Firefly) 145 Janus Perajurit Terakhir (Janus the Last Soldier) 287 Jardim da Celeste 189 Jarinko Chie (Chie the Brat) 217 Jaroudi, Bahige 258 Jase, Leandro 327 Jasmine Birds, The (Hijazi) 257 Jassim, Mohammad 260 … Ja teeb trikke (… And Plays Tricks) 141 Jaunaˉ Suga (The New Species) 145 Jawisaro (Estifanos) 295 Jaws 3D 344 Jazz for a Massacre (Carrano) 184 Jazzed (Setola) 110, 112 Jazzimation (van Cuijlenborg) 112 Jedné noci v jednom meˇsteˇ (A Night in a City) 159 Jegyz˝okönyv – Mansfeld Péter enkékére (Court Record – in Memorian Péter Mansfeld) 164 Jelenések (Revelations) 164 Jennings, Garth 97 Jeno˝ , Koltai 162 Jeno˝ , Vass 165 Jeser, Dave 10 Je suis bien content 102 Jesus vs. Frosty 9 Jesus vs. Santa 9 Jeu (Game) 127 Jewel Mountain (Alimorad) 261 Jiang Jian-qiu 270 Jicha 323 Jie (Chiu Hsian-yuan) 274 Jigen Bakudan (Dimension Bomb) 233 Jigoku no banken: Kerubersu (Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops) 230 Jik yev Jak (Jik and Jak) 175 Jimenez, Alejandra 89 Jiménez, Alfredo ‘Wilfi’ 316 Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (Nickelodeon) 25 Ji Mo Ma Tou (The Solitary Pier) 276 Jin Fuazi 272

Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (Production I.G) 226 João Sete Sete (John Seven Seven) 191 Jobs, Steve 14, 16, 19, 21 Joelfeest (The Carnaval Shout) 112 Joha (Madi) 292 Joha’s Diary (El-Zawawi) 292 Johannesburg – 2nd Greatest City After Paris (Kentridge) 309, 310 Johansson, Mats 131 John, Elton 12 John Henry the Steel Driving Man (Zolotukhin) 210 Johnny Bravo 8 Johnny Bravo in Bollywood 284 Johnny Cash Project (Chris Milk) 343 Johnny Sad-Boy (Character from Barbados) 314 John Silver (Muradyan, unfinished) 175 Johnson, Mike 25 – 30 Johnson, Stephen 339 Jo Jo in the Stars (Craste) 88 Joke, The (Aljassani/Abdalameer) 259 Joke-1 (Maharramov) 176 Joke-2 (Maharramov) 176 Jo Kilat (Ram Mohan) 285 Jolly Riger Jona/Tomberry (Rosto) 114 Jonard, Dominique 311 Jónás (Jonah) 163 Jonas et Lisa (Jonas and Lisa; Schorr) 297, 322 Jónasson, Oskar 137 Jones, Adam 341 Jones, Terry 137 Jonikaite, Rasa 148 Jordan, Larry 31, 56 Jorfald, Øivind 132 Joris & Marieke 112 Jose nia ístoria (Jose’s Story) 332 Jouette, Yann 101 Joung Yumi 270 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe) 121 Journey of an Idea, The (Nouralla) 257 Journey to Agartha 237 Journey to the West (CCTV Animation Inc.) 272, 273, 274, 284 Jours de Plaine (Days of Prairie) 322 JoWOnder 82 Joy (Dinkelbach) 95 Joy Street (Pitt) 39 József, Gémes 162 Jrra (Al Najm studio) 256 Jubei ninpocho (Ninja Scroll) 232

Index  377

Judge, Mike 7, 10 Judit, Mikle 163 Ju ge Cao Meng (Pursuing a Dream Frame by Frame) 275 Juha and the Shadow of the Tree (Aljassani) 259 Juha and the Sultan’s Elephant (Aljassani) 259 Jukebox (Wrake) 82 Jullien, Philippe 103 JumJum World (animated series) 260 June 345 Jungle Adventures (Saba) 261 Jungle Jokes (animated series) 284 Jungledyret (Jungle Jack) 130 Jungledyret Hugo – den store filmhelt (Amazon Jack) 130 Jurassic Park (Spielberg) 22 Jurassic Park (‘Weird Al’ Yankovic) 341 Just Hate Me (Pain) 341 Just Married (Pedmanson) 138 Justice League (animated series) 7 Jutakira 284 Juusonen, Kari 136 Kaasasündinud kohustused (Inherent Obligations) 139 Kaˉ bˉernin¸š naˉ k pasaulˉe (How a Baby Comes Into This World) 145 Kabongo the Griot (Sauvalle) 296 kabuki 75 Kachelhoffer, Gary 306 Ka-Ching 112 Kadmiri, Hatim 291 Kæmper, Klaudia 325 – 6 Kafanov, Vasiliy 209 Kafka, Franz 42, 58, 95, 152 – 4, 210 – 13, 242 Kafka inaka isha (Franz Kafka’s a Country Doctor) 242 – 3 Kage no kodomo (Children of the Shadows) 247 Kagirinaki rakuen (Eternal Paradise) 240 Kahari (A Clerk in Charge) 246 Kai Hua Roa 283 Kaiba (Yuasa) 225, 236 Kaikai & Kiki (Murakami) 238 Kaikisen (Kaikisen – Return to the Sea) 230 Kaimoni (Truck) 179 Kajiwara Ikki 228 Kakharov, Bakhtier 266 Kakıˉša Dzirnavin¸as (The Cats’ Mill) 145 Kak ou Nashego Omelechka (How Are Things for Our Melechko) 172 Kaktuso paslaptis (The Secret of a Cactus) 147 Kak Yartychulak nashel ottsa i mat (How Yartychulak Found His Father and Mother) 266 Kalasnikov (Seven Aksu) 343

Kali and Tewa Show (Boduvision Studios) 300 Kalil wa Dimn (Kalil and Dimn) 258 Kalila Wa Dimna (Basheer) 260, 291 Kall, Toomas 140 Kalnaellis, Reinis 146 Kalnaellis, Vilnis 145 – 6 Kalózok szeret˝oje (The Lover of Pirates) 164 Kaluchev, Daniel 169 Kaluchev, Iavor 170 Kamaji (character from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away) 290 Kamarihaikara (The Chamberstorch) 136 Kamene (Stones) 161 Kaminski, Hanan Albert 249 Kamiyama Kenji 226 Kamiyas Correspondence (Sakakibara) 245 Kamlu (Nihalani) 280 Kammen Sene (Another Year) 258 Kam nje kungulleshke (I Have A Pumpkin) 178 Kampung Boy (Lat) 284 Kamui no ken (The Sword of Kamui) 229 Kanada Yoshinori 239 Kanayama Akihiro 228 Kancil dan Kerbau (The Mouse Deer and the Buffalo) 287 Kandelaki, Mariam 174 Kandor Graphics 186, 187 Kanghagudhakutyun (Foresight) 174 Kani & Mani (El Nasr) 292 Kanno Yoko 234 Kanojo to kanojo no neko (She and Her Cat. Their Standing Points) 237 Kantana 283 Kapetan Džon Piplfoks (Captain John Pipplefox) 168 Kapitän Hu (Captain Hoo) 128 Kaplan, Jo Ann 81 Kapsapea (Cabbagehead) 138 Kaptein Sabeltann (Captain Sabertooth) 133 Karaev, Alexei 200, 210 Karakis (Madi) 292 Karavaev, Valentin 198 Karavan (Caravan) 263 Kare kano (Gainax) 225 Kareshi kanojo no jijo (His and Her Circumstances) 225, 235 Karl ja Marilyn (Karl and Marilyn) 143 Karlsson, Gunnar 137 Karlsson på taket (Karlsson on the Roof) 133 Karneval zvír ˇat (Carnival of the Animals) 157 – 8 Kartini 284 Karula, Mari-Liis 139 Karusel (Merry-Go-Round) 206

378  Index

Karwas, Piotr 151 Kasavina, Elena 172 Kasimov, Kaiyrgaly 263 Kas maakera on ümmargune? (Is the Earth Round?) 141 Kasmiya, Radwan 255 Kaso, Ilir 179 Kastelic, Dušan 166 Katabuchi Sunao 223 Katô Kunio 245 Katsin (The Axe) 174 Katten Mons (Mons the Cat) 133 Katzenberg, Jeffrey 13 – 14, 23, 87, 274 Kavanagh, Andrew 93 – 4 Kavárna (Pub) 159 Kawajiri Yoshiaki 225, 229, 232 Kawamori Shoji 215, 231 – 2 Kawamoto Toshihiro 226, 234 Kaye, Emma 307 – 8 Kayembe le Tenace (Kayembe the Tenacious) 302 Kaygisiz, Ozan 254 Kazimzada, Aydin 176 Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicää of the Valley of the Winds) 221 Keane, Glen 22, 25, 253 Keaton, Buster 21, 51 Kebabaluba (Ersöz) 253 Keenan, Brian 93 Keepvogel (Coppernickel) 113 Keeremet Koch (television series) 265 Kef (GCCJPI) 259 Kein Platz für Gerold (No Space for Gerold) 120 Keisariin salaisuus (The Emperor’s Secret) 136 Kele (Keleh) 201 Kelly, Karen 80 Kelog˘lan Hikayeleri (The Tales of Kelog˘ lan) 255 Kelpie (Gardner) 79 Keluang Man (UAS Animation) 284 Kemgumnerd, Kompin 283 Kemonozume (Beast Claw) 225, 236 Kempeneers, Willy 109 Kennedy, Jill 338 Kentridge, William 120, 309 – 10 Kenworthy, Richard 89, 342 Keret, Etgar 253 Kerity la maison des contes (Eleanor’s Secret; Monféry/ Heidsieck) 103 Ke˙rkoj (Seeking) 179 Kermo (Al Qaseer) 260 Kert (Garden) 163

Ketam dan Kecil dan Rumahnya (The Little Crab and Its House) 287 Keukeleire, Kim 110 – 11 Key, The (Mohammend) 259 Khage (The Game) 174 Khaidarov, Amen 263 Khait Al-Hayat (The Thread of Life) 256 – 7 Khan Kluay (Kemgumnerd) 283 Khan Kluay 2 (Sriwuthiwong) 283 Kharitidi, Aleksei 198 Kharms, Daniil 209 Khistauov, Gani 263 Khitruk, Fedor 51, 196 – 7, 206, 266 Khizhnyakova, Valentina 199 KhoBiKkoBi (Song Jung-ryul) 268 Khodyt Tykva Po Ogorodu (The Pumpkin Walks in the Vegetable Garden) 172 Khoo, Eric 285 Khoshnazar, Omid 262 Khoury, George 258 Khrzhanovsky, Ilya 197 – 8 Khudayberdy i Dev (Khudayberdy and Dev) 266 Kick Kivi (al-Dakheel) 260 Kid-A (Radiohead) 342 Kid A (Radiohead i-blip) 342 Kidanemariam, Netsanet 295 Kid Goku 277 Kidney, Eoghan 97 Kido keisatsu Patlabor (Mobile Police Patlabor) 230 Kids Castle (Yamamura) 242 Kids’ Story (Watanabe) 235, 248 Kid Stuff (Trudeau) 59 Kiekaketa monogataritachi no tame ni (For Amost Forgotten Stories) 247 Kiilerich, Karsten 139 Kika & Bob (Bal/Bothof) 113 Kiki’s Delivery Service (Studio Ghibli) 215, 221, 237 Kiko Mistrorigo 323 Kikos (Sahakyants) 176 Kila (Irish folk band) 92 Kilip dan Puteri Rembulan (The Firefly and the Moon Princess) 287 Kill Bill: Vol 1 (Production I.G) 226 Killi, Anita 135 Kilpkonnade lõppmäng (Tortoises’ Endspiel) 138 Kim (Laganà) 185 Kimba the White Lion 228 Kimball, Ward 19 Kim Eun-soo 269 Kim Hye-jung 269

Index  379

Kim Jun-ki 269 Kim Moon-saeng 269 Kim Possible 11 Kim Seong-chil 268 Kim Soo-jung 269 Kimura Shinji 224 Kim Young-sam 268 Kina Sky (Singer) 314 Kinga, Rofusz 164 King Kong 76, 336 King Monk 285 King of the Hill (TV show) 5, 7, 10 King’s Wake, The (McCloskey) 92 Kipling Jr. (Yamamura) 242 Kirikou et la sorcière (Kirikou and the Sorceress; Michel Ocelot) 98, 106, 146 Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages (Kirikou and the Wild Beasts; Ocelot) 106 Kirschner, Friedrich 122, 347 Kisobran (The Umbrella) 168 Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich) 48 Kisselo zele (Sour Cabbage) 169 Kistehén (Little Cow) 165 Kiyabu, Percy 319 Kizaki Fuminori 226 Kizi Mizi (Sowa) 151 Klahr, Lewis 31 Klaˉ ra un Rubinšteins (Clara & Rubenstein) 147 Klasky, Arlene 7 Klassen, Jon 97 Klein, Dennis 26 Klein Concert voor een Uiil (Music for an Owl) 112 Kleit (The Dress) 139 Klemeti, Martius Daane 139 Klimowski, Andrzej 94 Klinika (The Clinic) 172 Klimt, Aurel 156, 160 Klounada (Clownade; Tatarsky/Kovalyov) 52 Klown (Clown) 209 Klub odložených (The Club of the Laid Off) 158 Klucaˉ nija (Brickland) 146 Kluchi ot vremenii (Keys from Time) 197 Knerten films 133 KnickKnack (Pixar) 15 Knjiga (The Book) 168 Know Your European 189 Kochiyama Takashi 227 Kochu oja Mushiking – Mori no tami no densetsu (Mushiking, the Guardians of the Forest) 225 Koda (Dolatabadi) 81

Kodyukova, Irina 149 Koe ga detekita hito (A Manipulated Man) 246 Koenig, Christina 321 Koester, Jan 118 Kofi Lesson Book (Animation Africa) 297 Kogato biahme greshnitsi (When We Were Sinners) 170 Kogler, Clemens 126 Koha e dashurisë së akrepave (The Love Time of Scorpions) 179 Koha moderne (Modern Times) 179 Koike Takeshi 226 Koji chushi meirei (The Order to Stop Construction) 231 Kokaku Kidotai (Mobile Armoured Riot Police/Ghost in the Shell) 226, 229, 230 Kokaku Kidotai 2: Inosensu (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence) 230 Kokh, Amer M. 255 KO Kid (Caro) 101 Kokoa (Alassane) 293 Kokoa 2 (Alassane) 293 Kolacˇ (The Cake) 167 Kolmnurk (Triangle) 141 Kolobky 196 Kolyadnoe (Kodyukova) 149 Kolybelnye mira (Lullabies of the World) 199 Kompozimi (Composition) 179 Kompromiks (Compromise) 173 Konan on-air (animated series) 257 Konate, Kadiatou 293 Kondo Yoshifumi 216, 218 Kong (D’Ocon) 188 Kongen som ville ha mer enn en krone (The King Who Wanted More Than One Crown) 135 Konings, Jan 132 Kon Mamoru 226 Kono (Zerbo) 297 Kono mayonezu (This Mayonnaise Was Too Liquid) 246 Kon Satoshi 223, 225, 230 – 2, 234 Konsensus (Consensus) 179 Koodakaane (Rad) 262 Koons, Jeff 238 Koopman, Maarten 113 Kops’to (Stop It!) 177 Kordon, Renate 125 Korejwo, Aleksandra 150 Korochka (The Little Hen) 266 Korolyov, Sergey 265 Korova (The Cow) 200 Kosaka Kitaro 225 Koshka pod dozhdem (Cats Under the Rain) 208

380  Index

Koshka so scetilnikom (A Cat with a Lamp) 263 Kosrovani, Firouzeh 302 Kostopoulou, Natalia 177 Kostyleva, Valentina 172 Kostyuchenko, Natalya 149 Kotabe Yoichi 217 Kot v Kolpake (The Cat in the Cap) 204 Kot v sapogah (Puss in Boots) 206 Kotyk i Petushok (Little Cat and Little Cock) 172 Kouche, Darine 292 Kouchnerov, Sergey 172 Koudougou (Kaboré) 297 Koutsis, Nikos 177 Koutský, Pavel 159 Koval, Stepan 173 Kovalyov, Igor 51 – 4, 195 – 6 Kovanova, Assia 170 Kove, Torill 134 – 5 Koyaa: Laif je cˇist odbit (Koyaa the Extraordinary) 166 Koza-Dereza (Impudent She-Goat) 172 Kozak, Tomasz 151 Kozhushanaya, Nadya 204 Kozí prˇibeˇh – poveˇsti staré Prahy (Goat Story – Old Prague Legends) 161 Kractoon (animated series) 256 Kragovrat (The Circle) 170 Kranot, Michal 251 Kranot, Uri 251 Krasnye vorota Rasemon (The Red Gate of Rashomon) 196 Krˉasons, Jurģis 146 – 7 Kraus, Arthur 263 Kravitz, Amy 40 Krávoviina (Crazy Cow Story) 160 Krawinkel, Lenard 122 Kricfalusi, John 8, 343 Krikši (Triffles) 145 Kristel, Sylvia 113 Krivosheeva, Irina 264 Kroger, Peter 126 Krokodil (The Crocodile; Jancis) 172 Krokodill (Crocodile; Titov) 140 Kroky, skoky, roky … a posledný zhasne (Steps, Jumps, Years … and the Last One Please off the Light) 161 Krst, Kvadrat, Krug Kazimira Maljevica (The Cross, The Square, the Circle of Kazimir Malevich) 168 Krumme, Raimund 117, 119 Krupa, Gene 60 Kru Tuleb! (Cimermanis) 145 Krylya, nogi i hvosty (Wings, Legs and Tails; Tatarsky/ Kovalyov) 52, 195

Ksataty o ptichkaks (By the Way, About the Birdies) 195 Kto je tam? (Who’s There?) 161 Kuaile Dongxi (Happy Things) 273 Kubal, Viktor 161 Kubícˇek, Jirˇí 156 – 7 Kubik-Rubik (Rubik-Cube; TatarskyKovalyov) 52 Kubik-Rubik, Klounada (Rubik’s Cube, Clownade) 195 Kublitskaya, Tatyana 149 Kubrick, Stanley 148, 234 Kuch Kuch hota hai (Somethiing Happens) 279 Kuchu izakaya – The Saloon in the Air (from Digital Juice) 232 Kucia, Jerzy 154 – 6, 213 Kugel, Candy 37 – 8 Kuģis (The Ship) 147 Kuguchin, Aleksandr 199 Kuhn, Jochen 117, 119 – 20 Kui hing läheb oma teed (When Life Departs) 138 Kuipers, Frodo 112 Kulev, Andrey 169 – 70 Kulev, Anri 169 Kumo no muko, yakusoku no basho (The Place Promised in Our Early Days) 237 Kunchev, Pencho 170 Kung Fu Hustle 277 Kung Fu Panda 23 Kuranel, Koray 254 Kurenai no buta (Porco Rosso) 220, 221 Kuri, Yoji 119 Kurosaka Keita 239 – 40 Kurmiai (The Moles) 148 Kurpıˉtes (Tiny Shoes) 146 Kurt blir grusom (Kurt Turns Evil) 133 Kurtzes Leben (Short Life) 126, 167 Kutkh i myshi (Kutkh and the Mouse) 204 Kütt, Mati 138 – 40 Kvachis Tavgadasavali (Kvachis Adventures) 173 Kwok, David 285 – 6 Kykly (The Cycle) 177 Kylyshev, Chinghiz 265 Kyrie (Carrano) 184 L.A. Law (TV show) 5 La abuela Grillo (Grandmother Cricket) 323 Laas, Mait 139 – 40 La Balade (The Walk) 291 La bergère et le ramoneur (Pr˙evert) 217 Labirintos (Labyrinth; Sahakyan) 175 Labirintus (Labyrinth; Ferenc) 164 La bruja rechinadientes (The Teeth-Gnashing Witch) 312 Labyrinth (Khoshnazar) 262

Index  381

Labyrinth (Rintarô) 229 La canción du microsillon (The Long-Playing Record Canción; Pouvaret) 105 La casa axul (The Blue House) 323 Laces (D’Ocon) 188 La chanson du pharmacien (The Song of the Chemist) 127 La chute de l’ange (The Angel’s Fall; Massin) 102 La coda (The Tail) 180 La cosa que más duele en el mundo (The Most Aching Thing on Earth) 312 La course à l’abîme (Schwizgebel) 127 Lacroix, Georges 101 La cueva (The Cave) 232 La dolce vita (Woloshen) 60 Lady of the Lake, The (Neubauer) 73 Ladybirds’ Christmas 138 La fabrik (The Factory; Jouette) 101 La femme mariée à trois hommes (The Woman Who Married Three Men) 297 La femmesquelette (The Womanskeleton; Van Den Boom) 104 La flor más grande del mundo (The World’s Largest Flower) 188 La follia (A. Corelli) 116 La freccia azzurra (The Blue Arrow) 181 La funambola (The Tightrope Walker) 180 – 1 La gabbianella e il gatto (Lucky and Zorba) 181 La gallina ciega (The Blind Hen) 188 Laganà, Giuseppe 185 Łagodna (The Gentle Woman) 152 Lagos Sanitizer (Oluwafemi) 299 La grasse matineé (Lazing in Bed) 177 La grasse matineé (Prévert) 177 Laguionie, Jean-Francois 98 La habitación inclinada (The Sloping Room) 188 Lais of Marie de France, The 103 La jeune fille et les nuages (The Young Girl and the Clouds) 127 Lajos, Nagy 164 Lakmé (Roulin) 101 Lakmia (Greed) 179 Lakomá Barka (Stingy Barka) 160 La la la (Bereznickas) 148 La Leyenda de la Nahuala (The Nahuala Legend) 313 La libertà (Freedom) 185 La liga delas chocobolas (The Chocoballs League) 317 La Linea (Cavandoli) 70, 342 Lal Kalo (Mallik) 281 Lalilonska Kula (The Tower of Babel) 168 La Luna (Neubauer) 74

Lama at the Monastery Out in the Countryside, The (Munkhbaat) 267 La main de l’ours (The Bear’s Hand) 129 La mano que mira (The Hand That Watches) 330 La mansión de los politicos (The Mansion of the Politicians) 324 – 5 L’Ambouba (Rais) 292 La memoria dei cani (The Memories of the Dogs) 181, 182 L’Ami, Jean Charles 318 L’Ami y’a bon (Okay, My Friend) 291 La mort de Tau (Tau’s death; Boulbès) 101 L’amour à la sauvette (Love in a Hurry and Secretly; Ahond) 105 La Navidad (Christmas) 323 Land of the Heads (Barras/Louis) 129 Landreth, Chris 63 Lan Mao (3,000 Whys of Blue Cat) 273 L’anneé du daim (The Year of the Deer) 127 La noche boca arriba (The Night Face Up) 326 La noche de los feos (The Night of the Ugly Ones) 328, 329 La Noria (Waterwheel) 312 Lan Se Zhou Yu (Papa Blue) 276 Lape˙ ir vynuoge˙s (The Fox and the Grapes) 148 La partita (The Match) 180 La piccola Russia (Little Russia) 180 La pileta de las garzas (Jim˙enez) 316 La pista (The Track) 180 La pista del maiale (The Track of the Pig; or, Pinocchio) 180 La Plante Humaine (The Human Tree; Hébert) 65 La politesse des rois (The Kings’ Good Manners; Rubak) 104 La portada mágica (The Magic Cover) 323 La princesa de Trujillo (Oqo Films) 312 Lapsus (Lapse) 328 La puerta (The Door) 328 Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Miyazaki) 215, 221 La révolution des crabes (The Crabs’ Revolution; de Pins) 105 Largo es el camino al cielo (It’s a Long Way to Heaven) 311 Lars y el Misterio del Portal (Lars and the Mystery of the Portal) 320 La rivière aux grandes eaux (The Mighty River) 55 Larsen, Guttorm 132 Larson, Eric 27 La sacoche perdue (The Lost Bag; Gréco/Buffat) 103 La sagra (The Rite) 180 La Salsa (Barry) 325 La Saunda (Morimoto) 223 Las Colouradoe (Crisán & Lewis) 316 La señora calabaza (The Pumpkin Lady) 328 Las fabulas de Esopo (Aesop’s Fables) 323

382  Index

Las maravillas del mundo savaje-hormigasu (The Wonders of Nature-Ants) 312 Las Memorias de Salmo Trutta (The Memories of Salmo Trutta) 320 Las mil y una Américas (The One Thousand and One Americas) 185 La sorpresa de Lucas (Lucas’ Surprise) 323 Lasseter, John 4, 14 – 17, 19 – 21 Las Tabas (Dominguez and Puente) 319 Last Circus, The (Neubauer) 74 Last Days in a Lonely Place (Brakhage) 31 Last Drop of Oil (Jassim) 260 Last Exile (Studio Gonzo) 226 Last Minute (Rosset/Špela ˇcadezˇ) 166 Last Utopia (Mizue) 247 Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais) 163 László, Kollár-Klemencz 165 Lat (Datuk Mohammad Nor Khalid) 284 Latchman, Alison 314 Láthatatlan rajzok (Invisible Drawings) 165 Latibær (Lazy Town) 137 Latibær á Ólympíuleikunum (Lazy Town at the Olympcs) 137 La tortue, le singe et le paysan (The Turtle, The Ape and the Farmer) 296 Lätti, Leo 139 Latvietis (The Latvian) 145 Laud (The Table) 139 Lauenstein, Christoph and Wolfgang 117, 121 Laughing With (Regina Spector) La ultima reserva (The Last Reserve) 186 Laulu hirsiuista (Song of the Gallows) 136 Laura’s Star 121 Laurel and Hardy 51 Lava Kusa: The Warrior Twins (Sashank) 280 Lavie, Oren 251 La vie secrète d’Émile Frout (Émile Frout’s Secret Life; Elissalde) 104 La vieille dame et les pigeons (The Old Lady and the Pigeons) 100 Lavis, Chris 57 Lavrasiid Aigi (Killi) 135 Law and Order (TV show) 5 Lawrence, Anthony 335 Layug, Kris 287 Lazarus, Ashley 249 Lazin, Igor 165 Learned By Heart (Rimminen) 71, 72, 135 Leaving the Village (Sanyukta and Niyukta Shrestha) 281 Le avventure di Neve & Gliz (Neve and Gliz’s Adventures) 182 Le balayeur (The Dustman; Elissalde) 105

Leblanc, Maurice 220 Le Bouc et le Coq (The Goat and the Chicken) 296 Le Bûcheron de Ziétrou (Glès) 296 Le carré de lumière (Water Story) 127 Le chapeau (The Hat; Cournoyer) 55, 56 Le château des singes (The Castle of Monkeys/The Monkey’s Tale; Laguionie) 98 L’écluse (The Sluice; Demuynck) 104 Le conte du monde flottant (The Tale of the Floating World) 101 Le couloir (The Corridor) 108 Le criminel (Toccafondo) 180 L’Ecrivain (The Writer) 110 Le cyclope de la mer (The Cyclops of the Sea; Jullien) 103 Le Destin d’un guerrier (The Destiny of a Warrior) 300 Le Dog (O’Connor) 96 Le dos au mur (The Back to the Wall; Collet) 103 Ledus Pavˉelnieks (Master of Ice) 145 Lee, Lucy 83 Lee Dong-jae 269 Lee Hak-bin 268 Lee Kyu-hyung 268 Lee Kyung-Hwa 269 Lee Song-hee 269 Lee Sung-gang 269 Lee Yong-bae 268 Lefevre, Jim 80 Left-Handed Man story 210 Legacy of the Rubies, The (Okoye) 298 Legend of Nezha (CCTV Animation, Inc.) 273 Legend of Ngong Hills (Nyong’o/Mwaniki) 301, 302 Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (Animal Logic) 25 Legend of the Sea (Benjamin Toh) 285 Legend of the Sky Kingdom, The (Cunningham/ Hawkins) 303 Legenda Ghvinoze (A Legend About Wine) 173 – 4 Legenda o ledi Godive (Lady Godiva’s Legend) 149 Le génie de la boîte de raviolis (The Genie of the Ravioli Can; Granjon) 105, 129 L’egoïste (The Selfish One) 108 Le grand ailleurs et le petit ici (Here and the Great Elsewhere; Lemieux) 59 Le Guin, Ursula 289 Leib, Gary 39 Leiji Matsumoto 341 Leila (Zerbo) 297 Leiutajateküla Lotte (Lotte from Gadgetville) 138, 139 Le jardin (The Garden; Paccou) 101 Le jour de gloire (The Day of Glory; Collet) 103

Index  383

Le Livre Magique (The Magic Book) 297 Le loup blanc (The White Wolf; Granjon) 105 Lemieux, Michèle 59 Lemma 1 and 2 (Sorensen) 44 Le moine et le poisson (Dudok de Wit) 116 Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events (‘Littlest Elf ’ sequence) 80 Len (Laziness) 173 Lena (Éva) 165 Lendurid Koduteel (Pilots on the Way Home) 143 Le Nez (Alexeieff) 183 L’enfant au grelot (Charlie’s Christmas; Girerd) 100 L’enfant terrible (Konate) 293 L’Enfant-Roi (The Child King) 292 Lenica, Jan 31, 57 Lenkin, Aleksandr 149 Lennstrand, Petter 131 Lentoposti (Air Mail) 136 Leo és Fred (Leo and Fred I-II) 164 León, Hernando 325 Lepatriinude jõulud (Ladybirds’ Christmas) 139 Le paysagiste (Mindscape; Drouin) 64 Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince; Kadmiri) 291 Le phénomène atmosophérique (The Atmospheric Phenomenon; Conradi) 42 Le Portefeuille (The Wallet) 110 Le pouvoir de la pensée (The Power of Thinking) 300 Le printemps de Mélie (Mélie’s Springtime; Granjon) 105 Le process (The Process; Grammaticopoulos) 101 Le prophétie des grenouilles (Raining Cats and Dogs; Girerd) 99, 100 Le puits (The Well; Boulbès) 101 Le Rag (Sindo) 296 Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein (The Ravishment of Frank N. Stein) 126 Lerdam, Jørgen 130 Le régulateur (The Regulator; Grammaticopoulos) 101 Leroy, Guionne 110 – 11 Les âmes du clocher (The Souls of the Bell Tower) 303 Les aventures de Adji et Alho (The Adventures of Adji and Alho) 296 Les Aventures de Hatem, le courageux cavalier Zlass (The Adventures of Hatem, the Courageous Horseman of the Zlass) 291 – 2 Les aventures du jeune sorcier Ndoube Leya (The Adventures of Young Sorcerer Ndoube Leya) 300 Les Barricades mystérieuses’ (F. Couperin) 64 L’escalier chimérique (The Chimerical Stairs) 102 L’escamoteur (The Conjurer; Ramboz) 101 Les chouettes (The Coquettes; Rubak) 104

Les contes de l’horloge magique (The Tales of the Magic Clock; Rubak) 104 Les’ Copaque 284 Les Diaboliques (Clouzot) 96 Les fables géométriques (The Geometric Fables; Fantôme) 101 Les fauves (Shijaku) 179 Leshchiov, Vladimir 146 – 7 Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett’s Diaries; Ushev) 58 Les naufragés de Carthage (The Shipwrecks of Carthage) 292 Les noces de Viardot (Viardot’s Wedding; Rubak) 104 Les nouvelles aventures de Lucky Luke 102 Le soleil se lève … puis se couche (The Sun Rises. . Then It Goes to Bed) 303 Le sous-marin de Carthage (The Carthage Submarine) 292 Les perdrix (The Partridges; Gréco/Buffat) 103 Lesson (Sahakyants) 175 Les Terriens (The Earthmen) 292 Les tragédies minuscules (The Tiny Tragedies) 108 Les triplettes de Belleville (The Triplets of Belleville) 98, 100, 110 Le sujet du tableau (The Subject of the Painting) 127 Les ventres (The Stomachs; Grammaticoopoulos) 101 Letterman, Rob 345 Letter to Colleen (Londons) 36 Le tueur de Montmartre (The Killer of Montmartre) 109 Leunig, Michael 332 Lévasion (The Getaway; Demuynck) 104, 110 Levis, Myriam 178 Le Voyage dans la lune (Méliès) 343 Lewis, Cheri 316 Lex oiseaux noirs, les oiseaux blancs (Black Birds, White Birds; Miailhe) 107 L’heure des anges (Nightangel; Drouin) 64 L’histoire du grand chasseur de N’zassa (The Historoy of the Great Hunter of N’zassa) 296 Lhoir, Paul 297 L’homme aux bras ballants (The Man with the Wobbling Arms; Gorgiard) 104 L’homme qui a tout vu (The Man Who Has Seen Everything) 300 L’homme qui attendait (The Man Who Waited; Ushev) 58 L’homme sans ombre (The Man Without a Shadow) 127 Liao, Jimmy 275 Liang Zhu (The Butterfly Lovers) 273, 274 Liaotian (Chatting) 271 Liatoto na Gabelko (The Summer of Gabelko) 169 Libido Bendzhamina (Benjamin’s Libido) 208 Libya as It Is (Madi) 292 L’Idée (Bartosch) 183 Lidster, Ken 78

384  Index

Lie Detector (Bush) 75 Lieban, Andrés 322 Lietuviu˛ mitologiniai dievia (Lithuanian Mythological Deities) 148 Lieve, dilaga (Softly Flows) 181 Life, The (Kim Jun-Ki) 269 Life at the Pond – Tony’s Paper Route. Fish Fry (Triggerfish Studio) 309 Life in Hell (Groening) 6 Life in Transition (Dilworth) 38 Life of Buddha 284 Lift (Elevator) 195 Lifted (Rydstrom) 16n47 Light Comes from Within, The (Grillo) 328 Lighthouse, The’ (Jacques Prévert) 170 Ligne de vie (Life Line; Avedikian) 104 Lignini, Fabio 321 Liiniata (The Line) 170 L’île de Black Mór (The Island of Black Mór; Laguionie) 98 Lili (Riho Unt) 139 Lili Hosak (Fard-Moghaddam) 262 Lillqvist, Katariina 136 L’illusioniste (The Illusionist; Chomet) 100 Lilo and Stitch 22, 24 Limbes (Limboes; Bériou) 101 Lin Chong ye ben (Flee at Night) 271 Lindholm, Ami 136 Lindhout, Peter 113 Line Magic by Red & Blue (Sato) 244 Linear Dreams (Reeves) 59 Lingford, Ruth 77 Lingo y Poison Squad (Morpho Animation Studio) 316 Links (Kæmper) 326 Linnane, Maurice 340 L’inventaire fantôme (The Ghost Inventory; Dion) 105 Lion and Two Bulls, The (Dadashov) 176 Lion King, The (Disney) 12, 13, 18, 22, 344 Lionardo mio (My Leonardo) 161 Lippoldt, Anne-Lisa 295 Lip Synch (Channel 4 series) 85 Lisa (Carlsson) 132 Lisberger, Steven 14 Litla lirfan ljóta (The Lost Little Caterpillar) 137 Little Bird ABC (FopSpeen Pictures) 309 Little Bird’s Diary (Jansons) 147 Little Black Riding Hood (Dumala) 211 Little Boy (book and exhibit) 239 Little Brave (Wan) 314 Little Comi (Min Kyung-jo) 268 Little Fable of a Burning Nuisance (Petropulea) 177

Little Heroes (Zazam) 293 Little Krishna (Bapu) 280 Little Mermaid, The (Disney) 11 – 12, 13, 22 Little Nemo 340 Little Princess’ Birthday Party, The (Lefevre) 80 Little Robot (animated series) 90 Little Shop of Horrors (musical) 12 Little Tale, The (Kraus/Khaidarov) 263 Little Talks (Of Monsters and Men) 343 Little Things (Greaves) 88 Little Wolf (Vrombat) 80 Littlest Robo, The (Shynola) 89 Livanova, Elena 207 Live 25 Tour (George Michael) 340 Live Apartment Horror 231 Lively Lovely (and the Rest) (Parasitic Fantasy Band) 337 Living Cinema project (Hébert) 66 Living on the Comet (K. Smith) 332 Living with Happiness (Watt) 331 Líviusz, Gyulai 163 Li-Wei Chiu 276 Li Wu (The Present) 276 Lizard (Skibinki) 336 Ljubezen je bolezen (Lovesick) 166 Lloyd, Claudia 300 Lluvia (Rain) 188 LMN’s (Motion Pictures) 188 Lob des Anrufbeantworters (Praise of the Answering Machine) 120 Lobos, Themo 326 Lobser, David 42 Loc Light Louis (Poeth) 112 Local Dive (Watt) 331 Lock Ness Kelpie, The (Gardner) 79 Locked In (Judas Priest) 341 L’oeil du cyclone (The Eye of the Storm; Lefdup) 101 Log Jam series 165 Logorama (H5) 102 Loja e djallit (The Devilish Game) 179 Lo Ki-ping 276 Lokman, Adriaan 112 Lola & Virginia (Imira Entertainment) 188 Lola rennt (Alkabetz) 118 London, Andy 37 London, Carolyn 37 Loo (Bozzetto) 185 Loocymoon (McCloskey) 92 Look for Me (Heit) 40 – 1 Looking for Horses (Lawrence) 335 Lopes, Vítor 191

Index  385

Lopez, Adrian 314 Lopez, Juan 319 Lõpuõhtu (Closing Session) 139 Lord, Peter 68, 85 – 7 Lord of the Rings trilogy (Jackson) 336 Lord Vishnu (Phebus Creations) 280 Los Caprichos (Goya) 39 Los ciclos (Cycles) 317 Los cinco sentidos (The Five Senses) 323 Los desastres de la guerra (#44) (Goya) 118 Los extraños presagios de León prozak (The Mysterious Presages of Leon Prozak) 317 Los fusilados de Goya (The Shot Ones of Goya) 188 Los Herlufs (D’Ocon Films) 186 Los Ilusionautas (Aronnax) 320 Los pintín al rescate (The Pintíns’ Rescue) 326 Los reparadores (The Fixies) 328 Los Tatitos (television series) 329 Los tres errantes (The Three Wanderers) 318 Lose this Child (Y. and M. Nathan) 251 Loshad, skripka … i nemnogo nervno (Horse, Violin … and a Little Nervous) 209 Lost (TV show) 5 Lost and Found (Hunt) 88 Lost Cargo 110 Lost Tribes of New York (Londons) 36 Lotte no Izgudrotaˉ jciema (Lotte from Gadgetville) 138, 139, 146 Lotte reis lõunamaale (Lotte’s Journey South) 139 Lou Grant (TV show) 6 Louis, Cédric 129 Loulou (Elissalde/Solotareff) 104 Loulou et les autres loups (Loulou and the Other Wolves) 129 Love and Pop (Anno) 235 Love Games (Joung Yumi) 270 Love Is All (Harrison) 81 Love Patate (Cuvelier) 104 Love Song (Currie) 335 Love Story (Baumane) 146 Lovedoor Net Anime 237 Lua (D’Ocon) 188 Lucas, Anthony 334 Lucas, George 10, 14 Lucio, Carolina 318 Lucky Luke 98 Lugosi, Bela 111 Luján, Emilio 188, 328 Lukomorye. Naya (Lukomoye: The Nurse) 197 L’ultimo dei Mohicani (The Last of the Mohicans) 185 Lunata sus sinite ochi (Blue-Eyed Moon) 170

Lunatic, The (Okoye) 298 Luntik (series) 194 Luopatin¸i (Shammies) 147 Luora (Piaget) 128 Lur Xing (Meteor) 274 Luxemburg 111 Luxixi Qiyu Ji (Luxixi’s General Mobilization/Luxixi’s Adventure) 272 Luxo Jr. (Pixar) 15, 19, 20 Luyet, Claude 127 Lycanthropy (Dumala) 211 Lye, Len 60 Lynch, David 114 Lyrics (Aram) 291 Lyons, Robin 71 M (Kæmpeer) 325, 326 M (Dufour-Laperrière) 58 Ma, Louisa 277 Maalaislääkäri (The Country Doctor) 136 Maama, Hicham 291 Mabinogion, The (Grace) 71 MacDalland, Maria 329 MacFarlane, Seth 9 Mac Guff Line 100 Machine Word (Hilton) 83 Machynileth Museum of Modern Art 79 Mack, Jodie 41 MacKenzie, Leslie 90 Macross Plus (Kawamori) 215, 231 Macskássy, Kati 163 Madame Butterfly (Puccini) 133 Madame Potatoe (Calder) 89 Madame Tutli-Putli (Lavis/Szczerbowski) 57 Madden, Paul 97 Madi, Madghis Mohammed 292 Madsen, Linda 132 Mad Men (TV show) 5 Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) 329 Maejima Ken’ichi 237 Maestro (Géza) 165 Mafalda, minutos (Mafalda, Minutes) 313 Mafundikwa, Saki 303 Magalhães, Marcos 321 Magic Carpet, The (Galstyan) 174 Magic Journey series 265 Magic Lamp (Al Qaseer) 260 Magic Ring (Saba) 261 Magic Roundabout, The (Bolexbrother) 85 Magic Show (Hulsing) 113

386  Index

Magic Tree and The House in the Glade, The (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Magic Xianzong (Zhejiang Zhongnan Group and CCTV) 273 Magos y gigantes (Wizards and Giants) 313 Magritte 150 Magyar Népmesék (Hungarian Folk Tales) 164 Maharramov, Arif 176 Mahasanook 283 Mahiro, Maeda 226 Mahjoub, Zouhaïer 291 – 2 Mahmudov, Mavzur 264 Maho kishi Rayearth (Magic Knight Rayearth) 225 Mahy, Margaret 336 Majestic (Waziri) 299 Majo no takkyubin (Witch’s Delivery Service/Kiki’s Delivery Service) 215, 221, 237 Makharadze, Irakli 174 Makhmudov, Mavzur 263 – 4 Maksimov, Ivan 198, 207 – 8 Maku, Artan 179 Maku Productions 179 Malanichev, Dima 53 Malapata (Pulling My Leg) 312 Malchik (The Boy) 206 Malchik S Palchik (Pinkie Boy) 203 Maldonado, Camilo 323 Male Restroom Etiquette (Phil Rice) 347 Malenkaya nochnaya simfoninya (Little Night Symphony) 205 Malenky oprud u podnozhiya velikoy steny (Little Pond by the Great Wall) 206 Malis, Jossie 320 Malkiat Zmei (The Little Dragon) 169 Mallik, R. D. 281 Maminirina, Fabrice 303 Mamma Mia! (Lloyd) 12n34 Mamochka Rozochka i Minechka (Mummy Rosochka and Minechka) 172 Manaryan, Arman 175 Man Called Hero, A 277 Mandarine and Cow (Azan and Mandarine) 98 Manfredi, Rosanna 327 Manie Manie Meikyu monogatari (Labyrinth Tales; Madhouse) 225, 231, 232 Manikandan (Malayalam-language) 281 Man in the Wilderness (Dzhumaevna) 266 Manipulation (Greaves) 88 Mann Spider and the Princess of Melaka (Muthalib) 283 – 4 Manos libres (Free Hands) 325 Manpasand (The Perfect Match) 281

Mansukhani, Tarun 279 Mansurkhodzhaev, Munavar 266 Mansurov, Anvar 266 Mansurov, Dzhashmed 266 Manu Chao 82 Manuelita (Ferré) 326 Man Who Planted Trees, The (Back) 55, 61 Man Who Walked Between the Towers (Sporn) 37 Man with Issues (Reilly) 337 Man With the Beautiful Eyes, The (Hodgson) 72 Many Happy Returns (Rimminen) 72 Mao Tse Tung – Bd.2 (Wallner) 126 Mar, Alberto 313 Maramba, Simbirirai Solomon 303 – 5 Marañas (Tangles) 319 Maraton (Marathon) 139 Maravillosamente Distintos (Wonderfully Different) 319 Marchenko, Olga 143 Marchenkova, Natalia 172 Marcondes, Guilherme 322 Marcus, Greil 35 Marcus, Philip 306 Mardin de Zaochen (Martin Matin) 273 Margarita (Pergament) 328 Margolina, Irina 199, 205 Margucˇiu˛ rytas (Easter Eggs) 148 Marí, Juan Carlos 188 Mari Iyagi (My Beautiful Girl, Mari) 269 Marile speran¸te (Great Expectations) 171 Marino, Paul 346 – 7 Marioneta (The Marionette) 179 Mariposa nocturna (Moth) 318 Marker, Chris 229 Mars Attacks! (Burton) 26, 76 Marsh, Jeff 11 Marshall, Glenn 96 Martignoni, Andrea 183 Martignoni, Mario 183 Martínez, Marcos 187 Marti iš jaujos (The Daughter-in-Law from a Barn) 148 Martín Fierro, la película 327 Martyr Bahonar (Saba) 261 Marum, Cecilia Marreiros 110 Maruo Suehiro 240 Marušic´, Joško 167 Mary and Max (Elliot) 334 Mary Tyler Moore (TV show) 6 Masahiro Andô 227 Masha (Massoud) 301 Masha i Medved (Masha and Bear) 194

Index  387

Maski (Masks) 151 Maškin zabil Koškina (Mashkin Kills Koshkin) 160 Mas oi ellines (We, the Greeks) 177 Massa, José Luis 327 Más se perdió en Cuba (More Was Lost in Cuba) 313 Massi, Simone 180 – 2 Massin, Geoffroy Barbet 102 Massoud, Sharon Chema Ali 301 Masstransiscope (Brand) 34 Master of Ceremonies (Sullivan) 35 Master Q 2001 (Herman Hau) 277 MasterPeace, The (Abrahams) 315 Mastnak, Grega 166 ¡Más vampiros en La Habana! (More Vampires in Havana) 313 Matema, Nakai 304 Mater and the Ghostlight (Lasseter and Scanlon) 16n47 Material That Love is Made of, The (Folman) 252 Matevosyan, Gayane 263 Math Test (Joung Yumi) 270 Ma Tong Gong He Guo (The Toilet Republic) 276 Matrix, The (Wachowski brothers) 223, 230, 235, 248 Matsuo Kenji 247 Matt & Manson (Panaccione) 182 Matter of Loaf and Death, A (Park) 87 Mattotti, Lorenzo 100 Matyushevskaya, Alla 149 Maupassant, Guy de 209 Max & Co. (Guillaume and Guillaume) 128, 129 Maxwell, Stephanie 31 Maxx, The 7 Maya (Sorensen) 44 Mazaalai, The (Munkhbaat) 267 Mazurek, Jérémy 110 McCloskey, John 92 McCollum, Stephen 95 McCorkle, Mark 11 McCracken, Craig 8 – 10 McDull Kung Fu Kindergarten 278 McDull the Alumni 278 McDull, Prince de la Bun 278 McElheron, Maureen 49 – 50 McGuire, Richard 100 McLaren, Norman 54, 60, 124, 132 McLaren’s Negatives (St-Pierre) 59 McMug (television series) 277 McNally, Phil ‘Captain 3D’ 345 – 6 Mdzletamdzle (Insuperable) 174 Me and my Moulton (Kove) 135 Meame no hakobune (Open Your Mind) 230

Meawoo (animated series) 256 Mecanismo olvidador (Forgetter Mechanism) 318 Media (Koutský) 159 Medina, Juan José 312 Medkirtys (The Lumberjack) 148 Medlej, Joumana 258 Medlennoe bistro (Slow Bistro) 208 Mednis, Egils 147 Medurecˇan, Davor 167 Medvedev, Dmitry 192 Medvezhut (Bear-Night-Mare) 209 Medzhibovsky, Vadim 199 Mee, Michelle Pettit 347 Meena (UNICEF) 281 Meet the Robinsons (Disney) 22, 344 Megaghe (The Gardener) 173 Mehaˉ nisms (The Mechanism) 147 Meilicke, Pablo 324 Meilink, Sjaak 112 Mei Mei Bei Zhe Yang Wa Wa (The Garden) 276 Meine Heimat (My Homeland; Okoye) 299 Meitantei Homozu (Detective Holmes/Sherlock Hound) 221 Meitantei Konan (Detective Conan, Also Known as Case Closed) 225 Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, The (Burton) 26 Méliès, Georges 343 Melnaˉ Kaste (The Black Box) 147 Melnitsa 194 MeMeMaMa (Woloshen) 60 Mememto mori (Malis) 320 Mémoire fossile (Fossil Memory; Demuynck) 104, 110 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Pummell) 84 Memories (Studio 4°C) 223, 231, 232 Memories of Diamantina (Sorensen) 45 Memory (Shedaei) 262 Memory Box, The (short film) 257 Memory Matrix (Sorensen) 45 Memory of the Shadow (Madi) 292 Mengapa Domba Bertanduk dan Berbuntut Pendek (Why Domba Has Horns and a Short Butt) 287 Meng Jun 271 Menhaj 256 Meninos de parte nenhuma (Boys from Nowhere) 302 Menken, Alan 13 Mensah, Emmanuel 296 Mensdorff-Pouilly, Alfons 159 Men Who Shot Snapping Turtles, The (Neco Lo) 276 Menzel, Jirí 163 Mercano, el Marciano (Mercano, the Martian) 327

388  Index

Merchant of Dreams, The (Laza) 303 Mercier, Émilie 103 Merhej, Lena 258 Mérigeau, Adrien 92 Merlin Animación 185 Mermaid (Oren/Ofer) 250 Mermaid S.O.S. (Ofer/Oren) 251 Mermaid, The (Petrov) 201 Mermaid’s Tale, A (Michelle Pettit Mee) 347 Merveilleusement gris (Marvellously Grey; Massin) 102 Meshulam, Noam 249 Message, The (Krumme) 119 Messias, Daniel 320 Meštrovic, Marko 167 Mesyatch (The Month) 149 Metamfismenos Erotas (Love in Disguise) 177 Metamorf (Metamorph) 168 Metamorfoza (Metamorphosis) 179 Metamorfoze˙s (Metamorphoses) 148 Metamorphosis (Kafka) 211 Metamorphosis (Myrmigi Design House) 178 Metel (The Blizzard) 149 Metropolis (Fritz Lang) 163 Metropolis (Mizue; 2009) 247 Metropolis (Rintarô; 2001) 229 Meurant, Serge 66 Meyer-Hermann, Thomas 117 Mezamero (Wake Up) 247 Mezˇavilka, Rˉuta 146 Meziani, Mohamed 291 Mglis Aghsareba (Confession of the Wolf) 174 MI /US (Ajanovic´) 168 Mia (Chevelle) 341 Mia et le Migou (Mia and the Migoo; Girerd) 100 Miailhe, Florence 106 – 7 Miami Vice (TV show) 5 Mi amigo Shogo (My Friend Shogo) 319 Micaela, una película mágica (Micaela, a Magic Film) 327 Michalis, Moatsos 177 Michi (Road) series 244 Michiko to Hatchin (Michiko and Hatchin) 227 Microcosmos 122 Microfishe (Sorensen) 44 Midnight Dance (McCloskey) 92 Midoriko (Kurosaka) 240 Midori – The Girl in the Freak Show 240 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 191 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Trnka) 160 Miega rˉuk¸i (Dream Dwarfs) 145 Miel˝ott (Before) 164

Mi familia (My Family; Pakapaka) 329 Mi familia es un dibujo (My Family is a Drawing) 326 Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures 8 Mighty Orbots (Dezaki/Sugino) 228 Miguéis, José Rodrigues 189 Mike, Lu and Og (animated series) 8, 203 Mike’s New Car (Docter and Gould) 16n47 Mikhalkov, Nikita 193 Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. Dynamic Graphics (Seregin) 197 Mikhelson, Evgeny 266 Mikoishi Studios 286 Mikrofon (A Microphone) 264 Mikulás, Ferenc 162, 164 Milch (Kovalyov) 53 Milchev, Emil 170 Milimages France 171 Milingo the Spirit of Africa (Verger) 185 Milk (commercial) 96 Milk, Chris 343 Millimages 91 Milliner, The (Kavanagh) 93 Mills, The (Freeman) 80 Mimi o sumaseba (Whisper of the Heart) 216 Mimizu monogatari (The Worm Story) 240 Minami Masahiko 226 Min bestemor strøk kongens skjorter (My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts) 134 Min Cha Lin 306 Mind Game (Studio 4°C) 223, 236 Mind My Gap (Rosto) 114 Mind War (Savva) 172 Mind Your Eyes (Inglis) 337 Mine (Kentridge) 309 Mingo and Brutus (Hughes) 335 Minkoff, Rob 12 Minna no uta (NHK programme) 245 Minuet (Woloshen) 60 Miracle Maker (The Jesus Story) (Solkolov; Christmas Films) 71, 198, 207 Mirai shonen Conan (Future Boy Conan) 221 Miravey (Ant) 203 Mirazh në shkretëtirë (Mirage in the Desert) 179 Mire Bala Kale Hin (Tales from the Endless Roads) 136 Miriami piknik (The Scarecrow) 139 Mirjam (animated series) 139 Mirror Stage, The (Siákas) 177 Miškinyt ıˉ, Iava 148 Mis mõttes? (Things You Think) 139 Mis petaxis tipota (Do Not Throw Anything) 177 Mismaran Tale (Moffat Qat) 256

Index  389

Mistaken Identity (Selwood) 48 Mitchell, Phil 285 Mitos (Sequeira, Guill˙en, Porras) 316 Mitos y Leyendas (Myths and Legends; D’Ocon) 186, 188 Mitsu no kumo (Trilogy About Clouds) 247 Mix Juice Jigen Loop – SOS Rescue Version (Dimension Loop) 233 Mixed Feelings (Rimminen) 72 Miyamoto Musashi: Soken ni haseru yuma (Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai) 230 Miyazaki Goro 216 Miyazaki Hayao 215 – 17, 219 – 22, 224, 227, 234, 237, 288 – 9, 340 Miyazawa Kenji 217, 231 Mizgeci: cˇešnje (The Beezees – Cherries) 166 Mizue Mirai 246 Mizuki Shigeru 239 M kato Mikelangelo (M is for Michelangelo) 170 Mlilo, Nqobizitha 303 – 5 Moanaland (Verger) 185 Moanalogue (Guard) 70 Mobile Suit Gundam (Sunrise) 225 Mobilia, Diego López 319 Mochibe 240 Mochizuki Tomomi 216, 227 Modern Convenience, A (Selwood) 48 Modern Times (Chaplin) 94, 150 Moesker, Christa 112 Mogzauroba Istoriashi (Travelling through History) 174 Mohamad, Mahathir 283 Mohammend, Jassim 259 Mohan, Ram 279, 281, 285 Moholy-Nagy Universitiy of Art and Design (MOME) 165 Moilanen, Milla 136 Molitva ‘Otche Nash’ (Prayer ‘Our Father’) 207 Molla Nasraddin (Maharramov) 176 Momo alla conquista del tempo (Momo) 181 Momoiro no kirin (Yonesho) 243 Mon placard (My Wardrobe (Blanquet) 99 Mon Plaidoyer (My Advocacy; music video) 300 Mona Mon Amour (Sporn) 37 Mond und Tiger (The Moon and The Tiger) 123 Mondial of the Vegetables (Moatasim) 294 Mondlicht (Moonlight) 124 Money for Nothing (Dire Straits) 339 Monféry, Dominique 103 Monk and the Fish, The (Dudok de Wit) 115 Monkey’s T-Shirt (Morse) 46 Monkeybone (Selick) 29

Monkeys and the Secret Weapon, The 130 Monocules (Sorensen) 43 Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) 222 Monsieur COK (Mr COK; Dion) 105 Monster Rancher (D’Ocon) 188 Monsters (Bringas) 89 Monsters vs. Aliens 345 Monsters, Inc. (Pixar) 20 Mont Blanc (Tender) 139 Mont Real (Fink) 125 Montgomery, Lucy Maud 217 Montgomery, Tyron 117, 121 MONUment (Kentridge) 309 Moon (Pierri) 180, 181 Moon (China 1978) 276 Moongirl (Selick) 29 Moonlighting (TV show) 5 Moore, Stuart 81 Moore, Tomm 92 Mora, Rigoberto ‘Rigo’ 311 Morb (Lazin) 165 More Sex & Violence (Plympton) 50 Morˇe, strýcˇky, procˇ je slané? (Uncle, Why is the Sea Salty?) 159 Morgan, Robert 89 Morgenthaler, Anders 131 Morimi Tomihiko 236 Morimoto Kôji 223 – 4, 231 – 3, 236, 239, 248 Morir de Amor (Alkabetz) 117, 118 Morning Bell (Radiohead i-blip) 342 Morocco Memory II (Sorensen) 45 Morse, Deanna 46 Morstad, Paul 345 Morton, Rocky 71 Moscow (Mouse & Cow) 261 Moser, Marcella 343 Mosley, Joshua 42 Moso dairinin (Paranoia Agent) 231, 234 Mosquito and Job 112 Most (The Bridge) 148 Mother of the Grandchildren (Noronha and Altman) 302 Mother Tongue (Danta) 332 Mother’s Colours (Borenstein) 59 – 60 Mother’s Day (Lobser) 42 Motion Control (Anderson) 82 Motsme (Eyewitness) 173 Motta, Lancaster 322 Mouat, Maria 198 Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann) 12n34 Mouris, Caroline 40 – 1 Mouris, Frank 40

390  Index

Mousedeer series 283 Mousochist (Dilworth) 38 Move Your Feet (Junior Senior) 342 Movement (Yokosuka) 243 Moxy Show, The 8 Moya lyubov (My Love) 200, 201 Moyes, Peter 335 Moynihan, Frank 307 Mr Bean (Varga Studio) 165 Mr Carlsson (Carlsson) 131 Mr Egg the Great Magician (Vavrˇinka/Králové) 345 Mr Jessop (Wood) 80 Mr Klean 287 Mrs. Matisse (Solomon) 39 Mt. Head (Yamamura) 242 Mu Bottle ye wa (Oforeh) 299 Muana Mboka (Wooto) 302 Muchilwa, Alfred 301 Muchit (The Little Girl) 295 MUD’A (Musique et Dessins d’Afrique) 300 Muharremi, Artur 179 Muke, Stani 302 Mulan (Disney) 12, 274 Mulc: Fracˇa (Kiddo – Slingshot) 166 Mulloy, Phil 72 – 3 Muluk, Basar 254 Multtelefilm 52, 195, 198 Mummuy and Baddy (Dunleavy and Isaacs) 89 Munhoz, Paulo 322 Munier, Edmond 294 Munkhbaat 267 Munks un Lemijs (Munk and Lemy) 145 Muradyan, Naira 175 Muradyan, Yubik 175 Murahama Shoji 226 Murakami Takashi 228, 238 – 9 Murase Shuko 227 Murata Tomoyasu 244 Murata Tomoyasu Company 244 Muratkhojaeva, Svetlana 264 Muratti & Sarotti (Gockell) 117 Murer, Bruno 111 Murgak (Korochka; The Little Hen) 266 Murmurs, Forest 72 Murphy, Eddie 30 Murray, Joe 8 Murray, Maria 95 Mushroom Thief, The (Ashworth) 77 music by composer: Acosta 318; (John) Adams 34, 60; András 165; Louis Armstrong 169; Beethoven 205,

218; Berlioz 127; Bilin´ski 207; Bizet 247; Blackburn 64; Brubeck and Desmond 208; Chopin 131; Corelli 116; Die toten Hosen 119; Dr Strangely Strange 95; Ehala 138; Ellington 182; (Tom) Farrell, 40; Garbarek 132; (Carlos) Gardel 182; Gershwin 182; Goodman 60, 182; Gruber-Stitzer 62; Jimi Hendrix 60; Howie B. 82, 83; Janácˇek 78; Elton John 12; Gene Krupa 60; Kubin 117; Kabusacki 329; Kawai Kenji 230; La Rochelle 64; Michal Lorenc 150; Menken 12, 13; Messiaen 95; (Lisa Cay) Miller 63n186; Mossolov 57; Mozart 184; Nakamura Alice 247; Oesterle 57; Paleta 311; the Philharmonic Orchestra of Bogota 317; Piazzolla 205; Prokofiev 78; Queen 84; Ilyas Rahbani 254; (Tim) Rice 12; (Buddy) Rich 60; Ristovski 168; Normand Roger 60 – 1; (C.P.) Roth 36; Saint-Saëns 158; (Caleb) Sampson 41; Shostakovich 153n133; Stravinsky 205; Sviridov, 57; Tchaikovsky 163, 177; Fats Waller 60; Yadegari 45; (Frank) Zappa 165; Zimmer 12; Zulfuqarov 176 Music for Babies (music video) 340 Music Matters (Faithless) 342 music videos 4, 7, 8n17, 30, 38, 49, 80, 82, 86, 89, 95, 96, 97, 131, 151, 161n150, 164, 177, 216, 223n29, 224, 232, 251, 254, 281, 299, 300, 303, 304, 305, 306, 314, 316, 324, 336, 337, 339 – 43 Musker, John 11 – 12, 16, 27 Must Lagi (Black Ceiling) 140, 144 Mustan Saaran legenda (The Legend of the Black Sarah) 136 Mutangadura, Sabina 304 Mutant Aliens (Plympton) 50 Mute, Peter 301 Muthalib, Hassan 283, 294 Mutlu, Deniz 254 Muto (Mute) 185 Mutt (O’Connor) 96 Mutuverría, Rodolfo 327 Muwani, Allan 304 Muybridge 126 Muzikant-tcharodey (The Musician-Magician) 149 Mwaniki, Allan 301 My Arabic House (animated series) 257 My Baby Left Me (Krstic´) 165 My Chickens (Quliyeva) 176 My Dog Tulip (Fierlingers) 32 – 3 My Doll Plays Alice (Simeonidi) 177 My First Taste of Death (Hill) 77 My Friend Ganesha (Ruia) 280 My Life as McDull (Toe Yuen) 277, 278 My Life at 40 (Hill) 77 My Name Is Boffer Bings (László) 165

Index  391

My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki) 215, 221, 227 My Ukraine (Novatorfilm Studio) 173 Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (Lucas) 334 Myth Labs (Coburn) 35 Naapet Quchak-Noch (Naapet-Quchak-Night) 175 Naasan, Nasser 256 Næss, Kajsa 135 Naccio & Pomm (Fusako) 183 Nagagutsu o haita neko (Puss in Boots) 220 Naija Chicken (Oluwafemi) 299 Najafzada, Shamil 176 Nak (Rattanachoksiriku) 283 Nakamura Alice 247 Nakamura Ryûtarô 233 – 4 Nakamura Yusuke 236 Nakata Hideto 247 Nakazawa Kazuto 226 Naked Samoans, The 336 Nakounine (Nakunin) 127 Na krayu zemli (At the Earth’s End) 206 Nallars Väntam (Nallars Waiting) 131 Ñamandu (De la Quintana) 323 Nami (Oyama) 246 Nane ile Limon (Mint and Lemon) 254 Nanja monja obake (Weird Ghost) 243 Nansen (Kovalyov) 53 Nao Nei Fong Jing (Mindscape) 276 Na puodeˇ aneb Kdo má dneska narozeniny? (In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today?/Toys in the Attic) 158 Nara Yoshitomo 239 Narcotics (Witkiewicz) 210 Nå skal du høre (Now You Are About to Hear) 133 Nassenstein, Hans 112 Nasu: Andalusia no natsu (Nasu: Summer in Andalusia) 225 Natasha (Baumane) 146 Nathan, Merav 251 Nathan, Yuval 251 National Cake Embezzlement (Oluwafemi) 299 Nature Is Ancient (Björk) 343 Navarro, Carlos 188 Nave Mãe (Mothership) 322 Navidad Caribeña (Caribbean Christmas) 329 Navoi, Alisher 264 Navštivte Prahu (Welcome to Prague) 159 Nazarov, Eduard 196 – 7, 208, 266 Ncube, Carl Joshua 304 Ndodh edhe keshtu (It Happens Like This, Too) 178 Ndoye, Mahamadou 296

Ndryshimi (The Change) 178 Necropia 311 Nedelchev, Dido 170 Nedelia Vecher (Sunday Evening) 170 Needles (Ushev) 57 Negão Bolaoito Talk Show (Eight Ball Blackman Talk Show) 322 Neko no ongaeshi (The Cat Returns) 216 Nekojiurso (Cat Soup) 236 Nemr, Hussain 293 Nente vuet e nente dite (Nine Years and Nine Days) 179 Neo Tokyo (Labyrinth Tales; Rintarô) 229, 232 Neon Genesis Evangelion (Gainax) 225, 233, 235 Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth (Gainax) 225 Neparastie rıˉdzinieki (The Unusual Rigans) 145 Nerwowe zycie kososu (Dumala) 211 Ness un Nesija (Ness and Nesy) 145 Nest That Sailed the Sky, The (Marshall) 96 Neubauer, Bärbel 117, 122 – 3, 125 Neubauer, Vera 73, 82 Neumann, Hieronim 150 – 2 Neveˇrné hry (Faithless Games) 157 Nevesta (The Bride) 109 Nevidljive I Slabo Vidljive Zivotinjske Vrste (Invisible and Poorly Visible Animal Species) 168 New Batman Adventures, The (animated series) 7 New Educational Series (Kennedy) 338 Newland, Marv 62 Newlove, Rose 56 New Sensation (INXS) 342 News (Ferrara) 180 Next: The Infinite Variety Show (Purves) 75 Ng Ho-cheung 277 Nguyen Minh Tri 282 Nguyen Thai Hung 282 Niang-Piniang, Ibrahima 296 Nibariki 215 Nice Day in the Country, A (Hinton) 56 Nicer Than They Think They Are (Dinkelbach) 95 Nichetti, Maurizio 182 Nicolás (BRB) 188 Nido to mezamenu komori uta (Lullaby to the Big Sleep) 240 Nien Resurrection 284 Niestety (Unfortunately) 151 Nieto, Luis 342 Nigerian Baller (Oluwafemi) 299 Night of a Sleepy Writer 276 Night Sounds (Morse) 46 Nihalani, Govind 280 Nije ptica sve sto leti (Not Everything That Flies is a Bird) 109, 110

392  Index

Niki & Nikan (Saba) 261 Nikitina, Natasha 132 Niko & The Way to the Stars (Hegner) 93 Nikolova, Tsvetomira 170 Niko og vejen til stjernerne (Niko & The Way to the Stars) 130 Nikogo net doma (There Was Nobody At Home) 172 Niko – lentäjän poika (Niko and the Way to the Stars) 130, 136 Nils no fushigi na tabi (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils) 229 Nine, Carlos 328 Nine (Marshall) 12n34 Ninja (Hicham Maama) 291 Ninja Bete (Mlilo) 305 Ninja Square (Pedersen) 324 Nippon no tsukin kaisoku (The Japanese Commuter Train) 238 Nippon no yuya – Otokoyu (Japanese Bathhouse – Gents) 238 Nishi Robin 223, 236 Niti (The Strings) 208 Njegovo visocanstvo (His Majesty) 168 NLoops (Sorensen) 43 No Art 185 Nobumoto Keiko 231 – 5 Nocke, Daniel 117, 120 No Days Stories (Saba) 261 No for War (Zazam) 292 – 3 Noah’s List (Gardner) 79 Noch (The Night) 200 Noche de Ronda (Night of the Rounds) 188 Noche (Night) 325 Nocturne (Hindsefelt) 131 No-Face (character from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away) 290 Nog Eens (Once More) 112 Noirıˉt Krupi (To Swallow a Toad) 147 Noiseman Sound Insect 232, 223, 236 noitaminA 234 – 5 None of My Business (Ganbaatar) 267 Nööbi odüsseia (Button’s Odyssey) 140 Nordholt, Hanna 118 Norman, Floyd 313 Normano arka (Norman’s Ark) 147 Noronha, Isabel 302 Norstein, Yuri 112, 135, 195, 201, 241 Nosaka Akiyuki 218 Nosferatu Tango (Horváth) 128 Nostalgias de Dresden (Homesickness for Dresden) 325 Notchnyu v teatre (To the Theatre at Night) 149 Nott, Julian 86 Not There Yet (Tammemägi) 92

Nouralla, Sawssan 257 Nous sommes immortels (We Are Immortals) 102 Nova, Rikarda 179 Nova (Youssef Defali) 291 Novecento pianiste (The Pianist Novecento; Van Den Boom) 103 Novela (Soap Opera) 321 Nquoi Con Cua (Son of Dragon) 282 Ntabundi, Benjamin 297 Nuance (Murata) 244 Nu Damtoveb (Don’t Leave Me Alone) 174 Nudl Nude 268 Nudl Nude 2 268 Nuestro Miranda (L’Ami) 318 Nuevas islas (New Islands) 188 Nunca Jamás (Never Ever) 316 Nunu, the Sleep Fairy (NANI) 281 Nuova identità (New Identity) 180 Nu Pogodi! (Just You Wait!) 198 Nutcracker, The (Chaikovsky) 177 Nuut, Arvo 138 Nu Zi (Women) 276 Nyócker! (The District!) 165 Nyong’o, Kwame 301 – 2 NYPD Blue (TV show) 5 Nyurkina banja (Nyra’s Bath) 204 – 5 Nyuszi és ˝oz (Rabbit and Deer) 165 Nzamewi, Guillaume 300 Nzima, Mhle 304 O, Paris! (Shmygoon) 173 O Arraial (The Village) 321 Obake no Qtaro 227 O Banquete da Rainha (The Queen’s Banquet) 191 Obata Takeshi 225 Oba Tsugumi 225 Obomsawin, Diane 59 Obratnaya storona luny (The Cark Side of the Moon) 195 Ocas (The Tail) 148 Ocelot, Michel 98, 105 – 6, 146, 343 Ochen malenkie tragedii (Very Tiiny Tragedies) 206 Ôchi (A House) 242 Ochi Chornie (Black Eyes) 169 Ochumelov (Demin) 209 O’Connell, Darragh 91 – 2 O’Connor, Damien 96 Odell, Jonas 131, 343 Octo-Dancing (Dolatabadi) 81 Odalisque: Three Fantasies of Pursuit (Selwood) 48 Ode (Talybov & Ismailov) 176

Index  393

Ode on Melancholy’ (Keats) 81 Ode to Joy (Beethoven) 176 Odeur de ville (City’s Smell; Sifianos) 104, 178 Odise˙ja (Odyssey) 147 Odlazi Cirkus (The Circus Departs) 168 O’Donoghue, Barry 94 Odpryski (Chips) 154 Ofer, Avi 250 – 2 Off the Hook (Rossides) 172 Officially African (Oluwafemi) 299 Oforeh, Kenway Afam 299 O Grilo feliz (The Happy Cricket) 320 O Grilo feliz e os insetos gigantes (The Happy Cricket and the Giant Insects) 320 Ogu y Mampato en Rapa Nui (Ogu and Mampato in Rapa Nui) 326 OH (Neubauer) 123 Oh que calma (How Calm It Is) 189 Oh, Paradise (Oren) 250 Ohayo (Kon) 231 Ohayo! Spank (Hello Spank!) 225 Ohotnik (The Hunter) 202 Ohtlikud lennud (The Dangerous Flights) 139 Õhus (In the Air) 139 Oíche Sí (A Fairy Night; Drogheda) 94 Oiga Pana (Listen Buddy) 319 Ojamamo Doremi (Magical Doremi) 222 O Joong-il 268 Ok (Talvin Singh) 341 Okada Toshio 224 Okami shonen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken) 217 Okamoto Hotaru 218 Okamura Tensai 226 Okay, Meral 343 Okiura Hiroyuki 226 O kouzelném zvonu (The Magic Bell) 160 Okoye, Ebele 298 – 9 O kyklos tis exelixis (The Circle of Development) 177 Old Fangs Cartoon Saloon) 92 Old Fools, The (Lingford) 77 Old Lady and the Pigeons, The 55 Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) 200 Old Man and the Sea (Petrov) 55, 61, 200 Old Man, the Fox and the Ogre (Kraus) 263 Old Master Q 277 Old Master Q Part II 277 Old Orchard Beach, PQ (Cournoyer) 56 Old Tales, The (Rad) 262 Old Testament – the Bible in Animation (Christmas Films) 198 Olive’s Dream (Alaa) 259

Olivia (O’Connell) 92 Olivieri, Carlos 327 Olshvang, Valentin 204, 210 Oluwa, Hafeez 298 Oluwafemi, Olanrewaju 299 Oluwaseun, Oloto Oluwafunmilayo 299 Omake (Pieces) 242 Oman 261 Omdurman 295 Omoide poroporo (Drops of Memories/Only Yesterday) 218 On a Full Moon (Whitmore) 332 O nomos tis varitatas (The Law of Gravity) 177 On Your Mark (Miyazaki) 216, 340 On: Comm (CAM Solutions) 287 Onde Andará Petrucio Felker (Where Has Petrucio Felker Been?) 322 One Hot Day in Africa (Triggerfish Studios) 308 One Line (Abashar) 295 One Lonely Cactus (Yonesho) 243 One Man Band (Jimenez and Andrews) 16n47 One Minute Enlightenment (Kennedy) 338 One More Time (music video) 341 One of these Days (Pink Floyd) 339 One of Those Days (Plympton) 49 One Piece (Tôei Animation) 223 One Step of Love (Djeneni) 291 One Thousand and One Nights 255 One, Two, Three, Dusk (Dufour-Laperrière) 58 Oniisama e … (Brother, Dear Brother) 228 – 9 Onkyo seimeitai Noiseman (Noiseman Sound Insect) 223, 232 Only Yesterday (Takahata) 216, 218 Open Season (Sony) 24 Open the Door (Morimoto) 232 Open Your Eyes (Zazam) 292 Opéra imaginaire 101 Opera ocalenia (The Work of Salvation) 151 Operavox (Christmas Films) 198 Opeyokun, Victor Olusola 298 Opopomoz (D’Alò) 181 Opportunities – Let’s Make Lots of Money (Pet Shop Boys) 340 Optimistic (Radiohead i-blip) 342 Optimus Mundus (animated series) 199, 203, 210 O quarto rei mago (The Fourth Magus) 320 Oranus (Girlin/Bassovskaja) 140 Orbi studio 173 Orchard, The (Stenhouse) 336 O’Reilly, Chris 80 O’Reilly, David 97, 340 Oren, Rony 249 – 50 Oren, Tsvika 249 – 51

394  Index

Orhan, Esin 255 Oriental DreamWorks 274 Oriental Nightfish (Linda McCartney and Wings) 339 Original Wrapper, The (Lou Reed) 340 Oritsu uchugun: Oneamisu no tsubasa (Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise) 224 Orlova, Natalia 198 O’Rourke, Gerard 91 Orpheus (Forestieri) 181 Orpheus (Pieperhoff) 95 Orsolya (Ursula) 165 Orosz, István 163 Ortega, Pablo 316 Osaka Hiroshi 226 Os caracois (The Snails) 312 Oscailt 91 Oscuro Casrdinal (Dark Cardinal) 315 Oseam (Seong Baek-yeop) 269 Osel (The Donkey) 266 Oshii Mamoru 226, 229 – 30, 234 Os Idiotas Mesmo (The Real Idiots) 322 Os olhos do farol (The Eyes of the Lighthouse) 190, 191 O Sonho de uma Noite de São João (A Saint Johns’ Night Dream) 191 Os Salteadores (Fiejó) 188, 189, 190, 191 Ostertag, Bob 65 – 6 O’Sullivan, Mick 93 Os Urbanóides (The Urbanoids) 321 Osvoll, Lise I. 135 Otario (Arzuaga) 330 Otherwise (Morcheeba) 342 Otherworld (Grace) 71 Otomo Katsuhiro 223, 229 – 31 Otsuka Yasuo 217 Ott, Thomas 127 Ottoni, Massimo 180 Our Home (Saba) 261 Our Man in Nirvana (Koester) 118 Our Rights campaign (UNICEF) 323 Our Tele Came as a Maxim (Rad) 262 Outlaws of the Marsh. Old Master Q Part III 277 Ovacijos (Plaudits) 148 Ovando, Alfredo 323 Oveja Negra (Black Sheep) 330 Oviedo, Lourdes Villagómez 312 Ovos (Eggs) 191 Owen and Mzee (Mwaniki) 301 Oyama Kei 246 Oz, Amos 251 Özgür, Tahsin 254

O zi din via¸ta lui Ionescu (A Day in Ionescu’s Life) 171 Paccou, Marie 101 Pacusi (Yamamura) 242 Pád (The Fall) 160 Padavas 280 Padrón, Juan 313 Päevavalgus (Day Light) 139 Pai Francisco Entrou na Roda (Uncle Francisco in a Merry Go Round) 321 Pain Pleasure (Cox) 88 Paint Misbehavin’ (IMAX short) 345 Palestine, Summer (Habash0 255 Paleta, Zbigniew 311 Paley, Nina 32 Paluku, Hallain 302 Pamela (Carlos Nine) 328 Panaccione, Gregory 182 Panama 316 – 17 Panchatantra 281 Panda kopanda (Panda! Go, Panda!) 221 Panda kopanda Amefuri Circus no maki (Panda Kopanda Rainy Day Circus) 221 Pandele, Marius 171 Pandora’s Box 82 Pang Pond 283 Pangur Bán (White Fuller; Pieperhoff) 95 Paní Bída (Lady Poverty) 160 Panique au village (Panic in the Hamlet) 111 Panopticum (Gábor) 164 Pantamedia (Pentafour) 279 Pantela, Katerina 172 Pan Tian-Shou (Chang) 270, 271 Papa! Papa! Papa!/L’Homme et l’enfant 55 Papagalski zalugalki (Uncle Parrot’s Rhymes) 170 Papa ga tonda asa (Flying Daddy) 240 Papaionnou, Iannis 177 Papa Seku (Animation Africa) 297 Papawa (BRB) 188 Papermouse (Okoye) 298 Papiroflexia (Baldwin) 324 Paprika (Kon) 231 Papu & Yaki (Studio Pix Image) 302 Paradise (Rosensweet) 59 Paradoqsi (The Paradox) 173 Paraffin Safety Campaign (Triggerfish Studios) 308 Paraíso Terrenal (Earthly Paradise) 325 Paranoia Agent (Madhouse) 225, 231, 234 Paranoid Android (Radiohead) 132, 340, 342 Pararcˇio žiedas (The Fern’s Blossom) 148

Index  395

Parasite (Khoshnazar) 262 Parisse, Christine 111 Park Jee-youn 270 Park, Nick 85 – 7, 96, 339 Parker, Alan 82, 339 Parker, Claire 211 Parker, Kayla 81 Parker, Trey 9 Parker, Vladimir I. 147 Pärlimees (Pearl Man) 139 Pärn, Olga 140 – 4 Pärn, Priit 118, 138 – 40, 241 Pärnography – ees animatsioonist (Pärnography – Man of Animation) 140 Paronnaud, Vincent 99 Parroty Bits (Sorensen) 44 Pars, Heino 140 Partly Cloudy (Sohn) 16n47 Partsalat (The Rag) 169 Pasacin¸as (The Little Fairytales) 145 Pas de deux de deux (Bush) 75 Pasi 287 Pasintabi (Tuldok Studio) 288 Pasolini Requiem (Verger) 185 Passage (Krumme, 1994) 119 Passage (Neubauer, 2002) 124 Passages (St-Pierre) 59 Passingham, Frank 85 Passion (Hiraku Utada) 342 Pass Me Dolla (Give Me a Dollar) 314 Pastoral (Volchek) 149 Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven) 218 Pasty Child (Tymvios) 172 Patagonia, los hombres del confin (Patagonia, the Men of the Frontiers) 326 Patar, Vincent 111 Paterazme (The War) 175 Patlabor 2: The Movie (Oshii) 230 Patlabor: The Movie (Oshii) 230 Patoruzito (Massa) 327 Patrikiu, Dimitri 177 Patt (Stalemate) 128 Patterns (Okoye) 298 Patuvane (Trip) 170 Paukšcˇiai kaipo žmone˙s (The Birds as the People) 148 Paulina Hollers (Green) 35 Paunov, Andrey 170 Pausoka 188 Pautasso, Silvio 185 Pavlátová, Michaela 157 – 8

Pavasaris Vaˉ rnuielaˉ (Springtime on Vˉarnu Street) 147 Pavlova, Irma 208 Pax (Peace) 322 Pay, Nigel 88 Payen, Ariane 111 Payut Ngaokrachang 282 Pchela 198 Pearson, Joe 284 Peckinpah, Sam 234 Peculiar Adventures of Hector (Cox/Arthur) 88 Pedan, Oleg 172 Pedersen, Hanne 323, 325 Pedersen, José 324 Peddersen og Findus 3 – Nissemaskine (Pettson and Findus – The Santa Machine) 130 Pedmanson, Pehep 201 Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Burton) 26 Pee-wee’s Playhouse 86 Peila, Raúl Rodríguez 327 Peiwen Hsieh 276 Peixonauta (Fishtronaut) 322 Pektevich, Vladimir 200 Pelargónie (Geranium) 161 Pencil Booklings (Rose) 35 Pene (Penis) 184 Pene e crudité (Penis and Crudité) 184 Pentesilea (Carrano) 184 Peo Gallery (Fusako) 183 Peo in Svizzera (Peo in Switzerland) 183 People of the Sea (Thomson) 96 Pepee (Dünyası) 254 Pepi, Lorelei 40 Peppa Pig (Astley Baker Davies Ltd) 74, 77 Pequeña Historia (Little Story) 323 Pequeñas voces (Small Voices) 317 Pereira, Ariel 326 Père Ubu (Jarry) 120 Père Ubu (Sabl) 120 Pérez, el ratoncito de tus sueños (Pérez, the Little Mouse of Your Dreams) 327 Pérez, Iban José 188 Pérez, Jesús 129, 323 Perezhevivay (Chew!) 206 Perfect (Arthur Cox Studio) 88 Perfect Blue (Kon) 231 Peristsvaleba (Transfiguration) 174 Periwig-Maker, The (Schäffler) 121 Perkmandeljc (Perk) 166 Perlis, Efim 110 Perlman, Janet 63

396  Index

Persepolis (Satrapi) 98, 99 – 100, 103 Persistent Peddler, The (Cloutier) 57 Personal City (Kurosaka) 240 Perspectives (Schwizgebel) 126 Peruyi Otryad (First Squad) 342 Pesapane, Adam 38 Pescado come pescado (Fish Eat Fish) 315 Pesenka dlya kanareyky (A Song for the Canary) 149 Pesn o Volfgange neustrashimom, dostoslavnom istrebitele drakonov (The Song of Wolfgang the Intrepid, the Glorious Dragon Hunter) 149 Pessoa, Regina 189 – 90 Péterffy, Zsófia 164 Peter and the Wolf (Templeton) 78, 79 Petersburg (Yevteyeva) 209 Petite escapade (Little Escapade; Granjon) 105 Petkevich, Elena 143, 148 – 9 Petkevich, Vladimir 148 – 9, 205 Pet Pati (5 Times) 170 Petróleo! Petróleo! (Petroleum! Petroleum!) 321 Petropulea, Nikolau 177 Petrov, Aleksandr 55 – 6, 61, 198, 200 – 1 Petson and Findus (Kaminski) 249 Peur[s] du noir (Fear[s] of the Dark) 100 Peyser, Ruth 39 Phanm Minh Tri 282 Phantasia Digital 319 Phantom Canyon (Steers) 39 – 40 Phantom of the Opera (Schumacher) 12n34 Pharaoh’s Belt (Klahr) 31 Phelan, Nicky 92 Phineas and Ferb 11 Phont Cycle (Woloshen) 60 Photograph of Jesus (Hill) 77 Phoyai Maa Kab Thung Mah Mern 283 Phu Dong Thien Vuong 282 Phuong Hoa 282 Phutu & Bass (Ricaldi) 323 Piaget, Carlo 128 Pianistut (The Pianist) 170 Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major (Shostakovich) 12 Piazzolla, Astor 205 Picasso, Pablo 142 Picassoesque (Arthur/Leake) 88 Piccola mare (Little Sea) 180 PicPic André 111 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The (Barta) 158, 160 Piemineklis (The Monument) 144 – 5 Pieperhoff, Edith 95 Pierri, Andrea 180

Pigeon Within (Hubley) 33 Pika Pika (Totchka) 245 Pika Pika – Lightning Doodle Project (Totchka) 245 Pikkov, Ülo 138 – 40 Pilgrim (Darragh) 91 Pines of Rome (Respighi) 12 Ping Batter Pong (Wrake) 82 Pingviinide paraad (The Penguin Parade) 139 Pinilla, Diego Agudo 188 Pink Komkommer (Newland) 63 Pinocchio (D’Alò) 181 Pinocchio (Disney) 19 Pinocchio (Winshluss) 99 Pins, Arthur de 105 Piper, A (Yokosuka) 243 Pipers Sweet Milk Cheese (commercial) 307 Piratas en el Callao (Pirates in Callao) 319 Pirouette (Tali) 59 Pitt, Suzan 39 Pizza Passionata (Juusonen) 136 PJ’s, The 30 P-kies (children’s TV programme) 243 Plaa Boo Thong (Golden Goby Fish) 283 Placenta (Baldwin) 324 Plainpasert, Songsak 283 Plalstilinovaya vorona (A Plasticiine Crow; Tatarsky) 52 Planes Immigrations Nigerians (Waziri) 299 Planet 51 (Blanco) 187 Planet Karton 287 Planet of Apes (Burton) 26, 27 Planet, The (Jáuregui) 329 Plaque Dare Talk (Oluwafemi) 299 Plascon Woodcare (commercial) 308 Plasmo the Bookworm (Lawrence) 335 Plasmo: the Series (Lawrence) 335 Plastic People (Koutský) 160 Plastilinovaya Vorona (Plasticine Crow) 195 Platonov, Andrei 200 Playa explosiva (Explosive Beach) 324 Playground (Adeleye) 299 Playground (Mizue) 247 Pleasant Goat and Big Wolf (Original Power Culture Communication) 273 Please Say Something (O’Reilly) 97 Pleasures of War (Lingford) 77 Plemyannik kukushki (The Cuckoo’s Nephew) 204 Plume (Purves) 76 Plumíferos (Free Birds) 327 Plympmania (Plympton) 50 Plympton, Bill 31, 37, 48 – 9, 60, 146

Index  397

Pocahontas (Disney) 12 Pocket Dragon (D’Ocon Films) 186 Pocoyó (Zinkia) 188 Podobizna (The Portrait) 161 Podruzhki (Friends) 263 Poe, Edgar Allan 111, 312 Poˉe m pa kulšen (Cimermanis) 145 Poeth, Ties 112 Poet of Half Past Three, The (Chagall) 82 Poet of Half Past Three, The (JoWOnder) 82 Pohititel Elok (the Fir Tree Robber) 175 Põhjakonn (North Dragon) 139 Pohjavirta, Tatu 136 Poíesis (Munhoz) 322 Point of Mouth (Ajanovic´) 168 Point of View (animated series) 257 Pojar, Brˇetislav 64, 157, 160 Pokemon – Pocket Monsters (Pokémon) 233 – 4 Poldek (Gentinetta) 128 Põldma, Janno 138 – 9, 146 Police Report (Oluwafemi) 299 Polifemo (Polyphemus) 312 Pollo (Chicken) 188 Polychronakis, Stelios 177 – 8 Polygon Studio Japan 286 Pomeroy, John 253 Pomp and Circumstance (Elgar) 12 Pond Life (Guard) 70 Ponpon (Drouet) 105 Ponpon le plote (Ponpon Pilate; Drouet) 105 Ponto, Shavi, Shavi Zghva (Ponto, the Black, Black Sea) 174 Pood (Zarrinkelk) 262 Pool, Bouwine 113 Popcorn (music video) 342 Po-poc (El hombre invisible) 319 Popov, Ilya 199 Pop Party (Kennedy) 338 Poppy (Cunningham) 337 Pop Skool (Shepherd) 84 Põrandaalune (Underground) 140 Porco Rosso (Miyazaki) 216, 220, 221 Porgand (The Carrot) 139 Porgand Suvitab (The Carrot on the Beach) 139 Porgandite öö (The Night of the Carrots) 138, 143 Porras, Carlos Eduardo 316 Portable Airport (music video) 340 Portes, Amy 288 Portrét (Koutský) 159 Portreti (Maku) 179 Poslední lup (The Last Theft) 158

Poslední vecˇerˇe Páneˇ (The Last Dinner of Lord) 161 Posledniaya Zhena Siney Borody (The Last Wife of Bluebeard) 172 Posledních 100 let marx-leninismu v cˇechlách (The Last 100 Years of Marxism-Leninism in Bohemia) 159 Posledný Autobus (The Last Bus) 161 Posnanie (Erlich) 40 Pospíšílová, Vlasta 157, 160 Post, Jason 317 Postcard (Y. and M. Nathan) 251 Postcards from My Backyard (Morse) 46 Postman Pat (animated series) 90 Potop (The Spate) 208 Pouliot, Jean-François 346 Pouvaret, Laurent 105 Povara umbrei (The Burden of the Shadow) 171 Povenmire, Dan 11 Povest minuvshikh let (The Novel of Bygone Years) 149 Power, Eric 341, 343 Power of Generations (Jassim) 260 Powerpuff Girls, The 8 – 9 Powrót (The Return) 154 Prado, Javier 319 Prado, Miguelanxo 187 Prasavci (Premammals) 160 Precipitação (Precipitation) 321 Predpriimchivy Yartychulak (Enterprising Yartychulak) 266 Prekrasnaya Lyagushka (Wonderful Frog) 175 PrePost (Moilanen) 136 Presto (Sweetland) 16n47 Prévert, Jacques 217 Prévost, Nathalie 59 PRG Metanoia (Suarez) 288 Pribytie poezda (The Arrival of a Train) 196 Prica o … (A Story About …) 168 Priestley, Joanna 40, 46 – 7 Priklucheniya Sindbada (Sindbad’s Adventures) 264 Prilivy tuda-syuda (Tides To and From) 208 Prince of Egypt (Dreamworks) 14, 23, 292 Princes et princesses (Princes and Princesses; Ocelot) 98, 106 Princesha dhe hena (The Priincess and the Moon) 179 Princess (Copenhagen Bombay) 131 Princess and the Frog, The (Disney) 16, 16n50, 22 Princess and the River, The (Al-Yasiri) 258 Princeza Na Zidu (Princess on the Wall) 168 Prine Loseno (Wooto) 302 Prisoner, The (Booth) 95 Pritcha o Gasane (The Gasan Parable) 149 Privet iz Kislovodska (Regards from Kislovodsk) 205 Priznaniye v lyubvi (Confession of Love) 205

398  Index

Problem Child (D’Ocon Films) 186 Probuzení (Wake Up) 161 Procession (Hilton) 83 Prodigal Son (van Blerk) 307 Profane, Stephan 316 Professor Maher (Basheer) 291 Proikov, Proiko 169 Pro Ivana-Duraka (About Ivan the Fool) 203 Prokhorov, Anatoly 52, 54, 195 – 6, 199 – 200 Pronto saldremos del problema 311 Prophet Jonah (Saba) 261 Pro pitcharya, kotoriiy nitchego ne boyalsya (About the Fearless Knight) 149 Props un Berta (Props and Berta) 145 Pro rakov (About Crawfish) 210 Protect the Human: Measles (Ensby) 79 Provdivaya istorya o trech porosyatach (The True Story of the Three Little Pigs) 206 Provintsial’naya shkola (Provincial School) 208 Pszichoparádé (Psycho-Parade) 164 Public conVENience (Tabaimo) 238 Pucca Funny Love 270 Pudal proshlogodniiy sneg (Last Year Snow Was Falling) 195 Puente, Roberto de la 319 Pugovka (Little Button) 209 Pullin the Devil by the Tail (McCollum) 95 Pulp (Johnson) 41 Pummell, Simon 83 – 4 Pump Action – An Animated Story of Corrupting Power, Sickening Abuse & Paralysing Fear (McNally) 345 Pums (Poumse) 201, 202 Punkt und Striche (Dot and Lines) 129 Puppet (Pat Smith) 38 Purdy, Al 59 Puri Sihir (Haryanto) 287 Purno de Purno (Vlaar/Wessels) 113 Purves, Barry 75 – 6, 112 Pustyshka (Hollow Man) 206 Puteh (The Girl, Puteh) 283, 284 Puteshestviye (The Journey) 209 Putin, Vladimir 192 Putnin, Mˉaris 145 – 6 Putsch (Aldashin) 202 Putz, Peter 125 Pyesa dlia triokh aktoriv (The Play for Three Actors) 173 Pyramid Song (Radiohead) 342 Qiangdao de tiantang (The Paradise of Bandits) 270 Qin shi ming yue (The Bright Moon of the Chin Time) 270 Qiu (Autumn) 271

Qiyi de Mengguma (Fantastic Mongolian Horse) 272 Qiyi Jiazu (Strange Family) 273 Quake (video game) 346, 347 Quartey, Samuel 296 Quasi Niente (Almost Nothing) 180 Que nos oigan (Let Them Hear Us) 329 Queen’s Monastery, The (Pearly Oyster) 89 Queiroz, Aida 321 Quelque part dans le nord de l’Allemagne (Somewhere in the North of Germany; Avedikian) 104 Queremos al agua (We Love Water) 329 Queremos vivir (We Want to Live) 329 Quest 117, 121 Quiero aprender (I Want to Learn) 329 Quiero jugar (I Want to Play 329 Quiet Steam (Marshall) 96 Quinn, Joanna 69 – 71, 79, 81 Quirino Cristiani – The Mystery of the First Animated Movies (Zucchelli) 184 Quiroga, Horacio 326 – 7 Quist, Hugh 296 Qulol (Potter) 264 Qveqhnis Masheneblebi (Builders of the Country) 173 Raamat, Rein 139 – 40 Rabbit (Wrake) 83 Rabbit Punch (Andrews) 88 Rabbit Rabbit (Tandem Films) 88 Rabbit’s Trick, The (Sawadogo) 297 Rabe, Pablo 327 Rabinyan, Dorit 94 Rachawat, Chai 283 Rad, Alireza Kavian 262 Radev, Zlatin 170 Raeber, Jonas 128 Rafik, Anas 291 Ragana – cˇáry cˇarideˇjnice (Ragana – Witch’s Magic) 148 Rahbani, Ilyas 254 RahXephon (Studio Bones) 226 Rainbow Fish, The (Torabi) 262 Rais, Nadia 292 Rajzfilm (Cartoon) 164 Rall, Hannes 119 – 20 Ramadan, Ivan 169 Ramayana (Indian epic poem) 32 Ramayana – The Legend of Prince Rama (Ram Mohan/Yugo Sako) 280 Ramboz, Eve 101 Ramirez, Juanjo 187 Ram Mohan Biographics 279

Index  399

Ramos, Ellen 287 Ranbo13 (Krstic´) 165 Rand, Mikk 138 – 9 Ranft, Joe 21 Ranma nibun no ichi (Ranma 1/2; TV series) 215 Rao, Singeetam Srinivasa 280 Raoul et Jocelyne (Elissalde) 104 Rappas, Panagiotis 177 Rascagne (Boulbès) 101 Rashed, Tarek 293 Rashi: A Light After the Dark Ages (Disk-In Studio) 249 Rasidakis, Spyros 177 Rass Derb (series; computer shorts) 291 Rassaz o chude iz chudes (Story of Miracle of Miracles) 210 Ratatouille (Pixar) 16, 21 Ratom Ar Akvs Mtwares Kaba (Why the Moon Does Not Have a Dress) 173 Rattanachoksiriku, Natthapong 283 Raˉ vˉe jslˉedzˉe js (The Zip) 145 Raven, The’ (Poe) 312 Raw Day (Dimitrov) 170 Ray Gun Fun (Pummell) 84 Raýmanová, Vanda 161 Razafindralambo brothers 303 Razmataz (Conte) 182 Reaktivniy porosenok (The Reactive Piglet) 149 Real Schlemeil, The (Kaminski) 249 Real Zandonai (Marcondes) 322 Rebuttal (Woloshen) 60 Recent Discoveries (Kennedy) 338 Rechnitz, Josh 146 ˇrecˇi, ˇrecˇi, ˇrecˇi (Words, Words, Words) 157   Recordare (Carrano) 184 Recreation (Breer) 34 Red Aliens Studio 276 Red Ball (Holly) 94 Red Balloon 36 Red Fence (Glabicki) 34 Red Light Diaries (De Graaf) 113 Red Ribbon (Rimminen) 72 Red’s Dream (Pixar) 15 Redline (Madhouse) 226 Reek, Wouter van 113 Reel to Reel (Cox) 88 Reet Petite (Jackie Wilson) 340, 341 Reeves, Jennifer 31 Reeves, Richard 59 Reflection Studies (Sorensen) 44 Refleksy (Reflections) 154 Refreny (Refrains) 151

Regaré con lagrimas tus pétalos (I Will Water with Tears Your Petals) 188 Rehalt El Sendibad El Bahari (Sinbad’s Adventures) 292 Rehy Fox (Wilson) 96 Reider, Noriko T. 288 Reihana, Lisa 338 Reilly, Tom 337 Reinardo Chung 314 Reineke Fuchs (Goethe) 173 Reiniger, Lotte 27, 31, 118 Rejab, Leila Ben 292 Rejected (Hertzfeldt) 36 Rejuvenation (Sorensen) 43 Reka v svete luny (The River Under the Light of the Moon) 266 Rekata (The River) 169 Relaciôn de Michoacán 311 Reluctant Deckhand, The 62 Remind Me (Royksopp) 342 Remon no michi (Lemon Road) 244 Remote Control (Neumann) 151 Ren and Stimpy Show, The 7, 8 Renaissance (Volckman) 100 Rendón, Guillermo 311 Rendón, Jorge Cuéllar 324 Renoldner, Thomas 126 Repete (Repeat) 157 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner) 333 Requiem KV626 (Mozart) 184 Rescuers Down Under (Disney) 15, 22 Resuscita, rey Orelie (Revive, King Orelie) 325 Retouches (Schwizgebel) 127 Retratos (Portraits) 326 Return of Hanuman (Desai) 280 Return to Oz 27 Reubens, Paul 26 Reunión (Meeting) 325 Reyes, Ulises Guzmán 312 Rezgalıˉbas (Mischievous) 145 RGB XYZ (O’Reilly) 97 RH Factor (Woloshen) 60 Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) 12 Rhouma, Wassim ben 292 Rhythmus 94 (Renoldner) 126 Riaño, Alejandro 318 Ribas, Walbercy 320 Ribeiro, José Miguel 191 Ricaldi, Mauricio 323 Ricarski Roman (The Knight’s Novel) 175 Rice, John 94

400  Index

Rice, Phil ‘Overman’ 347 Rice, Tim 12 Rich, Buddy 60 Richter, Hans 113 Ricky Sprocket 77 Riddet, Dave 84 Riddle, The (D’Agostino) 342 Rıˉ dˉuze, Dace 145 Rien (Kunyi Chen) 79 Right Now (Korn) 340 Rights from Heart: Part 2 297 Rights from the Heart 54, 56 Rija 146 Rijken, Arnoud 113 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) 74 Rimminen, Marjut 71 – 2, 135 Ringbom, Antonia 135 Ring of Fire (Hykade) 119 Ring Out, My Saz, Ring Out (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Ringo no mori no fantasy (The Fantasy of the Apple Forest) 227 Rio (Saldanha) 321 Rip, Dripo, Tear (Goodey) 337 Rise and Fall of the Legendary Anglobilly Feverson, The (Rosto) 114 Rintarô (Hayashi Shigeyuki) 225, 229 Rittai anime – Ie naki ko (Nobody’s Boy – Remy) 228 Riva Palacio Alatriste, Gabriel and Rodolfo 313 Road Kill (Y. Nathan) 251 Road to El Dorado (DreamWorks) 14, 22, 23 Roadside Romeo (Disney/Yash Raj) 280 – 1 Robel, Xavier 127 Robert Creep: Une vie de chien (Robert Creep: A Dog’s Life) 127 Robertson, Paul 342 Robes of War (Cournoyer) 56 Robial, Etienne 100 Robin (Carlsson) 340 Robin (Filmtecknarna) 131 Robin (Y. and M. Nathan) 251 Robinson, Chris 58 Robinson, James 337 Robinson, Ruairí 96 Robotombo 319 Robots (Blue Sky) 24 Rock Sınıfi 254 Rock-a-Doodle (Sullivan Bluth Studio) 90 Rocking’ & Rollin’ (Greaves) 88 Rocko’s Modern Life 7, 8, 10 Rocky 78

Rocky and Bullwinkle 9 Rocky & Hudson, os Caubóis Gays (Rocky & Hudson, the Gay Cowboys) 322 Rocky and the Dodos (animated series) 90 Rodencia y el diente de la princesa (Rodencia and the Princess’ Tooth) 320 Rødningen, Ivar 132 Rodomski, Eric 7 Rodox Cucaracha 320 Rodríguez, Gabriel Martínez 188 Rodriguez, Paul 328 Roelants, Stephan 111 Roger, Normand 60 – 1, 86, 112, 116, 183 Rogor Gachnda Mtware (How the Moon Appeared) 174 Rogor Gaxda Zghva Mariliani (How the Sea Became Salty) 174 Roizman, Zinovy 264 Rojin-Z 231 Rojo Red (Betancourt) 317 Rokunga, el último homre pájaro (Rokunga, the Last Bird-man) 326 Röllin sydän (Quest for a Heart) 136 Romance (Schwizgebel) 127 Romero, Liliana 327 Rood, Sjaak 112 Roof Sex (PES) 38 Room Nearby, A (Fierlingers) 33 Room of Drafting, The (Zazam) 293 Roost (Kravitz) 40 Rooster (Quliyeva) 176 Rooster, The (Ganbaatar) 267 Rooster, The Crocodile and the Night Sky, The (Fagan) 94 Rooted (Opeyokun) 298 Roots (Neubauer) 123, 124 Rosa, Emilio de la 188, 328 Rosa, Sergio Aristides 315 Rosa Rosa (Dufour-Laperrière) 58 Rose, Kathy 35 – 6 Rosenberg, Hans 315 Rosensweet, Jesse 59 Rosenthal, Tatia 253 Ross, Graeme 55 Rosset, Marina 129, 166 Rossides, Andreas 172 Rossides, Kyros 171 Rostam & Esfandiar (Rad) 262 Rosto 114, 149 Roth, C. P. 36 Rothkirch, Thilo Graf 121 Rou E Tam (Meat Days) 276

Index  401

Roukavichka (Small Mitten) 172 Roulin, Pascal 101 Roussoum Mutaharrira (Liberated Cartoons) 258 Royal Whiz Kids, The (Adewumi) 299 Royco Potato Bake (Commercial) 308 Rozhdestvo (Nativity) 202 – 3 Rozi’ (Transit Crew) 304 Rozovaya Kukla (Pink Doll) 210 Rozum a Šteˇstí (Reason and Luck) 161 Rua Sésamo (Sesame Street) 189 Rubak, Jean 104 Rubicon (Alkabetz) 118 Rubicon 256 Rueda, Eric 316 Rugrats 7 – 8, 52 Rugrats Go Wild 8 Rugrats in Paris 8 Rugrats the Movie 8, 52 Ruia, Rajiv 280 Ruiz, Norman 327 Rukmana, Andi 287 Rumour of True Things, The (Bush) 74 Rumpelstilzdhen/Rumpelstiltskin (Grimm brothers) 288 Runaway (Barker) 56 Runnin’ Down a Dream (music video) 340 Rupan sansei (Lupin III) 220 Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro (Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro) 220 Rupan Sansei – Bai Bai Ribatii – Kiki ippatsu! (Lupin III: Bye Bye Liberty Crisis – Goodbye Lady Liberty) 228 Rupert Bear (Purves) 76 Ruse pour ruse (Trick for Trick) 292 Rush (Luyet/Robel) 127 Russell, Erica 71 Russina Classcs for Children (Animos) 194 Rutskoy, Aleksandr 191 Rutterford, Alex 342 Ruzz et Ben (Jullien) 103 Ryan (Landreth) 63 Rybczynski, Zbigniew 340 Rycker, Piet de 121 Ryeh (Mahfoudh) 292 Ryunosuke, Akutagawa 263 S-7: Le devoir n’aura pas lieu (The Exercise Won’t Be Done) 296 Saamueli internet (Saamuel’s Internet) 138 Sääsk ja hobune (The Mosquito and the Horse) 139 Saba’t Ayyam fil Ousbouh (7 Days a Week) 258 Sabz (Shedaei) 262

Sacou Wala Bouteil! (Niang-Piniang) 296 Sadamoto Yoshiyuki 224, 233, 235 Sadeghi, Ali Akbar 262 Sadykov, Rashid 265 Safari (Herguera) 188 Sahakyan, Aida 175 Sahakyants, David 174 Sahakyants, Lyudmila 174 – 5 Sahakyants, Robert 174 – 6 Saida Toshitsugu 217 Sailor Moon 215, 287 Sainte Barbe (Holy Beard) 129 Saint-Saëns, Camille 12, 157 Saje, Nejc 166 Šajtinac, Borislav 108 – 9 Sa Kabila ng Bulkan (On the Other Side of the Mountain) 287 Sakadachi kun (Handstand Boy) 244 Sakadachi kun, hitasura hashiru! (Handstand Boy Intently Running) 244 Sakaguchi Hironobu 237 Sakakibara Motonori 237 Sakakibara Sumito 245 Sakalauskas, Rimas 148 Sakamichi no Apollon (Kids on the Slope) 236 Sakhli Lkhinisa (Festive House) 174 Saksida, Kolja 166 Salad Chick 1 and 2 (Tarumbwa) 305 Saladin (animated series) 260 Salah, Rim Ben 292 Salama, Meni 250 Salamaliki, Angeliki 177 Salamatac (GCCJPI) 259 Saldanha, Carlos 321 Salani (Goodbye) 302 Saldin 284 Salim Watani (animated series) 256 Sallis, Peter 86 Salma 261 Samak (Mwaniki) 301 Salmin, Elisabeth 138 Samant, V. G. 280 Samoladás, Zachos 177 Samsons, The (Pitchi Poi Studio) 249 Samstag Nachmittag (Saturday Afternoon) 124 Samurai Champloo (Watanabe) 227, 235 Samurai Jack 10 Samurai Love God (Crazy Piranha) 256 Samy malen’kiy (The Smallest One) 172 Samy’s Adventures 111

402  Index

Sanctuary (Sorensen) 45 Sanctus (Carrano) 184 Sánchez, Diana 318 Sanchez, Erasmo 317 Sancho, Mongi 292 Sandbox (Ofer) 251 Sandemose, Mikkel 133 Sanders, Chris 22, 24 Sandiford, Ted M. 314 Sandman (Gaiman) 114 Sandmännchen – Abenteuer im Traumland (Sandman – Adventures in Dreamland) 121 Sandoitti (The Sandwich) 242 Sandoval, Isaac 313 Sandra, detective de cuentos (Sandra, Detective of Tales) 188 Sangha, Michel 300 Sanguo Yanyi (Three Kingdoms) 273 Sang Wira (The Hero) 284 Sankale, Toni 301 San Martín, Pepe 319 Sanrio 227 Sanshui qing (Feeling from Mountain and Water) 271 – 2 Santa Maria Esparza, Mauricio and Luis 319 Santo Golpe! (Holy Golpe!) 311 Sapegin, Pjotr 132 – 3 Saportkhobelebi (Bugbears) 173 Saraiya goyo (House of Five Leaves) 227 Saravia, Eduardo 319 Sarpong, Kofi 296 Sarkar Epic, The (Maharramov) 176 Satiemania (Gašparovic´) 157 Sato Dino 244 Satô U.G. 244 Satrapi, Marjane 99 Sattar, Ansar 315 Saucer of Water for the Birds, A (Shenfield) 335 Saulıˉ tis, Askolds 146 – 7 Sauvalle, Pierre 296 Save Me (Hilton) 83 Savva, Marinos 172 Sawadogo, Cilia 297 Sawdust for Brains and the Key of Wisdom (JoWOnder) 82 Sayari Yetu (Ghazala) 293 Sayonara ginga tetsudo 999: Andromeda shuchakueki (So Long, Galaxy Express 999: Andromeda Terminal) 229 Sazghvrebi (Borders) 173 Scalable City (Sheldon Brown) 345 Scarfe, Gerald 71, 339 Scenarios from the Sahel – The General Assembly of Diseases (Pictoons) 296

Schaack, Michael 121 Schäffler, Steffen 121 Schast’e Mashkoba (Mashkoiba’s Happiness) 263 Schatzl, Leo 125 Scher, Jeffrey 39 Schesch, Stephan 122 Scheving, Magnus 137 Schiele, Egon 7 Schindler, Christina 117 Schlaf (Sleep) 128 Schmid, Sabrina 332 Schnall, John 39 Scholes, Claire 337 School Disco (Wood) 80 Schooley, Robert 11 Schorr, Daniel 322 Schuldt, Eduardo 319 – 20 Schuman, Brett 307 Schwaneberg, Frederic Cordoba 188 Schwitters, Kurt 60, 170, 298 Schwizgebel, Georges 126 – 7, 199 s´ciany (Walls) 152 Sciullo, Pierre di 100 Scott, Marlo 314 Scrapland (Sato) 244 Scratch (van Cuijlenborg) 112 Screen Play (Purves) 75 Scroggins, Michael 42 Sea Song (Reeves) 59 Sealift of a Chair, The (Mulloy) 73 Seaside Woman (Grillo) 328 Sebastan’s Voodoo (Baldwin) 324 Second Life (video game) 347 Second Nature (Battaglia) 39 Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, The (Bolexbrothers) 85 Secret History of the Mongols (Miagmar) 267 Secret Joy of Falling Angels (Pummell) 83 Secret Love (Bush) 75 Secret of Kells 91, 92 – 3, 98 Seefood (Les’ Copaque) 284 Seepage (Selick) 27 Seghmakojak (Button) 176 Segu Fanga or le Pouvoir de Ségu (Coulibaly) 292, 293 Segu Janjo (Coulibaly) 293 Seidel, Robert 117, 122 Seijas, Rodrigo 327 Seiltänzer (Rope Dancer) 119 Selenis, Algirdas 148 Selenis, Aurika 148 Selick, Henry 25 – 29, 78

Index  403

Seliyanov, Sergey 198 Selkirk, Jamie 336 Selwood, Maureen 48 Seishu heiki (Stink Bomb) 223 Selkirk, el verdadero Robinson Crusoe (Selkirk, the Real Robinson Crusoe) 329 Semesterhemmet (Holiday Home) 131 Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (The Mysterious Disappearance of Chihiro and Sen/Spirited Away) 219, 222, 288 – 90 Sennen joyu (Millennium Actress) 231 Señores de Sipán (Lords of Sipán) 326 Senpei’s Summer (Neco Lo) 277 Sense of Gravity (Anderson) 82 Seong Baek-yeop 269 Separation, The (Bringas) 89 Sequeira, Osvaldo 315 – 16 Seregin, Sergey 197 Serrazina, Pedro 189 – 91 Serial Entoptics (O’Reilly) 97 Serial Expoeriment Lain (Nakamura) 233, 234 Sero hiki no Goshu (Goshu the cellist) 217 – 18 Seru (Limbu) 281 Servir Bem para servir sempre (Serve Well to Serve Forever) 322 Sesame Street 265, 308; Arabic version 259 Sesame Street: Dogs (Morse) 46 Sestra i brat (Sister and Brother) 149 Setola, Anton 110, 112 Setu vurle üüsis (Caught By Setu Slicker) 137 Seule la main (Hébert) 67 Seventeen (Hulsing) 113 Sex and the City (TV show) 5 Sex & Violence (Plympton) 50 Sexteens (Zaramella) 328 Sezam (The Sesame) 168 Sezer, Tayfun and Tufan 254 SF Shinseiki Lensman (Science Fiction New Century Lensman) 232 Shaabiiyat Al Cartoon (animated series) 260 Shabiiyat Alcartoon 256 Shadow Cycle (Grillo) 328 Shaker Loops (John Adams) 60 Shakespeare – the Animated Tales (Christmas Films) 198 Shall I Be Mother? (Inglis) 337 Shangoul and Mangoul (Torabi) 262 Shannon, Alan 94 Shao Lin Si Chuan Qi (The Legend of the Shao-lin Temple) 274 Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow) 277

Shaolin wuzang (Shaolin Kids) 273 Shaouzab 261 Shaows (Haddad) 257 Shawn the Sheep 77 She (Rose) 36 She-Bop (Priestly) 47 Shéhérezade (Miailhe) 107 Shelamnov, Aleksey 209 Shel tramway nomer deviat (The Tram Number 9 Goes) 173 Shenfield, Ann 335 Shengelia, Paata 174 Shenghuo yuanlai shi zheyang de (This Is What Life Is) 271 Shepetov, Aleksandr 148 Shepherd, Chris 84 She-Ra: Princess of Power (animated series) 7 Sheydaei, Mozaffar 262 Shift (Hattler) 119 Shigeaki, Masuda 247 Shih, Charlene 276 Shih, C. J. 275 – 6 Shih, Jack 276 Shih, Jay 275 Shih-Ying Pu 276 Shijaku, Bertrand 179 Shiku’s Song (Wanjunki/Sankale) 301 Shimizu Yûko 227 Shimmer Box Drive (Woloshen) 60 Shin, Nelson 269 Shindel, Mikhail 203 Shingai Mtezo 304 Shingo Araki 228 Shinkai Makoto 237 Shinsatsu shitsu (Consultation Room) 246 Shinseiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion) 225, 233, 234 Shinseiki Evangelion Gekijoban: The End of Evangelion 225, 235 Shipwrecked (Kuipers) 112 Shirenke (Matches) 265 Shiro no michi (White Road) 244 Shishkov, Vlado 170 Shma Israel. Iudejskaya Molitva (Shma Israel. Judaic Prayer) 207 Shmelev, Ivan 200 Shmygoon, Alexander 173 Shock (Radev & Budinov) 170 Shock 3D! 284 Shock Head Sour (Pummell) 84 Shojo Tsubaki (Camelia Girls) 240 Sholev, Dragomir 170 Shomali, Amer 255

404  Index

Shomov, Vlado 170 Short Dream (Al-Hassan) 257 Short Passion Play, A (Poeth) 112 Shoshitaiahvili, Bondo 173 Shot You Down (Audio Bullys) 343 ShowPeace (series) 54, 322 Shredder (Lokman) 112 Shrek 14, 22, 23 Shrek 2 23, 24 Shrigley, David 342 Shukalyukov, Leonid 148 Shuke he Beita (Adventures of Shuke and Beita) 272 Shuman, Brett 306 Shu-Man Chang 276 Shu Wei Yi Shu Xin Lang Chao IV and V (Digitl Art New Wave Episodes IV and V) 275 Shveytser, Mikhail 209 Siákas, Spiros 177 Sicilia, Manuel 187 Sida (al-Dakheel) 260 Sieber, Allan 322 Sielecki, Hubert 125 Siempre amigas (Always Friends) 323 Sientje (Moesker) 112 Sieviete (Woman) 146 Sieviete un Vˉe jš (Woman and wind) 147 Sifianos, Georges 104, 178 Signes de vie (Signs of Life; Demuynck) 104 Sigurðsson, Hilmar 137 Sigurðsson, Sjon 137 Si Kancil (Haryanto) 287 Sikharulidze, David (Teimuraz) 173 Si Kurur (Skinny) 287 Silat Legenda (Legendary Silat Warriors) 283 Silence (D’Agostino) 342 Silence (Animus Film) 77, 89 Silence in Conversation (music video) 96 Silence is Golden (Shepherd) 84 Silent Ideas (Antebi) 256 Silent Thoughts (Entabi) 257 Silent Wishes (Nzima) 304 Silentium (Međurecˇan and Meštrovic´) 167 Silva, Carlos 191 Silva, Diego 329 Silverstein, Matthew 10 Si Macan (The Tiger) 287 Simba Chipniks (van Blerk) 307 Simeonidi, Akrivi 177 Simon vagyok (I Am Simon) 165 Simon’s Cat (Tofield) 89

Simpsons, The (TV show) 5, 6, 10, 11, 18 Sindo, Pierre Marie 296 Sin fin (Without an Ending) 324 Singer, Corretta 314 Sin Soste˙n (Without Support) 312, Sinai (Lieban) 322 Síndrome de línea blanca (White Line Syndrome) 312 Sinfonietta (Janácˇek) 89 Sing to the Dawn (Mitchell) 285 Siniestro Mu y las vacas lobotómicas (Crisán & Lewis) 316 Sinna Mann (Angry Man) 135 Sipas kapeles koken (To Find One’s Match) 179 Sirgo, Manuel 188 Sírius (Abreu) 322 SiSiSiSiSiSiSiSiSiSiSi (Yes – Eleven Times) 318 Sita Sings the Blues (Paley) 32 Sivan, Tami 249 Sivokon, Evgeny 172 – 3, 195 Siwin´ski, Tomasz 152 Six Feet Under (TV show) 5 Six Weeks in June (Hilton) 83 Sizmaria?! (Is This a Dream?!) 174 Skallerud, Morten 132 Skapˉans, Nils 145 – 6 Skazki lesa (Forest Tales) 149 Skazki Starogo Pianino (Tales of an Old Piano) 205 Skazki starogo pianino. Betkhoven (Tales of the Old Piano: Beethoven) 149 Skeleton Woman (Pieperhoff) 95 Šk¸ˉe rgriezis (Scissorman) 147 Skertcho (Scherzo) 149 Skhizein (Clapin) 105 Skibinski, John 335 Skunk Fu! (Cartoon Saloon) 92 Skrobecki, Marek 150 Skryabina, Natalya 173 Skucˇas, Antanas 148 Skulyabin, Sergey 197 Skvortsova, Elizaveta 199 Sky Crawlers (Oshii) 230 Skyland (Gorinstein) 102 Slam Dunk (Tôei Animation) 222, 268 Slameniat chovek (The Strawman) 169 Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel music video) 86, 339 Sledstvie vedut Kolobki (The Kolobki Investigate; Tatarsky/ Kovalyov) 52, 195 Sleeping Betty (Cloutier) 57 Sleepy Hollow (Burton) 26 Sleva napravo (From Left to Right) 207 Slipp Jimmy fri (Free Jimmy) 134

Index  405

Slo-Jo (commercial) 308 Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions (Selick) 27 Sluchai (Incidents) 209 Small World (Parker) 81 SMAP X SMAP (Oyama) 246 Smaugliukas Džeikas (The Little Boa Jake) 147 Smeshariki (animated series) 194, 199 – 200 Smirnov, Nikolay 264 Smirnova, Irina 172 Smith, Alan 80 Smith, Harry 183 Smith, Kathy 331 – 2 Smith, Pat 38 Smoke Rings (Webb) 79 Snijders, Michiel 113 SNIP (Woloshen) 60 Snoot Amanap (Grupo Fusión) 316 Snop (Candy) 132 Snopek, Martin 161 Snow Cat (Schorr) 322 Snowden, Alison 63, 76 – 7 Snowman, The (Jackson) 80 Snow Queen, The (Atamanov) 220 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney) 20 Snow Witch, The (Michelle Pettit Mee) 347 Snuden 130 Sny (Dreams) 149 Soaring, Roaring, Diving (M. Harris) 337 Sober (Tool) 341 Soberón, Diego Vizcarra 320 Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (Kentridge) 309, 310 Socializacija bika? (Socialization of a Bull?) 165 – 6 Soda Sexo (Lieban) 322 Sodnompilin, Miagmar 266 – 7 Sofian, Sheila 36 – 7 Sohbatul-esmar (Ahkundov) 176 Soiu megane (Well, That’s Glasses) 246 Sokerov, Simeon 170 Sokolov, Stanislav 71, 207 Solan, Ludvig og Gurin med reveropmpa (Gurin with the Foxtale) 133 Soldier’s Tale, The (Blechman) 31 Soliste˙ (The Soloist) 148 Solomon, Debra 39 Solomon, Phil 31 Solstice (Sorensen) 44 Sombras (Shadows) 312 Some Things Doh Change (Hudson) 315 Someone Else Not Me (Duran Duran) 341 Sommerhalder, Rafael 129

Son of a Jackal (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Son of Dada (Woloshen) 60 Son of Rainbow 97 Son of Satan (Villard) 36 Son smeshnogo cheloveka (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man) 200, 201 Sonny with a Chance 10 – 11 Sopranos, The (TV show) 5 Sora iro hana iro (Sky Colour Flower Colour) 244 Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Disney) 38 Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Dukas) 12 Sorensen, Vibeke 42 – 3, 45 – 6 Sorok nebylitz (Forty Cockandbull Stories) 263 Sorry Sidaks (Oyoon) 256 So Says I (The Shins) 342 SOS Galubú (Tozzi) 327 Sosemvolt Cigányország (Never Never Gypsyland) 163 Sotirákos, Cristóforos 177 Soto, Santiago 319 South Park (TV show) 5, 9, 10, 30 South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut 9 So vechora dozhdik (Spatter of Rain from the Evening On) 210 Soviet Clothing (commercial) 308 Sowa, Wiola 151 So What (Mohammend) 259 Space Adventure Cobra (Cobra) 228 Space Battleship Yamato 235 Space Feet Attack (Jouette) 101 Space Ghost Coast to Coast 8 Space News (Criado) 345 Space Pigs (Lindblad) 136 Space Station No. 9 (music video) 340 Spaghettata (Dinner with Spaghetti; Cournoyer) 56 Spaghetti Family (Laganà) 185 Spaghetti Western (PES) 38 Špála, Miloslav 159  Spaˉ rni un airi (Wings and Oars) 147 Spartalis, Angelos 177 Spasi i sokhrani (Let’s Save and Keep) 173 Special Cases (Massive Attack) 342 Special Forces (Hébert) 66 Speed Demon (Michael Jackson) 341 Spektor, Regina 343 Spˉele ar Dzlıˉvıˉbu (A Game With Life) 144 Spˉelˉe, dancoju (I Played, I Danced) 145 Spielberg, Steven 18, 22 – 3, 26, 90 Spin (Hattler) 119 Spine, The (Landreth) 63 Spinning – Bild 14 (Spinning – Image 14) 126

406  Index

Spirit of Christmas 1 and 2 9 Spirit of Place (Harrison) 81 Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron 14 Spirited Away (Miyazaki) 219, 222, 288 – 90 Splneˇný sen (A Dream Fulfilled) 160 Spomenici (Monuments) 168 SpongeBob SquarePants 10, 321 Spor (A Dispute) 266 Sporn, Michael 37 Spotless Dominoes (Hunt) 88 Sprattlan (TV series) 131 Sprookjesboom (The Fairy Tale Tree) 113 Sprott võtmas päikest (The Smoked Sprat Baking in the Sun) 138 Sprout, The (Torabi) 262 Sprowls, Eduardo 313 Sproxton, David 68, 85 – 6 Sr. Quinde (Mr. Quinde) 319 Sraig Maiva (The Snail Nellie) 148 Ssshottt (Gábor) 164 Stain, The (Rimminen) 71 Standaert, Frits 110 Stanley (Templeton) 78 Stanton, Andrew 16, 20 – 1 Star Child, The (Wilde) 306 Star system (Siákas) 177 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 14 Star Wars 14 Star Wars: Clone Wars 10 Staraya Novaya Skazka (The New Old Tale) 264 Stars (Kidney) 97 Starting (Hilton) 83 Stassen, Ben 111, 345 Stay with Me in Dreams Forever (music video) 177 St. Elsewhere (TV show) 55 Steamboy (Otomo) 231 Steers, Stacey 39 Steig, William 23 Steinberg, Saul 37, 50 Steiner, Thomas 125 – 6 Steingrobe, Fritz 118 Stelarc 84 Stellmach, Thomas 117, 121 Stenhouse, Bob 336 Stenhouse, Peter 336 Stenner, Chris 120 Stereotomy (Alan Parsons Project) 340 Stevenhagen, Rob 184 Stichting Raoul Servais 111 Stick (Naasan) 256

Sticky (Wan) 314 Sticky Business (Taylor) 80 Stiebra, Roze 145 Still Life with Small Cup (Bush) 74 Stiltwalkers (Meilink) 112 Sto simposio tu Arkeuli (The Symposium of Arkeuli) 177 Stoisis 95 Stone, Matt 9 Stone (Hafiz Akbarov) 176 Stone of Folly, The (Rosensweet) 59 Stop (Rastko C´iric´) 168 Stork, Lee 71 Storm Hawks (BRB) 188 Stoyanovich, Ivan 170 St-Pierre, Marie-Josée 59 Strange Invaders (Barker) 56 Stravinsky, Igor 12, 205 Strawberry Swing (Coldplay) 343 Street Fighter II (video game) 215 Street Fighter II: The Animted Movie 215 Streetcar Named Perspire (Priestly) 47 Stressed (Kelly) 80 Stressed Eric (animated series) 90 Strict Machine (Goldfrapp) 343 Strings 62 Strojenie instrumentów (Tuning the Instruments) 154 – 6 Struss, Michal 162 Stuart (Cavalhiero ‘Zepe’) 190 Stuhr, Fred 341 Stunt Goat (Tarumbwa) 305 Štyri (Four) 161 Suárez, Jorge Ramírez 311 Suarez, Luis 288 Subotnick, Steve 40 Subservience (Bouchard) 57 Sucré (Sweetened; Brisou) 105 Sugar Rush (Careaga) 324 Sugino Akio 228 Sui Tang Yingxiong Zhuan (Sui and Tang Heroes) 273 Suiren no hito (Nostalgia) 244 Suivez mon regard 104 Sukh’s White Horse (Sono-Studio) 267 Súkup, David 161 Sulakvelidze, Vladimer (Lado) 173 Šuljic, Daniel 126, 167 Sullivan, Chris 35 Sullivan, Leo 313 Summer of ’77 (Chandler) 332 Summer Wars (Hosoda) 236 Sunday (Moyes) 335

Index  407

Sunková, Lucie 161 Sünnipäev (Birthday) 138 Super Flat 239 Super Inggo atang Super Tropa (television series) 288 Superbirriosos (AG Video) 317 Superdimensional Fortress Macross 215, 231 Superflat Manifesto 239 Superflat Monogram 238 Superflat Trilogy 239 Superman (animated series) 7 Superted (Grace) 71 Supofonia (Soup Symphony) 170 Sur les murs de la ville (On the Walls of the City) 303 Surf ’s Up (Sony) 24 Surface Dive (Priestly) 47 Surinovich, Dmitry 149 Surprise Cinema (Plympton) 50 S¸urubaru, Mihai 171 Survival (El Nasr) 292 Survival (Glay) 342 Survivors (Sofian) 36 – 7 Suter, Daniel 127 Sutherland, Malcolm 57 – 8 Sutorenjia mukô hadan (Sword of the Stranger) 227 Suzuki Toshio 215 – 16, 221 Svajoniu˛ bokštas (The Tower of Dreams) 148 Svaki je dan za sebe, svi zejedno nikad (Every Day By Itself, Never Together) 167 Švankmajer, Jan 4, 59, 159 – 60 Svislotsky, Andrei 52 Svetlaya Lichnost (Light Personality) 172 Sveˇtlo (The Light) 161 Svetlost u A-duru (Light in A-Major) 168 Svichkraft (Switchcraft) 206 Svyatochnie rasskazi (Christmas Tales) 149 Swamp (Alkabetz) 118 Swan (Pavlátová) 158 Sweden (TV series) 131 Sweeney Todd (Burton) 27 Swenson, Charles 203 Swimming outside the Flags (SBS) 331 Symphony No. 42 (Réka) 165 Symphony no. 5 in C Minor (Beethoven) 12 Synchronization (Sakalauskas) 148 Synnos, Nicos 171 Syntymäpäivä (Birthday) 136 Synnos, Nicos 171 Szczerbowski, Maciek 57 Szilágyi V., Zoltán 164 Szlaban (The Barrier) 154

Szop, Szop, Szop, Szope˛ (Chop, Chop, Chop, Chopin) 151 Taaleek Al-Yaoum (Daily Commentary) 258 Tabaimo (Tabata Ayako) 238 Tabak, Ahmet 254 Tabaré (animated series) 330 Tables of Content 62 Tabrizi, Hasan 262 Tachigushi retsuden (Tachigu: The Amazing Loves of the Fast Food Grifters) 230 Taçi, Stefan 179 Taciu, Raul 171 Tadeus (Jullien) 103 Taesuniyoyin Indomie (Grandma Telling Stories) 300 Taevalaul (Sky Song) 140 Tagasi Euroopasse (Back to Europe) 138 Tagimba (Alassane) 293 Tahsin, Enis 253 Taib, Jaafar 284 Taiho no machi (Cannon Fodder) 223 Taipei, Taipei (Shih) 275 Taiyo no oji: Horusu no daiboken (Prince of the Sun: The Great Adventure of Horus/The Little Norse Prince) 217, 220 Takahashi Rumiko 215, 229 Takahata Isao 187, 215 – 21 Takalani Sesame 308 Takano Aya 239 Takarajima (Treasure Island; Dezaki) 228 Take Care (The Lovely Sparrows) 341 Take Me Out (Franz Ferdinand) 343 Take on Me (A-ha) 339, 341 Takeuchi Naoko 215 Takeuchi Yoshikazu 231 Talbot-Kelly, Matthew 96 Taleb, Aladin Abu 292 Tale of Desperaux, The (Fell /Stevenhagen) 184 Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, The (Dunbar) 78 Tales from the Powder Room (Burgess) 335 Tales of a Wise King I, II (Oren) 250 Tales of Italy (Gorky) 210 Tà limpo! (It’s Clean!) 321 Talinguito (Vásquez) 317 Talking Head (Oshii) 230 Tall, Pärtel 139 Tallinnfilm Studio 138, 140 Talpy (miniseries) 183 Talybov, Vakhid 176 Tamagotchi (Bandai) 227 Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space 239

408  Index

Tamm, Kalev 138 Tammemägi, Jason 91 Tamtchouong, Armand 300 Tanaka Eiko 223 – 4, 232, 236, 248 Tang yun (Pond) 271 Tangled (Disney) 22 Tango (Rybczyn´ski) 340 Tango Ragtime (Rastko C´iric´) 168 Tank Girl’ (Hewlett) 341 Tanto te gusta ese hombre (You Like That Man So Much) 328 Tao Shu – The Warrior Boy (Peach Blosson Media) 285 Taoqibao Ma Xiaotiao (Naughty Boy Ma Xiaotiao) 273 Ta paidia tou Piraia (The Piraeus Children) 171 Tapan (The Ark) 174 Tapmacha (The Puzzle) 266 Tappe, Holger 122 Tarantella (Karaev) 210 Tarantino, Quentin 226 Tarasov, Vyacheslav 149 Tariro – A Peace of Afrika (Baramba/Maramba) 304, 305 Tarkovsky, Andrei 51, 148, 229 Tartakovsky, Genndy 8 – 10 Tarte aux pommes (Apple Pie) 129 Tarumbwa, Tafadzwa 304 – 5 Tarzan (Disney) 12, 22, 103, 253 Tarzoon, la honte de la jungle (Tarzoon, the Shane of the Jungle) 110 Tasvir 266 Tata Colores (Barry) 325 Tatarsky, Aleksandr 51 – 2, 54, 193 – 7, 199, 202 – 3 Tati, Jacques 100 Tatsumi (Khoo) 285 Tattoo (Shijaku/Çene) 179 Taxi (TV show) 6 Taylor, Ed 80 Taylor, Richard 336 Tchaikovsky: An Elegy (Purves) 76 Tchego na svete ne b’ibaet (Nothing in the World is Missing) 149 Tea House (Olshvang) 210 Teat Beat of Sex (Baumane) 38 Technical Hitch, The (Dunleavy) 89 Technology of Tears (Hébert) 65 Teddy (Bergs) 112 Teekond Nirvaanasse (The Way to Nirvana) 139 Tegnefilmcompagniet (The Animated film Company) 132 Tehanu (LeGuin) 289 Teifogak (Milk Teeth) 165 Tekkonkinkreet (Black & White; Studio 4°C) 224, 232 Telefons (Telephone) 146

Telegastrovizija (Telegastrovision) 148 Telegin, Valentin 196 Tellez, Alejandro Rojas 326 Tell-Tale Heart, The (Garcia) 111 Tell-Tale Heart, The (Poe) 111 Telly Tales (BBC Wales) 90 Telmo & Tula – Artes y Manualidades (Telmo and Tula – Arts and Dexterities) 188 Telmo and Tula  – Los pequeños cocineros (Telmo and Tula – The Little Cooks) 188 Tembucha xepiti (Jonard) 311 Tempest (Sorensen) 43 Temple (Sorensen) 43 Templeton, Suzie 78 – 9, 89 Ten Brothers 276 Ten Brothers vs. the Sea Monster 276 Ten Commandments (Mulloy) 73 Tender, Priit 138 – 9 Tengo la posizione (I Hold My Position) 180 Tenkku no shiro Rapyuta (Laputa: Castle in the Sky) 215, 221 Tenku no Escaflowne (The Skies of Escaflowne) 232 Ten Poems from Hafez (Peacock) 82 Tenshi no tamago (Angel’s Egg) 230 Tenusaar, Andrus 139 Teo, cazador intergaláctico (Teo, Inter-galactic Hunter) 327 Terem-teremok (Lenkin) 149 Terkel i knibe (Terkel in Trouble) 130 Terpini, Zhani 179 Terra à vista (Land Ho) 320 Terra incognita (Cotte) 101 Terracotta Dream (Zazam) 292 Teru Murakami, Jimmy 80 T’es où mère-grand? (Where Are You, Grandmother)? 129 Tesseur, Ben 111 Tetsuwan Atom (Tezuka) 9, 25, 217 Tetsuya, Chiba 228 Tetteh, Frank 296 Te Wei 206, 271 – 2, 274 Tezuka Osamu 220, 227, 229, 231, 239 Tgete (Ignoramus) 175 Thank You (Reilly) 337 That Same Sea (Ofer) 251 There 2 Care 81 There There (Radiohead) 343 There Was a Little Girl (Crafts) 39 There’s No One As Irish as Barack O’Bama (Corrigan Brothers) 342 Thieves and the Wolf, The (Kraus/Khaidarov) 263 Thin Baron 132 Things She Can’t Avoid in the City, The (Park Jee-youn) 270

Index  409

Things, The (Audiobully) 342 Thirsty Crow, The (Torabi) 262 Thirtysomething (TV show) 5 This Could Be Heaven’ (Queen) 84 This Is Where We Live (Asylum Film) 90 This Way Up 80 Thomson 279 Thorntons’ Chocolatiers (commercial) 96 Thready Games (Oren) 250 Threatened One, The (Baumane) 146 Three Friends … and Jerry 132 Three Green Frogs (Oren) 251 Three Knights, The (Baker) 74 Three Little Pigs (Green Jelly) 341 Thrill Ride: The Science of Fun (Stassen) 346 Throwaway (Ensby) 79 Thuyen Nguyen 347 Tian Yan 273 Tian Yan (Eye of Heaven) 273 Tiendrebeogo, Rasmane 297 Tiga (Clutterbuck) 335 Tiga au bout du fil (Tiga on the Other End of the Line) 297 Tigabu, Bruktawit 295 Tiga guérisseuer (Tiga the Healer) 297 Tiger & Bunny (Sunrise) 225 Ti ho visto in piazza (I Saw You in the Square) 185 Tikhaya Istoriya (A Calm Story) 209 Tilby, Wendy 62 – 3 Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick) 27 – 9, 30, 110, 344, 345 Time Flights (Morse) 46 Time for Bed (Maharramov) 176 Time for Love (Saldanha) 321 Time is … (Ushev) 57 Times (Harrison) 81 Timm, Bruce 6 Timms, John 7, 315 – 16 Timmy the Ticket (Drogheda) 94 Timun Mas (Haryanto) 287 Tin Toy (Pixar) 15 – 16, 19 Tinga Tinga Tales (Tiger Aspect Productions) 300 Tiny Planets (Taylor) 80 Tison, Hubert 55 Ti ta ghinis otan megalonis? (What Will You Become When You Grow Up?) 177 Ti-Ta Tovenar 114 Titeuf (comic strip adaptation) 102 Titov, Mikhail 172 Titus Groan (Mervyn Peake) 77 Tkachikova, Ludmila 172

Tobe! Kujira no Peek (Fly! Peek the Whale) 232 Tobita o akete (Open the Door) 223 Toby’s Traveling Circus (Purves) 76 Toccafondo, Gianluigi 180 – 1 Toccata (Cournoyer/Drouin) 56 Todas las manos (All Hands) 326 Todo es cuestion de trapos (It’s What You Wear) 315 Todorov, Nikolay 170 Toe Yuen 277 – 8 Toe Tactic, The (Hubley) 33 Tofield, Simon 89 Toh, Benjamin 285 Toho 216 Toki o kakeru shojo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) 236 Tokyo Godfathers (Kon) 231 Tokyo Loop 244, 246 Tõldsepp, Kristel 138 Tolerancija (Tolerance) 169 Tolj, Esteban Jáuregui 328 Tománek, Jan 161 Tom & das Erdbeermarmeladenbrot (Tom & the Strawberry Jam Bread) 119 Tom and Jerry 159, 287 Tomato Twins (Peach Blossom Media) 285 Tombs of Atuan (LeGuin) 289 Tom ja Fluffy (Tom and Fluffy) 139 Tømmerbakke, Lars 132 Tomov, Vlado 169 Tom Palacˇek (Tom Thumb) 159 Tom Sweep: The Bin (Dudok de Wit) 116 Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro) 215, 221, 227 Tone Yuko 218 Tongari bôshi no Memoru (Memoru in the Pointed Hat/Wee Wendy/Little Memole) 222 Tongue of the Hidden (Anderson) 82 Tonight, Tonight (Smashing Pumpkin) 343 Tonky (animated series) 329 Top Cat television cartoon 313 Top o nerae! Gunbuster (Aim for the Top! Gunbuster) 224, 235 Topolia (The Poplar) 172 Topological Slide (Scroggins) 42 Topor et Moi (Topor and Me) 113 Topuzanov, Christo 169 Torabi, Farkhondeh 262 Tora Tori (CAM Solutions) 287 Tornehekken (Hedge of Thorns) 135 Toro, Guillermo del 311 Torresan, Ennio 321

410  Index

Tortoise & the Wisdom Gourd, The (Adewumi) 299 Toscano, Daniela 319 To See or Not (Oren) 250 Toshi o totta wani (The Old Crocodile) 242 Totally Spies (animated TV series) 102, 248 Totchka (Nagata Takeshi and Monno Kazue) 245 Tóth, Éva M. 163 To the Peasants of the Emperor (AM Syndicate) 343 Toto l’éléphant (Toto, the Elephant) 296 Totò Sapore, o la magica storia della pizza (Totò Sapore, or the Magic History of the Pizza) 182 Toto’s Journey (Muchilwa) 301 To trøtte typer (Two Wasted Wankers) 134 Tottoko Hamtaro (Hamtaro, Little Hamsters’ Big Adventures) 225, 229 Toujours (music video) 177 Toumazou, Michael 178 Tourists, The (Sutherland) 58 Tournier, Walter 329 Tout autour de l’île (Around the Island) 104 Tower Bawher (Ushev) 57, 58 Toy Story (Pixar) 4, 13, 15, 18, 19, 22, 110, 270, 322, 344 Toy Story 2 (Pixar) 20, 22 Toy Story 3 (Pixar) 21 Tozzi, Susana 327 Tracey Ullman Show (TV show) 6 Tractor Tom 90 Traffic Sign (Shazi and Gabr) 256 Train Train Medina (Ndoye) 296 Tram.avi (Pavlátová) 158 Tran Thanh Viet 282 Trapitos al sol (Hung Out to Dry) 328 Trbuljak, Goran 167 Treasure (animated series) 89 Treasure Island (R.L. Stevenson) 25, 228 Treasure Planet (Disney) 25 Tree of Spirits (Sawadogo) 297 Tree of the Moon (Zazam) 293 Treedom (Sato) 244 Treefingers (Radiohead i-blip) 342 Trenches, The (Cloutier) 57 Tri sestri i Andrey (Three Sisters and Andrey) 170 Trial of Solomon, The (Woods) 95 Triangle (Russell) 71 Trifles (animated series) 146 Trijumf (Triumph) 109 Trip (Abashar/Lippoldt) 295 Trip!-Trap! Eternal Triangle (Mizue) 247 Triptyque (Hébert) 67 Trıˉs musketieri (The Three Musketeers) 145

Tritcha o Rozdestve (The Christmas Parable) 149 Triumph of the Wild (Colburn) 35 Trnka, Jirˇí 121 Trofeja (Trophy) 147 Trofeynye filmy (Trophy Films) 210 Trois exercises sur l’écran d’epingles d’Alexeïeff (Three Exercises on Alexeïeff’s Pinscreen; Drouin) 64 Troll-Film 135 Tron (Disney) 14, 19 Tropic Island Humm (Dunbar) 78 Trösterkrise (Comforter’s Crisis) 120 Trousdale, Gary 12 Trovas (Aškinis) 147 Trowell, Jacquie 307 – 8 Truckers (Cosgrove Hall Films) 90 Trudeau, Pierre M. 59 Trueno (Thunder) 319 Trummer, Norbert 244 Trumpas sujungimas (Short Circuit) 148 Truth Has Fallen (Sofian) 36 Tsai Chih-chung 277 Tsangaris, Yiorgos 171 Tsari (Csars) 203 Tse, Brian 278 Tsehai Loves Learning 295 Tsekhanovsky, Mikhail 197 Tsinda Mela (Holy Fox) 173 Tsirulev, Alexei 266 Tsklis Pirveli Shroshani (The First Water Lily) 174 Tsonov, Ivan 170 Tsuda Masami 235 Tsui Hark 277 Tsui Harks’ Film Workshop Co. 277 Tsuji Naoyuki 247 Tsumiki no ie (The House of Small Cubes) 245 Tsunami (Veseli/Veseli/Xuvani) 179 Tsutisopheli (Kandelaki) 174 Tsvetkov, Andrey 170 Tuah (APT) 284 Tubular Bells (Oldfield) 339 Tuesday (Dunbar) 78 Tuganov, Elbert 140 Tu historia es mi historia (Your Story is My Story) 318 Tuk-Tuk (Knock Knock) 206 Tulakhojaev, Nazim 263 – 4 Tulik (Ofer) 251 Tumelya, Mikhail 148 – 50 Tune, The (Plympton) 50 Tuneli (The Tunnel) 179 Tunis 2050 (television series) 292

Index  411

Tunnelirovanie (Tonnelage) 208 Tupicoff, Dennis 332 – 3 Tural and Zari (Quliyeva) 176 Turbo Lover (Judas Priest) 341 Turcatti, Pablo 329 – 30 Turilas ua Jäärä (Tootletubs & Juro) 135 Turkus, Aleksey 209 Turn On (Gates) 319 Turovaya, Elena 149 Tutiqhushi (A Parrot) 173 Tutu (Sifianos/Dalet) 104, 178 Tuukrid vihmas (Divers in the Rain) 140, 144 TV Tango (Chartrand) 56 TV Tubes (Sorensen) 43 TV-Set (Telewizor) 152 Twilight Q2: Maikyû Bukken File 538 (Twilight Q2: Labyrinth Objects File 538) 230 Twin Peaks (TV show) 5 Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (Shaw brothers) 277 tWINs (Budinský) 162 Twirlywoos (Purves) 76 Twist (Goldfrapp) 342 Twist of Fate (Aqua) 40 Two Angels (Zolotukhin) 210 Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (JoWOnder) 82 Two Eastern Hair Lines (Woloshen) 60 Twomey, Nora 92 – 3 Tyger (Blake) 322 Tyger (Marcondes) 322 Tymvios, George 172 Tystad, Nille 133 Tzartitza (Ushev) 58 Tzvety na polyane (The Flowers in the Glade) 264 U (Elissalde) 104 Ubornaya Istoriya – Lyubovnaya (Lavatory Love Story) 206 Ubos (D’Ocon) 188 Udivitelny uzhny v sotchelnik (A Wonderful Dinner on Christmas Eve) 149 Udzlieresni (The Strongest) 174 Uffa, che pazienza! (Oh … Boy!) 185 Ugig Eter (Live Broadcast) 174 Ugly Betty (TV show) 5 Ugly Duckling & Me, The (Hegner) 93 Uibel, Arvid 120 Ujang (Ibrahim Anon) 284 Ukanaskneli cerili (The Last Letter) 174 Ukey, Milind 280 Unkrich, Lee 21 Üks Uks (Yonesho) 244

U Lancima (In Chains) 167 Ulity (Seashells) 159 Ultravolet: Code 044 229 Ulysses (Joyce) 95 Uma Saída Política (A Political Way Out) 321 Umbra (Sutherland) 58 Umi ga kikoeru (I Can Hear the Ocean) 216 Umi no uta (Sea Roar) 240 Una historieta de ciencia fixión (A Little Science Fiction Story) 326 Un amore (A Love) 184 Una pelicula de huevos (A Movie about Eggs) 313 Un beau matin (On a Beautiful Morning; Avedikian) 104 Un chien andalou (Buñuel) 159 Uncle (Elliot) 334 Uncle Remus (Harris) 250 Under the Weather (Tali) 59 Underground (Metro-Night) 199 Une instituut (The Institute of the Dream) 140 Une leçon de chasse (Hunting Lesson; Drouin) 64 Une Saison en enfer (Rimbaud) 177 Une vie de chat (A Cat’s Life) 108 Unfair War, An (Thuyen Nguyen) 347 Unicho Oboba (The Daft Spider) 174 Union Street (Chandler) 332 Un jour (A Day; Paccou) 101 Un maravilloso estado de mísera y morbosa no felicidad (A Wonderful State of Miserable and Morbid Not Happiness) 319 Unravelling (Shenfield) 335 Unreal Tournament (video game) 122 Unt, Riho 135, 138 – 9 Untouchables 1 and 2 (music videos; Mlilo and Maramba) 304, 305 Untouchables, The 303 Unwin, Dave 80 Up (Pixar) 16, 21, 344 Upin dan Ipin (TV series) 284 Upton, Nick 84 Ura (The Bridge) 179 Uralin perhonen (Far Away from Ural) 136 Uraroji Diamond (Morimoto) 232 URBO: The Adventures of Pax Africa 309 Urduja (Portes) 288 Urmel aus dem Eis (Urmel from the Ice) 122 Urmel voll in Fahrt (Urmel in Full Throttle) 122 Urpo & Turpo (Umpy & Tumpy; Rimminen) 71, 135 Urrebuk 112 Urrutia, Antonio 312 Urso, Giovanni Oscar 183

412  Index

Urusei yatsura (Oshii) 229, 230 Urusei yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (Oshii) 230 Urutaú Legend, The (Cataldo) 324 Us (Regina Spektor) 343 Ushev, Theodore 57 – 8 Usmanov, Ramil 263 Usnavy en la capital (Post) 317 Usop Sontorian (Ujang) 284 Usul (Rosa and Rosenerg) 315 U susjedstvu grada (In the Neighborhood of the City) 167 Utopia (Mizue) 247 Utopia Parkway (Priestly) 47 Užgave˙ne˙s (Mardi Gras) 148 Vacak, az erd˝o h˝ose (Tiny Heroes) 162 Vai Rıˉga jau gatava? (The National Hero) 147 Vaikyste˙s dienoraštis (Childhood Diary) 148 Vakalis, Nassos 177 Valdeavellano, Camilla 320 Valente, António Costa 191 Valentini, Giorgio 185 Valentino y el Clan del Can (Valentino and the Clan of the Can) 319 Valhalla 129 Valkut i senemte Kozleta (The Wolf and the Seven Kids) 169 V al Paraíso (V to the Paradise) 326 Valsy Dymov (The Waltzes of Smokes) 265 Valtina, la película (Valentina, the Film) 327 Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (Kawajiri) 232 Vampires in Havana! (Padrón) 313 Van Beethoven, Ludwig 12, 149, 176, 203, 205, 218 Van Blerk, Lindsay 306 – 7 Van Den Boom, Sarah 103 VanDerBeek, Stan 36 Van de Vondel, Dirk 58 Van Goethem, Geert 110 Van itt jó is, rossz (There Are Good Things and Bad Things Here) 163 Varab, Jeffrey J. 130 Varela, Jorge González 328 Vares ja hiired (The Crow and Mice) 139 Varfi, Gjin 178 Variations sur deux photographies de Tina Modotti (Variations on Two Photographs of Tina Modotti; Hébert) 65 Varmints (Craste) 88 Vasar, Aarne 137 Vash Pushkin (Yours Pushkin) 205 Vasilevski, Valeria 49 Vasilyev, Georgy 199 Vásquez, Manuel 317

Vazdushniat Ass (The Air Ace) 170 Vectˉeva Medus (Grandad’s Honey) 146 Veer 83 Vefxi da mokme (The Leopard and the Brave) 174 Veilleux, Pierre 60 Velikaya Bitva Slona S Kitom (The Great Fight of the Elephant and the Whale) 175 Velký Kýchacˇ (The Great Sneezer) 161 Velna Fudži (Devil’s Fuji) 147 Vendor Rivalry (Sattar) 315 Vengeance+Vengeange (Chavez) 42 Vennad ja õed (Brothers and Sisters) 138 Vennad Karusüdamed (Brothers Bearhearts) 139 Venturi, Marco 183 Verde que te quiero (Green How I Want You) 325 Vereshchagin, Aleksandr 149 Verge (Parker) 81 Verger, Mario 185 Vernon, Conrad 345 Verrall, David 55 Versailles no Bara (The Rose of Versailles) 228, 229 Veseli, Shaquir 179 Veshnevekaya, Marina 201 Vester, Paul 36, 71 Vertabra (Moilanen) 136 Vertical (Ushev) 57 Vertigo Tour (U2) 340 Veselaya Karusel (Merry-Go-Round) 175 Vˉestule (The Letter) 146 Veter vdol berega (Wind Along the Coast) 208 Veterinaˉ raˉ rsts (Veterinarian) 146 V etot den (On That Day) 175 Ve ˇtvicˇka a Ploutvicˇka (Veˇtvicˇka and Ploutvicˇka) 159 Vey, P. C. 50 Viaggiatori e viaggiatori! (Travellers and Travellers!) 185 Vida de Menino de Rua (Street Boy’s Life) 322 Video Poetry (Chiesa) 181 Videopoesie di /per Felix Dennis 181 Vieira, Clóvis 322 Vienna Mix (Yonesho) 244 Vietnam Romance (Eddo Stern) 347 Vigyázat, lépcs˝o! (Mind the Steps!) 163 Viktoria (Victoria) 174 Village of Idiots (Fedorenko/Newlove) 56 Village, The (Baker) 74 Villalobos, Ana 315 Villalobos, Jorge 311 Villard, JJ 36 Villiers, Dirk de 306 Vilniaus mergele˙ (The Maiden from Vilnius) 148

Index  413

Viñales, Erwin Gómez 326 Vincent (Burton) 26, 27 Viola (Tender) 139 Violeta (Violet) 318 Vip, mio fratello superuomo (Bozzetto) 50 Vishapagorgi Gakhtniqe (The Mystery of the Dragon-Carpet) 175 Vishwarooop (Sorensen) 46 Vision (Dellers) 127 Visitation (Pitt) 39 Vipond, Sam 346 Virtanen, Ismo 135 Vita (Timms) 315 Vitamin rosta (Vitamin of Growth) 209 Vitaminix (Imira Entertainment) 188 Vito (Oyoon) 256 Vıˉ tols, Kˉarlis 147 Viva Carthago (Tunisi Animation Studio) 292 Viva el rey (Long Live the King) 312 Vive la Rose (Alcock) 59 Viy (Gracheva) 172 Vízipók a csodapók (Water-Spider, Wonder-Spider I-III) 164 V kocke (In the Box) 162 Vlaar, Marcus 113 Vladimirovich, Mikhail 201 Vlasov, Dmitry 263 – 4 Vogler, Christopher 18 Vogt, Basil 128 Voices (Priestly) 46 Volchek, Igor 148 – 9, 203 Volckman, Christian 100 Vollmer, Veit 121 Volmer, Hardi 138 – 40 Volshebnaya svirel (The Magic Pipe) 149 Vorobey, kotoryi umel derzhat slovo (The Sparrow That Could Keep His Word) 206 Vorris, Dimitris 177 Vos papiers! (Your papers!; Fouquet) 104 Võsu, Heilika 138 Voyage (Sorensen) 43 Voyajah (Singer) 314 Voyajah: Episode 2 (Singer) 314 Vremya nebesnyh Ryb (The Time of Heavenly Fish) 264 Vrettou, Angeliki 177 Vrite tin diaforá (Find the Difference) 177 Vuela por mí (Fly for Me) 188 Vuong, Pascal 101 Vutova, Kalina 170 Wachowski, Larry and Andy 230, 248

Wada Atsushi 246 Wahlforss, Jaana 135 Waiting (Lee) 83 Wajda, Andrzej 229 Wakaranai buta (In a Pig’s Eye) 246 Waking Sleeping Beauty (documentary) 12 Walkie Talkie Man (Steriogram) 343 Walking on by … (Ushev) 57 Wall, The (Parker) 82 Wall, The (Pink Floyd) 339 Wallace & Gromit (Aardman) 85 Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Park/Box) 25, 85, 87 WALL-E (Pixar) 16, 21 Wall in My Heart (Kasmiya) 255 Wallking Out (Parket) 81 Wallner, Heimo 126 Walls (Dumala) 211 Walnut and Honeysuckle (Clutterbuck) 335 Waltz with Bashir (Folman) 252 Wan, Dianne 314 Wanderlust (Björk) 343 Wan Guchan 276 Wanjunki, Moses 301 Wan Laiming 276 Wanted (Moilanen) 136 Ward, Jay 9 War of the Worlds: Goliath 284 War Story (Aardman) 85 Ward 13 (Cornwell) 335 Washaw – The Cave (Kidanemariam) 295 Watanabe Shinichiro ˉ  215, 227, 233 – 6 Watcher in the Woods, The 27 Watt, Sarah 331 – 2 Watts, Murray 207 Waziri, Adamu 299 W cieniu (In the Shade) 154 We Are the Champions (Ding a Dang Dong) (music video) 342 Weather Report (Hill) 77 Weatherhouse, The (JoWOnder) 82 Web, The (Ashworth) 77 Webb, Tim 79 Weber, Tom 117, 122 Wedge, Chris 24, 321 Weeds (TV show) 5 We Hear Them Cutting, Into Pieces (Marcondes) 322 Weitzman, Matt 9 Wei Xiao De Yu (A Fish with a Smile) 275 Weighing … and Wanting (Kentridge) 310 Weitzenbergi tänav (Weitzenberg Street) 139

414  Index

Welch, Craig 56 Welcome to Kentucky (Welch) 56 Welcome to the N.H.K. (Studio Gonzo) 226 Wellington Jackson (Post) 317 Wells, Frank 13 Wells, Simon 14 Well-Tempered Heads (Ushev) 57 Welss, Tomás 325 Wendidali (Álvarez) 317 Werner – Beinhart! (Hahn) 121 Wernham, Rowan 337 Wernquist, Erik 342 Wessels, Hans 113 West Wing, The (TV show) 5 Wet Magazine 6 What about me? (Guard) 70 What Goes Up? (Breer) 34 What I Love About Xmas (Phil Rice) 347 What She Wants (Lingford) 77 What-a-Cartoon! 8 Wheel of Life Neubauer) 74 Whelehan, Eoin 97 When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Tiger (Vrombat) 80 When the Day Breaks 62 When the Wind Blows (Murakami) 68, 80 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak) 19, 22 While Darwin Sleeps … (Bush) 75 White Birds (Alimorad) 261 White Cowboy, The (television series) 112 White Serpent, The (Yabushita) 220, 229 White Tape (Kranot and Kranot) 251 Whitmore, Lee 332 Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 18 Who I Am and What I Want (Shepherd) 84 Who Will Tell a Fancy Story (Sahakyants) 176 Why the Swallow’s Tail is Forked 262 Wicked City (Madhouse) 225 Wide Prairie (Grillo) 328 Wiener Wuast (Yonesho) 244 Wilczyn´ski, Mariusz 151 Wild Donkeys (Pavlátová) 157 Wild Life (Forbis/Tilly) 62 Wild Thornberrys, The 8 Williams, Chris 22 Williams, Richard 75 Williams, Robin 12, 24 Willy Fog (BRB International) 185 Wilson, Jackie 340 – 1 Wilson, Jacqueline 79 Wilson, Mihai 343

Wilson, Naomi 91, 95 Wind in the Willows, The (Cosgrove Hall Films) 75, 90 Wind of Change, The (Mulloy) 73 Winda (The Elevator) 154 Windmill Farmer (Baldwin) 324 Window (Woods) 94 – 5 Winging It (Bannah) 335 Winter, Kirsten 117 Winter Days (Kawamoto) 240, 242, 243, 244 Winzentsen, Franz 116 Wir lebten im Gras (We Lived in Grass) 117, 119 Wir sind viele (We Are Many) 109 Wire, The (TV show) 5 Wiroth, Daniel 110 Wise, Kirk 12 Wishful Thinking (Guard) 70 Witch and the Cow, The (Baumane) 146 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy 210 Wittlinger, Heidi 120 Wizard of Earthsea (LeGuin) 289 Wizard’s Son, The (Canemaker) 250 W/Mariam, Alemu 296 Wobble Incident, The (Blanchet and Vipond) 346 Wobblyland (Cat Little) 92 Wog Features (Reihana) 338 Wojtyla (Verger) 185 Wolf Children Ame and Yuki, The (Hosoda) 236 – 7 Wolf Daddy (Chang Hyung-yun) 269 Wolf ’s Bride, The (Danenov) 263 Wolf ’s Rain (Studio Bones) 226 WOLF2106 (O’Reilly) 97 Wolfman, The (Tim) 81 Wolnos´cˇ nogi (Freedom of the Leg) 152 Woloshen, Steven 60 Woman in View (Guard) 70 Wonder (Mizue) 247 Wonderful Days (Kim Moon-saeng) 269 Wonderful World of Dr. Kleiman (Klaybow Films) 306 Wong, Alfonso 277 Wood, Brian 80 Wood & Stock: sexo, orégano e rock’n’roll (Wood & Stock: Sex, Oregano and Rock’n’Roll) 322 Woods, Steve 91, 94 Woody (Anas Rafik) 291 Wooly Wolf (Neubauer) 74 Wooto, Jean-Michel Kibushi Ndjate 302 World Apartment Horror 231 World Garlic Flatbread (Ganbaatar) 267 World of Insects, The 276 World of Invention (BBC) 87

Index  415

World of Onki Tonkis 318 World of Stainboy (Burton) 26 World of Warcraft (video game) 347 World Premiere Toons 8 Worlds of Interiors, The (Shepherd) 84 Worm, Liesbeth 113 Wormie (Morpho Animation Studio) 316 Wortspiele (Word Game) 109 Wo Wei Ge Kuang (Craze for Song) 272 Wozniak, Steve 15 Wrake, Run 82 – 3, 340 Wreck-It Ralph (Disney) 324 Wrong Number Phone Message (Alcock) 58 Wrong Trousers, The (Park) 86 Wrong Type, The (Guard) 70 Wron´ski, Jakub 152 Wšród nocnej ciszy (In the Stillness of the Night) 151 Würfel, Herr 129 Wu Sau-yee 277 Wuthelam Group 284 Wu Yigong 272 Wyliczanka (Counting-Out Rhyme) 151 X (Rintarô) 229 X.O. Genesis (Robinson and Wernham) 337 Xamd: Lost Memories 237 X-Files, The (TV show) 5 Xi Jin-ping 273 Xi Yang Yang yu huitai lang (Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf) 273 Xia Ban Shi Jian (The Men of the Hour) 274 Xiang Le Hua Yuan (The Garden of Delights) 276 Xiao Mao Ba Ke Li (Barkley the Cat) 276 Xiao Tia Yang (The Little Sun) 276 Xiao Xin Di (Cindy) 276 Xihu cuyu (The West Lake Fish Cooked with Vinegar) 271 Xu Wu Dao Ji (The Empty Island) 276 XYZoo 305, 307 Ya, kazhetsya, poteryalsya (It Seems I’m Lost) 266 Yabushita Taiji 220 Yadegari, Shahrokh 45 Yadin, Orly 89 Yag˘ mur Makama (Rhythm of Rain) 254 Yakubu, Salamatu 296 Yama, tanch tchetire struni (A Hollow, Some Dances, Four Ropes) 149 Yamaguchi Hiroshi 226 Yamamoto Sayo 227 Yamamoto Sumika 228

Yamamura Koji 239, 241 – 3 Yamane Kimitoshi 234 Yamashita Ikuto 233 Yami o mitsumeru hane (Feathers Staring into the Darkness) 247 Yanagawa horiwari monogatari (The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals) 218 Yan Dingsian 272 Yankale (Alkabetz) 118 Yanobe Kenji 238 Yanovskyi, Yanov 264 Yard Work is Hard Work (Mack) 41 Yartygulak i lentyai (Yartygulak and Loafers) 266 Yasashii fue, tori, ishi (Gentle Whistle, Bird, and Stone) 246 Ya vas slyshu (I Hear You) 210 Ya videl, kak myshi kota khoronili (I Saw Mice Burying Your Cat) 206 Ya Waladi (My Son) 258 Yawaraka sensha (Soft Tank) 237 Yawarpampa, campo de sangre (Yawarpampa, Field of Blood) 319 Year 12 (Year of the Mouse; Sodnompilin) 266 Yellow Submarine (Beatles) 325, 343 Yeltsin, Boris 191 – 2, 202 Yemelyanova, Yelena 139 ’Yer Drivin’ Me Nuts! (Oren) 250 Yesase Teret (The Fable of Sase) 295 Yevteyeva, Irina 209 Y Mabinogi (Grace) 71 Yojohan shinwa taikei (The Tatami Galaxy) 225, 236 Yoju toshi (Wicked City) 232 Yo Lo Vi (Nordholt/Steingrobe) 118 Yokies (animated series) 284 Yona Yona Penguin (Rintarô) 229 Yonesho Maya 243 – 4 Yo participo (I Take Part) 329 Yo quiero (I Want) 329 Yo quiero que me quieran (I Want Them to Love Me) 329 Yoru no okite (The Rule of Dreams) 247 Yoshitoshi, Abe 234 Yoshiura Yasuhiro 237 Yo soy (I Am) 329 Yoshiyuki Momose 340 You Can Get Only So Close on Google Earth (Shenfield) 335 You Know I Love You … Don’t You? (Howard Jones) 341 Young, Mike 71 Young, Paul 92 You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ (song from Toy Story) 19 Your Face (Plympton) 49 Your Friend the Rat (Capobianco) 16n47

416  Index

Yuasa Masaaki 223, 225, 236 Yugo Sako 280 Yuke (Godoy) 317 Yuki chan (Oyama) 246 Yukidoke (The Thaw) 246 Yume miru kikai (Kon, unfinished) 231 Yume utsutsu (Between Sleep and Dreams) 246 Yumemiru kikai (Happy Machine) 236 Yuna Kui Le (Happy Wish) 276 Yusaki Fusako 183 Žabka, Michal 160 Zaedno (Together) 170 Zagadka (The Puzzle) 266 Zagury, Lea 321 Zajacová, Ivana Laucˇíková 161 Zamzam, Zeinab 292 Zamtari (Winter) 174 Zaniklý sveˇt rukavic (The Lost World of Gloves) 158 Zapiski animatora (Animator’s Notes) 210 Zaramella, Juan Pablo 328 Zarrinkelk, Noureddin 261 Zashto e vissoko nebeto (Why is Heaven so High) 170 Zasnezhennyj vsadnik (Snow-covered Horseman) 209 Zasukanec (Mate to Measure) 166 Zasyplet sneg dorogui (All the Routes are Snowbound) 173 Zbrodnia i kara (Crime and Punishment) 152 Zeganbaw (The Monster) 295, 296 Zeid wa Leyla (Zeid and Leyla) 258 Žemaicˇiu˛ pramote˙ (Samogitian Genesis) 148 Zentropa 145

Zephyr (Tsuji) 247 Zerbo, Justin 297 Zero (Balakov) 169 Zero Degree (Khoshnazar) 262 Zero Visibility (Woloshen) 60 Zeytin’in Hayali (Olive’s Dream) 254 Zgomot alb (White Noise) 171 Zhang Zhen-Xing 271 Zhao Ye 271 Zhejiang Zhongnan Group 273 Zherebyonok (The Colt) 266 Zhilo-bilo derevo … (Once Upon a Time a Tree …) 149 Zhitkovskaya, Tatyana 149 Žiema, žiema (Winter, winter) 148 Zig Zag (Schwizgebel) 127 Zigu Yingxiong Chu Shaonian (Little Heroes) 272 Zimmer, Hans 12 Zimnyaya Skazka (The Winter Tale) 207 Zirkus ABD (Circus ABC) 109 Zodiac: The Race Begins (Edward Fu) 285 Zöldfa utca 66 (Greentree Street 66) 164 Zolotukhin, Andrey 199, 204 – 5, 210 Zoopraxiscope (Neumann) 151 Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain 277 Zucchelli, Gabriele 184 Zuduši sniegaˉ (Lost in Snow) 147 Zumbers (Motion Pictures) 188 Zúñiga, Oliver 315 Zvaigžn¸u tˉeja (Starry Tea) 147 Zvˉe ri (Animals) 145 Zvezda Zaroastra (The Star of Zoroaster) 264