on
10/5/2002
The following is intended to serve as a partial recap of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, which ran from the evening of Wednesday, October 2, through Sunday 6. Ballots for the audience award were passed out during the competition showcases -- the writer's favorites are discussed in depth.
Revealed, as the festival went on, to be one of the best matched competition showcases, this portion of the festival bragged stop motion, computer animation, traditional cel animation with and without computer assistance, and live action compositing. The brassiest was a viscously baroque "(The Rise and Fall of the Legendary) Anglobilly Feverson," which, for all its (considerable) imagery couldn't quite paper over a hollow center. "Home Road Movies" was an admirable live action/CGI film with a heart, and a wonderful introduction not only to segment two of the competition, but also to the festival.
"Cartoon," a public service announcement dealing with child abuse made a brilliant transition from funny, to uncomfortable, to meaningful. The one minute stop-motion "How Democracy Actually Works" deserves credit for a number of good laughs, but in the current political climate it was almost hard to laugh at what would have been hilarious fun only a few years ago.
Tom Schroeder's "Bike Ride" is described as the following: "James rides his bike 50 miles to see his girlfriend. She dumps him and he rides home." Simple, clean white lines over back paper smoothly illustrate a rambling story told in voice over, something akin to what you'd get out of your buddy after a few beers. It's simple. It's funny. It's beautiful. The same set of lines keep flowing from one illustration to another, and somehow the film never manages to hit a wrong note. Remember Tom Schroeder.
Schmoozing at the picnic returned the following information, which should come as a joy to "Ren and Stimpy" fans. TNN intends to rerun the original episodes, and has hired the creator to produce six new episodes and a made for tv movie.
It rained, but the early birds got to eat under the tent.
A compilation of the best cartoons from a very short-lived television show produced by United Artists in the '50s. Without much time or funding, UA encouraged its animators to experiment with style and content. The limited animation becomes tiresome after a while (one wasn't meant to see more than half an hour of this at a time, remember) but some of the shorts were extremely good. Notable and worth seeking out are "The Invisible Mustache of Raoul Dufy," "The Twelve Days of Christmas," "Mr. Charmley Greets a Lady" and "Miserable Pack of Wolves." The germ of UA's later Pink Panther shorts can easily be seen in this '50s variety show.
Imagine a cartoon cow in a tree, singing... basically about being a little cow in a tree, in a bizarre, manic voice that only gets more so as it goes on, especially when the voice does its own instrument solos á capella... and you've pretty much got "The Little Cow." Now imagine a very depressing but well animated stop motion called "Dog," that intrigues but doesn't quite tell its story. Cartoon Network's Samurai Jack episode "The Blind Archers" may very well have been the finest film of this segment; the fact that it was produced for television could be seen as an unfair advantage, but if the festival proved anything it was that money and the quality of the product are largely unrelated in animation, and sometimes inversely proportional.
Georges Schwizgabel's "The Young Girl and the Clouds" was a lyrical, beautifully animated piece. The plot is somewhere involved, but not really important. What is, and what stays with the viewer, are the impressionistic renderings in pastel, which lend a painting-like quality to the piece. Paint animations are no longer rare, but they can clearly be done very well. Imagine feeling the story of Cinderella without having to follow the story. A treatise on beauty, and a Swiss animator to watch: Georges Schwizgabel.
This competition segment, on Saturday morning, was made up of cartoons suitable for kids -- and as a result was the most fun. The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Band Geeks" was extremely funny, and clever to the extreme, both in content and presentation. "The Hedge of Thorns" threatened to become the kind of children's fiction that adults love and children snore through, but may have just managed to avoid that trap. The Invader Zim episode "A Room with a Moose" was a decent introduction to a vastly underrated series, and a strong film overall. Illustrator Gary Baseman and Disney's Teacher's Pet was uncomfortably adult, but in a way that kids might not even notice.
Strongest in this competition was Zoïa Trofimova's "Pipsqueak Prince." The French title "Le trop petit prince" gives away the content; this is a story of the Little Prince, but not the story of the Little Prince. Animated as if drawn by a small child, this charming short follows our hero as he tries to clean a black stain on the sun. The sun keeps moving across the sky, such that he can't quite get up to where it is. After much effort the day is spent, and he can reach up and clean it without a ladder -- only to have to start again the next day. With any luck, we'll see much more of Zoïa Trofimova.
An occasionally skillful, but disappointing retrospective of modern Korean animation. Of the whole show, "Grandma," a computer animation in the style of traditional puppet theatre, showed the most promise. The twenty-minute "Econ V" deserves to be locked in a small box with Matthew Barney's "Cremaster" films and forgotten about.
Another strong show. "Tauro" mixed animation styles from cave painting to greek vases, and on up to cubism, but couldn't really communicate what it was about. "Novelty" a British girl's reminiscence of the creatures who lived in her slippers, was clever and lovable. "Post Mark Lick" was a surprisingly cool non-narrative film focusing on used postage stamps. A British Snapple ad called "Rent" was so wrong it deserves to be shown in the US. The chaotic, bizarre ink on paper style of "Flux" also deserves mention.
The standout of this show was Dik Jarman's stop-motion "Dad's Clock." While casting the narrator himself as a bird was a questionable decision, the wood and gears style of the animated props was both original and appropriate to the story. The ship on a mechanical wooden sea is truly haunting. Honest and intelligent: Dik Jarman.
Kricfalusi is the creator of Ren & Stimpy, as well as a number of other projects. This second showing of the retrospective changed the program considerably, and ran 15 minutes into the next show's time slot. John K. gave a funny, ax-grinding introduction, and was himself introduced by Amid Amidi, a funny guy in a stupid little beret.
The show opened with an episode of Mighty Mouse that sickly and hilariously parodied the Chipmunks. A strong episode of Ren & Stimpy was shown, along with an episode of the weak Ripping Friends series. His Yogi Bear parodies were largely uninspired, but his recent Flash cartoons, while short, were very funny. "Slab and Ernie: What Pee Boners Are For" was probably the best, and may be available online through the Cartoon Network's site.
The Aardman studio, producers of the Wallace and Grommit shorts, started the show off well with an Angry Kid stop-motion called "Curious," in which a kid asks too many questions after hearing his parents go at it the night before. The groundbreaking video for the Gorillaz "Clint Eastwood" was screened here. A short set of extremely well animated introductions for Bravo's showing of the Godfather saga were excellent, as was a a style-mixing animation called "Family and Friends." "Barcode," an abstract computer animation, would have been mind blowing before about 1990, but felt slightly spent in 2002. At the other end of the spectrum, "50% Grey" was an impressive bit of computer animation, but slightly pretentious.
Carles Porta Garcia's "François le Vaillant" was another 2-D computer-animated short in a festival full of them, but brought to the formula an irresistibly bright and shiny drawing style. The ending made little sense, but getting there was a lot of fun. The animation frequently relied on sound effects to explain what was happening, something that also grew tiresome by festival's end. Still, a short that can only be described as a popsicle with sound effects is hard not to love. Watch for Carles Porta Garcia.
Rumors were expressed that this was a showcase for Canadian shorts that hadn't made the main competition, and it showed. "Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance" and "Judge Tracy - Tommy's Day in Court" played like showoff reels for new animation studios in need of work, and indeed were; both were technically solid, but uninspired. "The Stone of Folly" and "The Brainwashers," both stop-motions, both crumbled under the weight of their own pretensions. "A Loss of Character" really thought it was funny/cheap, when it was just cheap.
On the positive side, "Black Soul," an oil-painted look at African/African-American culture, was nicely put together. "The Red Scarf" was a well-crafted pseudo-Russian fairy tale with the look and feel of a vintage Soviet cartoon. "Pirouette" managed to stay just shy of truly preachy as a short about the food industry, and had many entertaining moments.
Animation is alive and well in Ottawa and around the world, even as the industry continues to feel the squeeze of the softened economy. The main theme of the festival seemed to be mixed styles: traditional 2-D animation done on computers, live action actors in animated worlds, stop motion matched up to video footage, 2-D animation with 3-D elements and backgrounds. As animation production flows naturally into the computer, animators seem to be longing for the indefinable qualities of the traditional animation they grew up with.
The Walt Disney Studio's recent actions seem to be a microcosm of the industry as a whole. Before Lilo & Stitch's unexpected success, the studio was planning to move entirely to 3-D animation, gradually phasing out the traditional animation division. Lilo & Stitch, with its watercolor painted backgrounds and engagingly warm hand-drawn characters proved that 3-D was not a replacement for 2-D, merely a peer. Spirited Away's strong per-screen box office has further revealed this fact.
If anything, Ottawa demonstrates that animation is still about ideas, not flashiness or modernity. Big studios can turn out crap, and lone animators can do wonders with a small grant. Likewise, simple, quick animations can be pretentious and shallow, and larger studios can turn out wonderful pieces even for the traditionally uptight US television market. Studios are laying people off left and right; many have gone under recently. The possibilities of animation, however, continue to nova. This is simultaneously a great time to be an animator, and a poor time to be in animation.
Touch the Toast