The Story Behind Fats & Moe

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Jean-Louis Bompoint.

Awarded Best Pilot at Switzerland's MendrisioInternational Cartoon Festival '98 and part of the Official Selection at France's Annecy '99, the animated pilot Fats & Moe caught Animation World's attention as an interesting combination of cultures...a couple of zoot suited Jazz players, escaping Big Apple mobsters brought to life by a French creative team? We wanted to find out more. Here screenwriter Annabelle Perrichon and director Jean-Louis Bompoint discuss the vision behind the short. 1930. Fats and Moe perform with a jazz band in a New York speakeasy. They get fired because of an argument with the band leader. While they're trying to get paid for the night's work, a bunch of mobsters rush into the office and shoot the owner. Luckily, they are able to run away but their lives are changed forever. They have turned into living targets...An Associated Artists' ProjectAnnabelle Perrichon: The idea for Fats & Moe came up while Jean-Louis Bompoint and I were working on another series for television. We'd been working together before on the Secret World of Santa Claus series, me as the bible's writer, him as director, music composer and film editor.Jean-Louis Bompoint: I had directed very conventional animated TV series and, even though I had earned a lot of money with this kind of work, my creativity was censored by International production rules. I needed freedom and liberty. Also I felt very frustrated at seeing many talents working on conventional films. My idea was to use all of them for a good project without any restrictions.AP: We shared the same point of view about animated television programs: too much censorship, and too much interference during the early stages of creation. Basically, too many misunderstandings between artists and producers/channel buyers.JLB: One night, we were all in a good restaurant and we talked a lot about animation and its problems. We were all friends but we were employed by different film companies, so we decided to make a project together.AP: We found help in two wonderful people: Peter Choi of Hahn-Shin Studio in South Korea and Jean-Louis Rizet, President of Ramses/Toutenkartoon in France. Peter believed in the project and put a team of animators, set designers and painters together to make the pilot. Jean-Louis Rizet gave us the software to paint the drawings, and all the visual and audio post-production took place in his Parisian facilities, with his best artists working on it. To make this seven minute film it took all of us a lot of work, and two years went by between the very first idea and the finished film.A Series About Jazz?JLB: For many years I have made a lot of short films about Jazz. I also play vibraphone and trumpet with my own orchestra. My dream was to make a cartoon with my Jazz compositions, together with my best friend, Jean-Michel Bernard, an incredible composer and keyboard player. Jazz and Cinema have a very good association. When I was a teenager, I had the opportunity of studying animation with Norman MacLaren from the National Film Board of Canada. MacLaren has made many films about Jazz like Begone Dull Care (1949), which impressed me a lot whan I was 12 years old. As soon as I saw this film, I decided to concentrate my film work on the intimate relationship between music and pictures. "The ear sees and the eye hears."AP: When I was a kid, Some Like It Hot was one of my favorite movies. I didn't get the sex jokes then, but I loved all the fun and action. So when it came to make an animated movie about jazz, there had to be two characters, stuck up to their necks in trouble, and it had to be set in the American Thirties, with a lot of travelling around, dancing, singing and shooting too.

Built on a Fairy Tale StructureAP:

Usually TV heroes are monolithic. They are always right, and they always do right. They can never lose, all their opponents end up in jail and all the nice girls fall in love with them. Such a bore! I suggest everybody who believes in politically correct heroes for children should read Bruno Bettelheim's wonderful book about fairy tales. Heroes make mistakes, they are not always right, they get temptedAs we all do.

So our heroes have weaknesses. They can be bad tempered and they are afraid to die. Therefore they get fired from their job, and they run away from a bunch of mob killers. I like these guys. You can identify with them, while you can only dream of being Superman. Fats and Moe will really learn something from this adventure, experience some inner change. And I believe children can learn it with them through catharsis. Fats & Moe is built like a fairy tale of the quest type. They seem to run away, whereas they are really looking for themselves. Having faced all kinds of dangers they will trust themselves to face the biggest danger of all, thus putting an end to their wandering.They are also a family. A chosen family. Moe is an orphan who never knew his parents. Hence his name, Moe, for Moses. He became best friendswith Fats while they were kids. Later as the series developes, Moe will find out who his parents are, a typical ending for a fairy tale. Of course, it will be a parody of the classical, "I was poor and abandoned but my real parents are King and Queen of this country."

Only Two Recurring Main Characters AP: I was asked why I didn't have a third character. Most serieshave three characters now; the hero, his girl friend and the comic guy. Or the hero, his best friend and the comic guy, which can be replaced by a funny animal. Groups can be categorized as well: the funny, lazy guy, the serious guy, the girl -- usually a rebel or a leader but in any case an active girl -- the brain, the father figureI think too many characters lead to several problems. First, you have to introduce them and later, you have to give them something to do. They live as parasites on the story and transform many scenes into talking tunnels. You also have less story time to spend with each of them. So they will stick to clichés, and they will not evolve too much during the film. One should always ask oneself the basic question: Whose story is this?And to whom do I need to tell it? Three guys was too much, and one wasn't enough. This was not a Lone Ranger movie. It was a comic duo. Two guys stuck together in trouble.It's common in movies, but you don't see that a lot in animation, except in a detective series like Sam and Max. The Race Issue AP: One more detail. Fats is black, and Moe is white. In the beginning I wanted two black heroes because there were almost only black jazz musicians at that time. The whole team asked me if I was scared it wouldn't sell. In France buyers are white and think of viewers as white. Kasaii & Leuk the Hare, an all-African series forFrench TV channel France 2, directed & edited by Jean-Louis Bompoint and for which I wrote an episode, had already been an exception. So I started thinking about turning one of the characters into a whiteguy. And then which one should I choose? But I found a much better idea: Moe was an orphan, so why couldn't he have one black parent? We discover this much later in the series, but I think it's even more subversive than having two black guys. Suppose you like him, maybe identify with him, and then you discoverhe's black. Surprise! Thinking about it, it's pure logic. Moe is a mystery since the beginning, the one from the other side, bearing Moses' name and his message of love. Moe was redesigned with particular care to fit with this new development. He had to look white enough to fool viewers for a while, and later to be credible as a black man.

The Benefits of Having Artists Working Together AP: I got to meet the character designer and storyboarder, Thomas Szabo, something producers usually deprived me from. I wrote a first synopsis of the action, and we discussed it together. Then I wroteanother version with all the action and only a few guiding lines. Thomas showed me his first board before cleaning it up, and I wrote the definitive lines on the finished board. The lines got shorter and whenever useless, immediately erased. It then seemed obvious to me that this was the way to do it, whereas I was always asked to write a lot of lines for the scripts I'd sold before. That's why you seeso many action series that are nothing but talk, talk, talk.

Thanks to this method the movie got much better. It won in terms of efficiency, speed, characterization, timing and suspense. JLB: Directing an animation film is for me a rare pleasure. I want to get the best from every artist for the project. My job is to create a good combination between graphics, color, cinematography, and rythmn and sound (music, effects, voice). I am a bee who flies to every flower, taking sugar from them and making the best honey I can out of it. Also, I think that a good animation film director must have some distance from his partners to be a good "judge" and always be able to predict the future before it happens. As I assume that all of the artists (drawing artists, writers, actors, sound engineers, etc...) know their work perfectly, I let them go free, until the point where a conflict could be on the way. When some problems happen, I try to do my best to fix it and using the best from everyone, find the solution which will be best for the film.

Concerning cinematography, I always suffer when I see a lot of camera moves used in a TV cartoon series because they want to make up for poor animation and/or story. A camera move is only good when it serves the action. I'd rather see characters entering and going off screen without any camera move. Famous French film director Jacques Tatisaid: "When the camera moves, it is an event."

I consider sound as important as picture. As Walt Disney said: "To have a good animation film, put 50% of the money in picture and 50% in sound." How many producers thought like that in those times? It is also why I wanted to make Fats & Moe with this philosophy.

Concerning the animation, I have known Peter Choi's Hahn-Shin Company for many years. Peter's studio is one of the best in South Korea and I had the opportunity to supervise and direct many series with Hahn-Shin people. As I know all of the artists very well, it was quite easy for me to make some special requests regarding Fats & Moe's production. About freedom and creativity in France, hardly anybody wants to give you money to produce a pilot film without any restrictions. If they accept your project, most producers (not all of them, thank Heavens!) want to correct and/or change your design, story, music, etc. -- not because of Art, but to fix their own identity problems, like Pirandello's characters. Another current fact in France: most producers want to be involved in your creation to try to rob you of some percentage of your author rights. I even know some of them who want to co-direct for the same reasons! Also, they enjoy practicing censorship to be in tune with the dictates of TV channels. In other words, they treat us like dogs without any respect.If you see Fats & Moe today it is because a Korean producer has agreed to produce a French film! Also, I don't want to forget Jean-Louis Rizet and Jean-Michel Spiner (Ramses/Toutenkartoon) who gave us, in Paris, the same generosity as Peter Choi did. I am very proud to say that our film is really the first Franco-Korean co-production in the world.An Authentic Jazz Spirit: Writing and Recording The MusicJLB: I have to confess that I love to play Jazz! When I compose -- even if I can't read a note -- my main musical inspiration comes from my vibes master and friend, Lionel Hampton, and from 1930 to 1960 French film music. I am also very inspired by composers like Debussy, Satie, Ravel, Jaubert and Strawinsky. I have played and composed with Jean-Michel Bernard for 22 years and our partnership is the best; we hold complementary opinions. We also have the same cultural and musical references which help us to create comic effects and funny quotations in the compositions we make together. Fats & Moe's compositions and recordings were completely effortless. Jean-Michel Bernard and I played all the instruments, except the saxophone which was played by the talented Pierre Mimran.To coordinate the music and picture, I prepared all of the exposure sheets myself, with the beat of every musical piece and many rythmn indications for the animators. Good animation direction comes from the sound indications, not from the text.The Artists of Fats & Moe (1997 - 7' - ß-Sp - Stereo Dolby®)Screenplay: Annabelle PerrichonStoryboard and Character Design: Thomas SzaboArt Direction: Guillaume Ivernel & Hélène GiraudMusic: Jean-Louis Bompoint & Jean-Michel BernardAnimation: Hahn-Shin CompanyPost-Production: RamsesColor & Compositing: Toutenkartoon under the direction of Jean-Michel SpinerVoice Direction: Françoise Blanchard & Allan WengenSound Engineer: Gaby PastelProduction Coordination: Jung Mi-Kyeong & Fred MauxionAssistants To The Director: Yves Charles Fercoq, Philippe Hervieux, John BigorgneDirected and Edited by Jean-Louis BompointJean-Louis Bompoint is a director, editor, jazz composer, and director of photography. He is currently preparing a live video clip for the Rythmes Digitales. Annabelle Perrichon is a screenwriter, who just finished polishing a horror thriller that started shooting in August, 1999.