“Because Wallace and Gromit were existing characters it was possible to negotiate creatively with our partners at DreamWorks and what that meant was that Nick Park and Steve Box were allowed to make the film they wanted to make. I’m sure that’s the case with a number of the best animated films that are made. But, unfortunately, that’s not true of animated films generally. The costs are so great and the potential rewards so great that big studios have an instinct to make films by committee. The studio disposes of directors with strong voices and style and replaces them with a fabulously tuned filmmaking machine. That’s strange to me. Not wrong, but profoundly different from the culture in which I was brought up — in festivals like this — with auteurs, the animator/directors.”

Peter Lord previewed some of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which had not been released in Italy at time of I Castelli. Courtesy DreamWorks Animation SKG © and ™ Aardman Animations Ltd.

Conversation between Isao Takahata and Peter Lord (as told through a Japanese/Italian and Italian/English translators):

IT: The friendship between Studio Ghibli and Aardman goes further than the exhibition in Tokyo at Studio Ghibli. I hope that it can grow into a collaboration. We have a very similar way of working. When I saw their films, I was very excited about them. They are different from the American style. They were realistic and credible. An example of something we can learn is how the characters speak. It’s a wonderful test for us, Wallace’s mouth. It’s something really special, the way the mouth is. Also, in A Close Shave, the thing that impressed us was Wallace’s shyness towards women. I think this is one of the reasons why everybody loves Wallace.

PL: The way Wallace behaves is directly influenced by the film, Brief Encounter. I wanted to say this about his mouth. When I met Nick Park, he was making A Grand Day Out, and, in the first shot of lip synch, Wallace’s mouth was very small. It was realistic and small and he didn’t think it was very funny so he tried extreme exaggeration. He always used to say, as a joke, there’s a certain way to be funny in film — make the mouth as wide as possible and the eyes touching. That’s comedy.

Daniel Greaves: “There’s a theme in all my films — the challenge of doing something different every time. Rabbit Rabbit came around when I was writing the ambitious Flat World. I wanted to do something simple and direct, something quickly.”

“I’ve always wanted to make short films and when we set up Tandem, the idea was to work on commercials to finance films. Some studios opt to make commercials and make lots of money from that. At Tandem, we invest the money we make from commercials in short films. We’ll never be rich, but it’s so rewarding and so satisfying and enjoyable. When Manipulation won an Oscar in 1992, it opened the doors for us and enabled us to create Flat World, which was initially funded by the BBC. After that, we got commercials commissioned in the same style, and, oddly, each film after that spawned several commercials. So, we decided if we stopped making short films, the commercial side would dry up. We have to make short films to get commercials and the commercials fund the short films. It has become a cyclic thing.”

John Canemaker won the Bellocchio Prize for social content for The Moon and the Son. He screened his film at I Castelli Bridgehampton (right) in 1998. Photo credit: Sarah Baisley (left) and © John Canemaker. All rights reserved.

John Canemaker (on inserting animation into a film): “When someone comes to me and asks me to insert animation, I ask, ‘Why?’ I think you have to have a very good reason to use animation and not live action, something intrinsic in the art form itself. So in the film on child abuse, I used it not to show the abuse, but the emotional impact of it. The question became how to show it. The answer was in research. At NYU where I teach, I convey to the students that they can solve most of their problems with research — not to imitate but to inspire. For child abuse, I looked at photos and drawings by the victims and certain themes turned up. Hands were very important. Eyes. Children were locked into structures with doors but no key. That sort of imagery.”

“Animation is a unique art form. We can personify emotions on the screen. We can go into the mind and make it come alive. It’s something I try to do in my films.”

After Canemaker showed his film, Bridgehampton, an animation created from paintings of his garden, during the question and answer session, Raffaeli’s three-year-old daughter Rosita, walked up to Canemaker and handed him a paper crown with stars drawn on the points. He put it on, turned, and tipped the crown to his image on the screen behind.

Ciao.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist who has covered visual effects and computer animation for 15 years. She also co-founded the dog photography website dogpixandflix.com. Her most recent travel essay appears in the new Travelers Tales anthology, The Thong Also Rises.