With a Fellini writer behind the story, The Dog, the General and the Birds brings a true independent spirit to animated features. © Bac Distribution.

Common Features
The majority of European features are basically independent films, which do not enjoy contributions from the “majors” or large European groups.

This means that, just as in live-action, the instigators spend an enormous amount of time raising money, gradually stacking up contributions from many different sources, mainly comprised of public funding and partnerships with national television channels. Critics will snipe that with this system, financial break-even is guaranteed for some films even if nobody goes to see them in cinemas. This is a rather glib and partial view of the enormous problems generally encountered. To pull off this kind of project, it is often still the case that a studio has to be put together from scratch, and then dismantled once the film is completed, since there is no, or hardly any, continuity of production.

Partly as a response to this problem, and partly to keep costs down, many films rely on sub-contracting out, usually to the east. And here the word “east” is meant in the widest sense, since it stretches from Estonia to the two Koreas. Sub-contracting out is not without its problems: take the example of the problems encountered by the French-Belgian-Luxembourg production, Corto Maltese en Sibérie, adapted from the Hugo Pratt comic book, where the poor quality of animation delivered led to the producers switching sub-contractors in mid-production, having to start one whole section of the film again, with the obvious attendant delays.

Once a film is completed, the coffers are usually empty. The marketing budgets for European features are often very skimpy, and it is not so long ago that thinking seriously about marketing only began once the film was finished. One example, amongst many — it took four years from the time Kirikou was released in France to its sale to the U.K. Of course, over time things change, but it is revealing that the European institution’s program for audio-visual development, Media and its animation organization Cartoon, are now stressing the measures urgently required to remedy the continuing weakness of European features in terms of distribution, in Europe as elsewhere.

Raining Cats and Frogs has been a long time in the making, but its whimsical style may make it well worth the wait. © Folimage 2002.

European animation, remarkably diverse in terms of its creative inspiration, suffers from the very qualities that are its strengths. Some critics like to reiterate that the more firmly a film is rooted in its own culture, the greater the chances of achieving something universal, and hence appealing to a wide international audience. Whilst this is undeniably true for really outstanding works, it should not prevent us from acknowledging that many European features are successful in their home market, but do not manage to repeat this success in other countries, even and including countries relatively close to them, whatever the merits of the film. To take an extreme example, German box office hits like Werner - Volles Roaaa or Kleine Arscloch (1997) remain largely unknown outside their own borders. Almost the same could be said about the interesting films made by the prolific Danish filmmaker Yannick Hastrup who has had some considerable successes in Denmark.

Today, things might be about to change. The Living Forest, the first film to be made entirely in 3D in Europe (Spain) is on the way to a (partially) European-wide success, modest but effective, as was the case with Enzo d’Alo’s earlier film Lucky and Zorba (Italy). French films like Belleville Rendez-vous, Raining Cats and Frogs and Opopomoz have been sold to a substantial number of territories, some of them outside Europe. Simultaneous and large-scale release in all European countries remains, however, a distant dream for many producers.