Somehow Winnipeggers have once again survived a brutally Siberian winter. This one was, officially, longer, colder, and snowier than it's been in generations. Six months of snow-cover. Daily wind-chill warnings: Exposed skin freezes in 10 seconds. Almost all of January and February spent below -20.

It was marrow-freezing, eyeball-aching weather. Momma, stop chug-a-lugging the Prozac weather. Also: perfect animation weather!

Bears hibernate. Middle Americans vegetate. Winnipeggers animate. And enough of them kept their Jack Frosted noses to the peg-board this past winter to make 1996 look like it's going to be a banner year for animation. Everyone, it seems, from internationally famous Richard Condie (Getting Started, The Big Snit, The Apprentice) on down has a film nearing completion.

Richard Condie. © The National Film Board of Canada.

An Auspicious Beginning
Neil McInnes (Boarding House, Transformer) is the first Winnipeg animator to hit the screens in 1996. It's an auspicious beginning for the community. Lovehound is a send-up of a classic love story done in classic cel animation style. Ronnie the Realtor browbeats Knucklehead Pete who is smitten by the lovely Ethel, Ronnie's opportunistic mistress. Ethel spurns Pete until Pete accidentally proves his manliness. In the end, Pete gets what he wants but not quite what he expected.

If the story structure sounds familiar, it is deliberately so. After a couple of cryptic early films, McInnes wanted to "play with some dopey clichés." And play he does, to hilarious effect. Ronnie the Realtor is a nattering, manic lover whose macho posturing produces some of this movie's funniest gags, featuring exaggerated love bites and tongue kisses. Lovehound's best sequence, a tense and crazy chase edited and scored like a Hitchcock montage, ends when Ronnie's fast black car hits poor Pete's dog, and Ronnie plays hackiesack with the inert pet. Some of the humor is decidedly twisted. In fact, there is probably something here to offend everyone.

Ronnie the Realtor from Neil McInnes'Lovehound. © The National Film Board of Canada.

But gags and sick humor are not Lovehound's outstanding feature. McInnes has taught animation for years and it shows in the well-crafted squash and stretch animation and the beautifully designed backgrounds. He gives the movie a polished retro-look, recalling the buildings and furniture from the 1939 New York World's Fair. Most indoor scenes have an offbeat deep-focus effect achieved by placing kitschy lamps prominently in the foregrounds.

As is typical of most Winnipeg animation, this one also has a rich, multilayered soundtrack. The music, composed by Boyd MacKenzie, is thick with marimbas and flamenco guitars, as befits a Latin lover villain, but the overall effect is more like a Bernard Herman score.

Lovehound is both vulgar and sophisticated, tasteful and tasteless. It begins like Metropolis. Many of its backgrounds are postcard pretty. It's got a bad Elvis look-alike and other fifties stereotyped caricatures. Its jokes are often crude. It ends feeling like a Generation X movie. It is a refreshingly eclectic mix of pleasures.