There is animation in Iceland. This northern island of 103,000 sq. km., the second largest in Europe after Great Britain, 798 km. from Scotland, 970 from Norway, 287 from Greenland, is famous for its volcanoes and geysers as well as its great sagas and skaldic poetry. Up until now, though, it was considered a wasteland as far as frame-by-frame films are concerned; this is mainly the fault of specialists, especially of this particular historian.

Among the filmmakers and producers who have been submitting projects over the last few years to Cartoon (the European Community's program for supporting animation production) there have also been Icelanders. It was then that the discovery was made.

The Deacon of Dark River by Jón Axel Egilsson. Courtesy of Giannalberto Bendazzi

Beginnings
Animation started in Iceland in 1974, about the time when filmmaking in general started there, provoking a certain echo in the specialized press. Icelanders are proportionately the most avid moviegoers in the world; and an average of two live-action features have been made every year. In 1978, the Icelandic Film Fund was established to support production, thus making professional filmmaking a reality there.

The first animated fiction film, which was made in that fateful year, 1974, was The Pioneer, a five-minute black-and-white short by Jon Axel Egilsson. Born in Reykjavik (Iceland's capital) on October 4, 1944, Egilsson studied acting, was a news cameraman and worked on several documentary and fictional films as a cameraman and editor. Later in his career, he also taught animation and filmmaking at the College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavik.

In describing The Pioneer, he noted that, "The people and sets are made with cubes. No narration, just music. It is the story of a young man, a cube, who on his way to the Promised Land in a sailing ship meets a young woman. Her father is not happy with that. The ship sinks, he is thrown overboard and thinks he is the only survivor. He builds a house and plants trees. One fine day, he meets the girl, who is out walking her dog. She tells him how she survived, and that there are other people from the ship, and that they built a town in the next valley. They get married, but on their wedding night ... (a chapter is missing, 100 feet of film were overexposed in processing). I made the thing entirely on my own. It was premiered in 1974, the year we celebrated the 1100th anniversary of settlement in Iceland."

The second fictional animated short, The Hammer of Thor, was made by Sigurdur "Siggi" Örn Brynjolfsson. It was based on a 12th century Icelandic saga, it was the first cartoon film made in Iceland and the first in color.