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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 4.6 - SEPTEMBER 1999

The Story Behind Fats & Moe

by Annabelle Perrichon & Jean-Louis Bompoint

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from Fats & Moe.

Jean-Louis Bompoint.

Awarded Best Pilot at Switzerland's Mendrisio International 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' Project
Annabelle 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 Structure
AP:
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 friends with 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."


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