The Long Shadow Over The Atlantic

The Long Shadow Over The Atlantic
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"The fact that the animation is 85 minutes long, is not enough to get distribution," said a British producer Allan Rudoff from Index Entertainment at the Cartoon Movie seminar on the animation feature market. "For a distributor animation has risks that other films do not have. Cinemas are spoiled with huge campaigns run by the big US companies. Also the audience is spoiled with very expensive movies. Animated features are often made for children, and the screenings are often restricted to school holidays and afternoons. Even the ticket prices for children are lower."

British producer Robin Lyons confirms: "When I spoke about a new feature with a big distributor, the first thing they asked was about the budget. When I answered 3 - 4 million British pounds, they told me they were not interested unless the budget was 30 40 million pounds, because every film competes with Disney."

A typical European animated feature costs between 3 and 5 million euro. (The euro is the new European currency, which is at the moment almost equivalent with the US dollar.) This budget already includes the marketing promotion.

In the promotional field, Europeans are often poor amateurs in comparison with highly professional US companies. US animation producers are paying journalists, even from my far away home town of Helsinki, to see screenings in California or New York. Many European producers are not even supplying press photos of their films despite repeated demands.

Know Your Audience
Werner Schaack, director of the German Werner films, supposes the reason for his success is making films for an audience that already likes cartoonist Brösel's Werner comics. Werner is a major hit. The comics have sold over 10 million copies. "We will fail if we try to make Disney films. They do it better."

Schaack's company has adapted another popular German comic as an animated feature, Walter Moers' black satire Kleine Arschloch (Little Asshole, 1997). It gathered "only" 3.3 million spectators. "I know that German humor does not easily cross the borders, that's why we did the films for Germans," Schaack says.

Surprisingly the same strategy might also work in a small country. "For an international success you first need success in our own country," believes the Norwegian producer John M. Jacobsen. "See for instance Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (Party). It ran well first in Denmark, and then everywhere else." There is no point in trying to make an international film, Jacobsen says.

Even though his film Gurin and Foxtail was a colossal hit in Norway, it has difficulties in traveling abroad, even to the neighbouring Nordic countries which are culturally, mentally and partially linguistically close to each other. "There is a high threshold for a Norwegian film to be distributed abroad," Jacobsen says. "But," he continues, summing up the possibilities for a feature from a small country to travel abroad, "If the producer has good personal relations abroad, a Norwegian film has the same potential as, say, any Dutch or Belgian film. A British or French film is in a better starting position every time. This business depends on personal relationships. I've been working for a long time already and do have some credibility." While Gurin and Foxtail is his first animation, Jacobsen began as a producer in 1983 and already had a career as a distributor.