to make feature animation does not seem to have calmed down. This
was proven at the Cartoon Movie event at the historical Babelsberg
Studios in Potsdam, Germany. The place was well chosen; the first
feature animation of all time, Lotte Reiniger's Die Gesichte des
Prinzen Achmed(The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, 1926) was
created at Babelsberg. This annual co-financing forum for European feature
animation was held March 23 25, 2000 for the second time. In
three days 27 projects in development or production were presented.
All 350 participants -- including 93 investors and distributors --
also had the opportunity to see six brand new features on the big
screen.
Organized by Cartoon, the animation platform for
the European Union, Cartoon Movie follows the format of the well-known
Cartoon
Forum [3] event. Accepted producers have 40 minutes to convince participants
to either invest money, or agree to television screenings or a distribution
deal for the proposed movie project. Results vary; sometimes the producer
will get his financial need fulfilled 100%, sometimes the most visible
reaction is yawning. To present a project at Cartoon Movie does not
guarantee that one day it will hit the screens. The event organizers create detailed statistics
of the participants attending project presentations. Most popular
was the Danish-initiated film Help, I'm a Fish, which attracted
131 professionals. The film, which involves production companies A.Film
(Denmark), Münich Animation (Germany), EIV Entertainment (Germany)
and Terraglyph (Ireland), is almost finished and will be screened
at the Cannes Film Market.
The next projects on the list of attendance were
Silver Fox Films' Water Warriors (UK), NDF Hamburg's Derrick
- The Animated Movie (Germany), Oniria Production's Tristan
and Isolde (Luxemburg), Trixter's Loisel's Peter Pan (Germany),
Sparx's The Candelight Circus (France), Futurikon's Malo
Korrigan and the Space Tracers (France), Siriol Productions' 360
(UK), Metal Hurlant Productions' Benito Mambo (France) and
Entropie Films' The Barrel Organ (France). Most of the planned films are for children or
adolescents, the main consumers of animation. There are, however,
some interesting exceptions that break the rules. Absolutely the funniest
and perhaps furthest from the mainstream was the French project Teddy's
Coming Out. Hot Projects The story is full of perceptive details and humour.
It presents a psychologist and a priest as they try to decide who
knows what's best for little bears. After a failure in the re-education
center for boys Bobby is sent to the Wicked Wood. Which, as you may
guess, is not a horrible place but a kind of paradise. For example,
when little Bobby waits horrified for the Wolf, a group of animals
come along in colourful clothes singing, "YMCA." In the end love overcomes
all obstacles and the two hostile communities live in perfect harmony.
Yes, you guessed right. It is a feature
animation about the life and struggle of a little homosexual bear,
Teddy. He lives in Pretty Wood and really likes his pal Bobby who
loves flowers and perfume. Next to the happy village is Wicked Wood,
a dreadful place where the horrible Big Bad Wolf lives.
"Animals are always made human for movies,"
says director Philippe Leclerc of Praxinos. "I began to think that
they have to have some other kind of life behind the screen, too." Visually Teddy's Coming Out is made in
the now trendy '60s style, with a touch of Tex Avery and Tom of Finland.
The backgrounds are simple but effective and colourful. The total
budget is only around 6 million Euro or USD. Producer Jean-Paul Caspari
says that a big slice of the budget is slated for music. The film
will be full of gay cult music, like Doris Day, Gloria Gaynor, Marlene
Dietrich, The Village People, and of course, Elvis Presley and Judy
Garland.
Director Philippe Leclerc believes that the film
will find its audience, as did films like Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert. "We do not look to provoke, we want to make a comedy and
talk about tolerance," he underlines. "This is not only a gay movie,"
he adds. This is easy to believe, as the plot sounds truly funny and
innovative.
A more mainstream, but most interesting project,
is Loisel's Peter Pan by German company Trixter and director
Michael Coldewey. Frenchman Regis Loisel is one of the best European
comics artists today and he has been working on his five album story
Peter Pan for several years. It is loosely based on the well-known
book but interpreted in Loisel's sensitive and intelligent manner.
The fifth album will be published soon. Coldewey says he became a fan of Loisel four years
ago upon seeing the albums in Paris. "His drawings look like traditional
animation, but his way of telling the story is different," Coldewey
says. Trixter bought the rights in February and is just beginning
the work. In March they didn't yet have a pilot. Trixter is a German company, based in Munich that
specializes in character development and design. They are a strong
CGI producer as well. Trixter works together with another German company,
Das Werk, that at the moment might well be the biggest European post-production
company. "Now that we have strong support from Das Werk
we can start Peter Pan," Coldewey says. Trixter has just finished
another feature animation Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, a Canadian-German-South
Korean film directed by Coldewey and Michael Lemire. It will have
its German premiere in May. "Though Trixter is strong in 3D animation, we
will do this in 2D," says producer Lilian Klages. "We try to keep
the work in Europe and quality high. At the moment we are discussing
cooperation with a Spanish company."
Sounds nice but a cold shower follows. After showing
the video with Loisel's images, Coldewey says first of all, of course,
that Peter's bad teeth will be redrawn. The reason soon becomes clear:
Trixter wants to sell the film to the U.S. market and one cannot have
an animated character with bad teeth there -- not even in a film that
tells about an extremely poor and neglected slum child of London's
East End in the 1880s. Goodbye Dickens and historical facts, hello
sleek entertainment with modern dental care. The paradox is that Loisel didn't want to sell
his storys rights to the big U.S. animation company that was
interested. He wanted to keep it in European hands. Now the European
producer seems to be writing a story that is fit for U.S. cinemas;
for a country where practically no foreign films are screened. "We are currently rewriting the story for family
entertainment. We do not use all the parts of the albums," director
Coldewey says. According to my judgement, they aim to cut the "sex
and nudity" away. The story includes very little of these banned things
and they are an integral part. One of the main lines of the original
story is the robbing away of childhood with structural and physical
violence. Another is the sexual awakening of a young boy. All this
Loisel tells with a sensitive style, filled with innocence and understanding. Coldewey says that Loisel is following the developments
and has accepted the changes. "He knows the process and understands
that making a film is different than making an album and needs a wider
audience." Loisel was involved with the development of Disney's
Tarzan. He was one of the artists figuring out how Tarzan would
look. Finally Disney only used the dreadlocks-type hairstyle from
his drawings, though they were afraid it would look untidy. Loisel
reminded them that Tarzan lives in a jungle with apes; he cannot look
as if just walking out of a barbershop.
New Releases The story is an intelligent pastiche of traditional
British detective stories, with a smart script, which is full of imagination.
The story runs slowly, perhaps too slowly for audiences of this millennium,
but is hilariously funny.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Heavy
Metal F.A.K.K.2. This science-fiction action story is based on
the U.S. comic book and is also known as a computer game. The story
is straight from the most common cliches of the genre: A man, who
is a real bundle of muscles, finds a jewel that gives him supernatural
powers and greed for killing and conquering the world. He kills the
family of a young surprise, surprise -- big breasted and lightly
dressed woman who finally kills him. The film does not even try to give any kind of
psychological background or depth to the characters or their actions.
Perhaps the idea is to keep the action so high that the spectator
does not have time to think about the story or characters. Well, this
simply doesn't work. In the past a successful animated feature might
turn into a family of products, like toys, games, etc. Now the order
is being reversed. A successful product or game will become a film
using the slight dramaturgy of a computer game for example for an
entire plot. But which film will we see in the cinemas around the
corner -- Dog Days or Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2? The answer
is so clear it's not even worth guessing.
Participants could also see six new
feature animations made in Europe. The most fascinating was the Swedish
Hundehotellet (Dog Days) by veteran director Per Åhlin,
which was released this March in Sweden. The 65-minute film tells
of Sture the dog who aims to go to Paris but ends up in a hotel near
the heath of Dartmoor.
Entering Theatres An experienced European film producer told me
in Potsdam about his new, well made feature animation made for family
audiences. When he screened it to the major distributors no one was
interested. No cinema would take anything other than Disney,
they said. However, the producer didn't give up. He contacted the
multiplex cinema owners directly and screened the film for them. Their
response was completely different. The cinema owners said that it
was exactly the kind of family film they needed for their theaters,
but could never get. Now the film To get more visibility for animation in Europe,
Cartoon, the organizer of Cartoon Movie, will launch the Cartoon Movie
Awards at the third Potsdam meeting next year. Specialized cinema
journalists will propose candidates for the merited Animated Film,
Producer and Distributor of the year in the area of European animated
features. A fourth prize will reward any particularly effective initiative
that has attracted wide audience interest. Heikki Jokinen is a freelance critic and journalist
based in Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in comics, short films
and animation. He is chairman of the Finnish Art Critics' Association
and the former president of ASIFA Nordic, the ASIFA regional body
for the five Nordic and three Baltic countries.
Distribution [9]
is still one of the major problems for European feature animation.
There are in their countries of origin successful animated films,
but they do not travel across borders.
will open with a major campaign.
Links:
[1] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3391
[2] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3392
[3] http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.7/2.7pages/2.7jokinencartoon.html
[4] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3393
[5] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3394
[6] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3395
[7] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3396
[8] http://www.awn.com/imagepicker/image/3397
[9] http://www.awn.com/mag/issue4.08/4.08pages/jokinenfeatures.php3