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Q:
Politics, war, and injustice seem to be common themes in your films.
How did you get interested in these issues?
Well
I was hatched in Haifa, Palestine (later called Israel), during
the Second World War. There were a lot of bombs you know. When I
was in kindergarten, I remember Italian airplanes coming to bomb
us, and they were hit and went down into the bay. This was my childhood,
running between the bombs to the bomb shelter. I remember the scare
when Field Marshal Rommel and the Nazis were about to take Egypt.
We were worried that he would overrun us next. On the north we had
Turkey - a Nazi ally. We were squeezed in the middle. We were really
relieved, to say the least, when the British defeated Rommel at
El-Alamein. Then when the war was over, there was the War of (Israeli)
Independence when I was about eight. The British were occupying
Palestine. We threw stones at the British and put garbage cans in
front of their tanks. The British Empire was crumbling, and eventually
they gave up and pulled out. The soldiers used to get drunk and
shoot through people's windows. There were curfews and you had to
be careful. We would sleep on the balcony because it was so hot,
but you couldn't raise your head because they might shoot at you.
Q:
Wow! What a childhood! Were you involved in art at school?
I was
good at it! Art was the only good mark that I got in school, the
only mark above zero. (Laughs) I was a good art student but the
rest of my marks were in the toilet. I was mainly self-taught but
I went to life drawing classes when I was twelve to draw the human
form. I didn't know how good I was because my talents were very
strange. I went to other art tutors but it kind of confused me,
being exposed to this art style and that art style. I needed to
find my own way.
Q:
What did you do when you finished school?
I went into the Israeli army. Everybody had to. Luckily it was a
quiet period, nothing much going on. In the army I got out of doing
jobs by being a clown or a painter. I would do all the signs and
paint cartoons on the wall of the canteen, satirical cartoons about
life on the base. I was the crazy artist, trying to keep quiet and
out of trouble.
Q:
What did you after the army?
I painted a lot. Sometimes I worked in theatre, painting sets. In
1965 I performed on stage in a nightclub doing quick drawings on
large rolls of paper. I had a partner who would read the script
and I would draw. It was mostly political satire against the criminal
mob (with their goon squads) who ran Haifa. Sometimes I would project
slides with half a drawing on them and I would finish the drawing
on stage. Sometimes I would project movies on the paper. Eventually
the city shut us down. Then I came to Canada after the Six Days'
War because, to make a very long story very short, I thought that
Israel was fucking up. That war was a land grab, with Israel gobbling
up as much land as they could, kicking Arabs out and bulldozing
their homes. It polarized Palestinians against Israelis. As it happened,
I married a Canadian and moved to Canada.
Q:
What happened when you got to Toronto?
Well,
for a while I was making paintings for a salesman in New York. I
was a factory, making paintings of flowers, bullfights, whatever,
that this guy would sell to hotel chains. I was even resident artist
for a day at Bloomingdale's in New York. I would paint while people
shopped, right there in the store! Well, I wasn't really making
that much money painting so I started looking around for other things
to do.
Q:
How did you get into animation?
A famous Israeli feature director came to stay with us and that
got me thinking about movies. I began making some film collages
on political themes (war, missiles, the futility of things) using
a borrowed 8mm home movie camera. I would shoot things without a
script and I would put them together. Then I started to do some
animation with objects, puppets and cut-outs under the camera. I
didn't really know a lot about animation but I was experimenting.
I tried classical drawn animation but I didn't have the patience
to do it so pixilation suited my temperament much better. I was
looking for objects to use in my animation. One day I was lying
in the bath tub and my wife comes in; I notice that she's wearing
thin gold chain necklaces around her neck and eureka! I got an idea!
I ask her if I can borrow them and run down to the basement and
start pushing the necklaces around underneath the animation camera.
I realized that I could move these things and create figures with
them and metamorphose them into anything I want. The world opened
up. I had tried string but the chains were easier to work with.
It was so simple and I wondered why I hadn't heard of this technique
of animation before.
Q:
Did you show these early experiments to anybody?
Well I didn't know if what I was doing was any good so I took my
super-8 movie projector and went to see Elwy Yost (then host of
Saturday Night At the Movies) at TVOntario. That guy knew film.
I had seen him on TV and I wanted to see his reaction. It was something
that he hadn't seen before and he loved it. He encouraged me to
go to other TV stations. From there I went to City TV, CTV and Global,
and people treated me with respect. I had a lot of chutzpah. They
liked what I was doing. Eventually I ended up at CBC. This was 1978.
The CBC Graphic Design Boss at that time liked me. It was a Friday
when I showed him my stuff, and I started working the next Monday.
He gave me carte blanche to make a film so I made a film with chains
of a saxophone player turning into a piano player, etc. It didn't
take very long to do. Then I did animated political cartoons for
the CBC Television's evening news. In the morning they would call
me with a subject, usually something to do with a political event
or issue that was hot that day. I would take it from there and make
up and animate a film using chains and sand by noon and run it over
to the lab for processing. At 4 p.m. I would pick it up and with
a sound editor, we would cut in sound effects and it would be on
the news at 6 p.m. It was marvelous. I would thrive on the challenge.
I was so focussed. I made dozens of these little films, a least
one or two a week. Then I started to do animation for Canadian Sesame
Street which I did for 19 years.
Q:
In spite of working at the CBC, you made your own independent animated
films. How did that come about?
I
had to make them. I was driven. The first one was called "Nukie's
Lullaby" where this crazy, lunatic atomic bomb cloud called Nukie
talks to the viewer. This was during the cruise missile protests
in 1984. The Cold War was starting to heat up again under Reagan.
So Nukie is a salesman. He can sell anything to the American people.
It's almost like he's selling candy (nuclear war) to kids and the
American people were buying this wholesale. He was animated with
sand. It got a great response at film festivals. There were three
Nukie films: "Nukie's Lullaby", "Nukie's Sermon from the Bottle",
and "Nukie Takes a Valium".
Q:
My favorite film of yours is "Oh Dad!". How did you get the idea
for that film?
At
that time (mid-80's), Ronald Reagan had sponsored an animated commercial
for kids, using the style of children's drawings, selling Star Wars
(the Strategic Missile Defence System, recently revived by George
Bush Junior) to kids - and adults. That commercial was so well done
that it scared the shit out of me. It angered me that good animation
talent went into an evil project like selling Star Wars to kids.
"Oh Dad!" was my response to that commercial. I came up with the
idea of a kid talking to himself by writing in his diary (He was
writing about an argument he had that day with his Dad about the
futility of Star Wars, nuclear war and pollution.) I would record
my voice as the kid, so I had a rough idea of how long the scenes
would take as a guide to animate the chains and sand. Iris Paabo
(a local Toronto filmmaker) provided the kid's voice for the final
film. I used to do my films on my vacations. I would take 2 weeks
off and close myself in my camera room. So "Oh Dad!" was shot and
edited in that time.
Q:
At some point you stopped making films in 16mm. Why was that?
Availability of equipment! Once the CBC did away with film and went
all digital, I left. The animation stands were taken away in 1997.
People who didn't have computer skills were shoved out. I was determined
to stay on top of things, so in 1990, I bought a Macintosh computer
and started playing around with it and along with film works, started
to do computer animation for Sesame Street. I trained some of my
peers to do animation with Director software.
Q:
So what are you up to now?
Well
it's an obsession. I have a G4 (Macintosh computer) and I'm working
on two projects, one about suburban sprawl around the outside of
Toronto (a collaboration with TAIS member Ray Foster with a script
by collage artist Richard Slye) and another about the proliferation
of billboards. These combine live action video and animation. Also
I'm continuing to do work on the middle East. So I've been busy.
Q:
Would you ever go back to film?
Yes I would, but after 19 years of working under the camera, I can't
because my back is out from a tobogganing accident and all those
years of leaning over the animation table. But I would like to get
back to sand and chains, but this time with computer assist.
Q:
You've made some wonderful films. I hope that you keep making more.
Thank you.
Well I'm going to live another 200 years you know. (Laughs)
Q:
You're very optimistic!
(Laughs)
Check
out Jonathan's Flash animation at these websites:
http://www.interlog.com/~jamitay/
http://www.amitay.00show.com
http://members.fortunecity.com/jamitay/
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