Here I Go Again On My Own

If I were inclined to appreciate 80s hair-bands, I might be singing, “Here I go Again On My Own,” by Whitesnake because as of Monday I completed my latest project (directing six spots for the Electric Company). All I have lined up now is teaching one night a week at Parsons this Fall and one night a week at SVA this Spring. The rest of my time is ripe with possibility. I’ve learned long ago to seize such time because it is often fleeting. Most of us agree that although we love animation this doesn’t automatically mean that all of our employment is spent on “dream jobs.” The realist in me adds, “nor could it be.” Dreams are ours to make. Opportunities are ours to take. If anyone from Hallmark Cards is reading this, I’m available for a job in the copy department.

For me, time on my ownsome means time spent on a personal film (see images above from my in-progress short!). The new film is a third collaboration with musician, producer, and voice over artist Bob Charde. I used to refer to my films as independent films. Maybe if I had called them personal films I might have actually made something personal. I started out on the right track by making a film called Snow Business, which started out as a concept film (a snowman traveling through a city by accidental means) but, I realized later that the film was really based on part of my life experience. As a child, I used to eagerly anticipate my father coming home from his Ad agency job in Manhattan. As a family, we always waited until my dad got home so we could all eat together. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until 9 PM. It was such a special feeling when his car pulled up and he came up the stoop of our house. Before we would eat, I would get to hear a play-by-play of the day’s events at the office and I’d fill him in on my day too. It was OUR time and I cherished it.

That longing is in the film Snow Business, which at its core is about a boy longing for time with his Dad. That personal truth gave them film a powerful center and I believe it went a long way to overcome any production problems with the film. Yet, I didn’t fully understand this at the time and I thus allowed other influences to creep into my second film, ensuring that it had nothing personal in it whatsoever. At the time I was obsessed with getting a development deal for my own television property (something I wouldn’t achieve until 8 years later). I allowed this to corrupt my second film (and my third film too, but that’s another story) in which I tried to draw the current hot look on TV. For content I aimed at shock value, which was a two-part rebellion. Firstly, I was working fulltime on Blue’s Clues and secondly, Snow Business had also been a family-friendly affair. I was oddly concerned that I would develop a reputation as a children’s filmmaker. All of this added up to a sad cocktail on which to base a film.

Although it took me years to get my personal films back on the right track, I can't say that nobody tried to warn me. Once in a while somebody comes along and has the guts to tell you something painfully honest that you desperately need to hear. Shortly after my second film debacle, David Cutting (an animator at Blue’s Clues) said to me, “David, I think with your second film–– you really threw out the baby with the bathwater.” The last time I heard such stinging honesty was years earlier at SVA when an foreign student told me through his broken English, “Your work is no good.”

I think the demands and pressures on the next generation of independent filmmakers to do something "commercial" with their films must be even worse than what I had experienced. If your animation doesn’t become the next big viral sensation on YouTube does that mean that it's a failure? Whenever one thinks of the marketplace when making personal art the “personal” goes right out the window. I’m now just under half way through production on my newest film. I’m proud to say that it doesn’t look or feel in any way like the product you see today on TV or in the viral sensations perpetuated on line. Although it is a kid’s film, I’m not using any of the assembly-line techniques of puppeted animation that dominate much of kids TV these days. Content-wise, the film spends its entire time in the company and conflict between two characters engaged in an average day’s activity. The tone is quiet, the pace is slow, and the characters do not scream their lines. I am blissfully out of step and I LOVE IT!

Hiroshima Mon Amour

***photos from top to bottom: the closing ceremony where the festival logo, Lappy, gets to share the stage, the local Hiroshima dish called Okonomiyaki which is sort of like a crepe piled with noodles, scallions, bacon, and an egg, and topped off with a sweet Japanese sauce. (Thanks for the tip, Masako!), and finally a rooftop ASIFA party at the festival picturing Yasmeen Ismail, me, Yoshiya Ayugai, Bin-Han To, and Eric.)

My wife and I just got back from our trip to attend the 2008 Hiroshima International animation festival, where my film, Good Morning, was in competition. The festival was fantastic! The staff was very friendly and the screenings and events were very well organized. The sound and projection of the films was superb throughout. I’m finding it difficult to organize my thoughts on the whole experience because there are so many things I could write about.

First off, the festival coincides with the anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. We attended the Peace Museum (which is just a few blocks away from the festival) on our first day in Japan and it documents both the years of war that led up to the A-bombs dropped on Japan as well as the rebirth of the city soon after. As you walk through the museum you begin to experience the event as one big time clock with all the pieces falling into place to lead up to the tragic event. It was very emotional experience to walk through the museum surrounded by Japanese people experiencing it too. By the end we were mentally and physically exhausted and tried to fit in a nap before the next festival screening. I found myself staring at the ceiling in our hotel room, unable to sleep because of the understanding that I was lying in a space that would have been only 800 or so meters from the Hypo center of the explosion on 8:15 AM, August 6, 1945.

On a lighter note, I found the festival screenings were a great deal longer than at other festivals. At the Hiroshima festival, the nightly competitions were so long that there was a ten-minute intermission. A retrospective on animator Paul Driesen was over three hours long and a retrospective on Astro Boy creator Tezuka broke the four-hour barrier. I enjoy Driesen’s work, but I wonder if a tighter selection of films would serve his screening better. He makes concept-heavy films and after a while, one might yearn for some characters in a different kind of interaction. But, I realize that my bias is an unfair criticism for Driesen’s work because my preference has nothing to do with kind of stories he’s moved to tell. The character-based film, John and Karen directed by Matthew Walker (which won an award at the festival), pulls a viewer inside in a way that a concept film cannot. At its worst, a concept heavy film acts as a distancing device because there are no characters to draw the viewer in. My definition of a character is any character that goes beyond a stereotype, archetype, or a piece of moving furniture. There are examples of films that combine characters with concept and the best example I can think of is John R. Dilworth’s The Mousochist, which is one of my favorite films of all time.

The festival offered many opportunities for schmoozing with a series of official parties, and the party often spilled out from there to a local bar called Otis!, or to the 8th floor lobby of our hotel. I was impressed how many of the British and Finnish filmmakers were self employed at their own studios and I was jealous to hear how their respective governments help fund some of their films.

Also in attendance was ASIFA-East’s own Ray Kosarin (who had also served as a selection committee member some months earlier). Former ASIFA International board member David Ehrlich served on the festival jury and attended the festival with his wife Marcella. Recent RISD graduate Andy Cahill was in competition with his film “Spontaneous Generation.” I had met Andy a few months earlier when I spoke to the graduating at class at RISD. I am always impressed when students or recent students trek to festivals and dive into their careers. Too many students graduate and stare at the wall and wait for something to happen instead. At festivals you can make numerous important relationships and pick up oodles of inspiration––two things that could help anyone’s career (student or otherwise).

My film didn’t win a prize at the fest, but our week in Hiroshima was unforgettable. We followed it up with a four nights in Tokyo, where friends of a friend from New York showed us around and took us to dinner and karaoke. We felt so welcomed! On our last night in Japan, eight of our new international pals (who attended the Hiroshima festival) regrouped with us for dinner and more karaoke in Tokyo. By then, our little group was like a family. No doubt another festival will bring some of us together again soon. Maybe Ottawa?

In conclusion, a few words about Tokyo. It’s huge. It’s modern. They don’t take credit cards. There’s no litter ANYWHERE. Toilets are heated and spray water at you (in a good way). Signs are in English and Japanese. The subway is far easier to navigate than people say. There is a plethora of 7-11s and McDonalds. Customers are treated WAY better than they are treated in NYC. The summer heat and humidity gives Florida a good run for its money. Instead of a pigeon infestation, you run into the occasional haw-hawing magpie. And, the city is teaming with vending machines, bicycles, and… Japanese people. The last one came as a real shock. Next time, I’ll read the guidebook more clearly.

Go East, Young Man!

Well, I'm off to Japan, to see my short "Good Morning" compete in competition at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival... so I don't have time to say too much today.

I'll do my best to post something on the festival this coming Monday. Until then, wish me luck!

Just for fun, I drew the Totoros above after rewatching "My Neighbor Totoro" this week. I suppose I shouldn't admit that the film had me crying like a baby even though I'd seen it once before.

Talk soon!

Dave

PES and the "Trick Film"

It’s almost embarrassing. How is it that PES, a self-taught filmmaker dabbling in stop motion can teach most traditional animators a thing or two about a thing or two?

Animation history explains the first fantasy films were produced in France by Georges Méliès (1861-1938), and as his special effects techniques improved, Méliès began producing longer fantasy films, and filling his movies with more and more trick film effects. Méliès is a stepping-stone, leading to other things including the art form of special effects and the development of an animation industry. The trick film became a dated novelty, long ago replaced by more sophisticated filmmaking. The only problem is, somebody forgot to tell this to PES.

PES’s latest short, “Western Spaghetti” is featured at the 5th Animation Show, now playing at the IFC center in NYC. As I’m hosting a Q&A with PES following Tuesday night’s 8:20 PM show, the filmmaker has been on my mind. In 2008 we are a hundred years on from the days of Méliès, and it makes it easy to assume that nothing can surprise an audience anymore. Since liquid metal morphed into the terminator and dinosaurs came back to life in Jurassic Park, the novelty of CGI REALITY has worn off. Audiences are now used to seeing anything and everything.

“Western Spaghetti” opens with a close up of a stovetop gas burner. The shot is well composed and beautifully lit. And then a hand enters into the frame turning on the burner, which lights in animated candy corn flames set to a natural gas sound effect. At once its possible to imagine what an audience might have felt watching a Méliès film upon initial release. Forgive an overused phrase, but PES is a master at making the ordinary extraordinary. The premise is simple: the filmmaker cooks spaghetti, substituting familiar ingredients with abstract artifacts of pop culture. Googily eyes become salt, tin foil texture represents oil in a pan, undulating bubble wrap is boiling water, pin cushions are tomatoes, a ball of yarn is a hunk of parmesan cheese, a pack of yellow post it notes is butter, a dollar bill is basil, and etc.

It’s not so much the gimmick of substitution that makes “Western Spaghetti” crackle to life; it's the filmmaker’s slavish devotion to his subject. He stages and lights each composition with the same mastery DP’s used to shoot a close up of a starlet in the golden age of Hollywood. Anyone can create action by shooting an object in a series of frame-by-frame movements, but PES weaves his elements together, putting a new spin on the familiar in a way that we haven’t seen since Warhol worked in soup cans. PES can take a few items from his junk drawer and make a film with a stronger point of view than the average animator toting around Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Kit. How can we not be impressed?

Memo from Dr. No

I have become a master at rejection. With an average of four pitches out in the world at any given time, I hear, “no,” a dozen times a year. While it’s a little disappointing, it’s never discouraging. I would be discouraged if I believed others held the key, blocking my success. I learned long ago that I can’t expect any network or development executive to be more sincere about making my dreams come true than I.

For the last ten years of my pitching experience, development windows of opportunity have opened and closed more times than I can count. No one opportunity was THE opportunity. Almost none of the gatekeepers (development executives) I pitched to ten years ago are still in place at their original networks––many of them have left the business all together. I’ve seen trends and fads change, rise, and fall year-to-year. After a decade, I am the only consistent element in my pitching career.

It’s no shock that development executives say, “no,” more than 99% of the time. Most projects aren’t as good as we artists think they are. Besides, even when we have a good pitch, we show it in crumbs, trying to convince an executive that the three-coarse-meal will be delicious. When they say, “no,” we take our projects somewhere else, and when we collect enough “no’s,” we put those pitches to bed. In this action, we make the executives right. But, what about those projects that won't let us walk away?

My two most current pitches are redeveloped versions of two projects I pitched in 2000 and 2005. The image above are the designs from one of my current repitches with co-creator Dale Clowdis. The time away has allowed me to view these pitches with fresh eyes and lavish them with the attention I wasn’t able (or capable) of giving them the first time around. The revolving door of development executives allows me to bring these pitches back to networks that might have rejected them the first time around. Besides, the only risk I face is a fresh set of, “no’s.”

A fear of hearing, “no,” is an example of bad fear. It's the kind of fear that keeps one from their dreams. Most every vital band, movie, TV show, and book ever created was turned down dozens of times before finding a home. John B. Sebastian, of the Lovin’ Spoonful, said that his band was turned down so many times that with each rejection it taught the band that they were on to something––“Because the record companies couldn’t dig it.”

Collect a “no,” or two and join the club.

Is Imitation really the Greatest Form of Flattery?

It didn’t turn out so well for Dr. Frankenstein and it doesn’t work so well for animation. There was a recent dog pile of praise for Pixar’s new short, Presto, by some commentators on cartoonbrew. http://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/presto-on-itunes#comments
In general, the commentators’ premise is that if something conjures up a Tex Avery-like approach, it must be good, and therefore a good direction for Pixar to explore. I guess their idea is that animation has nothing to say today, so we can only advance by making inferior copies of the styles and techniques of yesterday. I too, noticed that Pixar’s Presto was a love letter to Tex Avery. Yet, this didn’t automatically lead me to believe a Tex Avery influence equals a good film. The film still has to stand on its own two legs (or four paws). The newish Goofy short, How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre, was similarly well received by the animation community. But did we need another Goofy short from the “How to” series which ended in the 1940s? Is the ‘act of imitation’ what we celebrate now-a-days?

There are rare moments where something genuinely new comes along and advances the artform. The above two examples ain’t it. Isn’t it funny that the same people who argue that animation has the potential to be the greatest of all mediums are often the one’s wishing to restrict it to the land of Disney’s 9 Old Men, Chuck Jones, and Tex Avery? As brilliant as these founding fathers of our industry were, they offer us a creative straight jacket if we try to follow in their exact footsteps. Thank goodness Bob Balser and George Dunning didn’t hold that belief when they gave us The Yellow Submarine. And lucky for us, Yuri Norstein didn’t get the memo that he too needed to live in the past. Otherwise, how could he have created Tale of Tales? Note: both pictured below:


Is the golden age of animation great? You betcha! Did it provide a foundation for the art and industry of all that followed? Heck, yeah! But do we do honor to these heroes and their innovation by mirroring them, OR, by continuing to blaze a few trails of our own? The greatness of the golden age of animation lives on, not in Pixar’s Presto or in Disney’s new Goofy short, but in the work of animators like Paul Fierlinger whose work has the power to make us laugh, think, and cry with as much power as the best work by The 9 Old Men, Chuck Jones, and Tex Avery in their prime. Fierlinger does this, not by mimicking the styles of the past, but by honoring his own artistic vision. Today, animation’s past legacy lives on, but not where most people are looking for it.
Note: still from Fierlinger's Drawn From Memory pictured below:

Today, The Fleischer’s Stand Taller Than Ever!

A couple of weeks ago the second Fleischer Popeye collection dropped into stores. I would make the argument that these films are the first fully realized character cartoons of the modern animation era. We can trace the modern character driven cartoon to the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon, Steam Boat Willie (1928). Yet, today we know Mickey Mouse as a corporate logo more than a compelling character. A few years back, when the Walt Disney company began issuing its shorts on DVD in lovely tin box packaging, a whole new generation of animation artists were able to watch the chronological Mickey, Donald, Pluto, and Goofy shorts. In my opinion, the most interesting DVDs issued focused on Disney’s Silly Symphony cartoons, which retain their joy of innovation all these years later. Some of that joy can be found in the early Mickey shorts as well, but to watch a few Mickey’s back-to-back, the joy soon gives way to repetition-induced fatigue. I find myself wondering why they had bothered to reanimate Mickey or Minnie playing the piano for ten cartoons in a row.

Across the continent, The Fleischer’s were busy launching a major star of their own, Betty Boop. Betty immediately stood out as the only non-animal cartoon star, and unlike Minnie Mouse, this woman had womanly attributes that went far beyond a bow in her hair. The pre-code Betty Boop cartoons are loosely constructed and often surreal. Unlike Mickey Mouse, which had its roots in silent animation (the first two Mickey shorts were silent cartoons), the Fleischer’s Betty Boop was a modern sound cartoon reflecting contemporary American society, depicting immigrants populating bustling cityscapes. Mickey Mouse, in contrast, depicted country life and the nostalgia of a vanishing America. Maybe Disney’s nostalgic approach struck a larger chord with the public, because he was infinitely more successful than the Fleischer’s in the long run. How odd, that from today’s vantage point, we can be nostalgic for the Fleischer’s approach.

The loose approach of Betty Boop films get criticized (or underappreciated) in the light of more structured films that followed (think Chuck Jone’s Coyote and Road Runner series). Betty Boop offered a different approach, one no less valid, and one more close to Jazz music, where animators improvised gags in a sequence, not always knowing where it was all leading to. It could be argued that the Betty Boop shorts were so far ahead of their time that series animation is still trying to catch up. Recent pilots such as Frederator/Nickelodeon’s Adventure Time by Pen Ward, show that looseness can still be applied to today’s cartoons with a winning result. Betty Boop may prove to be far more influential than Bugs Bunny over the long haul.

Shortly after Betty Boop’s success, the Fleischer’s secured the rights to animate E. Segar’s comic strip character Popeye. Its hard for us to appreciate how brilliant the Fleischer Popeye shorts are. For one, since they are based on someone else’s creation, it tends to diminish the credit we might bestow on the Fleischer’s. Yet, everything from how Popeye walked, spoke, and moved had to be figured out for animation. The Fleischer’s not only rose to those challenges, they delivered so much more. I like to screen the Popeye short, “The Paneless Window Washer” (1937) for my animation students. While Mickey Mouse shorts might still charm an audience, Popeye shorts like this one, have the power to astound us. My students watched the short in amazement and awe. The layouts, timing, and characterization are superb. Should we not be extra impressed that such expertly constructed shorts came from the same studio that was making the free-form Betty Boops? Bugs Bunny and other star characters that followed at rival cartoon studios delivered laughs but, don’t always have joy in every frame as the Fleischer Popeyes clearly do. Run, don’t walk, and pick up the new Fleischer Popeye collection today!