Animation for Art’s Sake Is a Tough Cel

Sunday’s Calendar examined how Hollywood heavyweights are challenging Disney’s animation empire. Today’s series conclusion sees how the Hollywood animation boom has stifled the independent movement, which may find its future on the Internet, and how schools prepare students for the digital arts.

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After languishing at the fringes of the film industry for decades, animation is booming, but its unprecedented commercial success has come at the expense of the independent artists and festivals that sustained the medium during its dark days.

Working on minuscule budgets in the United States or in government-sponsored studios in Eastern Europe and Canada, individual artists pushed the boundaries of animation, exploring new media, visual styles and content during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when commercial production usually meant mindless kidvid and toy commercials thinly disguised as features.

Although their films were seen only by festival audiences and in touring compilations, these innovative artists won Oscars and provided mainstream filmmakers with new ideas. Long before computer-generated imagery became a Hollywood staple, artists at academic institutions and the National Film Board of Canada were experimenting with computer animation.

But the independent animated short has been co-opted by Hollywood. The competition among the major studios for talented, experienced artists has produced a rise in salaries and intense recruiting. Artists around the world who once pursued independent visions are working on big-budget features and TV shows. Why starve on a waiter’s salary or a government grant when you can earn a six-figure salary? And many artists who do make personal films seem more interested in creating a new “Ren & Stimpy” that a producer will buy for a pile of money than in exploring a style or technique.

Avant-garde animators see hope for their medium, however, on the Internet, where short, simply made cartoons can overcome sluggish modem speeds to find global distribution.

The demise of the government-funded studios in the former Eastern Bloc (more than a dozen studios existed in the USSR alone) eliminated another source of serious work that balanced the more mainstream shorts. Many of the Eastern European animators are now working on American features and programs, either in Los Angeles or in satellite studios around the world.

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The major animation festivals at Annecy, France; Ottawa, and Hiroshima, Japan, used to have the atmosphere of a summer camp, where a relatively small group of artists met to view each others’ work and to exchange ideas and gossip. Over the last decade, the focus of the festivals has shifted from screenings and socializing to buying and selling.

“I’m not even sure that the best independent films get into the festival circuit, because the members of the selection committees--who are usually good people--are afraid to pick films that are too unusual or out of the mainstream,” said independent animator Faith Hubley. “The problem is that the large festivals, with the exception of Hiroshima, are totally geared to the marketplace. I find the whole scene so bizarre that I feel like Alice in Wonderland--I can’t take it seriously. In the old days, people came to the festivals not to wear their clothes, not to be seen, not make money, not to make deals, but for the sheer joy of seeing challenging films and talking about them.”

Hubley and her late husband, John, won three Oscars and scores of festival prizes for their innovative films exploring subjects as diverse as childhood games, the folly of war and the threat of nuclear destruction. They were part of the group of international artists who worked during the early ‘60s to establish a festival in the lovely resort of Annecy in eastern France as animation’s equivalent of Cannes. (This year’s event concluded Saturday.) Her disappointment is echoed by Frederic Back, who won Oscars and the grand prizes at Annecy and Hiroshima for his ecologically themed films “Crac!” and “The Man Who Planted Trees.”

“Commercial production has overcome the basic purpose of the festivals, which should be a kind of revelation, a presentation of what people can do by themselves, and not big productions,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Montreal. “It may be the level of films has also declined; the majority of films seem to be of very mediocre quality. I think the problem is that Disney and other great companies have enough money to take all the talent away from short films and inventions. They risk annihilating those talents by making them work only in a very small area of the art.”

“All the animation festivals seem to have a market, a co-production seminar and a licensing seminar, but how many have writing seminars?” asked David Sproxton, the co-founder of Aardman Animations, the British studio that produced the award-winning clay shorts “Babylon,” “Creature Comforts” and “The Wrong Trousers.” “How many question the quality of the work at all, or even think seriously about training the next generation? Rhetorical questions, I know, but there are serious issues here.”

Not all the news is bad. Sproxton and his fellow artists at Aardman have helped to organize a new festival in Bristol, England, “Brief Encounters: A Celebration of the Short Film,” that offers seminars and competitions for writing and storyboarding to help young artists prepare and develop their ideas.

“As a group, we feel very strongly that much of what is wrong with many short films lies in the development of an idea,” he said. “If that idea is given the resources to develop, something better will come out.”

Another promising innovation is the Absolut Panushka Web site, designed by the Santa Monica interactive entertainment company Troon and underwritten by Absolut Vodka. Christine Panushka, an independent filmmaker and associate dean of animation at CalArts, selected 10-second original films by 24 artists from 12 countries for a mini-festival available online at https://www.absolutvodka.com.

“Animation has become a part of the Net through a little technology everybody’s starting to use called ‘Animated GIFS,’ and we thought it would be great to have a real animator lead the way and create original animation specifically for the Internet,” said Chris Tragos, a partner at Troon.

Visitors to the Web site can also explore an online history of independent animation and try creating a brief film of their own, using a simple program called Animation Tool. The site has received millions of “hits” and won awards at film festivals in the Netherlands and Los Angeles.

Although the size of the files currently imposes a practical limit of about 10 seconds of relatively simple imagery, site designer Deborah Callabresi noted that new software and faster modems will soon allow animators to create longer works specifically for the Internet.

“The people at Absolut really are interested in two-dimensional art,” Hubley said, “so the future of independent animation may lie in the support of a combination of enlightened corporations and individuals.”