Tracing the kings of animation
Animation, according to its elder statesman John Halas, is a medium of extremes. It’s used at one extreme as a vehicle for burlesque comedy, and at the other to express highly complex ideas. The burlesque, ingrained in the gag-a-second US tradition, has tended to dominate, but Halas’s recently completed TV series, Masters of Animation, aims to show that there is more to the medium than wise-cracking rabbits and hapless, mouse-chasing cats.
The series, which went on air last month in Canada and will be shown on the BBC, is ambitious in both scope and objectives. It comprises 13 half-hour programmes which analyse the development and practice of animation in 10 countries. There are two programmes on Canada, one each on the US, Japan, Russia, the UK, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Italy, France and Poland, and two programmes devoted to computer animation.
The idea of a series bringing together the world’s greatest animators was suggested to Halas by the International Animated Film Association 10 years ago. He brooded on it for almost a decade, and has spent the past two years labouring to put the programmes together.
Halas’s qualifications to pronounce on 75 years of animation around the world are impeccable. Since coming to the UK from Hungary in 1937, he has produced more than 2,000 animated films, including the classic Animal Farm (which he made in 1954 with his wife Joy Batchelor) and Automania 2000, which was an international success and Oscar nominee. Today, about to celebrate 50 years in British animation, he is as busy as ever: producing animated educational films, working on a series of programmes about artists such as Leonardo and Botticelli, and completing the Animation and Computer Graphics Dictionary for publication next year. All this in addition to producing, directing and co-financing Masters of Animation, and writing a book of the series to be published by the BBC.
The series cost £300,000 to make, with half the cash coming from Halas and the rest from the BBC and co-production agreements like the one with Canada. A deal with Italian TV is imminent, there is plenty of interest from the US networks, the series should sell in eastern Europe, where animation is hugely popular, and there are plans to sell videos of the programmes in the wake of their TV showings. “The intention,” says Halas, “is to hit as hard as possible, to reach as many people as possible, and to show what animation is able to do. The series concentrates on the best examples of work done in the past 25 years, and has a form which is easy to follow.” In the programmes covering individual countries, Halas traces the development of animation and puts each animator’s work in a broader context. For him, great animators are artists who express in their own way the moods and traditions of the country in which they work.
Italy, with its great operatic tradition, is characterised by a fusion of sound and vision, summed up in the work of Emanuele Luzzati, and by pantomime burlesque, of the type practised by Bruno Bozzetto. In Poland, animation is artistic, pessimistic and attempts to “reveal the impossible”. Halas says that it was while assessing material for the programme on Poland that he made his most exciting discovery – the work of Witold Giersz, who paints on celluloid and glass. According to Halas, “he combines texturised animation and fluid, American-type movement in a way that has not been explored before to such brilliant effect.” In the UK, animation is, he says, both technically excellent and closely allied to satire and literature. Halas cites Geoff Dunbar’s Ubu as an example of a brilliant animated film which has been translated from literature, and argues that such work reveals a subtlety of thought that is often missing from animation in the US and elsewhere in Europe. “There is”, says Halas, a richness in British animation which I wanted to present to a wider audience.” As well as Dunbar, he mentions the work of Alison de Vere, Bob Godfrey and George Dunning.
The series as a whole concentrates on film rather than commercials, except in computer graphics, where the sheer volume of ad work is impossible to ignore. Advertising work gets little coverage, first because of the practical problems of obtaining copyright clearance from agencies and clients, and second because Halas doesn’t think animated ads illustrate any techniques not used in films. He has by no means exhausted all the countries producing innovative animation, and if the series is successful he hopes to extend it with further surveys. He wanted to include Czechoslovakia, but refused to pay the huge fees demanded by the Czech film export board for worldwide rights. China, too, is rediscovering animation, and now has a 350-strong studio in Shanghai producing films with a strong element of mysticism derived from Chinese fairy tales. Another omission is Bulgaria, where, according to Halas, animation is the primary art form. “In Bulgaria,” he says, “there is a hood deal of experimentation and a search to reveal the inner emotions through animation, something which is not possible there with other art forms.”
The search to express inner emotion is clearly what, for Halas, separates good technical animation from great work. He can appreciate cartoons, but he wants animation to be seen as something more than that.“Cartoons have their place,” he explains, “but much cartoon-style animation is like hitting the same note on a big keyboard. It does no good to the medium; it’s not forward-looking; it’s not expanding.” This insistence on looking forward rather than back is evident in the programme on the US. Tributes are paid to Disney, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, but the emphasis is on animators who since the 1950s have tried to extend the creative frontiers of animation in the US: John and Faith Hubley, Barrie Nelson, Leo Salkin, Joanna Priestley.
“I wanted to show the enormous diversification of styles in the US, giving emphasis to the fact that it is not only excellent in animation built around cheap gags and confrontation,” he says. “The popularisation of the medium derived from the US, and I had to acknowledge that fact that it was there that the industrialisation of animation took place. But I also wanted to prove that there is a much richer seam of talent in the US than in Hollywood alone.”
Halas has no time for those who say that animation was born and died with Disney, and that soaring production costs mean that his ultra-detailed style of animation will never be bettered. “To say that animators will never animate in the same way as Disney,” he insists, is like saying that you will never repeat what Mozart and Beethoven did centuries ago. We have passed on from that period into new periods which make different demands. Consider Disney as a Beethoven. We don’t want to repeat this any longer. It has passed into te archives.”
Halas sees progress on two fronts: technical innovation, such as the use of computer graphics, and artistic development, allowing fuller characterisation and the expression of deeper emotions. He was an early champion of computer animation. His only caveat is when it is used to replicate conventional animation instead of striving for different effects. “Animators haven’t yet learned how to use the tools for fluid, hand animation effects,” he says. “Many TV commercials done by computer lack the fluidity and the humanity of conventional animation.”
In artistic terms, he admires the work of many current animators, but he has special regard for the films of Russian animator Yuri Norstein, whose work includes the unforgettable Tale of Tales. “Norstein is a brilliant creator,” he says. “To express so much humanity and such subtle emotions using such simple means is truly unique.” The reclusive Norstein, a slow and meticulous animator, has a dark corner in one of the studios at the masive Soyuzmultfilm complex in Moscow. He is currently working on a film based on Gogols short story, The Coat, which, according to Halas, is due for completion in 1988.
Replying to the question “Which animator’s work would you take to the proverbial desert island?”, Halas is at first cagey. “I’d take a drawing board and start animating,” he says. Then he comes clean. “I’d take three reels, one by Norstein, one by the Yugoslavian Nedeljko Dragic, and one by Frederic Back from Canada. They are all individual artists, who take two to four years to make a film, so once I’ve used up those reels I’ll have to wait a long time for their next productions.”
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