ESSAYS
I spent most of June 2004 in Europe, visiting people and places
associated with Walt Disney. I also spent a couple of days at the
animation festival at Annecy, France. I'm writing about that trip,
which took me to Switzerland, Denmark, and England as well as France,
in several installments. MB
European Journal
II. Annecy
At almost the last minute, Phyllis and I shaved time off our stays
in Paris and Switzerland so we could add two nights at the Annecy
International Animated Film Festival to our itinerary. We had
been to the town of Annecy before, spending one rainy night there
in 1995 after visiting John
McGrew, but I had never before attended the festival. "The
films are not worth the trip," an animator friend told me,
"but the town is." The town's attractions were obvious
in 1995, even in the rain—Annecy sits on a beautiful lake,
looking out over the French Alps, and at its heart is a picturesque
"old town"—so I was sure a visit there would not
be wasted even if the festival disappointed.
 As
it was, I wound up wishing I could have spent more time at the festival.
I'm not sure that I would ever want to devote a full week to it,
but a day and a half clearly wasn't enough. I saw only a sampling
of the short films in competition (and missed the surprise winner
of the grand prize, Mike Gabriel's Lorenzo for Disney) and
only one of the five competing features. I had lunch with Amid Amidi
and Will Ryan, and met Bill
Plympton, but I didn't get to see nearly as many people as I
would have liked.
Despite the large number of festivalgoers from other countries,
Annecy is unmistakably and almost defiantly a French event. Signs
in English—and convention employees speaking more than an approximation
of English—were relatively scarce, and there was barely a nod
to other languages. Perhaps Mifa, the animation marketplace that
ran alongside the festival proper, was slicker and more international
in flavor, but I never got there.
The three film programs I attended opened with clever animated
festival "bumpers" that the audiences greeted raucously,
like old friends. When the second program devoted to shorts in competition
was late in starting, the theater filled not just with catcalls
but with paper airplanes—just what you'd expect from a festival
by and for cartoonists.
Most of the shorts in the program were a letdown compared with
the entertainment provided by the audience and the bumpers. I did
enjoy a two-year-old American computer-animated cartoon, Carlos
Saldanha's Gone Nutty for Blue Sky Studios, which I'd somehow
missed before. It's a much better film than Blue Sky's feature Ice
Age, in which the character Skrat was introduced. The most intriguing
entry, though, was Marc Craste's Jo Jo in the Stars, a British
film—in black and white!—that uses computer animation
to create a bleak and mysterious world. If Tod Browning were to
return to life as a computer animator, he'd probably make films
like Jo Jo.
The next day, I had just enough time before my train left for Geneva
to see part of the third shorts program. Like the second program,
it included one good American cartoon—Mark Kausler's It's
the Cat, an expert recreation, set to a song from the early
thirties, of what is most enjoyable about the free-flowing Hollywood
cartoons of those years. Kausler's cartoon got only a tepid response
from the apparently baffled audience. There was much more enthusiasm
for the film that followed, Through My Thick Glasses, a clunky
Norwegian-Canadian clay-animation effort about the Nazi occupation
of Norway. (Glasses wound up receiving an award for "special
distinction.")
 Even
though I saw only one of the five feature films in competition,
that was the only one I wanted to see, Bill Plympton's Hair
High. The other four sounded—and, to judge from stills
and posters, looked—variously dull or awful, or both. (A South
Korean feature, Oseam, won in the feature category.) Is it
even possible, I wondered, to make good short animated films when
the feature form is artistically moribund? Most of the shorts I
saw at Annecy could be taken as evidence that it is not.
I've never been quite sure what I think of Bill Plympton's films.
I remember very well how astonished and delighted I was by one of
his first shorts, Your Face, when I saw it in the late eighties,
and I've always been impressed by how fecund and inventive Plympton
is. He came to animation relatively late, in his mid-thirties, but
he mastered the medium with impressive speed. His films, unified
as they are not just by a drawing style but by his own drawings—the
animation is entirely his—are personal as few others are. But
my interest in his films has waxed and waned; something has always
made me question my enthusiasm for his work, and I can't claim to
have followed his career as closely as I might have.
Finally, when I saw Hair High at Annecy, I figured out what
was bothering me. A clue lay in Plympton's identification of his
cartoon as a "gothic comedy." "Gothic" it is,
I suppose, for reasons suggested by a summary of the film in Annecy's
program guide: "the legend of Cherri and Spud, a teenage couple
who are murdered on a prom night and come back to life [as skeletal
remains] a year later."
The problem with the "gothic" emphasis is this: until
the gruesome business at the end, Hair High has been
for most of its length a sharp and funny comedy, set at an early-sixties
high school, and a wonderful showcase for Plympton's genius at translating
mental states into startling but invariably apt drawings. There
has been nothing "gothic" about it.
Things go wrong in revealing ways, though, even before Cherri and
Spud are murdered by Rod, Cherri's jealous boyfriend. There's graphic
and painful violence when Rod pries loose a stooge's fingernail,
and again when another stooge's eyeball is pierced. Blood flows,
as if to question Plympton's renderings, in most of the film, of
a reality that is far more emotional than physical.
In Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation
in Its Golden Age, I describe the great achievement of Disney
animation in the late thirties as its bridging of the gap between
"inner" and "outer," so that cartoon characters
were for the first time wholly present on the screen, both physically
and emotionally. I write of Bill Tytla's animation for Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs: "Whatever passed through Grumpy's
mind, it seemed, was simultaneously visible in his face and body,
through acting of a kind that was possible only with a cartoon character."
As long as "inner" and "outer" are unified
in this way, a cartoon maker has a great deal of leeway in choosing
what to emphasize. What makes Bob Clampett's Warner Bros. cartoons
so thrilling, for instance, is that what's on the screen is almost
entirely "inner," an animated equivalent of the tumultuous
human psyche. What I see in the best Clampett cartoons, filled as
they are with fluid movement and expressive distortions, is what
the French philosopher Diderot wrote about more than 200 years ago,
when he described the human mind as "awash with many images,
many excitements, merging fears and fantasies that dissolve into
one another."
In the features from the Disney studio and its imitators—and
in computer-animated features like Pixar's—animation has evolved
in a very different direction. It has been increasingly concerned
over the decades with the "outer," in the form of literal
movement and realistic drawing. Even the animation of those characters
drawn in a true cartoon style has tended to slide into formulas
that nod toward individual expression without providing any of it.
As dreary as it is, such animation has somehow become the standard
against which other kinds of animation are measured and invariably
found wanting.
At some level, I'm afraid, Plympton has bought into the "illusion
of life" humbug that long ago robbed the Disney features of
their vitality. Plympton is very much an "inner" sort
of animator, one who is almost totally concerned with bringing to
the screen what is going on inside his characters' heads. At critical
points, though, as if bowing to the Disney line, he asserts the
supremacy of the "outer," in the form of the harshest
sort of physical reality, and thus denies the validity of exactly
what has made his characters so interesting. When he pulls off a
fingernail in excruciating close-ups, or murders his hero and heroine
for the sake of grim jokes at the senior prom, he mocks his audience—and
himself.
John Kricfalusi, that most vociferously anti-Disney of Hollywood
cartoonists, has done very much the same thing in his most recent
Ren &
Stimpy television cartoons, dominated as they are by disgusting
images. Like Plympton a brilliant "inner" sort of animator,
Kricfalusi has also erected imposing obstacles between his characters
and his audience, in effect conceding the whole vast domain of character
animation to his self-proclaimed enemies. What sad, strange victories
for the forces of dull, lifeless animation.
In short, I didn't come away from Annecy filled with high hopes
for the future of animation. But I came away thinking I had at least
glimpsed the future, and that's enough to make me want to go back
to that lovely town and its fascinating festival.
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[Click here to read the first
installment in this journal, about Disneyland Paris, the third
installment, about the Swiss village of Zermatt, or the fourth
installment, about Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens.]
[Posted July 21, 2004]
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