A LOT OF… ANIMATED THINGS
Year 2008 was announced the Year of Animation. The celebration of ‘60 years of Polish animation’ is to go hog wild. Polish Audiovisual Publishing Company announced a contest to take part in organization of jubilee parties. I cannot wait the list of cultural events: festivals, roundups, meetings with filmmakers and occasional publications. However, one has to take a chill pill and make use of what offers the cinema (fabulous animated Persepolis) and cultural press. Armed with patience, I flick through the titles. Fortunately, I’ve got lucky and here and there found texts about animation. I enter the forest of information about cinema animation.
Craft and Artistry
Editorial staff of “Magazyn Filmowy SFP” (Film Magazine of SFP – Stowarzyszenie Filmowców Polskich / Polish Filmmakers Association; issue no. 2/2007) encourages discussion about animated movies, to take part in jubilee Year of Animation. A very good idea. Among various cultural events it is worth to get to know up-to-date opinions from the perspective of ‘here and there’ by the people who are concerned with this art discipline not only in practice but also in theory. Questions asked by the editorial staff, determining the range of discussion, are as follows: What animated cartoon is required, to what audience should it be addressed and how should it search for its audience? Let’s have faith that asked to the blackboard people from film circles will answer and we will read interesting opinions in successive issues of “Magazyn”.
Alina Skiba, (director and producer of animated movies) in a text Co to za sztuka (What an art is it) opening the discussion, tries to tidy up multitude of terms and opinions about animation. And here I have first reservation or at least doubt. Skiba writes that in common belief (having in mind Polish recipients) animated movie is a bed-time cartoon, a short cartoon movie in television or feature family productions of huge movie companies (Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar). Hardly anybody would list Spider-Man although it is also an animated movie but in 3D. 3D is a movie, as Skiba writes, “with participation of actors filmed on blue-box and bounded in computer generated elements.”
However, associated with 3D animation Shrek is actually an example of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) animation. Using freely terms (to avoid repetitions and to diverse statements) 'animated movie' and 'animation' may lead to misunderstanding – and here hides submitted previously doubt. A movie as such is a certain wholeness, artistic statement whereas animated movie is a wholeness but the medium of artistic statement is animation (of different kinds: puppet animation, drawings animation, stop-motion animation etc.). When we use the term ‘animation’ in new technology context we do not have to mean animated movie because we may refer to one of the techniques which creators of a given movie decided to use. That is why we would not necessary define Spider-Man as animated movie. Still for us it is a theatrical movie, with computer generated elements in which animation has only menial function, is not autonomous. Let’s regard that we will use the term animated movie for feature productions intended for cinema (not only those best known, American ones, but also those from Japanese studio Ghibli or for example French Les Triplettes de Belleville) and productions made for TV (those might be for example children series). We will not take into account movies in which animation is used as one of techniques, where the intention of makers/producers was not to make an animated movie but a blockbuster diversified by animated inserts (without which it would be difficult to make certain kind of scene).
We have to remember about animated artistic cinema, about author’s cinema, as well. Such a movie would lie on antipodes. Since Skiba asks in the title: “What an art is it”, she should not omit art, in its artistic dimension not only craft’s. For sure we need craftsmen creating animations to satisfy: commercial, digital platforms and mobile telephony needs and being able to supply movie teams working on feature productions, but we need also animated movies creators – artists, who will be capable of going beyond cliché in told stories. Neither knowledge about technology nor being au fait with using it guarantee creating real art.
Issue about Animation
Zbigniew Żmudzki talks aptly about that in conversation with Artur Zaguła (Oscar for Se-maphore?) published in the web magazine “Purpose”. Producer of rewarded this year by Oscar Piotruś i Wilk (Peter and the Wolf) claims that “computer animation trivialized itself and it is difficult to make significant masterpiece in 3D animation. It is just a technological masterpiece, but when a movie masterpiece, a significant movie, is to be created, one can achieve better results with the use of classic techniques such as puppet technique”. Further he lists other nominated movies mainly made with the use of traditional techniques and only in a low degree with the use of computer. By the way it is worth to write that the whole January issue [1 (40) 2008] of “Purpose” is devoted to animation (of course in context of enterprise in culture as this is the profile of the magazine). We will find there also a conversation with Wojtek Wawszczyk (I had a lot of luck, talks Maja Ruszkowska-Mazerant), young, talented and well known in the film industry animator who creates author’s cinema, but engages himself in bigger productions (currently cooperates with the film director of feature adaptation of cartoon Jeż Jerzy (Hedgegog George) and trailer for recently completed Drzazga (Splinter) and movie photos from that animation may be viewed in the gallery of the magazine); there is also an interview with Mariusz Frukacz, organizer of Polish-wide Festival of Author's Animated Movies OFAFA and with Piotr Szczepanowicz, collaborating on formation of Peter and the Wolf.
I recommend also a trip around Museum of Animation and San Francisco about which tells Magda Wojnowska.
The Main Thing is the Balance
Going back to the article of Alina Skiba – one has to agree with the author when she writes that times have changed and with them a market of senders and recipients. New technologies and distribution channels have appeared as well as a different sensitivity of a viewer. Jerzy Kucia takes notice of that in conversation with Martyna Olszewska published last year in Cracow's quarterly “Splot” (Animation in context of reality 1/2007): “[…] when one looks at successive age-groups, one may notice that they enter university with different experience and expectations. Nowadays most often come along people thinking about film in different artistic categories and interested in it in commercial terms. But it is probably feature of contemporary life. It seems to me also that the young are better prepared to today’s reality than older generations. They are more conscious of market rules and of the fact that to have conditions for artistic work one has to make them on his or her own”. Kucia is a representative of older generation – in creating animation (animated movies) sees mainly possibility of author’s statement and perceives a creative process as developing one’s artistic personality. He does not care about creating feature animation as he knows that then he would have to conform his visions and a movie would lose its personal character. From the mentioned conversation with Wawszczyk, a young generation animator, we can see that he looks trifle different at the role of an artist in process of making an animated movie. “Being in Germany I saw the second face of animated movie. Polish Film School believes in artistic, author’s, often one-person cinema, whereas German taught me the craft, being in contact with the audience and evolved me from the technical side. Finding a balance between artistic aspect and craft’s correctness is extremely difficult but that is where probably hides the secret of a good movie.”
Artificial Divisions
Maybe the division into an author's cinema with high artistic values, made almost by one person, and feature productions, being a subject to commercialisation (a movie has to pay for itself so it uses animated tricks) will become anachronistic and artificial in no way grasping the wealth that arises thanks to the new and more accessible technologies (the expression of which is among others convergence culture – media unifying, blurring the division into radio, television and Internet etc., changing a television- telecommunication- multimedia landscape). An attempt of distinguishing a clear animation (without a living actor and in which one animates, that is, makes different materials move) from animation that is not only a lap on author's movie or varying the side of the viewer with accompaniment to the author’s movie, will be an echo of artificial divisions. Even today I do not know how to treat being prepared by Piotr Dumała movie Las (Forest) in which there are to be joined author's cinema and animation.
Vehicle of Discovery
Let’s stick to Piotr Dumała for a while. An artist with whom apparently most often talk journalists both from high circulation media and those of smaller outreach. About going beyond enchanted figures of reclusive animator, patient monk spending years on the masterpiece of his life, opening oneself to new challenges and animation as a part of bigger entirety talks Piotr Dumała in a conversation with Agnieszka Wróblewska published in monthly “Morele i Grejpfruty” [2 (4) 2008]. Dumała is one of the greatest creators of animation, a lecturer in the Film School in Łódź, a known in Poland and in the world artist with, as it turns out, not stabilized outlooks on animation. And this lack of stabilization and attachment to one, unchanged opinion about the art of moving images is something salutary in a creative process. When Dumała confesses: “I have reached such a stage in my life in which I would like to do something else, in which animation is part of something bigger, in which it meets with something else which is common now, for example today’s modern theatre practically does not exist without animation. The term animation as such has changed too. Once there were single creators who had their own styles, they were sitting in their own cellars, rooms and studios, alone or with some other – one – person”, he explains thereby why he engaged himself upon an author’s movie (not opting out of animation). He needed a contact with another person, living, not drawn, actor who contributes a lot to a created composition, who is director’s partner. Moreover, as he says, he wanted “animated movie to become a ‘vehicle of discovery’, not only making next movies, similar to the previous ones.”
What viewer, what movies
In the conversation with Dumała we can find also answers to the questions asked by the “Magazyn”: What animated movie is required, to what audience should it be addressed? The Author of animated Zbrodnia i Kara (Crime and Punishment) wants to make movies for normal people, who looking through movie repertoire wander what interesting movie go to the cinema for; so not for the chosen, festival audience (as usually only in such a closed circulation appear artistic animated movies, with no expectations to become a blockbuster) but for the audience with whom, as Dumała believes, one can engage in dialogue through a work of art, especially as an artist put his heart and energy into his work. Dumała hopes for a few thousands audience. I think that even one thousand viewers, one thousand sensitive and reasoning viewers, who will not swallow a movie like one more seed of popcorn, should give pleasure.
But is Alina Skiba thinking about such a viewer when she asks a reader to make notice of the fact that nowadays one has to be skilfully format a movie i.e. to decide beforehand on the format of production: to define kind of a movie depending on technique (2D, 3D, CGI, clay-mation, cut-out, puppet animation), viewer (adults, children, children at kindergarten age), genre (action, adventure, educational, kindergarten or science-fiction movie, action comedy, comedy, sitcom, musical, drama) and channel of distribution (cinema, TV, DVD, Internet)? I do not think so, as skilful formatting of production is a guarantee of achieving decent profit and yet one thousand people will not contribute to it. It would be ideal to make visually attractive, modern productions, offering ambitious broadcasting destined to the cinema, TV, for DVD production and to the Internet. Agreement to the format – one has to remember about it when writing a request for subsidy to different institutions, but we have to remember that a word may have also a negative undertone; formatting of artistic activity imprisons it in rigid corset of set phrases, deprives of artistry and excessively emphasises craft by the way. As a viewer of animated movies I am waiting, above all, for the artistic cinema. If I am to start to use the VoD (Video on Demand) and download animated movies in a digital video rental shop then I will be waiting for ambitious productions, preferably masterpieces.
Boom
I hope that the jubilee of Polish animation and the Oscar for Peter and the Wolf will make people interested in animation and in cultural press reviews there will be more texts about this still neglected field of art.
Agnieszka Kozłowska
Translated by Magdalena Sokolnicka