Frederic Back has won honors and awards from festivals and professional bodies around the world, but perhaps what most appeals to the retired animation filmmaker is the fact that his work is increasingly used by schools and environmental groups. In the years to come, one may be quite sure Back’s work will be even more valued than it is today.

Following a distinguished 25-year career in animation, Back has been named this year’s winner of the Banff Television Festival’s Award of Excellence. He is a four-time Academy Award nominee and two-time winner, picking up Oscars for Crac! in 1982 and The Man Who Planted Trees in 1988.

Typical of his profession, Back is a modest and quiet-spoken man. But he is also very much the militant, socially conscious artist who says hard work and a passionate commitment is the stuff of superior entertainment, uplifted spirits and a better world.

The artist has mixed feelings when it comes to personal acclaim.

He knows the awards are a welcome testament to the success of his work, but he wishes the many artists who inspired him and collaborated with him through the years might also receive their share of recognition. Awards ceremonies make the famous animator just a little bit nervous.

‘I have been so lucky over the years to have met so many generous creative artists and thinkers. These films would not have been made without people like producer Hubert Tison, who gave the animation department at Radio-Canada an international mission. Without this international aspect, the department would not have existed,’ he says.

Now formally retired from Radio-Canada, Back and his wife Ghylaine reside on a countryside estate near Montreal where they have planted literally thousands of trees.

Of course, Back remains active. He recently collaborated on a book about the Inuit, to be published this fall by the Museum of Civilization, and is completing a book on the St. Lawrence River, which will be published this fall by Radio-Canada and Quebec/Amerique and distributed internationally.

He travels and occasionally presents his films at foreign festivals. He says he has been approached by producers to work on new film projects but made a promise to his wife that he won’t return to the long grueling days and nights working at his animation table.

Then again, he says, ‘a promise is not a guaranteeÉthere are still so many important issues.’

‘There’s no animator on earth who has set a higher standard of excellence than this great artist,’ says Banff festival president and director Jerry Ezekiel. ‘His work is sublimely entertaining yet filled with ideas and ideals that inspire us all. He is a class act and we’re thrilled to have him as part of our own celebration of excellence.’

An artist, illustrator and filmmaker, Back won major recognition for his work in 1982 when Crac! – a tale about a charmed, very old rocking chair that refuses to be abandoned – won the Oscar for best animated film.

Also a lyrical history of Quebec, as witnessed by the rocking chair and the generations of family members who owned it, the film subsequently went on to win 23 other international awards, and in 1984, was selected as the sixth-best animated film of all time at the Olympiad of Animation in l.a.

In 1988, after five years of production and some 20,000 drawings, Back won his second Oscar for The Man Who Planted Trees (L’Homme qui plantait des arbes).

The film is a moving, flowing, pastel-flared rendering of the lifework of a solitary old shepherd who transforms a barren plain by planting trees. It is not an exaggeration to say the 30-minute piece has become an inspiration for young people around the world, and it has deservedly won more than 40 prizes, including awards at Annecy, Yorkton, Banff and an ASIFA International award presented at the 1988 Zagreb Festival.

Born in Germany in 1924, Back subsequently studied in France before emigrating to Canada in 1948. He has created artworks which can be seen throughout Quebec and began working in Canadian television in its earliest days, in 1952.

At Tison’s invitation, Back joined Radio-Canada’s animation film department in 1968 and went on to create films such as Abracadabra (1970); Inon ou la conquete du feu (1972), an animated rendering of the Algonquin legend of animals’ search for fire; La creation des oiseaux (1973); Illusion (1974); Taratata la parade (1977); the animated sequences for The Firebird (1979), a tv program produced by Jean-Yves Landry which won a Prague Gold award and an Emmy Award in 1980; and Tout-Rien (1980), which garnered an Oscar nomination in 1981.

Back’s latest work, Le fleuve aux grandes eaux (The Mighty River), completed in 1993, is a breathtaking animated essay on the great St. Lawrence River.

The 24-minute film took four years to complete and is made up of more than 17,000 drawings.

It, too, has profoundly touched people everywhere and has won more than 20 international honors, among them best animated film at the Los Angeles Critics Awards in 1993, an Oscar nomination, his fourth, the Grand Prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, an award from the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 1994, and the Grand Prize at the 5th International Animation Festival in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1994. The film is on the program at the recently opened Biosphere in Montreal.

‘Film is like art,’ says Back, ‘if one is to touch people, hard work and passion are necessary.’

Back is an officer of the Order of Canada, an officer of l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres de la France, and a 1994 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award recipient. He is the subject of a cbc documentary called Frederic Back, Master of Animation.

Past winners of the Banff Festival’s career achievement award include William Shatner, Peter Jennings, Barbara Frum, Walter Cronkite, Bea Arthur, David Suzuki, Sir Peter Ustinov, Ed Asner, Lorne Green, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dinah Shore, Gregory Peck and Norman Campbell.

The 1995 Banff Television Festival Award of Excellence is sponsored by Astral Communications.