Montreal: This year, the National Film Board’s English animation studio has opened the doors wide to coproduction opportunities and presales.

The strategy not only enhances the domestic and worldwide distribution of 29 new nfb animated films in production in 1995/96, and its rich library collection, it is a response to projected cutbacks that will see the studio’s annual budget reduced from $1.7 million this year to $1.4 million in 1996/97, says Studio A executive producer Barrie Angus McLean.

The new slate of nfb animated films is a labor of love from many talented directors highlighted by two programs, Kama Sutra, a two-part, two-hour special from directors Ishu Patel and Aileen Brophy, and Short Animated Canadian, a six-part, three-hour anthology featuring the works of many of the country’s superstar animation directors.

Targeted at international primetime television, Kama Sutra combines animation and live action and is a meditation on the ancient philosophy that ties healthy sexuality and loving relationships to non-violent and richer lives.

McLean hopes Kama Sutra will do as well on tv and cable as the two-part The Tibetan Book of the Dead, coproduced with nhk in Japan and Mistral Films of France, has done in the home-video market.

Short on moral judgments, with graphic sequences illustrating the arts of love, there are concerns the program’s sexual content might put a damper on North American tv and media sales. Coproduction interest has come from the Gemini Corporation in Southern India and elsewhere, says McLean.

The nfb is actively on the lookout for coproduction partners and presales for Short Animated Canadian, an anthology of 12 films that use various animation techniques. Each half-hour program is comprised of two titles plus a wraparound in which the filmmakers discuss their ideas and techniques. The package will be ready by mid-1996, says McLean.

Pitched in earnest at last month’s Banff Television Festival, McLean calls the three-hour package ‘extraordinary,’ adding that just about every director associated with the series has won a major international award.

BBC Bristol is a serious contender for the u.k. rights. ‘At $180,000 for the entire package, it’s simply a great buy,’ says the veteran producer.

The series raises topical social and moral issues with often subtle storylines laced with the wild imaging and humor typical of the board’s top talents.

Entries include two form-experimental films, Gayle Thomas’ Quilt and Paul Driessen’s The End of the World in Four Seasons, now completed but not released, and two films about encounters with super forces, Craig Welsh’s Wings and Robert Doucet’s Flying Canoe, the latter based on an ancient French legend about a group of lumberjacks who cut a hasty deal with the devil.

Behavioral extremes are explored in Les Drew’s Shyness, while John Weldon’s Scant Sanity is a computer/film meditation on the mind, the brain and reality. Weldon was the co-winner of the 1979 Oscar for the film Special Delivery.

Matters of life and death are raised in Children Speak from directors Bozenna Heczko and Georgine Strathy, while Reincaration is a rendering of an ancient Buddhist tale from double Oscar nominee Patel.

The human psyche revealed is the theme of Roslyn Schwartz’s I’m Your Man, a feminist, mixed-media rendition of the Leonard Cohen tune of the same title.

Village of Idiots, directed by Eugene Fedorenko, winner of the 1980 Oscar for Every Child, uses multiplane animation cut-outs to tell a tale about every man based on an Old European parable and a radio play by John Lazarus.

The series concludes with two titles on the theme ‘beside the normal,’ Inside Out by Wendy Tilby, Oscar-nominee for Strings (1991), and director Marcy Page’s Waves, a computer-generated story of romance based on the Thetus and Peleus myth.

Studio A is also producing Tiananmen Square, a short from exiled director and former Beijing art professor Shui Bo Wang, and Passerby from director Donald McWilliams. McWilliams is considered by many to be the strongest defender of nfb traditions first established by the legendary filmmaker Norman McLaren.

In Tiananmen Square, complex Chinese history combines with a design mix of European modernism, socialist heroism and traditional silk painting.

Passerby is a one-hour exploration of life’s meaning at the end of the 20th century. The film is a coproduction with the English Program’s Studio C, the nfb’s documentary unit, and mixes live-action footage with archival material, enhanced through animation special effects.

McLean says the studio can reinvest coproduction and presale earnings and is looking for $500,000 in new revenue sources in the year ahead, ‘just to maintain our critical mass of key creative personnel.’

‘We have to hustle,’ he says. ‘A further constraint is that we are definitely not competing with the private sector.’

Still, on a budget of only $1.7 million, Studio A has managed to develop a rich and varied line-up of 29 films for 1995/96, and once again this year, the nfb is the only Canadian producer to walk away with an Oscar, for Bob’s Birthday, coproduced with Channel 4 and Snowden/Fine Productions, both of the u.k.

This season, Studio A is introducing a multi-language series promoting conflict-resolution skills in children. The hope, says McLean, is that social service agencies and educational broadcasters will show some creative flair, get with the program and buy in.

Director Janet Perlman’s Dinner For Two is the first of three or four eventual titles in the series, with cd-rom distribution and subsequent application for adults in the works. A second film, When the Dust Settles, is being directed by Louise Johnson.

Other animation production highlights this season at Studio A include director Brian Duchscherer’s Glasses, a nine-minute puppet film on the subject of perception; a superbly conceived, traditional cel animation kiddies’ film called How Dinosaurs Learned to Fly from directors Isobel Marks and David Verrall; Heidi Blomkvist’s The Dance; Lead, a cel and computer-animated film on environmental toxins from director Michael Fukushima; and Snow Cat, a half-hour DLI Productions/ nfb coproduction on the theme of healing

Also on tap: Francoise Hartmann’s Solitude, a new children’s wax-crayon-on-glass film, and Words, a paper-line, computer-manipulated 10-minute film designed to motivate adult illiterates from director George Geertsen.

McLean says the production values inherent in nfb animation films reflect two and three years of a director’s investment in the creative process, a non-industrial, film d’auteur approach wherein the director does virtually all of the work.

From this perspective, the production value for the 180-minute Short Animated Canadian package is over $5 million.