Canadian animators claimed major awards at this year’s International Animated Film Festival in France. The celebrated festival, held in Annecy, a fairy tale town near Geneva, June 4-9, saw big showings for two NFB shorts: Paul Driessen’s The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg, which won the special jury and FIPRESCI awards, and Cordell Barker’s Strange Invaders, which was honored with a special distinction.

Two other NFB shorts were screened: Martine Chartrand’s Black Soul (in the official competition) and Jacques Drouin’s A Hunting Lesson. An episode of Pecola, Nelvana’s Japanese copro, also brought Canadians to the victory podium for special distinction for a TV series.

The FIPRESCI was awarded to Iceberg, produced by award-winning California ex-pat Marcy Page, for its ‘innovative form of storytelling, involving the audience in a little boy’s inner world.’ The nine-minute film uses a split-screen to show the mundane goings-on of a boy’s life on the left, and his imaginative interpretation of events on the right. He ends up a passenger on an ill-fated cruise ship – the Titanic, essentially – with the tone of the piece shifting from the comic to the tragic to the metaphysical.

Driessen, who remains in the south of France to complete an NFB/Dutch copro, says the lead character’s sense of isolation and vivid fantasy world is based on his own childhood. He was born in the Netherlands in 1940, at the time of the Nazi occupation. (His strong feelings for Canada began when the First Canadian Army liberated his homeland in 1945, and introduced him to the joys of chocolate and white bread.) After the war, his father, an ambassador, was stationed to Stalinist Moscow, taking the entire family with him. Local children were dissuaded from fraternizing with the foreigners, lest they be branded as spies. It was not until he was 10, and the family returned to the Netherlands, that Driessen had his first experience in a classroom with other children.

His career began when he blindly applied to a Dutch animation studio. In 1965, a 10-second commercial he did was shown in competition at Annecy. He later went to England and worked on the Beatles’ surreal feature Yellow Submarine (1968), directed by late Torontonian George Dunning. Dunning, an NFB veteran, introduced Driessen to the Film Board, which had a London office. Excited by the films he saw there, Driessen joined the organization, emigrating to Montreal in 1970. He continues to produce films at both the NFB and in Europe, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000 for his independent short 3 Misses.

Strange Invaders, co-produced by Barker and 30-year NFB vet Jennifer Torrance, is the long-delayed follow-up to Barker’s The Cat Came Back, a 7 1/2-minute folk song-driven short that also contended for an Oscar in 1989. When not working on his latest offering, for which he is credited with direction, animation, story and backgrounds, the Winnipeg native has paid the bills by animating/directing commercials for the North American and English markets. His list of clients includes Energy, Mines and Resources Canada, Benylin, Nike, Chili’s Restaurant and Bell Canada.

Barker credits Driessen’s NFB short An Old Box as his first artistic influence.

‘It was the first [animated] film I’d ever seen that made me forget about Warner Bros. and Disney,’ Barker comments.

Driessen says he had to invent his own style, simply because he had not seen much animation in his childhood, with the exception of the occasional Disney short in European cinemas. He says he’s unmoved by Uncle Walt’s recent slate of blockbusters.

‘It’s nothing different – I get a little bored by that stuff,’ he says. ‘But I do like clever storywriting, like both Toy Story films, just because [Pixar Animation Studios] is so good at it. The images are also interesting because they’re different.’

Driessen’s design in Iceberg bears little resemblance to Disney’s rich, classical style. He uses simple, grotesque lines to bring the boy’s world to life, with the ‘real’ side of the frame in bright colors, and the ‘imaginary’ side darker and almost monochromatic to illustrate the child’s fears.

Strange Invaders has its own outlandish style, somewhat reminiscent of that of alternative cartoonist Mark Marek. The film tells the tale of a childless couple that wakes to find a baby (‘It’), like a gift from heaven. They soon develop mixed feelings for their little visitor, however, as, in seemingly alien fashion, It wreaks havoc throughout their home. Barker has commented that his own ‘three evil boys’ inspired the piece.

NFB finds an audience

While some might associate working for the NFB with mainstream obscurity, Barker is satisfied with the promotional efforts of the public agency, which is looking to attach the film to a major motion picture as an opener.

‘They must have done something right, because I get comments from people everywhere that have seen The Cat Came Back,’ he says from a hotel in Paris, where Canal+ has bought Strange Invaders for broadcast throughout France. ‘Whether it’s been at theatres or on TV, there are certainly enough people who have seen it.’

In mounting his new film, Barker was fortunate to have avoided the budget cuts that have plagued the NFB in recent years.

‘My project steamed along, because it had been on the books for 10 years and languishing because of my being distracted elsewhere,’ he explains. ‘It was really up to me to push it forward. If I come to propose another one, that’s when I’ll see what’s happened to the budgets.’

Driessen, who has had a more prolific output at the NFB, recognizes the problems within the agency but has continued working unscathed.

‘The cutbacks are quite severe, but the animation department didn’t suffer as much as the live-action,’ he says. ‘[The NFB is] not well managed. The overhead is much too big, and the creative side suffers from that. But despite all the cuts, a lot of films at the animation departments, both French and English, are being made, and I’m glad I’m still part of that.’

No doubt it’s advantageous for the NFB to ally itself with filmmakers who have strong showings at a festival such as Annecy, which this year drew 6,000 attendees.

‘All eyes in the animation world are on Annecy,’ Barker says. ‘A lot of directors of other festivals show up to invite films to appear at their festivals, and the whole word-of-mouth and invitation process [begins], leading up to the Academy Awards.’

Driessen, on the other hand, has become skeptical about the festival’s growing mainstream component.

‘It’s getting too big, because the market is there and you get into all kinds of commercial venues,’ he says. ‘But it’s still partly an intimate festival because you meet old friends. It’s kind of a gathering point for animators who make personal films.’

Spot burnout

Barker’s commercials had taken too much time away from Strange Invaders, so he cut his spot workload down to just a few weeks in the last year. He anticipates receiving more commercial offers with the success of Strange Invaders, but is trying to find the discipline to refuse them and focus on his films.

‘Ten years of commercials is enough for anybody,’ he quips. Despite suffering from spot burnout, the animator still sees a lot of value in the commercials he has done, with the exception of ‘a few really embarrassing ones.’

‘I have a perverse interest in commercials,’ he says. ‘It’s doing the best you can with a huge number of guidelines – you have to please all these different people and you have all these different parameters to work in. When the whole thing is done, it feels like you’ve won a chess game.’

Driessen has only dabbled in commercials and admits he has led a ‘charmed life’ of doing projects close to his heart.

‘I did a few commercials and other things in between [my films], but I don’t really care [about them] and I don’t have to do them,’ he says.

In addition to Barker’s commercial jobs, another factor that kept sending him back to the drawing board was his shifting perspective brought on by the birth of each of his sons. The animator estimates he invested 4 1/2 years’ labor in the project, as compared to two years in the case of Driessen, who was teaching in Germany and working on 3 Misses while producing Iceberg.

Barker says he wants to try to wean himself off animating each of his films’ 12 frames per second by himself, ‘because based on [my rate of production so far] I’ve only got a few more films left in my lifetime.’ Yet despite the time it takes, it is artists such as him and Driessen who are keeping the tradition of personal animation alive.

‘If a project gets bigger, then it goes overseas [for production] and really starts to lose the creator’s touch,’ Barker says.

Both animators work in a similar fashion, drawing characters on paper and then scanning them into the digital domain, where they are colored in USAnimation, the 2D animation system from Montreal-based software company Toon Boom Technologies. Backgrounds are also colored in the computer, using Adobe Photoshop.

In terms of animation’s future in the digital landscape, Barker confesses to being intrigued by the Internet more as an additional delivery system than as a primary destination.

‘The Flash stuff that you can access instantly [doesn’t] really appeal to me that much,’ he says. ‘I love simple animation, but a lot of the stuff I’ve seen just isn’t really interesting looking, but I guess anything can be if it’s done properly.’

Barker says the NFB has approached him about doing Web animation and he is considering it, although widespread availability of greater bandwidth would help convince him. Meanwhile, Driessen has been talking with Hollywood animation studio Klasky Csupo about producing work for the Internet.

‘They’re interested in who I am and what I would do,’ he says. ‘It might end up like a series, but my kind of series. I would do it the way I like to do it.’ *

-www.nfb.ca

-www.annecy.org