Short Film (Animated): I Met The Walrus, Madame Tutli-Putli, Even Pigeons Go To Heaven, My Love, Peter & The Wolf

With his nominated short I Met the Walrus, rookie Toronto director Josh Raskin wanted to peer inside the brain of an angst-ridden adolescent who sought guidance from John Lennon at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel nearly 40 years ago.

The six-minute prize-winning film distils an extraordinary 40-minute tape-recorded meeting between 14-year-old fan Jerry Levitan and the Beatle during Lennon’s days as an outspoken peace activist.

‘I was enchanted by this artifact and its message. But I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed,’ an elated Raskin told Playback on the phone from the Sundance Film Festival, where he was screening the film. ‘I wanted to get inside the head of a naive, star-struck 14-year-old without trying to interpret what happened.

‘When you make a film, it’s because you are passionate. You feel like you’ve accomplished something if it touches a few people. So the Academy Award nomination is really thrilling.’

Levitan, today a lawyer and also the film’s producer, took nearly four decades to do something with the famous audio-tape and Super 8 footage he took during his encounter.

‘It’s very personal. I had been approached but I didn’t want to do something cheesy. I wanted to do something artistic. When I met Josh, it just clicked,’ Levitan says from his Toronto home.

In 1969, Levitan knocked on the musician’s hotel room door posing as a reporter for ‘the Canadian news,’ and was welcomed by Lennon. Levitan believes the Beatle worried that the Love Generation was turning bad: ‘He told me, ‘If you run round wild you’re going to get smacked. You have to protest non-violently.”

With Lennon’s message of peace as a backdrop, the rapid-fire animated short integrates hand-rendered illustrations by artist James Braithwaite that are meant to echo Lennon’s own drawing style, as well as computer drawings by Alex Kurina.

‘I took the interview and the drawings and I wiggled them around and made a horrible mess, which is probably in part inspired by the [1968 animated Beatles] movie Yellow Submarine,’ Raskin says.

Levitan financed the film along with Bravo!FACT. The National Film Board, which produced fellow nominee Madame Tutli-Putli, also provided indispensable assistance, adds Raskin. ‘They paid for a 35mm print, which is the primary screening format. So in a way, the NFB is directly responsible for this nomination.’

Levitan views the Oscar nom as simply another incredible thing that’s happened to him since he met Lennon. ‘I walked out of that hotel room a changed person. He was my hero. If you look at the footage, it’s more about me than him. That meeting has had a profound impact on my entire life.’

www.imetthewalrus.com