Canadian animation recently reaffirmed its excellence on the international stage, with two very different kinds of films winning awards at a pair of the world’s premiere festivals, both in France.

At the 55th Cannes Film Festival’s closing ceremonies May 26, The Stone of Folly, the directorial debut of Toronto’s Jesse Rosensweet, who also cowrote and produced, shared the Jury Prize for best short film with A Very Very Silent Film by India’s Manish Jha. Martin Scorsese presented the award to Rosensweet for his eight-minute stop-motion animated film, which features puppets by sculptor Alastair Dickson and animation by Phillip Marcus.

Two weeks later, renowned Montreal-based animator Christopher Hinton won the FIPRESCI international film critics’ prize at the International Animated Film Festival in Annecy for his seven-minute National Film Board short Flux. The project was also cited for special distinction ‘for the boldness of its animation and design and for its humor.’ It is the second consecutive year the NFB has triumphed at Annecy; last year Paul Driessen’s The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg won the special jury and FIPRESCI awards and Cordell Barker’s Strange Invaders received special distinction.

Whereas Hinton has created animation for the likes of the NFB (a 25-year relationship), CBC and various commercial studios, Rosensweet has thus far been a live-action director of photography by trade. He admits that part of the reason he chose to make an animated film was a realistic sense of the funding that he would be able to raise, given this was his first film as helmer.

‘My talents went further with a small crew working for a long time than if I was relying on a cast and a crew working really long days over a weekend,’ he says. ‘Making the film in one room on a tabletop would give me a lot of control for relatively the same budget.’

The Stone of Folly was inspired by the eerie figures in Dickson’s diorama-type sculptures. ‘Alastair was tickled by the idea of bringing his pieces to life,’ says Rosensweet.

While researching early 16th century medical facilities, equipment and practitioners, Dickson and Rosensweet came across a painting of the era by Hieronymus Bosch titled ‘Removing the Stone of Folly’ or ‘The Cure of Folly,’ which is seen in the opening of the film. It depicts a doctor cutting into the head of a patient to remove the stone of folly, which according to folk belief would cure ‘madness’, and which provides the storyline for the short.

The Stone of Folly was made for $30,000, with funding from Bravo!FACT, the Ontario Arts Council’s First Film and Video Fund, Toronto Arts Council and the NFB’s FAP fund, topped up out of Rosensweet’s pocket. The director says that with all he received in donated services and equipment, the screen value of the short is closer to $400,000.

Rosensweet felt especially fortunate for the loan of a Frazier Lens System from Panavision. It allowed him to indulge his longtime interest in macro-photography and to shoot with the lens nearly touching the 13 seven- to 12-inch characters. The expression and personality Marcus’ animation brings to the characters, combined with the language of the film and Rosensweet’s use of extreme close-ups encourages the audience to forget they’re watching puppets.

‘I approached the tabletop environment as though I was working with actors on a set,’ says Rosensweet. ‘It was boarded out the way you might see a feature film shot.’

The 60-day tabletop shoot at Marcus’ new studio Quack Quack in Toronto’s Danforth neighborhood was painstakingly slow, with a simple frame taking five to six minutes and a more complicated one 10 to 12 minutes, producing about five seconds of film in a 12-hour day.

Rosensweet says his next directing project will be a live-action feature, but surprised to come home with two awards.

The animator was born in Ontario, started his career in Winnipeg and now lives in Montreal. He has made more than a dozen NFB and independent films, including The Gift, Fiprecan and A Nice Day in the Country.

The style of Flux was inspired by Hinton’s daughter’s drawings, in which the important anatomical parts of figures were disproportionately prominent in size, color and perspective.

Flux experiments with the idea of playing with relative size and expands it to a similar treatment of time, noting that in memory certain events are more prominent than others.

‘The combination of the push and pull of time, coupled with the stretch and squash of the drawings themselves, has a certain freedom I’m very pleased with,’ says Hinton.

After trying several techniques, Hinton opted for old-fashioned black ink on quartered 8 x 11 sheets of paper.

‘With little pieces of paper you have to be more economical with the lines,’ says Hinton. ‘With Flux, I found a way of working that just suits me.’

Although much of Hinton’s work is traditional, he is a fan of digital innovation and says it increases his artistic freedom. This is exemplified by the way the black pen-and-ink drawings were colored and rendered in the computer.

‘Technology has allowed me to be much more independent, and I find I can work on two or three projects at the same time,’ says Hinton. ‘It tends to make things much more economical.’

Hinton is currently on sabbatical from Concordia University, where he is a professor of fine art, and is using the time to concentrate on making independent animated shorts, even if they live in obscurity in his own country.

‘In Europe, they are much more aware of independent short film as an art form and as a dialogue for adult themes,’ he says. ‘NFB films and independent animated films are incredibly well received in Europe and Canadians have a great reputation abroad for short animation, but you can’t even see [the films] in Canada.’

-www.nfb.ca