The Cartoon Grows Up

TV Ontario ran two animated features, Perspepolis and Mary and Max, on Saturday Night at the Movies on March 17. As usual, between features, they ran interview footage relating to the films. This segment features Oscar winner Chris Landreth (Ryan), Director and animator Robin Budd (Producing Parker, Ruby Gloom) and me.

Marjane Satrapi on Making a Film From Comics

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis and the co-director of the animated version, gives her thoughts on making a film from comics.

"Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they're two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you're always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there. And when you make a comic it never happens that you have 500 or 1,000 people reading it in the same place at the same time, all reacting. The language of cinema and comics is different, even though they both use images. In comics, you write with images; they're like pictograms. And in a movie you think about movement and sound and music, all those things that are not considerations when making comics."

Rowley on Persepolis

I want to draw your attention to Stephen Rowley's review of Persepolis, which has only recently been released in Australia. It begins:

"Even those who love animation are prone to dark speculation about its shortcomings as a medium. The lack of live actors and the associated hindrance to truly subtle performances, in particular, is often cited as limiting the potential for serious dramatic work in animated films. The fear is that the relative paucity of full length, adult-oriented dramatic features might not only be due to a lack of courage and imagination on the part of directors and studio executives, but might also reflect actual limitations of animation itself. Thank goodness, then, for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis."

Rowley goes on to enumerate the ways that animation is better suited to telling this story than live action would have been. Definitely worth reading.

Animated Oscar Nominees

Nominees for Best Animated Feature

Perspeolis (Sony Pictures Classics) Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Ratatouille (Walt Disney) Brad Bird
(Ratatouille also got a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing.)

Surf's Up (Sony Pictures Releasing) Ash Brannon and Chris Buck

Nominees for Best Animated Short

I Met the Walrus
A Kids & Explosions Production
Josh Raskin

Madame Tutli-Putli (National Film Board of Canada)
A National Film Board of Canada Production
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski

Même Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven) (Premium Films)
A BUF Compagnie Production
Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse

My Love (Moya Lyubov) (Channel One Russia)
A Dago-Film Studio, Channel One Russia and Dentsu Tec Production
Alexander Petrov

Peter & the Wolf (BreakThru Films)
A BreakThru Films/Se-ma-for Studios Production
Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman

I have seen all of the feature nominations this year and I hope that Perspeolis wins. I have great admiration for Ratatouille, but Perspepolis points in a direction that I would like to see animated features follow. An Oscar win would certainly help that. Also, Perspepolis has yet to get a wide release, so an Oscar win would benefit the film economically in theatres as well as on DVD. The other two features are no longer in theatres and they've already made the majority of their DVD sales.

Some may argue that Persepolis could win for animated feature and Ratatouille would get the award for screenplay as compensation, but I highly doubt that an animated film will ever get the award for screenplay. However, it is a tribute to Ratatouille and Brad Bird that the script was worthy of a nomination.

I've seen three of the five shorts nominations. I won't name which ones because none strikes me as a truly great film. As a result, I don't have a rooting interest in this category. If people have comments about the nominations (and the shorts category in particular), I'd be happy to hear them.

Marjane Satrapi at the New York Film Festival

These are clips from a press conference after the screening of Perspeolis at the New York Film Festival. If you only watch one clip, make it the first where Satrapi talks about choosing animation over live action in order to increase audience identification with the characters.

Persepolis

Persepolis started as a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It's autobiographical, relating her childhood in Iran during the period when the Shah was deposed and the government that replaced it was (and remains) an Islamic theocracy. This combination of a coming-of-age story set against political turmoil is what gives the story its power. Satrapi's family is politically liberal, so their position relative to the government was always precarious.

Marjane confronted for wearing a Michael Jackson button.

Persepolis is now an animated feature made in France, co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. It's currently playing festivals (The Toronto International Film Festival and the Ottawa International Animation Festival, where I saw it and where it took the award for Best Animated Feature). It is due for release in North America in December in order to qualify for the Oscars. It has already been selected as France's Oscar entry for the category Best Foreign Language Film and of course it will be eligible for a nomination for Best Animated Feature.

The film is a successful adaptation of Satrapi's book and I highly recommend that you see it. Besides being a satisfying experience in itself, it stands in stark opposition to most Hollywood animated features. It's drawn animation. It's black and white. It deals with politics and the real world. It not only has a female protagonist, but as Satrapi is the screenwriter and co-director, it has a genuinely female point of view.

Marjane with her grandmother, one of the most vivid characters in the film.

All of the above qualities are nothing special in live action. I'm sure that the audiences who view Persepolis at live action film festivals will that find it fits easily into the world of independent films and their subject matter. But in the world of animation, Persepolis blazes many new trails and it shows just how provincial animated features are.

Yes, short animated films tackle many of the same themes, but the films are difficult to find and rarely reviewed. Whether we like it or not, features are the coin of the realm when it comes to film, and it's there that audiences and critics focus their attention.

Animation tends to speak metaphorically. If it has a point to make, it places it within a fantasy context. This is one of the things that's kept animation at the children's table. Only a few animated film makers working in long format have grappled with the world as it is: Ralph Bakshi and Paul Fierlinger come to mind.

What Satrapi has done with her first film is to show that animation is capable of more than Hollywood will allow. The film has shattered many tropes of conventional wisdom and proved in its festival screenings that it satisfies audiences. What she's done is to take subject matter that's commonplace in independent films and shown that animation can communicate it successfully. It's depressing that someone without a background in animation can use the medium more broadly than those who have laboured in the industry.

Perspepolis will not be the highest grossing animated film released this year. It may not win any Oscars. But Persepolis is unquestionably the most important animated film of the year in terms of its subject matter and how the subject is treated. Perspeolis suggests a way forward that animation has mostly ignored. I'm not saying that all animated films should be like this one, but what good is a medium that voluntarily avoids dealing with large portions of human experience? That's Hollywood animation in a nutshell.

Director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart, Nobody's Fool) said in a recent interview,

“I believe there are conversations filmmakers have with one another that they don’t have across the table,” said Mr. Benton. “I believe Butch Cassidy [and the Sundance Kid] is a conversation that Will Goldman was having with Bonnie and Clyde. Its a conversation that can only be done through work.”

I'm sure that Marjane Satrapi was focused on bringing her story to the screen as effectively as possible rather than challenging the animation industry. Be that as it may, she has entered the conversation. The question is, will anyone respond?