Vivien Halas has posted this filmic remembrance of her father John Halas (1912-1995), who would have been 100 years old today. Halas, whose studio, Halas & Batchelor, made the first British animated feature, Animal Farm (1954), was obviously a seminal figure in British animation and also served as the founding president of ASIFA-International.

The documentary features a number of interviews with friends and people who worked with him at his studio and ASIFA. It also includes some fascinating clips from his films, including a 1970 experiment with 2D computer animation and a 1930 film he made in his native Hungary.

I never really met Halas, though I did correspond with him when I served as editor of the ASIFA-Hollywood’s Graffiti magazine and The Inbetweener newsletter in the mid-1980s. As ASIFA-International President and President Emeritus, he would send out a column which we and other ASIFA chapters would publish.  I still recall a rather prescient piece talking about the growing affinity between visual effects and animation.

Vivien Halas add that, “This short documentary will be available shortly as a bonus on a new DVD specially made for ASIFA of John’s favourite short films from Halas & Batchelor.”

Happy birthday John.

French trailer for Pequeñas Voces (Little Voices), a film about the lives of four Colombian children whose lives are interrupted by the arrival of armed men in their rural communities.

On the occasion of the French release of Jairo Carrillo et Oscar Andrade’s animated documentary, Pequeñas Voces (Little Voices), the AlloCiné website offers (in French) a nice dossier on what has become one of the more interesting areas of animation in recent years. Dounia Georgeon’s introduction notes:

Ever since Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir people cannot stop talking about the animated documentary as a new genre. Contrary to popular belief, its existence goes back (or nearly so) to the early days of film. On the occasion of the release of Little Voices, AlloCiné offers you an overview of the films that have joined the real with the wonderful.

It’s basically a survey of recent films, including Pequeñas Voces, though it does start off with four older titles, including Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) and Disney’s The Story of Menstruation (1946). If you can read French and/or like me can manage with Google Translate and a bit of college French, it’s worth a glance.

The above article from the December 1918 issue of Popular Science is about how a training film produced by “the Training Division of the War College, Mr. Max Fleischer, a former member of the Popular Science Monthly staff, devised for the General Staff the system that we illustrate.” During World War I Max Fleischer was assigned by the Bray Studios to make training films for the Army, all of which, as far as I know, were destroyed.

You can check 138 years of PopSci  at the magazine’s “The Complete Popular Science Archive” here, though the same material is also available (in slightly easier to read format) on Google Books.

(The man bending down on the lower right image looks a lot like Max Fleischer?)

The young David Lloyd George’s dream of David and Goliath in Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

On July 14th, the UK’s National Commission for UNESCO announced the 10 items and collections to be included in its first UK Memory of the World Register, which follows in the footsteps of  UNESCO’s worldwide Memory of the World Programme, which I previously posted about here. Included are two films, both rather obscure — one because of its subject matter and the other because it was a film that was never shown publicly and believed to be lost. The latter is Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918),  a biography of the British prime minister, which was repressed and presumed destroyed; the latter is  St Kilda, Britain’s Loneliest Isle (1928), a documentary of  life on a island in the Hebrides that was soon to vanish.

Luke McKernan provides a fascinating rundown of the history of Elvey’s film on The Bioscope, his invaluable blog about silent movies. He notes that the film has

a remarkable history of idealism, political intrigue, slander, subterfuge, disappearance, rediscovery and restoration. The Life Story of David Lloyd George was made in 1918, vanished before any cinema audience had a chance to see it, and re-emerged to astonished acclaim in 1994. Its place must be in virtual history rather than actual film history, because its story is one of if onlys and maybes. But what a story it is.

The 152-minute film is available on DVD from The National Library of Wales here and includes 47 minutes of extras, including an interview with ace film historian Kevin Brownlow.

As to St Kilda, it is

A filmed voyage by steamer from Glasgow to St Kilda, containing scenes of the ports en-route and life of the population on St Kilda. Research supports the conclusion that the scenes on the island of Hirta were taken in May 1923, with footage of the voyage from Glasgow out to St Kilda shot later, c. 1928. The film was made on the eve of the evacuation of St Kilda, August 1930, and with it the end of two millennia of human habitation on the island.

The film can be seen on YouTube in two parts (part 1 is embedded above), though you can also see in one sitting on the Scottish Screen Archive site here, which contains additional information on St Kilda.

Meanwhile …

In preparing for this post, I checked UNESCO’s Memory of the World site and discovered its list of Current Nominations, which include a number of film-related items. These include the EYE Film Instituut Nederland’s Desmet Collection, that includes “films, company documents, posters and film stills from the 1910’s” collected by Jean Desmet and Rossellini 77 Triptych, about Roberto Rossellini’s final project. Others include the Audiovisual Collection of Max Stahl, which includes material relating to the founding of Timor Leste, the Thor Heyerdahl Archives (Heyerdahl, the 20th century explorer, made Kon-Tiki (1950),one of the most popular post-war documentaries), and Collection of note manuscripts and film music of Composer Aram Khachaturian.

Thanks to The Bioscope, from whose site I cribbed the frame grab at the top from The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

A free preview screening of Waking Sleeping Beauty, Don Hahn’s documentary on the Disney animation renaissance that started in the 1980s will be held at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, 1600 Peachtree St., in Event Space 4C, on Wednesday, April 14th, at 7:00 PM. The film will be presented by Peter Schneider, the film’s producer and former President of Disney Feature Animation.

As the CBC reports, “The UNESCO Memory of the World Register has selected McLaren’s films to be held in its heritage collection of the most significant world cultural artifacts.

“McLaren’s Oscar-winning anti-war film Neighbours is among 82 films and 52 film tests to be preserved.”

The Memory of the World program is aimed at the “preservation and dissemination of valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide.”

In addition to McLaren’s films, other additions include the Diaries of Anne Frank, Song of the Nibelungs, and the Magna Carta. Other film-related material added this year includes the John Marshall Ju/’hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection, 1950-2000 and NRWA Photo and Film Archives of Palestinian Refugees.  A list of this year’s additions can be found here.

Other film-related added in the past includes: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the Tait Brothers’ The Story of the Kelly Gang (Australia, 1906) (the first feature film made), Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, the Ingmar Bergman Archives,Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned), Lumière Films, Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition (1910-1912) and The Battle of the Somme (1916). A full  list of Registered Heritage can be found here.

The CBC further notes:

The Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, which protects Canada’s film and video heritage, nominated the collection for preservation by UNESCO.

The bid was supported by groups such as the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, the British Film Institute, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Film Studies Association of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds an archive of McLaren works.

Neighbours and other McLaren classics can be viewed at the NFB’s online screening room.

(Thanks to Karl Cohen.)

Correction: The CBC report which I initially relied on was in error in saying, “The UNESCO Memory of the World Register has selected McLaren’s films to be held in its heritage collection of the most significant world cultural artifacts.” Instead the honor was reserved for just Neighbours. As its website noted:

Norman McLaren is the most influential animator in the history of the art of animation. Over many years of constant groundbreaking research and experimentation he has created a coherent and extraordinary body of work with a unique inventiveness. This is best exemplified by his most important film, the anti-war parable Neighbours.

Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi has posted this trailer for Eduardo Carrillo’s forthcoming Pequeñas Voces (Little Voices/Born Under Fire), a feature animated documentary about the ongoing guerrilla war in Columbia. The film’s website describes it as:

… an animated documentary based on interviews and drawing workshops with a new generation of children (8 to 13 years old) who have grown up in middle of violence and chaos in Colombia; the interviews show how they perceive their reality. Those stories are illustrated and animated using the original drawings by the children.

The computer animated film, done in the style of children’s drawings,  is an expansion of a 19-minute short done for Oxfam International (see below). Both the trailer and short are in Spanish with no English subtitles, but I think much of Carrillo’s points come through very forcefully. The website for  the short is here.

In addition, Oxfam made the following interview  (in Spanish) with Carillo at the 12th Latin American Lima  Film Festival, with several of the clips having English subtitles.

I’m a bit late on this, but I think it important to take note of Fatenah, the new Palestinian animated documentary, which Erika Solomon at Reuters described on July 3rd as:

The true story of a young Gazan woman’s futile battle against breast cancer has been commemorated in the first-ever Palestinian animated commercial film. “Fatenah” debuted last night in the West Bank city of Ramallah, at the Al-Kasabah Theater, and was received by a large and enthusiastic audience [as seen in the above video]. …

The film, only 30-minutes long, draws inspiration from a true story of a woman who died in the midst of trying to get treatment for breast cancer. Her story was documented by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights.

Director and animator Ahmad Habash says the piece, which is being funded by the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territories, tries not to portray either side—Israeli or Palestinian—as sheer good or evil. “That’s the reality,” he said. “There were doctors that tricked the girl and those that helped her on the Palestinian side. And on the Israeli side there were people who helped her, and those who didn’t”.

An Associated Press story notes the film had a $60,000 budget and is schedule to make the international festival circuit. The publicity accorded the film only goes to confirm that the recent trend towards high profile animated documentaries, exemplified in recent years by Persopolis and Waltz With Bashir; interestingly, all three essentially come out of the political caldron that is the Middle East.

Although animated documentaries are one of the most exciting areas of filmmaking today, in an interview for Comingsoon.net, Waltz with Bashir director Ari Forman in discussing the problems getting funding, notes,

The problem was clearing the film as an animated documentary. This was the main problem, because people sit in documentary funds, they get 10 times less money than people in fiction, and then they have to spend the money, and they think, "Should I spend it on animation? Is animation a documentary? Is it real? Will people believe the story? Is it true?" They gave me a hard time. It was too risky for them, and today, I don’t give a damn. If I would do it now, I would declare it as a fiction film, animated, and this is it. Raise the money, work…

Last year, Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis grabbed the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, helping to launch it on the road to international fame. It also brought a greater realization that animated films could be taken as seriously as their live-action brethren. Now, with Satrapi serving on this year’s Cannes jury,  Waltz With Bashir, Ari Forman’s Israeli-made documentary, seems to be garnering considerable buzz at this year’s festival. And if the reception reaches beyond Cannes, it’s possible that animation will have reached a new tipping point.

The reception from the press seems generally positive. For instance, in a report for Time entitled “Cartoon Pandas, Animated Nightmares,” Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss note that,

For the seven decades since Walt Disney made Snow White, most animated features have followed the Disney mold: cute and colorful, with talking animals and a coming-of-age plot meant to inspire and amuse. Even a seeming exception like Persepolis found saving humor in its girl-grows-up story. Ari Forman’s Waltz With Bashir is a break from all this: an animated documentary about the lingering, subterranean effects of war on the director and some old friends who had served in the Israeli Army during the 1982 incursion into Lebanon. They are still haunted by the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, perpetrated by followers of the assassinated Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayal.

Ari Forman’s background is as a director of live-action documentaries and feature films. He first used animation to open each episode of The Material that Love is Made Of, a documentary TV  series. That an established live-action director made a move into animation is no longer a surprise, even for a documentary filmmaker.  (Michael Moore, who used animation in  Bowling for Columbine, subsequently announced he was going to make an animated film, though he has not yet followed through on  it.)

Animated theatrical movies have been taken seriously before, but that acceptance in the West has often been fleeting. For instance, there was no real follow up to Ralph Bakshi initial successes, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies took several years before reaching American screens, and Bill Plympton’s independent features have performed poorly viz-à-viz his short films. But  with critical excitement over Waltz With Bashir coming on the heels of Persepolis, the increasing acceptance by live-action directors of animation and independent animation filmmakers finally starting to move into features, there is the promise of a new day dawning.

Whatever happens though, it looks like the next few years could be very interesting. In the meantime, check out the excerpt below and the film’s official website for trailers.

Persepolis, directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud based on Satrapi’s series of four autobiographical graphic novels, has just opened here in Atlanta after earning considerable praise elsewhere. These include nominations for Best Animated Feature Oscar and Annie Award, a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and being the official French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Though I feared these accolades might be due more to the film’s intentions than its qualities, I am delighted to say they are well deserved.(The fact that it was a low-budget, $8.1 million cel animated film, done mostly in black and white, might have also helped its reputation.)

The film recounts Satrapi’s life in Iran both before and after the Shah’s overthrow, as well a stay in Vienna, where her parents send her to escape the Islamic Revolution. This politically-aware coming of age tale is certainly a refreshing change from conventional, Hollywood-style animated movies. It is Satrapi’s animation debut, though Paronnaud has had more experience in the field, mostly on TV series. Their relative lack of filmic experience occasionally shows through, but the power of the narrative soon makes one forget about its flaws.

It is hard to say who was responsible for what, but Paronnaud looks to have put himself at the service of Satrapi’s art, which bears little resemblance to his own underground comic style done he does under the name of Winshluss (see sample above).

In Michael Guillén’s interview posted on Twitch, Paronnaud says the two were influenced by Italian comedies for the family scenes, as well as “German expressionism for some of the décors.” The reference to Italian comedies, if he means the delicious social satires of Pietro Germi, like Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned (see picture on left), does ring true. As to German expressionism, the one thing that springs to mind is not so much the film’s décors but its frequent use of silhouetted figures, which cannot help remind one of Lotte Reiniger silhouette films. In any case, the influences seem to have positive.

Though much has been made of the autobiographical nature of Persepolis, especially as it follows the autobiographical tradition in the world of the graphic novel, one should realize that strong biographical films have also been emerging in animation. For instance, two of the past three winners of Best Animated Short Subject Oscars have been biographical films: Chris Landreth’s Ryan and John Canemaker’s The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, both of which are exceptional films. However, in terms of approach, Persepolis is more like Paul Fierlinger’s feature-length Drawn from Memory (pictured above) made for PBS, as both deal with life under oppressive political regimes. (Fierlinger’s film recounts his life as the son of a Czech diplomat who grows up in America and becomes miserable when his parents bring him to Communist Czechoslovakia.)

Needless to say, I find animated documentaries to be one of the most exciting areas in animation and is something I hope to talk about more in the future. In the meantime, Persepolis is an easy film to recommend.