Ed's Newsletter - January 2004

NEXT HOOKS ANIMATION BOOK IN THE WORKS
I have signed a contract with Heinemann for my next animation book. The working title is "Acting Analyses of Twenty Classic Animated Films", but I'll bet they come up with something more clever than that. What is will be is an acting analysis keyed to the DVD chapters. All you'll have to do is rent a DVD, toss it on the machine and then follow along in the book to get my perspective on performance. I will include examples of what I think works great and what I think falls short, and it should all be a lot of fun. Stay tuned for a firm publication date. I'm working now on the manuscript.

OOPS! DAVID MESPLE, the creative genius behind the fabulous "The Singing Highway" CD I mentioned in last month's newsletter actually works at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. I erroneously listed a couple of his former employers in my endorsement. Sorry, David! In fact, David Mesple has taught at RMCAD for the last 5 years! In my next life, I'm getting a secretary. "The Singing Highway" is a fiendishly clever piece of art and I recommend it highly. It only costs a $5-$10 donation to ASIFA-Colorado. Contact David at davidmesple@earthlink.net and he'll burn you a copy.

ED HOOKS'S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
January 12-13 Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, http://www.fasastudio.com/default.htm?c00=1 (private class)

January 26-30 Animex 2004, Teesside, England http://animex.tees.ac.uk/default.cfm

Feb 1-10 Italy (vacation, but if anybody in Italy wants me to teach....)

March 22-26 Game Developers Conference, San Jose, CA. http://www.gdconf.com/

May 6-9 FMX '04, Stuttgart Germany (keynote speaker)

June 7-11 Annecy, France (I'm not teaching, I'm just going to join the fun and watch the flicks. Drop me a note if you'll be there and we'll hook up for a French brew.)

June 18-19 Zurich Switzerland. This is an open Acting for Animators class sponsored by FOCAL and ASIFA-Switzerland. For more info, contact Robi Rengler at: rengler@mail.tnca.edu.tw

July 8-10 East Tennessee State University/Digital Media Conference. Open Class: For info contact Pete Hriso: hriso@etsu.edu

CRAFT NOTES
"TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE"

My favorite moment in Sylvain Chomet's marvelous animated feature "Triplets of Belleville" was when one of the elderly singing Triplets of the title stepped up to the microphone in front of a sold out house. She clutched a folded newspaper which she promptly snapped opened and began to noisily thumb through the pages. I thought she was looking for a particular article and maybe was going to make an announcement of some kind. Then to my total delight, it washed over me that the swishing and crinkling newspaper sound was rhythmic! It was being amplified through that standing microphone on the stage and was actually the most unusual percussion instrument in all of history. Whooo-Hooo! It has been a long time since I was fooled like that in a movie and I just loved it. The old lady could rock!

And if that wasn't enough, our aged and hip newspaper percussionist was joined on stage by the two remaining Triplets who were also unorthodox musicians. One of them grooved by banging on the wire racks in a refrigerator, and the other made a whirring vacuum cleaner hose sound like Louis Armstrong's horn. After the Triplets were in place, the new fourth member of the group stepped out into the stage lights: a club-footed granny we've been following since the beginning of the flick. She was a virtuoso on the tuned-up bicycle wheel spokes. This amazing sequence appealed to all of my senses simultaneously. Sylvain Chomet had picked me up, spun my head and heart around and deposited me back onto my movie seat. I knew conclusively at that moment that I was looking at something way beyond special. This fellow is a brilliant talent and an important new shining star in the animation heavens.

To make things even more delicious, "Triplets of Belleville" is a 2D movie with no dialogue. It is for adults, and it works. At the very moment when the industry is sounding the death knell of traditional animation, the night is made day by Chomet's "Triplet's of Belleville".

This movie, more than any other I can think of offhand, is dependent on its score. Benoit Charest did a brilliant job with it, plugging in everything from Beethoven to Django Reinhardt to vacuum cleaners and newspapers. The plot (...that includes the bicycle-spoke-playing grandmother) would take Hemingway a lengthy short story to outline, and I'm not going to go into it during these brief craft notes. Anyway, you can find the plot in plenty of places in the Internet. The movie features some of the most delicious and fiendishly droll character designs you'll see on screen at any time. And, no, this is not one of those animated films that could have been made just as well live-action.

PERFORMANCE

The most empathetically emotional character in "Triplets of Belleville" is the mixed-breed family dog, Bruno. He gets smelly fishy left overs from the dinner table, doesn't have a bed of his own, is at one point used as a spare tire on a truck (don't ask, just go see the movie...) and is tormented by the roaring elevated train that passes by the second story window of the house he shares with this bicycle-riding mama's boy named Champion, and Champion's bespectled and knitting club-footed grandmother. Given that all of Bruno's emotions are recognizable as dog-like, it is actually quite impressive that he moves you like he does. I continually cared about Bruno. He was the one character that made me a little sad. Maybe it is the long-suffering effort he must continually make just to stay even with life. If ever a dog has been dealt lemons, it is Bruno, and yet he still wakes up each morning and makes lemonade out of it. Even when he gets so old that his legs constantly tremble, he never ever gives up. In this sense, Bruno is a Chaplin-esque character.

Most of the other characters stretch into hoot-funny caricature of cultural stereotypes. They are drawn with physical extension that springs from emotional inner bearings. Their faces may not express much emotion, but their bodies are extremely expressive. The French underworld hit men, for example, are drawn like two upright black coffins. The French waiter that appears in a few scenes is such a send up of every French waiter joke you have ever heard that he is perpetually bent over in a false obsequiousness. Grandmother wears a built-up black shoe that clop-clops whever she walks I was particularly enamored with that. The clubfoot and elevated shoe are character elements that truly define the woman, and the sound of her shoe and uneven gait helps make the movie sound track work. Brilliant, just brilliant. Champion, the Tour de France competitor, is almost a human metronome on a bike, with a massive Gallic nose and over-developed calves and thighs. This character displays zero emotion. Chomet frequently compares Champion to a locomotive in fact. He's like a human wind-up toy and is no more appealing than that.

The three women who are the Triplets of Belleville are extreme characters but not parodies. Their personalities are defined more by their habits and eccentric behavior. (I would love to see the character bible for these women!) For example, their diet is comprised only of frogs, which they fetch from a nearby lake (it must be a lake because frogs don't live in salt water, right?) with explosives and a net. Their nourishment comes from frog stew, tadpole popcorn, frozen frogs on a stick and my favorite: frog shish-ka-bob.

I suspect you will appreciate this movie a little more if you happen to love the French and Italian cinema. While watching it, I wished I could speak or at least understand French, not because of any dialogue but because of background noises, European references, painted signs on buildings, songs with French lyrics and so on. There were no sub-titles in the screening I saw, but this is a French movie at the core. It is in fact dedicated to Jacque Tati, another filmmaker whose movies have no dialogue.

When "Triplets of Belleville" is released on DVD, I'll buy the first copy. This is one of those movies I want to screen about twenty times, knowing that every time I watch it I'll see something new. It's that good.