GASPAROVIC'S film raises many questions about animation and animators that even this two-hour festival cannot answer. Are these animators great artists? Certainly many of the drawings reveal the hand and eye of skilled painters. Yet many others do not appear to be more than moving New Yorker cartoons. If animation is art, why have no great artists attempted it? The possibilities seem extraordinary--a moving painting! The vitality in a work such as "Guernica" need not merely be conveyed but visually demonstrated.
Anything, it seems, can be done with animation. The camera can travel anywhere, rest at any angle. The artist creates montage frame by frame; it need not be an editing room task. All the tricks and stunts that ordinarily cost a live-action filmmaker thousands of dollars can be quickly pencilled in. Laws of gravity can be disobeyed, color reformed through prisms, and sounds and music distorted.
Of course it all takes patience, years of it--days of drawing the same tiny figures on the same background until the artist gives up and changes his mise-en-scene with the flick of his Bic. It is almost incomprehensible how many thousands of drawings must be transferred to celluloid for one short animated film. Michaelangelo might have preferred to paint the ceiling of Madison Square Garden rather than make an animated short.
Yet thanks to sponsors like the National Film Board of Canada, dozens of artists doodle away. None produces characters so round or squeaky-cute as Disney's or as bawdy and animalistic as Bakshi's. Instead they often depict very real people in not-so-real situations. The best of these is Why Me?, the story of Nesbitt Spoon, an average CPA-type who learns from his doctor that he has only a short time to live--five minutes (and counting). Understandably, Mr. Spoon panics, and his creators have scripted their story so well that it matches perfectly the stages of impending death as described in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
BY THE TIME poor Mr. Spoon leaves his doctor's office to "enjoy" his last 27 seconds, he has passed through each stage with marvelous histrionics. In the process of denying the inevitable, he wonders why his doctor cannot freeze him until they discover his cure. "Freeze me!" he shouts, running to the refrigerator for an ice tray, then lying on the floor and dumping the cubes on himself. "Put me under a microscope!" he begs, then resignedly laments, "I could've played piano like Picasso."
The most curious mix of the real and the absurd, the naturalistic and the impressionistic is a French film based on the diary of a coupe who attempted to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat. The story of their failure both to make the journey or to happily coexist is haunting and moving, replete with terrifying violence and strange sexual fantasies, ending finally with their rediscovered love.
Unfortunately, the Tournee series cannot be discussed adequately here. It includes a number of animated commercials (Crest's battle to save Toothopolis is terrific) as well as philosophical discourse, brief wit and ironic humor, a medical polemic and the warm story of a girl outgrowing her parents. It deserves a short look.