-THE FUTURE OF ANIMATED CINEMA
WORLDWIDE IN ART AND INDUSTRY-
by Jean-Louis BOMPOINT

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen.

Before beginning my presentation, I would like to thank the Korean Ministry of Culture and Sport for inviting me to Seoul for this great event, the SICAF '95. I would also like to thank the French Embassy in Seoul, represented by Madame Martine PROST, as well as the SICAF Orgainising Commitee, for their precious help and warm welcome.

I would rather have spoken in my mother tongue today. But in order for everyone to understand what I have to say, I have decided to address you in English.

By way of introduction, I am a film director, director of photography and editor. I have worked in many areas of film and television for the past fifteen years. My particular interest in animated films and my membership, in France, of the Commission Supérieure et Technique at the Centre National de la Cinematographie, have led me to have the pleasure of meeting you today.

INTRODUCTION

Our profession is currently undergoing a crucial period in its evolution. Even greater than the era of the introduction of sound into the cinema (1929). Even though it has been industrialised since its origins, the cinema has finally been recognised as an art; the seventh to bear the name. This means of expression and communication has spread very rapidly from the confidential level to the international one. It has ushered in its own destruction, with the birth of television and now multimedia following in its wake. In my opinion, in a few years time cinema auditoria, where people occupy a common space to see a film projected onto a canvas screen, will - apart from a few exceptions - no longer exist. Everyone will have a giant, very high definition screen at home, made out of light-weight materials, and will select the programme of their choice by inserting a credit card into their home programming box. Continuing a process which began via television, the cinema will no longer be an art communicating, but rather individualising image and sound. The true craftsmen of the profession, working lovingly with the medium of film - a light-sensitive surface, if ever there was one - are going to have to adapt to the new technologies or disappear. We will no longer be able to take our time over things. Faced by the growing demand for programmes, only speed and high technology will count in our profession. Who is going to benefit from this? Art or industry?.. But then again... What is animated cinema, if not one which is gradually sculpted, image by image, with patience and skill? One which the Surrealists called Pure cinema, because the movement of its projected images was not stored up by a "machine to capture life", but created out of nothing by the hand of man; even if people like Walt DISNEY, to name but one, have developed this craftsmanship to the level of an industrial labour force.

I decided to be a film maker when I was a child. Through the years, I have often fought to make films with an artistic vocation, a few of which I have also succeeded in making. But although this spirit and way of working may be gratifying both in terms of personal satisfaction and in attracting the relative esteem of one's contemporaries, it is clearly not the ideal way of earning a living. I was thus forced into deciding to work in the industrial and commercial domain, and therefore into accepting a number of concessions simply in order to survive, although they filled me with horror... But, as the years passed by, I realised that it is quite possible to carry out one's profession with honesty, adding a personal touch to subjects which are imposed, or which even go against one's personal sensibility. Should we call that wisdom or resignation? I still do not know. But it is certain that I have discovered - via the resources made available to me on the "bread and butter" productions with which I have been entrusted - a whole load of human and technological parameters which I would never have dreamed of before. This, then, is the spirit in which I am going to try to talk to you today.

FROM CRAFT TO INDUSTRIALISATION

If we take the example of France, animation was originally a craft, and inspired the invention of cinema. Thus Emile REYNAUD, with his praxinoscope and then his luminous pantomimes projected at the Musée Grevin in Paris, proved well before the LUMIERE brothers' invention that the illusion of the moving image was capable of drawing the crowds. Unfortunately for the broader public, REYNAUD's animated films were impossible to duplicate, since they were manufactured by hand in one, unique copy. So when the Cinematograph was invented, creators like Émile COHL were able to diffuse their works - although these were still hand-made - in a huge international context. There were two reasons for this:
a) The LUMIERE brothers had discovered a technical means of capturing, storing and duplicating moving images.
b) Léon GAUMONT had been convinced, along with Charles PATHÉ and Georges MELIÉS, that the moving image - quite apart from its technological performance - brought about a new crowd psychology and was, by the same token, a marvellous way of making money.
The magic formula was thus discovered:
ART + TECHNOLOGICAL MASTERY + DIFFUSION = FILM INDUSTRY
At the beginning, everyone was happy:
- Firstly the film makers, who were commissioned to make works in which they had total creative freedom.
- Then the industrialists, who could extract increased profit from their machines and operate their factories at full capacity.
- The producers and distributors, who set up a lucrative commercial system.
- And lastly the public, which was delighted by the quality of the entertainment.
Everything started to go wrong when demand began to outstrip the quantity of films produced. Film makers were asked to work faster, and therefore not as well, and to repeat styles which had already met with public success. In order to go even faster, the producers and distributers had the idea of installing a hierarchy in the cinema, whereby each artist and technician would be attributed a specific task, without knowing how or why the subject was being filmed. The notion of the author - which consisted in writing, directing and shooting one's own film - was thus destroyed. The roles were reversed: by dividing up the creative component, the producer achieved complete control over his product, and no longer had to worry about the people who had dreamed it up. From that moment on, the cinema became an endless struggle between the creator and the producer. This unfair contest did give birth to some masterpieces, but at what a price!... Witness the tragic fates of Georges MÉLIÉS, Eric von STROHEIM, Buster KEATON, Jean VIGO, Judy GARLAND, Jean GREMILLON, John CASSAVETES, etc... who payed for their artistic integrity with their lives, and were rejected, humiliated or devoured with no second thoughts by an industry which had nonetheless asked them to think twice about things. We can, though, cite a few examples of jealously-guarded independence like Charlie CHAPLIN, Walt DISNEY or Orson WELLES, who, nevertheless, did not have a trouble-free time preserving their domain. In fact, Marcel PAGNOL alone was the only happy producer, author, studio and laboratory owner, director and distributor in world cinema history.

If today we still find contemptible and puerile works like PULP FICTION (Quentin TARRENTINO) being awarded prizes by "professional commitees" devoted to the lowest possible form of commercialism, and thus to the detriment of art, we should not be in the least surprised. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the foundations of the industrialisation of cinema were being laid, the problem was identical, and the Deciders already preferred vulgarity and facility over quality. Thus, in the face of such a flood of mediocrity - in spite of a few masterpieces - the public has, over the years and before the plethora of images presented, become less demanding and even, with the advent of television, passive. The moving image is no longer appreciated, it is consumed. The creators have themselves been forced to conform to the producers' system, clocking in at the studios like any other factory worker, and running the risk of being drummed out of their profession if they fail to respect imposed directives and production quotas. Instead of remaining faithful to its original vocation of being a cheap and high quality public entertainment , the cinema has, in modern times, become a costly spectacle reserved for a social pseudo-elite, and whose technology is anachronistic, even if it is still unbeatable in terms of conservation and reproduction. (By way of an example, if we compare ten minutes of sound and images stored on video tape and the same quantity of thirty-five millimetre film, ten minutes of thirty-five millimetre film represent three hundred metres of celluloid in a thirty-centimetre-diameter roll, impregnated with costly silver salts and weighing about two kilos). If cinematic works are still broadly diffused on television (because that remains the only means of recovering the sums invested in their production), they lose out in quality of reproduction and are cut up by advertising messages which end up transforming them into hamburgers of uncertain size, sandwiched between slices of more or less mouldy bun.
I think it was necessary to discuss all that before tackling the problem which concerns us today: the reconciliation of art and industry in animated cinema.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ANIMATED FILMS

Throughout its existence, and for its foreseeable future, animated cinema has necessarily been structured IMAGE BY IMAGE. Cinema films originally ran at sixteen images per second, from 1895 to 1929, during the silent period. After 1929, the running speed was readjusted to twenty four images per second, because of the sound track. With the advent of television, the running speed is currently twenty five images per second. Therefore, to obtain one second of animated film, the movement must be divided into twenty five parts. As we all know, this is a long and complicated business. Many film technicians have studied the problem to try to speed up the process, but with no real results up until now. So the technique of animated cinema has remained unchanged since Emile REYNAUD. The only invention to truly revolutionise the technique of cartoons remains the use of celluloid by the American Earl HURD, in 1918. Thanks to this procedure, it was no longer necessary to copy the entire drawing to be animated from one sheet of paper to another. Celluloid's transparency enabled the backgrounds to be separated from the characters, and for these latter to be animated using several layers of paper which could be reused at will. This daring technological solution has saved a considerable amount of time in film production. To go faster, the teams of draftsmen have been enlarged, and are broken down as follows:
- Head Animators: they draw the key stages of a movement.
- Assistant Animators: they draw the intermediate periods between the key stages, in other words the intervals.
- Tracers/Colourists: they copy the animators' outlines onto celluloid and colour the drawings using poster paint, on the opposite side from the ink tracing.
- Decorators: they draw the coloured backgrounds against which the characters are positioned.

In this way, for a feature-length production we can sometimes count up to two hundred and fifty people, who have worked for more than one year to bring the film to completion. These working methods functioned in the West for fifty years or so. However, since the economic crisis of the past fifteen years, producers have begun to find them too costly. In America as in Europe, the world of animated films has been struck by a serious crisis: the demand for films was as strong as ever, but producers were no longer able to pay the wages of all the artists and technicians. The producers therefore developed an alternative strategy: The development and pre-production of film projects would take place in the West. But their production would be carried out in the Far East, because of low production costs in the studios of Asia. (By way of an example, the last one hundred per cent French cartoon series was "LES TRIPLÉS", a TÉLÉ-HACHETTE production dating from 1986) Before long, more than half the profession was out of work in the West. To halt this process, Americans and Europeans have begun actively researching new production methods, in an attempt to develop a new, faster and cheaper technology. This research has mainly taken place in the field of computing. Although excellent results have been obtained in recent years, they remain - alas - at the prototype stage, since one second of completed animation ends up costing thirty times more than using traditional methods...

The existence of paper and celluloid has also been called into question recently, and systems have been developed with the goal of attaining "zero paper". There again, although they are satisfactory from a technological point of view, the results obtained incur higher production costs than with the traditional system. But whatever happens, and even if the systems developed reduce their production costs to a minimum, their generalisation in the world of professional animation will never increase the number of jobs on offer. The number of professionals out of work will thus remain constant, and the schools which train tomorrow's artists and technicians will continue to launch onto the labour market young people whose only prospect is unemployment. The same danger is threatening the Far East, where production costs using the traditional system are becoming less and less competitive for the West, at least as far as the liberal economies are concerned: when the price threshold is reached, and when the new computer technology for animated films has been perfected, the Westerners will go back home to produce their films from beginning to end and the Asian studios, thus losing considerable markets, will themselves experience hopelessly high levels of domestic unemployment, unless they succeed in transforming their role of sub-contractors into one of true producers and so win new markets outside the Western economies... And so what has become of creativity in all that? No one even has time to think about it, so great is the preoccupation with mere survival. As a result, the artists and technicians of animated films no longer react with the same faith that made them take up their profession in the first place, but rather with a cold logic aimed at respecting quotas and standardising an international mode of production, that is one which is technologically and "artistically" understandable by everyone, from East to West.

At the last International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, the profession was visibly divided into two camps:

a) Independent authors, presenting in competition short films with a high artistic vocation, often produced at a loss, and whose confidential commercial careers will never support their directors or producers. These authors are enthusiastic young artists, brimming with talent, full of illusions and whose spirit has not yet been corrupted by cinematic commercialism. They are accompanied by a few of the profession's old hands, who have given themselves the pleasure of making a personal short, to prove to themselves that they are still capable of creating something new, and some of whom still have a few surprises stored up for us. Finally, there is the unique case of the directors from the Canadian National Film Office, who are state employees, payed to produce entertaining works of their choice (in subject as in technique) destined for the broadest possible public.

b) The authors, directors, producers, distributors and researchers who come to size up the competition and develop contacts with television stations in order to create, sell, exchange, coproduce or buy such and such a product in the framework of the International Animated Film Market. Computer technicians are also present, presenting tomorrow's technology to the world of animated films.
The tragedy is that these two groups never mix, a sad state of affairs when all it would take is the intervention of an experienced producer to launch a young artist, who wants nothing more than to be able to express himself while earning a decent living.

The case of the Annecy festival is just one example showing how a dialogue between the creators, the producers, the deciders and the representatives of tomorrow's technology has now become more necessary than ever, if we want animated cinema to once more become a high quality entertainment, offering an endless source of pleasure to the broadest possible public.

ANIMATED CINEMA: A UNIQUE AND IRREPLACEABLE ENTERTAINMENT

The image by image process can be used in the cinema medium in different ways:

- CARTOONS: consisting in making characters or objects move in a more or less realistic manner against a given background, in the graphic style of one's choice.

- ANIMATION OF VOLUMES: enabling three-dimensional characters or objects to be brought to life. Puppets can be designed, or alternative materials can be used, such as plasticine, wood, iron, cardboard and even everyday objects.

- DIRECT DRAWING ONTO FILM: an economical procedure with endless possibilities. Without using a camera, the animator draws and paints directly onto transparent 16 or 35 millimetre film. Alternatively, black film can be scratched using points and stylets. This procedure has another particularity: if we draw onto the optical sound track, we can obtain all the notes of the chromatic scale over a range of two and a half octaves. On the other hand, if we scratch onto the optical track of a black film, we can obtain various percussion sounds.

- PAPER CUT-OUTS: a technique in contrast to that of celluloid cartoons, whose materials render gradations of colour impossible, since they employ uniformly applied poster paints. Paper cut-outs can exploit articulated characters which are animated directly under the camera, or can progress via successive phases of animation, stuck to celluloids and placed against a background. By their very nature, paper cut-outs enable us to retain the richness of a colour drawing, with all its palette of different shades.

- ANIMATION OF MOVEABLE MATERIALS: a technique using coloured powders or sand which can be modified directly under the camera. Both direct lighting and backlighting can be used.

- SHADOWPLAY ANIMATION: manipulated directly under the camera.

- PIXILLATION: consisting in making human characters move image by image, and so carry out movements impossible in real life.

- ANIMATION OF PHOTOGRAPHS: a process combining camera movements and dissolves, using fixed documents. A number of special effects can also be added.

- PIN SCREEN: a technique borrowed from engraving. Thousands of pins are stuck into a two by one-and-a-half metre board, and can be pushed in or pulled out against a low-angled light source in such a way that greater or lesser degrees of shadow appear on the work-surface. We can thus obtain black and white drawings with every possible gradation of grey.

- VIRTUAL IMAGE ANIMATION: enabling cartoons to be combined with live footage.

- COMPUTER ANIMATION: creating an impression of three-dimensionality with near-perfect quality of movement.
As one can see, these techniques are rich in scope and provide practically endless creative possibilities.

Animated cinema has another advantage over live footage: its TIMELESSNESS. Mickey Mouse is as fresh in 1995 as it was in 1928, the date of its first appearance. As a general rule, an animated film does not date over the years, and its emotional potential remains intact despite the passing time.

To say that production of an animated film remains costly is to pose a false problem. Everything which can be imagined in terms of cinematic creativity is possible using animation. Let's imagine, for example, a scene which takes place against an imposing background whose different elements are several kilometers high, and where more or less human characters fly through the air, leaving a trail of multi-coloured stars in their wake with each of their movements. In live footage, such a result could be obtained at a cost of millions of dollars and using advanced special effects. With cartoons, all that is needed is some paper, some ink and some paint. What is more, we can be sure that the leading actor will never break his leg during the shooting of a perilous scene... Producers should consider this sort of solution more often.

International coproductions must also be encouraged, since they enable artists from different countries to exchange their techniques and cultures for the greater benefit of cinematic creativity. I am happy to note today that events like the SICAF can promote this sort of initiative.

Thank you for your attention. I remain entirely at your disposal if there are any questions you would like to ask about this presentation, which it has been my pleasure to deliver.

Note: Three short films by J-L Bompoint will be projected during this presentation:
- "Histoire d'un clown". 5' 45" - (1984) - Magic Films Productions.
- "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge". 2' 30" - (1989) - Lobster Film.
- "Correspondance". 4' 30" - (1990) - Exposure.

©1995 - Jean-Louis BOMPOINT. All rights reserved.