INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION FILMS

By David Ehrlich

In 1983, I invited my Romanian friend, Adrian Petringenaru, to Vermont to collaborate with me on a series of children’s animation workshops. While there, Adrian became interested in a film I had left uncompleted from the late 1970s, a series of transformations between drawings by the Masters. By the time Adrian was to return to Bucharest, we had designed an international co-production around these drawings, with the Bucuresti Animafilm Studio extending them, coloring them, and adding music. The resulting film, called Perpetual Revival, was completed in 1985 and premiered at the Varna Animation Festival in Bulgaria. Adrian and I were pleased with the artistic result, but because of administrative problems with the Animafilm Studio, though I was listed as animator, designer, and co-director, I was unable to gain a single print of the film. I then decided that if I were to enter into another international collaboration, I would do it also as the executive producer. What follows is the story of the films that are the result of that decision.

Image by George Griffin

Academy Leader Variations (1987)

Co-directed by David Ehrlich, Jane Aaron, Paul Glabicki, George Griffin, Al Jarnow, Skip Battaglia (USA); Georges Schwizgebel, Martial Wannaz, Claude Luyet, Daniel Suter (Switzerland); Piotr Dumala, Jerzy Kucia, Krzysztof Kiwerski, Stanislaw Lenartowicz (Poland); A Da, Yan Dingxian, Lin Wenxiao, Hu Jinqing, Chang Guangxi, He Yumen (P.R. China). Produced by David Ehrlich (USA). 6 minutes.

Image by Daniel Suter

Since 1978, each of my personal films had begun with a personal variation on the academy leader, and in 1985, I had begun doing a number of variations to place into a single film compilation. However, I was increasingly conscious that all my variations were a bit too similar. At the Zagreb Animation festival in 1986, I was discussing this problem with my young Polish friend, Piotr Dumala. Piotr thought for a moment, and then within a few seconds sketched out his own variations. After a moment of depression that this young genius could come up with such great variations so quickly, it occurred to me that I could ask other friends to do the same thing and put the segments all together for an international compilation film. The unifying element of the film could be the structural theme of the academy leader.

Image by Chang Guangxi.

Piotr liked the idea and we immediately went to speak with Jerzy Kucia, a mutual Polish friend, who was excited about the project, and we agreed to invite two of his other Polish colleagues to participate. Then I went to Georges Schwizgebel, who agreed to bring in his colleagues from the GDS Studio in Geneva, Switzerland.

Animation Journal, Volume 14, 2006

Image by Jane Aaron.

Raoul Servais and Nicole Salomon, President and Secretary-General of ASIFA, happened to be at Zagreb, and I asked them if the project could come somehow under the official umbrella of ASIFA to facilitate the participation of my friends from Poland, and I hoped, from China. I thought that these two nations might need the UNESCO affiliations of ASIFA as a kind of guarantor to allow collaboration with the West. Raoul and Nicole both readily agreed, and the French title, “ASIFA-Presente” was placed at the head of the film and in official letters sent out to Socialist ministers. With ASIFA therefore UNESCO behind us, I then persuaded my Chinese friends, A Da and Lin Wenxiao also at Zagreb that year, to return to Shanghai and try to bring others in the studio into the project.

Image by A Da.

 I was fortunate that Lin was in fact the wife of Yan Dingxian, Studio Chief at the time, and I imagined that after one of Lin’s beautifully cooked dinners, Yan was softened up enough to agree. When I returned home, I immediately called five of my American friends, all of whom were fascinated by the project and happy to participate.We were now on our way!

Academy Leader Variations (1987)

As executive producer and co-director, I agreed to advance funding of the final printing and distribution of the film. This was to be a cooperative venture, however, with all net profits (after the return of my advance) divided equally by fourths so that the group leader would then sub-divide the funds to the individual animators. This was a simple matter with the American, Swiss, and Polish animators, but the good people from China, in 1987, required something different.

We agreed that the Chinese portion would be used to pay the annual ASIFA dues of the Chinese animators, dues that their Ministry was otherwise not planning to pay.The structural theme of the academy leaders was quite experimental and was somewhat problematic for Shanghai animators used to beautiful but fairly straightforward animation for children. The animators had to analyze and deconstruct the academy leader, abstracting the most significant and dynamic elements, and reconstructing them in their own personal ways. In fact, the most successful of all the variations in the entire film and the one that generated the greatest applause and laughter was the revolution of the stamping pig, created by Chang Guangxi, who later went on to become the Director of the Shanghai Animation Studio. Although the Chinese variations were less experimental than those of the other three nations, they were certainly much more exploratory than the work they had been doing. These projects prepared the artists for more extensive co-productions with the West.Academy Leader Variations had a wonderful lifespan at festivals like Cannes (where it won the Jury Prize for Shorts), on television, and in the popular International Tournée of Animation (a traveling series of films that later was distributed on video). Invitations to festivals and subsequent trophies were distributed to those groups who lived nearest the event, and two of the participating animators, Paul Glabicki from the U.S. and Stanislav Lenartowicz from Poland, were given commissions to create MTV logos solely on the basis of their work for this film.

Image by Chang Guangxi

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Image by Osamu Tezuka

Animated Self Portraits (1989)

Co-directed by Sally Cruikshank, David Ehrlich, Candy Kugel, Bill Plympton, Maureen Selwood (USA); Mati Kutt, Priit Pärn, Rao Heidmets (Estonia, USSR); Borivoj Dovnikovic, Nikola Majdak, Josko Marusic, Dusan Vukotic (Yugoslavia); Jiri Barta, Pavel Koutsky, Jan Svankmajer (Czechoslovakia); Renzo Kinoshita, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Osamu Tezuka (Japan). Produced by David Ehrlich (USA). 8 minutes.

Image by David Ehrlich.

The next “ASIFA Presente” project began in 1987. My initial idea was a series of variations on the ASIFA logo. This time I thought the segments could be less experimental and a bit more entertaining. The Americans I chose were all experienced in narrative animation. When we got together in New York to discuss the project, there was some resistance to doing all that work for what seemed to be just a promotional vehicle for ASIFA. When Candy Kugel suggested instead that self-portraits be the theme, we all liked the idea. It may not have been as conceptually interesting as a deconstruction of a logo, but the idea of an expression of self proved more exciting to artists who must spend long hours in solitary confinement over a drawing board. I presented the proposal to the ASIFA Board at the Varna Animation Festival in Bulgaria in the fall of 1987, as an aesthetic expression of identity, and gained approval for it as the next “ASIFA-Presente” project. Then, while at Varna, I immediately got the cooperation of the Japanese, the Estonians, the Czechs, and the Yugoslavs. It was agreed that my friends Renzo Kinoshita (Japan), Priit Pärn (Estonia), Pavel Koutsky (Czechoslovakia) and Nikola Majdak (Yugoslavia), would lead their respective groups.

Image by Renzo Kinoshita.

The following year witnessed great socio-political turmoil in Central and East Europe. This context was reflected in the process of our collaboration, which became a clarification of not only personal identity but also national identity. In beginning this film, and choosing the countries whose animators I wanted to participate, I had been thinking only of the artists whose work I respected. In 1987, I never believed that the world could change so much in two to three years. For Academy Leader Variations, I had transformed the title into each of the four national languages and had intended to do this for Animated Self Portraits. And in the final credits, I had similarly planned to list the authors under the names of their countries. The first problem I had was with Yugoslavia, a country that was already coming apart psychologically, if not yet geographically in civil war. The leader of the group and ASIFA Executive Board member, Nikola Majdak, was living and working in Belgrade, and we naturally expected that the film’s Serbo-Croatian title would be in the Cyrillic script, the national writing of Yugoslavia. Josko Marusic, a Dalmatian working in Zagreb felt the Cyrillic was too esoteric and insisted that it should be in Roman script. My ultimate compromise was to place the title in both Cyrillic and Roman script, a sad prediction of the violent geopolitical split that was to occur a few years later.

Image by Jan Svankmajer.

Image by Rao Heidmets

Image by Bordo Dovnikovic

The Czechs had no such problem with the language of the title, but Pavel Koutsky, a firm nationalist, told me in 1987 that very soon the country would dispense with the suffix ‘CSSR’ and that in no case should I place that suffix in the credits after ‘Czechoslovakia’. My Czech wife, Marcela, who had left Prague in 1968 with the Soviet invasion, would not believe that things would ever change there, telling me that Koutsky had his head in the clouds, and that I shouldn’t listen to him. But then, as I was completing the film in the early spring of 1989, things looked so different there that I decided to dispense with CSSR. If the film had in fact been delayed much longer, I would have had to change the name of the country completely (when it became the Czech Republic in 1993).

Image by Sally Cruikshank.

In 1987, Estonia was still part of the Soviet Union. The Russian on the ASIFA Board said that Estonia was part of the Soviet Union (or USSR) and should be listed as such, and that the language of the title should be in Cyrillic. Prit Parn, a fierce nationalist like Koutsky, told me that within two years Estonia would be an independent nation, that the title should be in Romanic Estonian, and that he and his colleagues should be listed under the designation “Estonia.” There was a lot of heat around this discussion, and the final compromise as we came into the early Spring of 1989 was to have the title in Romanic Estonian and the credits listed under “Estonia, USSR”.

Image by  Mati Kutt

Artistically, the Czech and Japanese animators, whose international reputations were already secure, simply confirmed their greatness in these short segments. The real surprise was the Estonian section, for the work being done in Tallinn was not well known internationally. Of the whole film, the segment that received the greatest applause was created by young Mati Kutt, indeed a complete unknown. The Tallinn Studio has since become as well known as Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm Studio. The 1998 Ottawa Animation Festival presented four retrospective programs of Estonian work that toured through North America afterwards.

Animated Self Portraits (1989)

Animated Self-Portraits went on to win many awards at festivals including the short list for the Oscars that year. The award which we were most proud, however, was the Prize for Efficiency of International Cooperation presented at the Krakow Short Film Festival in Poland. Both collaboration films gave animators from different parts of the world a way to get to know each other better, enabling them to meet at festivals and have an easy rapport. It gave forty animators from eight countries a place where they could experiment with new techniques and ideas while facing minimal risk, as the segments were but a few seconds in length. Animators like Chang Guangxi and Mati Kutt had a chance to show the world (and themselves) what they could do, and it made some much needed hard currency for our colleagues in the former Socialist countries. I also hope that these films gave the world of the late 1980s—beset by racial, ethnic, cultural, and national divisions—a positive image of artists coming together across these divisions to create something of beauty. Soon after the completion of Academy Leader Variations, A Da passed away, and at the film’s screening at Annecy in June of 1987, we dedicated the work to him with these words: “It was A Da’s dream that one day all peoples could be as one and smile at one another.”

Image by  Kihachiro Kawamoto.