Picture This: Irish Animation

This article was written for Film-maker Magazine. You can see it there by clicking here

Among the usual platitudes and orations, this year’s Oscar nominations did yield one small surprise. Plucky little Ireland landed two nominations in the Short Animated Film category. If this wasn’t big news in the rest of the world, it came as quite a shock to most people in Ireland. A few years ago it wasn’t unusual to see Jim Sheridan donning a tuxedo to walk the red carpet. But most people in Ireland, including a fair few within the film world, were a bit startled to see two Irish animated films get the nod.

Cartoons? In Ireland?

Back in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the IDA (Industrial Development Authority) offered companies tax incentives and facilities to work in Ireland. Large international firms such as Don Bluth Studios, Fred Wolf Films and Quateru Films, set up shop in Ireland and regularly churned out animated films and series like An American Tail and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By the mid-nineties, however, these companies had already left the country or become insolvent. “The Irish animation studio bubble had burst,” writes animator John White on his Web site www.johnwhiteartist.com.

Rod Stoneman, chief executive of the Irish Film Board, says that although the “abrupt withdrawal of Don Bluth was a massive blow,” it forced the Irish animation industry to work on a sustainable scale. But by making intelligent use of new incentive schemes, co-productions and affordable technology, Irish animators are creating a sturdier base.

Brown Bag Films (www.brownbagfilms.com), nominated at this year’s Academy Awards for Give Up Yer Aul Sins, have been producing animated shorts and TV programs since 1994. The idea for Sins came about when director Carthal Gaffney heard a thirty-year-old recording of Dublin students telling stories from the Bible which had been discovered in a dustbin by celebrity priest, Fr. Brian Darcy, and subsequently broadcast on RTE radio. Brown Bag optioned one story told by a little girl about John the Baptist, and with financing from the Frameworks Short Animation Fund, Sins was born.

The Irish Film Board is there to guide the development of a national cinema. The Frameworks funding scheme, initiated by the Film Board, the Arts Council and RTE, gives independent animators the chance to make a name for themselves and has led to animated features with a strong Irish theme being produced in recent years.

An Bonnan Bui (1995) by independent animators Edith Pieperhoff and Maire Murray, which took its inspiration from an Irish-language song of the same name, and 1848 (1997), a documentary-style animated feature set during the Famine, were among the first signs of a growing national animated cinema in Ireland.

Brown Bag’s Give Up Yer Aul Sins has toured U.S. arthouse cinemas as part of an Oscar®-nominated shorts package, and RTE has since commissioned a six-part series using other recordings from the same series that inspired Sins.

The second nominated film, Fifty Percent Grey, is a much darker, more original work: A soldier wakes up on a dystopian flat grey plane with only a TV and a gun for company. “Welcome to hell,” says the TV. Disney it ain’t.

Director Ruairi Robinson, at twenty-three, a relative newcomer to the scene (www.zanitafilms.com/ruairi.html), worked within the Film Board’s Short Shorts program. With its comparatively low budget — Fifty Percent received 12,700 euros — this scheme gives younger or less experienced filmmakers a chance to cut their teeth. Robinson did the animation himself, using the Fim Board’s money to hire Ardmore Studios, which also worked on Braveheart, to help him get the sound right.

Fifty Percent Grey was shown before Behind Enemy Lines in Irish cinemas, and Robinson took advantage of his trip across the Atlantic to pitch future projects, including a live-action work and “a horror-film project, tentatively titled Borrhomeo the Alchemist. It’s brutally, brutally violent,” he says. “It contains my two trademarks, broken noses and exploding heads — in buckets.”

The biggest animation concern in Ireland today is Dublin-based Terraglyph Productions (a division of Chicago-based Terraglyph Interactive), where many of those who found themselves out of work in the mid-nineties settled. Terraglyph have made three features in the last five years through partnerships with companies from all over Europe: Carnivale with Millimages in France; Duck Ugly with Moro Studio in Spain; and Help! I'm A Fish — which was theatrically released throughout Western Europe and grossed over $1.2m in Ireland and the United Kingdom — with A.Film in Denmark.

Many of the animators at The Cartoon Saloon (www.cartoonsaloon.ie), a smaller, younger Irish animation studio, were taught by ex-Don Bluthers at college. (The Don Bluth Studios had strong ties with the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design, which runs an animation program considered among the best in the world.) Having produced some award-winning shorts they are now developing their first feature, Rebel, featuring the voice of Brendan Gleeson, about the monks who illustrated the Book of Kells, Ireland’s most famous ancient manuscript.

The Cartoon Saloon has received development money from the Film Board and the Irish Arts Council for Rebel, and is thrashing out deals with French company Les Armateurs and John Boorman’s Dublin-based Merlin Films. Tomm Moore, managing director of The Cartoon Saloon, is confident that this project will have a theatrical release in Europe. “A limited theatrical release [in the U.S.] would be nice,” says Moore, “but it’s a tough nut to crack.”

According to Moore, Rebel is “about the clash that happens between Art and Commerce, old ways and new ways, that sort of thing.” This clash is often at the heart of independent filmmaking. In the real world it can be a difficult battle to win.

Rod Stoneman points out that “some companies earn their bread and butter by doing ads, promos, and title sequences.” The Cartoon Saloon have “worked on all sorts of things,” producing Flash animation e-cards and Webisodes, CD-Rom educational projects, television series, pilots, a music video, short films and Web sites.

The Web, afterall, is an ideal way for animated shorts to reach the widest audience possible. Under the Irish Flash funding scheme, the Irish Film Board has partnered with AtomFilms to commission Flash animations. Brown Bag have their own flashy content site to showcase their work at www.flasharama.com.

Ruairi Robinson saw how the Web helped him: “Hundreds of thousands of people have watched Fifty Percent Grey online, there’s no way in hell I could have managed that any other way. Festivals just don’t reach enough people,” he reckons.

For what it's worth, Ralph Eggleston, who has a writing credit on Monsters Inc., won the Oscar® for Short Animated Film with For the Birds. Pixar were very proud. But Gaffney and Robinson and the rest of the Irish animation community aren't too worried. They're doing alright.