(Hand-Drawn) Animation

This summer’s big box office hits were the confirmation of a continuous trend in cinema: animation is taking over. Toy Story 3 is already the highest earning film of the year, gaining profits of over 1 billion dollars worldwide. The last chapter of the Shrek series is not far behind, drawing similar numbers to Christopher Nolan’s much praised Inception or the teen sensation Eclipse.

Disney and Pixars domination over the genre is undisputable. Their creative use of new technologies has gathered massive audiences who lead us to conclude this is in no way a temporary state of affairs. While the success of American animations is defining new standards, something interesting is happening in other parts of the world. Some animators are going back to their origins by replacing the same new technologies with a more classical approach, and by doing so achieving completely different results.

One good example is Fernando Trueba’s new film Chico and Rita, one of this year’s highlights of the narrative competition. The Oscar-winning Spanish director launched himself on new terrain alongside two renowned Spanish artists, Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando, to produce a film that encapsulates this new dimension of animation, a new film language where hand-drawn characters and places are brutally real, politically critical and altogether thought provoking.

This phenomenon is not necessarily new, but you would find it hard to point out another moment in film history where so many serious and influential animations have been release simultaneously, creating enough space of maneuver to launch the absurd cry of the birth of an international movement.

Chico and Rita, a love story set on the background of the Latin jazz explosion in the pre-revolutionary Cuba of the 1950s, attention to detail is nothing short of brilliant. It adds a poetic and emotionally intense reality to a script that, even though it borders on the obvious, is charged with stimulating political and social commentary.

A series of similar productions have been released in the past few years, and more interestingly, from very different corners of the world. In France Sylvain Chomet is being the target of great praise following the recent release of The Illusionist and his now legendary Bellevue Rendez-Vous. The Japanese, in some way, actually set the standard a while ago, in particular through the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Ponyo).

Equally relevant has been the part the Middle-East is assuming in this story. From all the animations released in the last few years Waltz with Bashir from Israeli director Ari Folman, is perhaps the most astonishing of them all. Set during the early 1980s Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Folman’s daring voyage into his very own forgotten war memories showed us exactly how much animation has got to offer, creating a film truly without parallel.

In this edition of the Abu Dhabi film Festival audiences will have the opportunity to take a look at yet another interesting version of the new animation language. In Kingdom of Women: Ein El-Hilweh, Palestinian born director Dhana Abourahme teamed up with Lebanese artist Lena Merhej to present us with a unique experiment. The documentary attempts to compile testimonies by Palestinian women who have survived a series of Israeli invasions and one civil war in the largest refugee camp in Lebanon, Ein El-Hilweh. Most of the stories told by the interviewed women are enough to transport the audience into frightening and despairing scenarios. But what really stands out in Kingdom of Women is Merhej contributions, a series of short animations that illustrate these same events, taking the emotional impact yet another step forward.

As animation is also on the rise in other countries in the region, such as Iran, and most importantly in the UAE, with the TV success of Haider Mohammad Haider’s Sha’biyat Al Cartoon, new paths are bound to be open for the emergence of local talent. The question is, will they be able to catch up with the rest of the world?

By Fernando Vasquez