A million viewers - for a short animated film

Finnish shorts are doing the rounds of film festivals - and winning awards

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By Harri Römpotti
     
      Ten years ago, Finnish film directors turned out very few animated films. Now one full-length animated feature - Keisarin salaisuus (The Emperor's Secret, 2006) - was released a few months ago, and four more are in progress. Short films tour the specialist festivals, and the animations training programme at the Turku Arts Academy is world-famous in the branch.
      Laura Neuvonen's Kutoja (The Last Knit) has been presented at 40 festivals all over the world, for instance in the official competition at Annecy in 2005.
      Annecy is the most prestigious event in the calendar for animated films, the genre's equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival.
      Kutoja has also already notched up more than a million viewers on the Net. Under its English title, it has been available on the YouTube portal since August.
     
"It is great to get a big audience like that, even if it doesn't bring in any money. You cannot think of a short in terms of financial rewards", notes 33-year-old Neuvonen.
      She makes her living by animating characters for the weekly Saturday night political satire Itse valtiaat (The Autocrats, 2001-) on YLE's TV1, and she was also involved on Keisarin salaisuus, which is based on the same animated characters.
      "I don't make shorts only with a view to directing a feature-length picture. With short films it is possible to deal with subjects that are personal to you, while in a longer film there would be endless numbers of people who would want to influence the content", she shrugs.
      Kutoja is the amusing 7-minute story of a woman who cannot stop knitting at any price. Neuvonen does not acknowledge that it is a self-portrait. "Everyone has their own obsessions, but knitting is not one of my hobbies."
     
The director has already completed a new 15' animation called Möbleeraaja (The Next Move, 2006), and she is planning the next one.
      She uses computer-generated animation perfectly happily in her own personal work. The technology has overrun most of the commercial animations market, but many a maker of short films still favours the tradtional methods.
     
Tatu Pohjavirta is one such traditionalist. His puppet animation Elukka (Animal, 2006) has been screened at around a dozen festivals in Europe, Asia, and North America.
      Elukka tells the story of a single parent father who is turning into a werewolf, his son who has mixed his body with a lamb in an accident, and a female doctor - the object of the father's desires.
      As a short film, it is on the longer side, weighing in at around 28 minutes. Nevertheless it was made on the budget of a much shorter film.
      "If the average cost of a short puppet animation in Finland is around EUR 10,000 a minute, we had enough money for a quarter of an hour. The other half came from the team's personal readiness to push themselves beyond the limit. But this wasn't a chopped long film so much as a short that grew in scale", says 29-year-old Pohjavirta emphatically.
     
The Turku Arts Academy graduate's earlier directions have included Kuvastin (The Reflector, 2001), which was nominated in the Best Short Film category at the 2002 European Film Awards.
      This, too, was a puppet animation, a fantasy about the circus and making movies.
      "It's a good thing that short films are no way a commercial exercise. You don't have to go out and make compromises to make somebody love the work. You won't lose your shirt or your house if the movie doesn't get 100,000 people watching it. On the other hand, of course, with shorts it is almost impossible to put together a large enough budget - but I guess that's the same story for all the arts."
      Recently Pohjavirta spent some time in Prague working with Katariina Lillqvist. Lillqvist's animated shorts have made her one of Finland's best-known film-makers on the international scene.
     
The majority of short animated films are made as student works or low-budget exercises, and they do not get much of an airing, except at a few domestic events. Producing a full-length animated feature is quite another business.
      In expensive projects there is seldom any leeway for artistic risk-taking. Even so, Pohjavirta is drawn to the longer format. He is developing a number of shorts, but is also hatching out an idea for a full-length puppet animation.
      "It would not be in Disney style or the sort of cream-pie-in-the-face comedy. I'd like to do it in my own style, like my earlier pictures, and aim it at adults and young adults, which would probably make things that much more difficult."
     
To put things very crudely, short animations are "art", and long ones are "product".
      For all that, it is definitely a good thing that the Finns are coming around to the idea of making feature-length animations.
      "It's naturally very different from making something arty with a small group of people. The contribution of a big team provides its own lift. Things move forward on several fronts at once - background, characters, and storyboard", says Kari Juusonen.
      Juusonen is co-directing Lentäjän poika (working title: The Way to the Stars), a full-length computer animation, which received a EUR 600,000 grant from the EU's Eurimages fund in October. This was a Finnish record from the fund, and the Finnish Film Foundation has also put in a hefty half a million euros.
     
The money is welcome, as the film's budget is more than EUR 6 million. Lentäjän poika , scheduled for release at Christmas 2008, is the most expensive film ever made in Finland, regardless of genre. It is going ahead as a Finnish, Danish, German, and Irish co-production.
      "It is nice to think that the completion of a project like this is unstoppable. Things won't fall apart on us even if I'm off sick for a couple of weeks. When I started doing animations in 1994, something like this never seemed remotely possible. Finnish movies were doing badly at that time, and nobody was really even making animations in this country."
      Juusonen, 39, also has a track record among the short films. His Pizza passionata was a prizewinner at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
      Lentäjän poika is set in Lapland and tells the story of Rusty, a little reindeer who is ashamed of his fear of flying. Matters are made doubly awkward since Rusty's father - whom he has admittedly never met - is said to be among the heroes of Santa Claus's airborne cavalry. Juusonen was brought in to direct an idea that had already been shaped out in storyboard form.
      "Since then it has changed almost out of all recognition. I was recently in Denmark discussing the script once again. But then again, nobody wants to hear patent ideas on the basis of 'now what would best appeal to the kids in the audience'. The story is going to be personal for all the people involved in the film."
      In Juusonen's case, he has as it were adopted one of the minor characters - a flying squirrel named Julius. He says he is drawn to Julius's tendency towards desperate hopeless endeavours, and finds himself backing the character in all his doings.
      So in a sense it is possible within a large project to get one's own individual contribution seen and heard.
     
Juusonen says he will probably go back to making shorts, but right now he seems very enthusiastic about the idea of a large group working together.
      And the aim of the film is not to imitate other countries, even if the makers do have an eye on international distribution.
      "This story could not take place anywhere else but Finland. The authentic nature of the Lappish landscape is close to our hearts. A Finnish Christmas movie has to be different from an American one, anyhow. And the quality of the snow effects in our demo has been admired by professionals around the world", says Juusonen.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 3.1.2007


Links:
  IMBD: Laura Neuvonen
  The Last Knit (YouTube)
  Camera Cagliostro
  Tatu Pohjavirta: Elukka
  Katariina Lillqvist
  http://www.cameracagliostro.fi/lillqvist.htm
  Finnish Film Foundation: Lentäjän poika
  Finnish Film Foundation: Animations

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