Co Hoedeman: master animator

TAKE ONE, Summer, 1999 by Gene Walz

Go Hoedeman has spent most of his adult life working at being a kid. It's an irony he's well aware of. The Dutch-born NFB animator makes his living creating fanciful little puppets which he arranges in front of a camera on miniature, tabletop sets, playfully moving them about to tell charming, gentle stories that have captivated children and adults around the world. For doing this he has been handsomely rewarded. His name is etched on dozens of international animation trophies, including an Oscar for The Sand Castle. There's even a movie about him, Nico Crama's Co Hoedeman, Animator. However, the Oscar came in 1978 and the movie shortly thereafter in 1980; for the past 20 years Hoedeman has receded from the limelight. His movies (seven since The Sand Castle) have won awards but not the clamour and the glamour that go with Hollywood acclaim. With the release of Ludovic: The Snow Gift, this may change. Paired with Nelvana's latest Babar feature, Babar: King of the Elephants, Ludovic has met with such positive response that three sequels have already been planned. Is there more limelight in Hoedeman's future?

Ludovic is the Baby Bear in a conventional three-bear family. He and his parents are old fashioned-looking teddy bear types but 1990s folk in their attitudes. Busy but overprotective, his parents keep a tight rein on Ludovic. He is anxious to escape their rules. When the new girl bear next door invites Ludovic to go tobogganing, he tries to slip away even though he's been told he's too little. His father catches him and Ludovic is forced to find some consolation in a doll that has fallen off the girl bear's toboggan. It turns out to be a special doll that can dance and play. When it accidentally breaks a dancing-bear statue, Ludovic is punished, and he, in turn, punishes the doll who sneaks out the window of the bears' thatched-roof home. Ludovic follows. Later Ludovic is hit by the girl bear's toboggan just as he decides to go for a ride with her. Papa Bear returns the doll to its original owner over Ludovic's protests, but the girl bear returns it as a gift to brighten Ludovic's lonely convalescence. In the end, he draws a heart on the frosty pane of his bedroom window as the camera tracks back to reveal the girl bear waving to him as she walks off with her toboggan full of dolls.

Dedicated to Hoedeman's grandchildren, Ludovic marks a return to the simplicity and cuteness that made his pre-Oscar films such audience pleasers. The bears are Stief-like and as cuddly as those unadorned pre-1950s bears get; the plain, muslin bear with its open face and stitched, goggle eyes is universally recognizable as the lovable receptacle of a child's projections. Ludovic's tiny-voiced interior monologue is perhaps gilding the lily, but there is a warmth and charm to these creatures that has largely been missing from Hoedeman's films for the past decade or so.

Unlike some puppet animators who work with the same or very similar creatures in film after film, year after year (Nick Park's square-mouthed clay figures Wallace and Grommit spring quickly to mind), Co Hoedeman's career has been characterized by a constant search for new subjects. He has never worked with the same materials or figures twice until now. He began his NFB career in 1969 with a cute pipe-cleaner figure for Oddball (Maboule in French). For Matrioska (1970), he turned to those familiar colourful but sombre-faced Russian nesting dolls. In The Owl and the Raven (1973), based on an Inuit legend, he used sealskin effigies. Tchou-Tchou (1972) featured a dragon, a boy, a girl and, in fact, an entire world made out of children's colourful building blocks. Most unforgettably, The Sand Castle (1977) followed a team of strange, seemingly half-formed creatures that emerged from the primal sand to build a magnificent curvilinear edifice; they were made out of bulky foam rubber over a solder armature. Hoedeman's approach in all of these early films was much like a modernist sculptor's. When questioned about The Sand Castle, he once told me, "You have to ask yourself what is the sand all about? In Tchou-Tchou, what are wood and blocks all about? With the sand it came down to smooth forms, no sharp edges. The characters had to be created to fit the landscape." He concluded by saying, "It would be nice to make a film about rope or about metal." Oddly enough, he never did.

With Masquerade (1984), Hoedeman began working with less familiar, less childlike materials. Masquerade is a science-fiction story set in a quarry-like world where a large group of children create their own costumes and masks for a community dance. They are elaborately coiffed and costumed figures made from brilliantly printed papier mache. Charles and Francois (1988), the story of an old man and his grandson, is Hoedeman's most adult-oriented work. It is populated by two-dimensional drawn figures cut out of thick paper. They are moved about in a three-dimensional, construction paper world with elaborate moving scenery shots to indicate changes in time and space. For The Box (1989), he returned to preschool characters (in what would now be termed a vaguely South Park style), but they were virtually two-dimensional, constructed out of thin slats of brightly painted wood. Hoedeman himself appears in the film--to encourage the "children" he has constructed to find a life of their own outside the box.