Co Hoedeman: master animator

TAKE ONE, Summer, 1999 by Gene Walz

Just prior to Ludovic, Hoedeman's search for new puppet materials took another turn. The Sniffing Bear (1992) and The Garden of Ecos (1997) are animal stories. Hoedeman started by making his own art paper. For The Sniffing Bear, a parable about substance abuse, he merely cut out three different shades of the roughly textured paper into the two-dimensional shapes of a bear, a seal and an owl.

For The Garden of Ecos, a more elaborate parable about the deadly consequences of disrupting the environment, he shaped the paper into a variety of odd, three-dimensional figures with cut-out or drawn-on features. Interestingly, the more resourceful Hoedeman became in his search for different puppet materials, the more distracting these materials have become. So, while his films since The Sand Castle have been impressive (and often award winning), they have not been as universally engaging. They have also strayed somewhat from his initial themes and concerns. Hoedeman's two major films of the 1970s, Tchou-Tchou and The Sand Castle, as well as most of his other early works, are celebrations of inspired action, joyful movement and creative transformation--matters central to all animator's art. At some point in all of these films a small, unprepossessing creature demonstrates its creativity by transforming itself and/or its environment in a captivating display of its hidden powers. This demonstration is almost always accompanied by or takes the form of a dance. In Oddball, challenged by a colourful array of beach balls and children's agates, the title character--a pinpoint of white light--bounces around and reveals that it contains all the colours of the rainbow. Beneath the stern countenance and unpromising bulk of the Matrioska doll are six smaller nesting dolls charged by a vital terpsichorean spirit which propels them into a snap-the-whip-style dance at the sound of the Russian folk music. The appearance of the dragon in Tchou-Tchou seems to be in response to the exuberance of the little block children. Whenever one of them performs a happy flip, the beast menaces them. Their early coping strategies (hiding from it, bombing it or tricking it) prove inadequate. It's only when they turn it into a train as it sleeps that they are successful. Then they can ride it through town accompanied by playful music in a kind of mechanical dance. Likewise, at the climax of The Sand Castle when the unlikely team of builders and shapers has transformed the barren beach into a castle, they celebrate their achievement with a happy dance. Against an empty, black-felt backdrop that suggests a void in Oddball and Matrioska, in the frozen high Arctic of The Owl and the Raven, in the cramped and circumscribed world of blocks in Tchou-Tchou, and in the fragile and transient world of wind, sand and waves in The Sand Castle, creatures still dance and express themselves. Creativity, Hoedeman repeatedly stresses, is irrepressible.