Co Hoedeman: master animator

TAKE ONE, Summer, 1999 by Gene Walz

This optimism is somewhat compromised in The Treasure of the Grotoceans (1988), where buoyant, underwater creatures make a life out of salvaging human junk that has been discarded into the sea. They are creative, but the ecological threat casts a pall on the film. After this, Hoedeman focuses increasingly on those things that stifle creativity. In the future world of Masquerade, weird machines make everything from food to music to masks. Although there are young girls to organize and prepare for the final dance, there are, ominously, no adult females, only old men to run things and offer advice and fathers to interfere. Despite this, the children succeed in making crude and amusingly amateurish costumes and masks for the dance. The film seems to be more concerned with human persistence and the acceptance of childish limitations rather than the triumph of the spirit evident in Hoedeman's earlier work. The relationship between mentors and proteges is the focus of all the films since Masquerade. In fact, that is the most noteworthy change in the work Hoedeman has completed so far. Before Masquerade, his films are inhabited exclusively by precocious children, unsupervised creatures or naive animals. Since then, with the possible exception of The Sniffing Bear, adults are a constant presence and the fallen world is too much with us. This has meant not just an addition of characters but an altered point of view and a change in tone. Muted colours predominate in Charles and Francois and The Garden of Ecos. Both films end with deaths. A sombre sense of inevitability and loss, never far below the surface, gradually emerges. The bounce and sparkle of Hoedeman's earlier films is nowhere in evidence.

The one exception to this virtual sea change is The Box. A Pinocchio-like story, The Box combines live action with animation as Hoedeman appears as himself at his animation table. Starting with a drawn-on smile and then a blue, paper heart, the animator subsequently provides the little wooden boy with periodic nods of encouragement and useful props to help him negotiate his way around his boxed-in world. In the end, on his own, the puppet boy creates a three-dimensional star which Hoedeman places on the wall of his own studio, allowing the boy to escape his own small box for the larger one of the animator. More overtly metacinematic and philosophical than his earlier work, The Box nonetheless reprises many of the qualities that made his films so refreshingly attractive--bright and lively colours straight out of a child's uncomplicated imagination and a story composed from the simple and yet familiar trials of childhood, amusingly and unexpectedly plotted. Accessible by children, yet attractive to adults at the same time (like the best of his films), The Box provides the added bonus of clever allusions to Hoedeman's earlier work.

What is most distinctive about Hoedeman's 30-year career as an animator is not, however, his ups-and-downs, his consistencies or inconsistencies. Nor is it his constant search for new materials or the appeal he holds for both the sophisticated and the uninitiated. What stands out is the fluidity and involvement of his animation camera. Working on a precarious tabletop landscape of blocks or paper, sand or stones, requires extraordinary patience and delicacy. Negotiating an inquisitive and sympathetic camera through a maze of features with nary a visible flow is nothing short of God-like. Continuity lapses, out of focus shots, wonky setups are nowhere in evidence. That he can do this with a moving camera and often in extreme close-up with four-inch creatures (where the tolerances are exaggerated) is a testimony to his wizardry.