An Interview with Sylvain and Sally Chomet

Edinburgh has long been a mecca for all sorts of artforms, but its tiny community of animation producers could never claim to be at the centre of anything big – until now. The unexpected arrival this summer of Sylvain Chomet, Oscar-nominated director of Belleville Rendez-vous, has set the industry alight. With Chomet comes three new animation productions, just as local company Red Kite nets one feature-length co-production and pursues several more.

“There’s really something happening in Scotland now,” says Chomet, in the New Town flat which he rents with his English producer wife, Sally. Downstairs in a makeshift studio, art director Evgeni Tomov is hard at work, designing characters for Chomet’s new projects. “At one point,” says Chomet, “Edinburgh is probably going to be the place in Europe where there are the most animation productions.”

Born in France, Chomet started out as a comic strip artist, but inspired by Nick Park’s Creature Comforts he turned to animation in London in the 1980s. Chomet moved to Canada in 1993 where he completed his first short, The Old Lady And The Pigeons, winning a stream of prizes and earning him his first Oscar nomination. His second was for Belleville Rendez-vous, which took the world by storm last year.

Sally and Sylvain are currently riding the crest of a wave, with international companies queueing up for the next Chomet film. The couple are currently developing no less than three films: two of them will be made in Edinburgh and one – an unusual foray into 3D – will be made by a US team under Chomet’s direction.

Chomet is particularly excited about his Jacques Tati film. An unused script by the silent comic was recently unearthed by his estate, and offered to the animator. Chomet, a huge Tati fan, jumped at the chance. The Illusionist follows the fortunes of a magician who wins the heart of a young village girl. She has never seen electricity and believes his tricks are real magic. He doesn’t have the heart to disillusion her, and goes bankrupt buying her magical gifts.

Although Tati set the story in Czechoslovakia, Chomet plans to shift the action to Edinburgh, and to a Hebridean island where the girl speaks only Gaelic. As with Belleville Rendez-vous, there won’t be any actual dialogue, so the music provides the linguistic clues.

“We won’t make fun of Gaelic,” insists Chomet, “although we might have a caricature. That is not like making fun – you just caricaturise something which is very true, and then it’s so caricaturised that it becomes funny. There’s probably going to be some Scottish bagpipe music. There’s a céilidh and then we’re probably going to create some fake traditional Scottish music and we can have fun with that.”

Because Pathé is already interested, The Illusionist is likely to be first off the starting blocks, and ready, Chomet hopes, for Cannes 2007. The couple are currently looking for premises in Edinburgh to house the 100 people they need for a full-scale feature production, starting in about six months time. Then, of course, they have to find the people.

“Always the problem in animation is to find the artists,” explains Chomet. “I’m not very sure about the quality of the teaching in Edinburgh. There was a screening last week and I was very disappointed. With student work you always expect that there’s going to be some rubbish in it, but there was no animation, there was just this image treatment, like a demo for a computer.”

Chomet puts his finger on a problem which has been recognised for some time by the Scottish animation industry: while art students are given plenty of access to technology, and lots of creative freedom, few Scottish courses teach the discipline of classical character animation. Soon, it seems, there will be more jobs around than animators to fill them, a baffling turn of events for this neglected cottage industry.

Fortunately that’s not putting Chomet off. He has a further 2D film up his sleeve, although he says there’s no question of making both films simultaneously. Barbacoa is a dark and violent tale of a group of animals who take part in the Paris Commune, a bloody period in France’s revolutionary history. Not a cartoon for kiddies, one would think, but Chomet argues that children will find it interesting too.

The animator’s third project is for Universal Pictures. Although the 3D film is based on a children’s book, it will still bear the grisly Chomet hallmark. The Tale of Despereaux “is like going back to old Grimms Fairy Tales,” says Sally. “It’s quite sinister and dark in places, like original Grimms, before Disney got in and made them cute.”

3D animation is a new departure for Sylvain, and he is determined to do something very different with it. “I don’t think that right now there have been many films which are really showing the potential of 3d animation,” he argues. “What’s come from the States – everything, whether it’s Disney, whether it’s Shrek, seems to have no originality to it.”

Chomet has been looking to early Flemish painters such as Brueghel for inspiration, and intends to make a film in the style of those rustic paintings, indeed a far cry from Shrek. Once he’s happy with the look of the film, he’ll leave the American animators to it. “Once the storyboard’s done and the development’s done, I basically don’t have to touch a pencil anymore.”

And, I ask, which of these three films would he like to win an Oscar with?

“All of them!” he replies.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 25.07.04