Animation - Made In Germany
Key European Market
If one wanted proof that the German animation industry has become a force to be reckoned with in Europe, this was convincingly delivered last year when two of the industry's top international events - March's CARTOON Movie and September's CARTOON Forum - were both staged in Germany.
In fact, it was the third time that the CARTOON Movie co-production market had assembled at the Babelsberg Studios (returning for a fourth time this spring). And the Bavarian alpine town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen was the latest stop in CARTOON Forum's trail across Europe, which brought more than 700 delegates together for the pitching of projects for animated TV series and web-based productions.
The significance of the German animation sector was also brought out by the fact that 240 of the delegates accredited at the Forum were from Germany, including 60 potential investors, with German animation production outfits involved as lead producer in 18 of the market's 88 projects.
While France is still the leading center for the production of animation in Europe, Germany has now developed in a matter of only a few years into the second largest European market, with production said to be worth US$130 million annually and new animation studios popping up in some corner of the country every month.
Long Tradition in Animation
However, before we look at the current situation of the animation industry in Germany, let's have a brief glance back at some of the past highlights in German animation.
Going back to the days of the silent movies, before the First World War, the first German animation films were made by Julius Pinschewer (Corsets Gebr. Lewandowski, 1910) and Guido Seeber (Die geheimnisvolle Streichholzdose, 1909/10).
In the 1920s, their involvement in abstract and dadaist art attracted Walther Ruttmann (Der Sieger, 1921) and Hans Richter (Rhythmus series, 1921-1925) to make outings into animation, but a unique figure from this time who built up an unchallenged international reputation was the animator Lotte Reiniger, who became famous for her silhouette films created from back-lit paper cut-outs.
She made her first animation film in 1919 (The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart/Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens) and animated a dream sequence for Fritz Lang's 1924 epic Die Nibelungen, which was widely screened despite being removed from the completed version of the film. Reiniger's classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926) - which was credited by some as being the first feature-length animation film - consisted of 250,000 single images and had a «multi-plane» camera specially designed and built for the production.
In addition to shooting experimental shorts and silhouette films from the late 20s to the mid 1930s, Reiniger also contributed silhouette sequences for such live-action features as Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Don Quixote (Don Quichotte, 1933) and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise (1937). In 1936, Reiniger emigrated with her husband to Great Britain where she lived and worked (Hansel & Gretel, 1955) - among other things, for the Crown Film Unit and General Post Office Unit - until 1980 before returning to her native country a year before her death.
Another important figure was the avant-garde animator and painter Oskar Fischinger who co-owned an animation company in Munich by the age of 22 and produced a number of experimental films. In an attempt to combine his two passions of music and the graphic arts, Fischinger experimented with photographing multiple forms - melting wax, cardboard cutouts, swirling liquids. According to Fischinger historian William Moritz, he devised «a machine that would slice very thin layers from a prepared block of wax, with a camera synchronized to take one frame of the remaining surface of the block. Any kind of image could be built into the wax block - a circle getting smaller would be a simple cone, for example.»
Fischinger worked at the UFA studios in Babelsberg on the special effects for Fritz Lang's silent science fiction film Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond) in 1928, and some of his shorts took the form of advertisements. Muratti Gets in the Act (Muratti greift ein, 1934), for example, was for a popular cigarette company and had cigarettes marching in mad goose-stepping formation - as a precursor to his later work with Walt Disney on Fantasia (1940) where broomsticks did the marching in The Sorcerer's Apprentice episode.
Fischinger's pioneering use of multiple overlapping projected images and light shows alongside his abstract animation won him a following outside of Germany at film festivals around the world for bringing the last word in modernism. But the Nazis didn't share the same enthusiasm declaring his work as «degenerate» in 1936. Forced to leave Germany, Fischinger created shorts for Paramount and MGM, worked for a year at Disney on Fantasia and at Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on a project that was never realized. As Moritz notes, «he was the only avant-garde filmmaker of the 20s who also continued his work in the 30s and 40s in his new home of Los Angeles and so helped to spur on the experimental film movement in America».
Animation During the Third Reich
Any development of artistic dimensions to animation was nipped in the bud by the draconian measures of the Nazi regime from 1933 onwards even though there was a (failed) attempt in 1942 by the Film Ministry to establish an official Deutsche Zeichenfilm GmbH. The Film Ministry did command however the most distinguished animators still in Germany to step up their production and concentrate on theatrically viable animation features.
One figure working during the 30s was Wolfgang Kaskeline (Zwei Farben, 1933, and Der blaue Punkt, 1936), who, despite the general restriction of artistic freedom, was mainly active in the field of advertising and ran his own studios in Berlin and Bonn-Bad Godesberg after the war until his death in 1973.
Short animated commercials were the focus of the work at this time by the three Diehl brothers - Paul, Hermann and Ferdinand Diehl - who initially started in classical animation and silhouette films before moving into puppet animation when they set up their studio in Graefelfing, near Munich, in 1929.
Their film work specialized on fables and fairytales, but their greatest success was with the tales spun around the figure of «Mecki» (1937) who captured children's (and adults') hearts from the 1950s onwards and spawned a veritable flood of toys and books, even to this day. Until 1970, the Diehls made more than 60 films - some combining puppet animation with live- action - and over 100 commercials.
Meanwhile, «audience darling» Hans Fischer - also known as Fischerkoesen - directed and produced animated fairy tale fantasies -- such as Schall und Rauch (1933), Das blaue Wunder (1935) and Snowman (Der Schneemann, 1944) - which some observers deemed could hold their own with the likes of Disney. As a result of Fischerkoesen's success in advertising films, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ordered him to move his staff and studio from the Leipzig area to Potsdam to make himself available for consultations and special effects on features and
Disney Dominance
After 1945, Germany was flooded with animated films from the US, particularly from Walt Disney. People who had just lived under 12 years of terror wanted to catch up on all of the pleasures forbidden them by the Nazis and this included films from Hollywood.
As Albrecht Ade, founder of the internationally-renowned animation festival in Stuttgart, pointed out in an touring exhibition brochure of the new generation of animators in 1984, Disney et al then set the agenda for a long while regarding the audiences' tastes, and it was only in the second half of the 1960s that new efforts came from art academies and individual enthusiasts to give space once more to experimentation in animation and find new forms of expressions and new audiences.
In the fifties, animation in (West) Germany was - with a few exceptions - more about mannered style and perfect animation technique than the quality of the drawing and imagination in the dramaturgy. Any prospects for a continuity in the development of the animation sector withered away when the tax incentives for cultural films (Kulturfilme)- and thus for animated shorts - were abolished. For many years, animation was alive and well in Germany - but only in the world of advertising.
The Oberhauseners and Animation
In February 1962, a group of young filmmakers signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, including a handful of animators. One of the signatories, Wolfgang Urchs had made the short Die Gartenzwerge in 1961, pointing up social aspects of life in the young Federal Republic. At the time, the press described it as «the first competitive West German animated short» and Urchs followed with highly political short films like Die Pistole (1963) and Kontraste (1964).
It was over two decades, though, before Urchs embarked on his first animated feature for Michael Schoemann's studio, In der Arche liegt der Wurm, which was made between 1985 and 1987 and known as Stowaway in the Ark in the US. He followed this in 1990 with Peterchens Mondfahrt.
Meanwhile, fellow Oberhausener Helmut Herbst, who later progressed to live action features, brought the Axel Springer concern into his sights with Schwarz-Weiss-Rot (1963/1964). He then established the animation studio Cinegrafik in Hamburg which worked on animation sequences for industrial films and for Time Life as well as promotional trailers for the third channel of local public broadcaster NDR. One of the studio's collaborators was Franz Winzentsen who had co- founded an experimental puppet theater in 1960 and worked on animation films at Cinegrafik until 1973.
In the 1970s, Winzentsen and his first wife Ursula made many animation films for children's television at NDR and WDR, continuing this work into the 1980s after their separation with such children's films as Hin- und Rueckfahrt (1984/85) and Telefonfieber (1984/85), playing with the possibilities of the medium.
A previous film, Flamingo - Aus meinem Animationstagebuch (1982), had seen Winzentsen - who has been serving as professor for animation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg since 1987 - combining various animation techniques with photographs he had collected or taken. This approach was continued in a collaboration with Thomas Mitscherlich on the feature Der Fotograf (1990).
Doyen of German Animation: Curt Linda
Back in 1969, the first German feature-length animation film was produced in color - Die Konferenz der Tiere - by Curt Linda who was awarded a Honorary German Film Award last year for his outstanding services to German cinema. «I unfortunately didn't invent any Mickey Mouse» was what Curt Linda is supposed to have said when asked why he hadn't become as famous as his US colleague Disney.
But generations of German children have been nevertheless enchanted by the magical figures coming from his Linda-Film Produktion animation studio since its launch in December 1961 with such features as Shalom Pharao (1982), Harold und die Geister (1988, with live-action sequences), Das kleine Gespenst (1992) and Die kleine Zauberfloete (1998).
«What distinguished Linda's works was not the conveyor belt work of hundreds of animators or lots of computers, but the handicraft of a few possessed souls who pottered about in his Munich studio between sketches, overflowing files and full shelves, between prizes, certificates and cluttered up desks», the German Film Award organizers declared last year. Linda and his team wanted, above all, to offer an alternative to the »American style of over-dynamic movements and the mad hectic pace of the characters» with imaginative stories, the soft and gentle approach and careful drawing. Often, more than 400,000 individual draw-ings were needed for just one 90-minute film.
Apart from his feature films, Linda also worked for television with such series as Sensationen unter der Zirkuskuppel (1971-1974), Spass an der Freud' (1973-1974) and Opera Presto (1976-1977).
Meanwhile, over in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the DEFA Animation Studio was founded in Dresden in 1955 and became a gathering place for artists from a variety of related disciplines including graphic design, commercial graphics, puppetry and information films, as well as production groups specializing in puppet animation films, silhouette films and the «classic» 2-cell animation.
As a Goethe Institute brochure accompanying a GDR animation retrospective in 1992 observed, «their love for the very special art of animation, this unique combination of the visual and the dramatic, formed a common bond which lasted for decades».
Until 1990, over 2,000 films were made - for the cinema, television and other institutions. Each year saw about 15 films and series with episodes of between five and thirty minutes being made for the Children's General Program (Kindersammelprogramm) to be shown to kindergarten and nursery school groups.
Often, the films served as supporting films before the main feature in the cinemas, and some of them served an educational purpose for both children and adults. One series of 30 episodes, Theo, for example, was on the issue of safety at the workplace, while the figure of «Kundi» appeared in another series on behalf of the German Hygiene Museum to teach children about healthy living.
Among the leading figures from the DEFA Animation Studio were co-founder Kurt Weiler and Sieglinde Hamacher, whose works were celebrated in retrospectives at last year's Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animation Film.
While 80-year-old Weiler is known for his puppet animation on such films as Die Geschichte von Kalif Storch and Vom faulen Toepfer und dem fleissigen Waescher, 65-year-old Hamacher is known for her artistically challenging and politically non-conformist films, such as Kontraste (1982) and The Solution (Die Loesung, 1988), made when the days were numbered for the East German state.
The Dresden studio was also a stage in the career of 1961-born Heinrich Sabl, one of the most innovative figures of German animation in the 1990s, whose films include the shorts Wolf bleibt Wolf (1994), The Cock (1994), and 100 Jahre Kino (1995), as well as Père Ubu (1997) and Mère Ubu (1998). In 1989, the Filmfest Dresden was established on the grounds of the DEFA studios, focusing on the city's long tradition of animation film. Since then, the festival has developed into and remains a leader in the specialized area of animation. In 1991 however, all of the studio staff were laid off and the studios closed down, bringing the production of puppet animation films to a halt. In December of the same year, though, some of the animators banded together to found Hylas Trickfilm Dresden to produce and distribute puppet films for children and adults. The following year, production began with support from the state of Saxony on the making of Von der Fee, die Feuer speien konnte. The arts authorities in Dresden helped the new group set up a studio outside of the former DEFA infrastructure, and they also produced the puppet film Wie der Mistkaefer Bernhard zum Verstand kommt (1995).
German Animation from the 1990s
Animation films are traditionally targeted first and foremost at children, but this changed at the beginning of the 1990s in Germany when producers, in particular Michael Schaack, came upon the idea of bringing movement to the characters in the cult Werner comic strips by Roetger «Broesel» Feldmann. Director/producer Schaack's animated feature Werner - Beinhart! (1990) was the result, and the beginning of a highly successful franchise which has now entered into production on its fourth edition with Hayo Freitag's Werner - Ein Volk, Ein Koenich (2002).
The German animation industry has since become the envy of the rest of the European animation community for being able to score box-office success with «adult» features such as Gerhard Hahn's Werner - Volles Roaaa! (2.7 million admissions) and Schaack's The Little Bastard (Kleines Arschloch, 3 million admissions), as well as with «traditional» animation for children such as Schaack's Pippi Langstrumpf, and Thilo Graf Rothkirch and Piet de Rycker's The Little Polar Bear (Der kleine Eisbaer, 2001).
Animation targeted mainly at children is naturally at a disadvantage because such films normally can only secure afternoon and, possibly, early evening screening slots in the cinemas and will have lower takings since the bulk of the box-office comes from the lower priced tickets for children. Films aimed at a wider, adult audience, however, will also have access to evening slots and thus have the potential for higher box-office returns.
It is no surprise then that European animation producers are increasingly adopting the moniker of «family entertainment» to describe their output so as to escape the «children's film ghetto».
As Michael Schmetz, consultant to studio Hahn Film and Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg among others, observes in a study of animation feature films in Germany since 1997, one point to remember about the comedies à la Werner and Arschloch is that they may «have not only refinanced themselves in the German-speaking market, but have also generated good profits for the producers»; however, their «specifically German humor» means that these comedies are not great shakes in the export department.
Top German Animation Features 1997-2001
| Title | Prod Company | Admission |
|---|---|---|
| Kleines Arschloch | Senator/ TFC | 3,071,042 |
| Werner - Volles Rooaaa | Achterbahn/ Hahn | 2,612,679 |
| Der kleine Eisbaer | Cartoon Film/ Warner | 2,612,679 |
| Kapt'n Blaubaer | Senator/ TFC | 1,371,115 |
| Pippi Langstrumpf | Kirch Media/ Svensk Film (Sweden) | 1,106,033* |
| Pettson & Findus | TV Loonland/ Happy Life Animation (Sweden) | 1,029,554* |
| Die furchtlosen Vier | Munich Animation | 800,736 |
| Hilfe! Ich bin ein Fisch | Munich Animation/ AFilm (Denmark)/ Terra Glyph (Ireland) | 696,737* |
| Die Story von Monty Spinneratz | Monty Film/ Warner Bros. | 692,111 |
| Pippi Langstrumpf in der Suedsee | Kirch Media/ TFC/ Svensk Film (Sweden) | 574,171* |
Diverse Studio Landscapes
Unlike France - where the industry is very much based in Paris - Germany's lack of one main production center is something of a problem. But the federal structure does have its benefits since, as with live-action production, the German states vie with each other to attract animation studios to locate to their region by providing attractive incentives. This is reflected in the seven leading animation studios for the production of features: Hahn Film and Cartoon Film Rothkirch are based in Berlin, TFC Trickompany and Animationsstudio Ludewig in Hamburg, Motion Works in Halle, and Trixter Film and Munich Animation Film in Munich.
Added to these players are the production companies active in the animation sector who do not have their own physical studio, ranging from Senator Filmproduktion and Greenlight Media through ndF neue deutsche Filmgesellschaft and RTV Family Entertainment to Warner Bros. Film and TV-Loonland.
"Tobias Totz und sein Loewe" by Thilo Rotkirch & Piet de Rycker
Not to mention the many small outfits dotted around the country who work primarily for television or advertising such as Toons 'n' Tales, Scopas Medien and Studio Film Bilder.
«The German animation film studios also work in part as networks since, on the one hand, they often don't have the capacity for the production of a feature film», Schmetz explains, «and, on the other, there are components like 3D animation which are only available in certain studios». Thus, The Little Polar Bear involved the cooperation of four German animation studios: Cartoon Film Rothkirch, Motion Works, Animations-fabrik Hamburg, and Animationsstudio Ludewig. According to Schmetz, around three animation features have been produced in Germany each year since 1997, although he argues that «a volume of annually seven to ten German films could be well managed by the local cinema market and would also give the studios the possibility to hold on to their valuable creative personnel and occupy them on a continuous basis. Three films annually, however, are not enough to keep the existing studio capacities busy. All feature film producers are therefore also producers of TV series at the same time».
New Entrants
Interestingly, animation has also cast its spell on producer colleagues from the live-action fiction segment.
One of the highest profile «converts» to the animation world was veteran producer Eberhard Junkersdorf who set up his own animation studio Munich Animation Film from scratch with Michael Coldewey in 1995 to produce an animated version of an updated story of the Bremen Town Musicians in The Fearless Four (Die furchtlosen Vier, 1997), distributed by Warner Bros.
Since then, the studio has worked with Thilo Graf Rothkirch on Tobias Totz und sein Loewe (1999); on Help! I'm a Fish (2000) with Danish and Irish production partners; and is now preparing a feature based on the adventures of Jester Till (Till Eulenspiegel) with British and Belgian partners. «The animation scene didn't really exist before in Bavaria», Junkersdorf recalls. «We really triggered off a lot and many other companies then followed».
Meanwhile, down at the Bavaria Film-Studios, Odeon Film is preparing to diversify into animation programming through subsidiary Lunaris Film's animation film rights to the classic children's books by Erich Kaestner. First up is a 13-part series of Emil and the Detectives (Emil und die Detektive) together with the Cologne-based animation studio Juergen Egenolf Productions (J.E.P.) using the famous Kaestner illustrations by Walter Trier as the basis for the animation.
What's more, the Leipzig outpost of Berlin producer Alexander Ris' Mediopolis Film - producer of films by Fred Kelemen and Seyhan Derin - has joined forces with Tony Loeser's Motion Works to develop a 26-part series, Count Mocca, centered on the figure of the colorful inventor and adventurer for the six to eleven age group.
And Berlin is the base for an animation subsidiary launched by Hofmann & Voges Entertainment - Punchhole Film - to produce for cinema and TV. The first fruits of this collaboration are the animated linking sequences in the Erkan & Stefan headnut TV show, which will prepare fans for the release of an animated feature film based on the «krass krauts», currently entitled Erkan & Stefan und das Doenertier.
European Dimension
Given the size of the budgets animation features command - an estimated average of Euro 6.5 million -, it is not
This «European dimension» to the German animation scene operates in both directions: foreign animation studios come onboard German productions - as in the case, say, of Tobias Totz und sein Loewe and Pettson & Findus.
Indeed, Michael Schmetz's line up of 20 German animation features planned for production from now until 2004 shows that 13 - i.e. 65% - will be international co-productions (this figure was 40% between 1997-2001). They include Motion Works' Globi - der gestohlene Schatten with partners from Switzerland and Luxembourg; Lenard Krawinkel's Gaya with a Spanish production partner; and three projects between Greenlight Media and OSCAR-winning producer John Williams (Shrek, 2001). But German studios are also much sought-after partners for productions from other European territories. As Fredrik Zander of Stockholm-based Happy Life Animation points out: «Many of our projects have been co-produced with Germany because the German funding programs are more flexible with co-production deal structures. It is more difficult to co-produce with French or Canadian partners because their quota system forces us to place production in places where we might not think there was the best talent».
A recent case of a German animation studio being involved in an international feature was Animationstudio Ludewig in Hamburg working on the compositing for Jimmy Murakami's Christmas Carol - The Movie (2001), featuring the voices of Kate Winslet and Nicolas Cage
In the past five years, German public funds - i.e. the regional economically-oriented bodies and the national German Federal Film Board (Filmfoerderungsanstalt/FFA) - have, on average, put up 50%-60% of the production costs for German animation features via conditionally repayable loans.
«In many cases, animation can be more successful than live-action films because it can get distribution not only nationally but also internationally», argues FilmFernsehFonds (FFF) Bayern president Klaus Schaefer.
Indeed, the regional funds' intention is also to help support the creation of a lasting infrastructure for the animation sector, and FFF Bayern's Euro 7 million worth of investment over the last five years in such animation projects as The Fearless Four, Help! I'm a Fish and Pettson & Findus created an economic «effect» of Euro 50 million in the region.
Meanwhile, FilmFoerderung Hamburg has been particularly supportive of its local animation industry through the organisation of its «Toon Town» initiative showcasing the talents of such companies as Animationsstudio Ludewig, TFC Trickompany, Spans & Partner and Animationsfabrik. Over the years, the fund has backed the development and production of animated feature films and TV series and also supported the theatrical distribution of animated features by Hamburg-based Warner Bros.. Among the current projects benefitting from FilmFoerderung Hamburg funding are neue deutsche Filmgesellschaft's (ndF) feature film Derrick - Der Zeichentrickfilm, following the adventures of the internationally famous German TV detective and his assistant Harry Klein, and the Toon 'n' Tales Filmproduktion's second season of the TV series Jasper der Pinguin following a little penguin's journey from the South Pole to a European city where he makes friends with seven-year-old Emma.
Similarly, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and its regional fund Medien- und Filmgesellschaft (MFG) have made the animation sector a priority given the concentration of talents coming out of the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg in Ludwigsburg and the presence of companies in the region like Studio Film Bilder which handled the animation sequences in Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998).
But not all is hunky dory as producer Thilo Graf Rothkirch explained in an open letter to the finance ministries of Berlin and Brandenburg this spring, calling on them to make a clear commitment to the region's media industry by increasing the financial resources available to Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg.
«We should not allow well-trained animators and operators to move away to other regions just because we are on a weak footing in the financing of our projects, or whole projects leave the region», Rothkirch argued. «We want to realize our visions at the place where we live and not in foreign parts».
According to Eberhard Junkersdorf, more money could be generated for German animation films (and other genres) on top of the public funds through the introduction of financial incentives based on models in other countries such as the UK sale and leaseback scheme, or the tax schemes operating in Ireland, Luxembourg and Canada.
As it is, Germany's private media funds have already identified animation features and series as a lucrative business with the promise of a long shelf-life and broad exploitation of ancillary rights. Some - such as Berlin Animation Film (BAF), Festival Film and Scopas Family Entertainment have specialized solely in animation.
Others have boarded certain projects with international potential such as MBP (Internationale Medienbeteiligungs- Film- & TV-Produktionsgesellschaft)'s backing of the UK production house Illumination Films' Christmas Carol - The Movie and CP Medien's involvement in Jester Till to be produced by Munich Animation with Nik Powell's Scala Productions and Belgium's Stupid Studio.
And Berlin-based Target Media was recently set up by Thilo Graf Rothkirch's Cartoon Film and The Little Vampire-producer Comet Film to produce at least 15 animation and live-action features and TV series with Warner Bros. as a distribution partner.
German Animation's Up-and-Coming Generation
During the 1980s, several film and art schools in Germany, particularly in Hamburg, Kassel, Stuttgart and Braunschweig, became centers of animated film experimentation, which have since served as a wellspring of ideas and development laboratory for commercial film productions.
Albrecht Ade, who launched the animation studies course at the Art Academy in Stuttgart in 1979, has played a pivotal role in the development of a new generation of animators and of the public perception of animation in Germany. Animation was high on the agenda during the founding of the Film Academy in Ludwigsburg, where Ade served as artistic director (Dr. Arthur Hofer succeeded him in this post in 2000). Ade also provided a national and international forum for the latest trends in animation with the establishment of the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film which has been held every two years since 1982.
The Film Academy in Ludwigsburg has gained the expertise of Jochen Kuhn as professor for film design. Kuhn has taught widely in Germany, Great Britain, Austria and Australia and has received numerous awards for his films, such as Der lautlose Makubra, 1980, Die Beichte, 1990, Die Stimme des Igels, Vol. I & Vol. 2, (1994), Just Messing About (Fisimatenten, 2000), and the Neulich series (1998-2002), to name but a few. And in January of 2002, the Film Academy launched its own Institute for Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Post-Production. The Institute - under the direction of Professor Thomas Haegele - is not only responsible for courses such as Storytelling/Artistic Animation, Character Animation and Visual Effects, but also for a development pool for animation series with the focus on content design and technical design.
Moreover, recent developments have also seen the establishment of an Animation Master Class at the Fernsehakademie Mitteldeutschland (FAM) in Halle in central Germany in cooperation with the local animation studio Motion Works and MDM Mitteldeutsche Medienfoerderung to offer courses on VFX and animation. And here are some of the «ones to watch» in the new generation of animators in Germany:
Susanne Fraenzel teaches film animation at the Art Academy in Stuttgart and makes films illustrating a successful symbiosis of live action and colorful drawings, such as Bravo Papa 2040 (1989).
Felix Goennert has been studying at the «Konrad Wolf» Academy of Film & Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg since 1997 and made Bsss in 1999, which was shown in the Export-Union's «Next Generation» student film showcase in 2000.
Thomas Meyer-Hermann teaches at the Art Academy in Stuttgart and is founder of Studio Film Bilder, which produced Gil Alkabetz' animated sequences for Tom Tykwer's international hit Run Lola Run.
Andreas Hykade is a director and animator at Studio Film Bilder in Stuttgart and the recipient of numerous awards. His films include: We Lived in the Grass (Wir lebten im Gras, 1995) employing a very individual drawing style to explore the human psyche, and Ring of Fire (2000).
Vuk Jevremovich studied Architechture in Belgrade before moving to Munich in 1991 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. His films include: Era (1995), The Wind Subsides (1996), Panther (1998), which was shown in Venice, and Diary (Tagebuch, 2000), shown in competition in both Montreal and Biarritz.
Vera Lalyko studied Music and Sound Engineering before taking up Animation at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in 1996. She graduated with the film Window with a View (Fenster mit Aussicht, 2001), which is being presented in this year's Export-Union «Next Generation» program. She works as a freelance animator for music clip productions, commercials, TV series, and Internet projects.
The brothers Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein brought home a much-cherished OSCAR for their film Balance in 1989 and have created advertising spots in their Hamburg studio for such companies as Sega, Nike and Coca-Cola.
Daniel Nocke studied Animation and Direction at the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg from 1994-1999, graduating with the film Die Troesterkrise, which won a prize at the International Festival for Animated Film in Stuttgart and was nominated for the First Steps Award in 2000. He has also written screenplays for Stefan Krohmer's (live action) films Barracuda Dancing, Ende der Saison and Sie haben Knut.
Ingo Panke studied Sociology and Political Science before attending to the «Konrad Wolf» Academy of Film & Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg. During his studies he made two cartoons - including the 1999 «Next Generation» film Trompe L'Oeil - and an experimental film.
Jan Thuering made his first short - The Battle of Waterloo - at the age of 10 and studied Visual Communication at the Niederrhein Academy of Communication from 1995-1997. His animated short Terminal: Paradise (Endstation: Paradies 2000) was shown in the «Next Generation» program in 2001.
Thomas Stellmach and Tyron Montgomery are young filmmakers teaching at the Academy in Kassel and working independently. They received an OSCAR in 1996 for Quest, a tragic tale of a sand person searching for water in a world of sand
Chris Stenner has worked as a programmer and 3D artist and has been studying Animation at the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg since 1998. He co-directed the animation short Mann im Mond (1999) with fellow student
"Christmas Carol - The Movie" by Jimmy Murakami
Arvid Uibel (1978-2000), and Rocks (Das Rad, 2001), together with Arvid Uibel and colleague Heidi Wittlinger. Rocks is dedicated to Arvid Uibel.
Kirsten Winter teaches at the Academy for Design and Media in Hanover and has participated in numerous media art festivals with such films as Clocks (1995), a powerful synthesis of sound and painting and winner of the Short Film Award at Montreal in 1995, and Escape (2001), which was shown in competition at Montreal in 2001. She also collaborated with Gerd Gockell on the documentary Muratti & Sarotti (2000), a documentary on early German animation using cut-outs, objects, and archival material.
Heidi Wittlinger has worked in design studios in Stuttgart and Israel and has been studying Animation at the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg since 1998. In addition to her co-direction on Rocks, her other films include Lockvogel, Auf Herz und Nieren, Ei and Headless.
Martin Blaney