The startling realization comes in the first two minutes: A young waif of a woman is waiting on a train platform consumed by brown fog. She's dressed as a 1920s flapper and burdened with too much luggage. She's also a puppet, moved by stop-motion animation, yet with a stylized, marionette-like quality to her.
That is, until she looks up at the camera. Are they real eyes? They show a fatigue too subtle to have been reproduced by hand. At that second, the film suddenly takes on a different tone. She seems no longer to be a puppet, but is infused with a real presence. It makes the night-train trip she takes all the more dreamy and disturbing.
Madame Tutli-Putli is a 17-minute example of the kind of auteur-ish animation in which the National Film Board of Canada excels. And the film's unusual look and the highly technical animation will undoubtedly be its main selling point as the NFB promotes it heavily to critics and exhibitors at Cannes and other international festivals this spring and summer, on the road to the next Oscars.
The film will have its premiere at the International Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18 and then head to other prestigious venues such as the International Animated Film Festival at Annecy, France, in June and possibly Toronto's Worldwide Short Film Festival, also in June.
It's the same strategy used for the NFB's 2004 animated short Ryan, which went on to win an Academy Award.
"It is actually very Ryan-like," NFB producer Marcy Page says about the strategy. But she added that an Oscar nomination can't realistically be the ultimate goal because of the degree of luck involved in appealing to the tastes of academy voters. Instead, the aim is to expose the film to as large an international audience as possible. But it's clear that the NFB has dusted off the template used for Ryan, a short film about Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, by targeting certain key European festivals first and with an eye on the Oscars.
The NFB has been on a roll. At the last Academy Awards, NFB's co-production of The Danish Poet won best animated short. But that film had a very different festival life: The NFB chose not to submit The Danish Poet for last year's Cannes festival. Because the film is so dialogue heavy, it wasn't expected to do as well with international audiences, even though it's a Scandinavian love story.
So the NFB premiered it in the children's program at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, 2006. Word was that it indeed didn't do so well there, because the simultaneous audio translation from English to German made it difficult to hear the film's soundtrack. But it had a much more successful festival run in the United States before going on to win the Oscar.
Madame Tutli-Putli's lack of dialogue and high experimentation already makes it feel very European (to say nothing of its European train motifs), even though its thirtysomething filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski work in Canada. Madame Tutli-Putli really isn't a children's film and its experimentation is adult-minded. The mood is nightmarish (even if they are just puppets). The Madame Tutli-Putli character in her flapper hat finds herself sitting in a train car with an obscene (if humorous) tennis player. Two weirdly serious men play chess in the luggage rack above her and are puppet versions of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. That's before the film descends into all manner of surrealistic absurdities inflicted on Tutli-Putli and her train ride. It's all about atmosphere and mood.
And then there are those eyes.
Work on Madame Tutli-Putli started with a cross-Canada train trip by Lavis and Szczerbowski, who are creative partners at their company Clyde Henry Productions. They have worked together in everything from animation and set design to music videos and the comic strip The Untold Tales of Yuri Gagarin for Vice Magazine.
The idea with this film was to go all-out in a way their commercial work doesn't allow: minutely detailed stop-motion animation, intricate set and costume design, the use of actors to rehearse the puppets' movements and a complicated, computerized retouching technique to superimpose the actors' real eyes on the puppets.
But the eyes were so painstakingly superimposed by portrait artist Jason Walker over a year or so of post-production that the result doesn't look nearly as gimmicky as it sounds. The footage of the actors' eyes was also so heavily manipulated and carefully lit that it begins to look artificial, while still feeling real. The animation was also shot with a 35-mm digital still camera to give it fantastic resolution.
"We've been doing animation for years, all kinds of animation. This project was a particular experiment, if not indulgence, to finally address a certain kind of perfectionism within the stop-motion medium," Szczerbowski said.
It's that kind of attention to detail - a four-year-long walk through a minefield of experimentation, as Lavis described it - which the NFB is hoping will draw critics and win accolades at Cannes and subsequent festivals.
Drawn to the Oscars
On the road to the Academy Awards, there are certain major festivals for an animated short film to hit, all for different reasons:
International Critics' Week at Cannes in mid-May was particularly good to the National Film Board of Canada's celebrated 2004 animated short Ryan, and it could be again for the NFB's major animation short this year, Madame Tutli-Putli. It's the place to establish international buzz and to get the critics on board.
June's International Animated Film Festival and Market in Annecy, France, is where animators show their wares to their animation peers and to potential distributors and broadcasters with those all-important chequebooks.
The Canadian Film Centre's Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto in June is a major launch-pad for the North American film community. So is the Ottawa International Animation Festival in September.
Then there are the myriad U.S. festivals to enter with Oscar in mind. But a key vehicle is the Animation Show of Shows, a program of animated shorts shown to Hollywood studios and others within the animation business. The NFB's latest Oscar-winning animated short The Danish Poet was accepted, and the rest is history. G.D.