Total panic
Is this an animation studio, I wonder, as my eye falls on a dildo when I enter an industrial building in a suburb of Brussels. Not one, not two, but, well, a lot of dildos.
Beast brings stop-motion animation to Belgium
I decide to mind my own business and talk animation with Ben Tesseur, one of the founders of Beast Animation.
Flash back to 10 years ago. Two students of the animation department of Brussels film school RITS, Ben Tesseur and Steven De Beul, share a dream: specialising in stop-motion animation (the kind you see in the Wallace & Gromit films). But Flanders has almost no tradition, and the two eventually fall out of touch.
Some years later, luck brings them back together. Two directors from Liège are planning to make a series of stop-motion shorts called Panique au village (A Town Called Panic).
"Since there was no stop-motion studio in Belgium, we had to improvise a lot," says Tesseur. "Afterwards, our dream for our own studio was alive again. Everyone in the animation field was very enthusiastic about the project, but nobody dared to participate. We decided to take the risk."
They struggled, but the project worked out. So they took another risk. "If there isn't enough work, we thought, we should generate it ourselves," says Tesseur. "And we started a second company, Beast Productions, so we could produce films."
Lightning doesn't strike twice, they say, but apparently good fortune does. Right at that moment, Beast was asked to co-produce the feature film version of A Town Called Panic, now playing across Belgium as Panique au village in French and Paniek in het dorp in Dutch.
Both Tesseur and De Beul worked intensively on the film: the former as assistant director, the latter as chief animator. "But we also pushed to have a Flemish version of the film so that the characters, who were virtually unknown in Flanders, would gain some more fame."
The pair contacted television director Jan Eelen, who rounded up a voice cast of the usual suspects (Bruno Vanden Broecke, Frank Focketyn, Wim Opbrouck). Tesseur: "I find Panic very Belgian with humour typical for this country; that's why the Flemish version works as well as the Walloon."
Beast Productions now has a third partner, so Tesseur and De Beul have less production duties and can concentrate more on the creative side. Right now, they're working on the new credit sequence for Man Bijt Hond, the daily TV newsmagazine that will resume in September.
But don't they want to direct their own stop motion feature?
"We'd love to, in the long run", Tesseur concedes. "But right now we're working on a TV film of about half an hour about the Ros Beiaard [a folkloric horse in Dendermonde] and on the pilot for a series of one-minute films for new media called Master Bator. It's a quickly edited short about a superhero, a penis, who has to rescue a princess, a vagina, who's held captive by a villain, a dildo."
Which explains the dildos in the workroom of Beast Animation. I think.
What's in a name? Stop motion
Classic animation is made with drawings - on paper in the old days, mostly on computer now. But stop motion works with objects: puppets in A Town Called Panic, but the most famous stop-motion characters, Wallace and Gromit, are made of clay.
For every image (one second of cinema contains 24 images), the objects have to move slightly. Stop. Motion. Stop. Motion. Etcetera. The quick succession of the images creates an illusion of movement.
Sound a bit technical? It's easy to give it a try! Take your digital camera, make 24 pictures of an object, say a pen, and move it slightly for every photo. Watch them on your computer as a very fast slide show, and you have made your first stop-motion Animation. (But don't dream you're ready to compete with Beast.)
A Town Called Panic
It's an unnamed village, but it could be called Absurdistan because the weirdest things happen in A Town Called Panic. The main characters are Horse, who is more or less a father figure, Cowboy and Indian, who act like his children. The later are gentle rascals who cause a series of calamities when they, by accident, order zillions bricks instead of the 50 they need.
It's the start of an adventure that leads the threesome to the middle of the earth, where they meet strange water creatures and a giant penguin. (Not that these are odder than the three of them or the other villagers, mind you.)
The screenplay goes awry a few times, but A Town Called Panic offers loads of laughs, is so hyperkinetic you have no chance to get bored and is fascinating animation to watch.
