L'Animographe, ou Je suis né dans une boîte à chaussures (2022) - full transcript
The amazing story of the animograph, a machine created in France in the sixties by the cartoonist and self-taught inventor Jean Dejoux (1922-2015), whose creation was intended to revolutionize the animation industry.
“BUT," HE ADDED, "NO PROPHET IS
ACCEPTED IN HIS HOME TOWN."
In the 1960's in France,
a self-taught inventor
presented himself at the ORTF
Research Department
with the bizarre idea
of building a machine
to draw cartoons.
This machine was the animograph,
and its inventor, Jean Dejoux.
Together,
they would travel around the world.
From the Shadoks to Asterix,
from Chuck Jones to Norman McLaren,
from Paris to Hollywood,
via Italy,
here are the unknown
and thrilling adventures
of a visionary
and his wondrous machine.
The TV news introduced to you
last Sunday
an astonishing French invention
talked about in all the papers,
the cartoon-making machine,
a truly revolutionary machine,
the animograph.
We wanted to know more about
the machine itself and, above all,
its inventor, Jean Dejoux.
These little characters, which
I've always drawn mechanically
at my drawing table,
have always made me dream.
I wanted to see them move.
So I first translated this dream
into drawings,
which, even inside
the structure of the gag
I was looking for,
was found in their movement.
Yes, it was very nice.
It broke down into three or four
drawings.
Movement was essential.
And then no, it really had to move.
I had to unblock
all my dimensions.
In other words, it had to move,
make some noise,
talk and have some colour.
I used to see my father
standing at his table, drawing.
He worked a lot
for Paris Match
and other big papers.
He drew cartoons in which there is
quite a lot of movement,
it's true.
But his dream was animation.
I learnt animation image by image,
following this
terribly long process.
Animation is essentially
an extremely slow process.
You do thousands of drawings.
In theory, you do almost
700 to 800 drawings for one minute,
so it was very logical
to try to invent
a machine that could help
this laborious,
artisan process.
He thought that, with television,
there was something,
a joint,
something to find and he found it.
One day, Dad called René
saying: "Listen,
I think I've invented something.
I'd like to show it to you,
maybe I'm mad".
And he showed it to René,
who told him
he wasn't mad,
he had really invented something.
So here is
the forerunner of your animograph.
Yes, exactly. Everything started
like in all the best stories.
The poor young man who arrives
with a cardboard box,
and in this cardboard box
is a mass of wires.
You switch them on
and little characters start moving.
Moreover, he told me during
the last years of his life:
"I would like to write
something and it would be called
'I was born in a shoe box'.
And so he arrived with his
cardboard shoe box
with a mass of films,
prisms, a whole optical thing
I couldn't explain.
In this cabinet, you have
the famous shoe box with which
Jean Dejoux
arrived at the ORTF
Research Department
to present his invention.
Firstly, on the lid,
there is a polarising filter
which you can turn by hand.
On the inside,
there is a system of mirrors
and also polarising filters
combined with two images.
In fact, the system allows
either one
of the images to be seen
or both images superimposed,
by simply progressively turning
the polarising filter
on the lid.
And then,
I started to get lucky because
first of all, I had found a
highly competent engineer,
the engineer Kitroser,
and the company that employed him.
They began working on it right away.
He used to tell me that
this man looked
and listened to Dad's explanation
and told him: "Your thing's good,
but it's a bit thrown together."
Television was the ideal media
for its format,
for its means
of broadcasting animation.
At that time, I went surreptitiously
to this company on
the Rue Cognacq-Jay
through any door I could.
It was Jacqueline Joubert
who had a programme called
"Encounters with..."
ENCOUNTERS WITH...
He went to see her, explaining
that he had his little machine,
his little thing in cardboard
with a little man inside it,
and he needed one of the cameras
to film it.
And Dad told me that he would
always remember a technician
who said, during a silence:
"Oh wow, it's moving!"
So, it worked.
The little man moved,
and that was how it started:
a little man in a shoe box.
It was a primitive animograph.
He showed it to Pierre Schaeffer,
who found it
pretty interesting.
It was perfect timing,
because the Research Department
was very interested
in animation and cartoons.
He had some great artists
like Laguionie,
Kamler, Foldès,
some great animation artists.
That made Schaeffer happy,
and when something made
Schaeffer happy,
you had to do it quickly.
So the animograph,
according to Dejoux's plans,
was ordered from SFOM.
And that's how
the adventure started.
The ORTF developed
a special department
which used to make programmes
that you could
perhaps see on Channel One
or Channel Two,
or on no channel at all
if that was deemed preferable.
So for us, the Research Department,
it was something quite exceptional
in the world.
The fact that that could even
exist was,
in itself, incomprehensible
within the structures of the time,
and it doesn't exist any more.
They called it
the Research Department.
The Research Department is...
It's here. It's all this.
We thought we were going
to go to cold offices,
very modern.
Yet you work here in...
extraordinary outdoor conditions.
The Research Department
begins by looking for researchers.
Consequently,
it means finding musicians,
directors, painters,
artists interested
in modern problems of modern arts
and art techniques. It also means
finding scientists,
electronics scientists,
working with electronic acoustics
and optics interested
in the problems of art,
the formatting problems
of cinema, television
and radio.
Researchers is a term
which is
both very specific and very vague.
We had to be
highly multi-skilled because
we did the whole production,
the organisation, the management,
training, shifting...
It was all research.
YOUR PROGRAMME
WILL BE BACK SHORTLY...
For three years,
we developed
this cardboard box's daughter.
Its daughter is made of metal,
and if you would like,
we're now going
to take a closer look at it.
OK, let me introduce you
to Caroline,
the first born of the large
family of animographs.
Caroline. Why Caroline?
Caroline was the name
of Émile Reynaud's mother,
who was the creator of animation
and even maybe of cinema.
So, with the greatest respect,
we called it Caroline.
Reynaud and Jean Dejoux
should have met, even though
Reynaud died in 1918.
But both inventions,
those of Renaud,
in other words,
the praxinoscope,
the theatre praxinoscope
and the optical theatre
created in 1888,
are similar objects invented
70 years apart.
Yes, there's standard animation
used in cinema,
and there's this one.
What is the difference?
The essential difference
is this.
Here are 24 little drawings
which represent exactly
the amount of work needed
for just one second
of cinematic animation.
In other words,
1,440 drawings,
drawn, then filmed
image by image,
for one minute of animation.
And now?
And now, with the animograph
which makes
thorough use of retinal persistence,
we only need
300 drawings for one minute.
In other words,
the rhythm is of five
or six images per second.
And you can evaluate the result?
We can evaluate
the result immediately,
as we're going to do now.
I can stop the animation.
I can set it going again.
I can accelerate it
or slow it down, and I can
make it go backwards and forwards.
If I don't like one
of the characters
I've drawn very much,
I can take it off.
It falls down onto my pencil,
and I can correct it immediately,
and I can send it back to play
its role in the machine.
In fact, it's a very simple process.
It's more complicated mechanically,
which is why we have
the imposing machine
presented at the MIPE,
the International Market
for Television Programmes
and Equipment.
The first one took place in Lyon.
The MIPE is a marvellous week
because the Research
Department trusted me
three years ago.
It was a real game of poker
deciding to build this device.
And now at the MIPE,
under the banner
of French Television,
we were really delighted to see
that almost all the representatives
from all countries at the MIPE
were interested in this device.
Yes, in the newspapers.
I think it was in 1963.
It was everywhere.
The incredible machine
which revolutionised animation,
and animators
came from everywhere.
Dad talked to me a lot about
Norman McLaren.
There was Bill Littlejohn, who
became a very close friend.
There was Chuck Jones, whom I met
at home before he went
to New York with Dad.
Lots of people who said
this machine was incredible.
I knew Jean Dejoux,
a very charismatic man,
that's for sure.
He was a charmer,
but in a good way.
He was enthusiastic
about his research,
his process.
And he knew how to communicate,
so well that he formed
a close-knit team of people
around him, people who believed...
who believed in
this marvellous machine.
Uderzo made a visit,
Goscinny made a visit
to see the animograph.
Unfortunately,
they had not got to the stage
where the first Asterix cartoon
was made with the animograph.
Because really,
it was too early
or too late,
but anyway,
it wasn't the right time.
The animograph was viewed as
something not frivolous, of course,
but that the possibilities of it,
because they were working on,
used to working on a large format.
And because you had to work
on a small
format, these old guys,
maybe it was their eyesight,
I don't know.
But the...
The first series was made
on a machine
called an animograph
and which forced animators,
in other words, the artists,
to work on formats
which were no bigger than that.
They used to draw on
70 mm wide film,
matt film, and consequently,
it was a tiny little thing.
Kodak used to make it for us,
using the same perforators
and the same celluloid media
as for films.
But they used what was called
Kodatrace,
and Kodatrace is a thing
for artists and such.
It's an unpolished media
that you can draw on very easily.
At the beginning, the Shadoks lay
ordinary eggs,
but as their legs were too long,
the eggs used to break.
Now, the Shadoks lay metal eggs.
Norman McLaren animated directly
on the 35 millimetre film,
which is much smaller
than that,
so this format was not too small.
In fact,
they did a separate film
that they made on 70 millimetre.
Any machine takes exactly
the same formula
as Charles, Mr. Schultz films,
so for me, it was no problem at all.
Hello, Yogi.
In particular, we know that
Norman McLaren,
the great Norman McLaren,
author of a huge number of works,
visited the RTF
at the beginning of the 1960's
to test the machine.
Norman McLaren, who is Scottish,
was born in Glasgow,
has given
animation a new economic sense.
And I'm not joking when I say that,
because he is well-known
all the world over
for having made camera-free films
accompanied by instrument-free
music.
Norman McLaren
discovered that he could
quite simply
draw directly
onto the film and engrave with a tip
animated cartoons
which invented
totally unknown forms.
And as McLaren was a thorough,
articulate man,
he produced
a full report
describing the machine,
and offering some ways forward
for possibly using
the machine in Canada.
In this report,
Norman McLaren, like a visionary,
described what could be
a problem in the future.
Traditional animators
were not ready to use
this new animation process.
Retroactively,
we can remember
that the animograph
was a machine which...
wasn't unanimously welcomed.
It was too early.
It completely dismantled
the mechanics
of traditional animation,
and the "animators"
of animated film,
were confronted
with a new element
which could completely
call into question
the traditional system
and traditional
methods of animation.
There were detractors.
I was open to experiment
in animation
in the spirit of Norman McLaren.
I found the machine a little funny.
It was big and looked
like it was put together
by Meccano,
and it was noisy.
Yeah, but it worked.
Well, a washing machine
is quite silent
compared with the noise
the animograph made.
There was
one experiment made
with the TV news,
which consisted of
me going to Cognacq-Jay
early in the morning.
The journalists
used to give me...
not each time,
but used to tell me
there's this or that subject,
it would be good if we had
a little graphic,
a little drawing,
something to explain the story.
On 25 July 1956, the Andréa Doria,
one of the most beautiful vessels
in the Italian fleet,
would never arrive in New York.
Off the coast of the United States,
the Stockholm, a Swedish boat,
collided with her.
So, I went with the subject.
René Borg went to work,
and we delivered the little 16 mm
film, in black and white,
of course. I took it to Cognacq-Jay,
the film was developed,
and went out that night
on the TV news.
Only the animograph could
have done that,
supplied an animation
so quickly, but obviously,
it was extremely simple.
Ordering a sketch
or a sequence in the morning
and having it in the evening
seemed absolutely impossible.
Except that in the new world
of television, there was no choice:
if we wanted animation,
we had to have something
like the animograph.
And it's exclusive to RTF?
I hope it will remain so
as long as possible.
In spite of its promising
beginnings,
the Research Department
never ordered any machine.
The animograph remained a prototype.
The end of Jean Dejoux's contract
was approaching,
and it was not renewed.
It's true there were
Dejoux contracts that were
very advantageous
for him,
it's true.
But I knew that he had been
"dismissed"
because René Borg had told me.
René told me,
and when he told me: "Your Dad
forgave them, but I didn't.
Moreover, I'm going to write
a book", but the poor man died.
I've read articles and things
which said that Dad
had been scorned,
that it was absolutely disgusting.
But the machine was kept,
and several short films
and mini series
have been made on the animograph.
KNIGHT OF THE HURRICANE
S.O.S
THE ZLOPS ARE ATTACKING!
That morning was
a charming morning
like all the others.
And in all the cities on earth,
you could hear the soft,
daily murmuring
of our smiling,
peaceful civilisation.
Well, I have some memories,
when we were sitting at the table
and he was talking to Mum
and I wasn't all that old.
And there was this word,
"polytechnician, polytechnician,
polytechnician, polytechnician"...
And now I understand.
They really looked down on him
because he didn't have
any qualifications.
When they used to say:
"My dear Dejoux,
there's no future in video",
and so on...
and: "We'll take your patents,
we'll try to pinch your patents
because you're not an engineer."
Those are hard things.
They knock you right down.
So it took him strength
and it took people coming to him
saying that it was wonderful
for him to fight.
FRANCE
ITALY
In 1966,
Jean Dejoux left for Milan
to join Gamma Film,
a company specialising
in animation for the cinema
and television
led by Roberto Gavioli,
with the view to developing
a new animograph.
Roberto Gavioli
managed to convince Jean Dejoux
to move to Milan
to set up
a secret laboratory
within Gamma Film
which hardly anyone knew about.
They worked together
for several years
making a prototype
of the animograph,
a really extraordinary experience.
Italian TV broadcast
its first adverts
via the programme Carosello,
where the principle was
to offer a normal story.
But at the end,
they broadcast an advert.
Famous characters like Calimero
and Alinea
were born from this famous
programme,
Carosello.
Carosello was a cult programme
for generations of Italians
during the 60's
and 70's.
These animations were made
by many great Italian directors,
Sergio Leone,
De Sica and others.
I'm going to read you an interview
with René Borg, OK?
"Fortunately, Jean
had an exclusive contract to use
the animograph
after the ORTF,
if they weren't using it.
So between 1964
and 1967,
he and I made a series
of a hundred
advertisements,
each two and a half minutes long,
in full animation
named Gomma and Matitino:
'The fat rubber and the
little pencil',
broadcast by the RAI channel
in Italy, all thanks
to the animograph
which officially, didn't work.
There's no need to point out that
no one at the ORTF
knew that I was doing it."
It was here that
the animograph showed
its full potential
and was able
to guarantee
a quality image,
while reducing costs.
In reality, the final prototype
made at Gamma Film
was quite a cumbersome machine,
and it didn't reach the goal
of decentralising production
for people to work at home.
But the machine worked!
During this time, another researcher
knocked at the Research Department's
door
with a new idea of animation.
He didn't know it yet,
but his project was going to
revolutionise television
and shake the French society
of that time.
His name was Jacques Rouxel,
and his project was called
The Shadoks.
The first person I met
at the ORTF Research Department
told me, seeing my really simple
drawing:
"That's just right! We've got
a machine
that's absolutely right for this
kind of cartoon."
The Shadoks looked like birds.
They had a beak
and feet,
but their wings were ridiculously
small.
The Shadoks were really nasty.
I don't know how much
the relationship between
the machine, Dejoux and Rouxel
led the drawing
of the Gibis and the Shadoks,
but you can easily see
that the artwork
is a succinct artwork,
and that it was important
for Rouxel
not to make people think
of Walt Disney.
That was something different.
It's true that I don't want very
much. I just want
an illustrated text.
The simplest possible drawings,
the simplest possible characters
to tell my story.
The whole Shadok population
pumped and pumped and pumped.
They pumped for joy,
they pumped with gladness,
but for the moment
for nothing, because
the Cosmogol
was showing up late.
Following a change of director
at the ORTF,
a full series of 52 episodes
of the Shadoks was ordered.
It was produced using
the animograph,
and René Borg directed it.
From Milan, Jean Dejoux asked
his loyal friend to do everything
in order to make it work,
and to prove to everyone
the efficiency of the animograph.
At the beginning, it was
extraordinary.
It was a revolutionary machine:
"It works! Let's do it!"
and afterwards:
"No, the prototype's going
to break down. It's not reliable.
The deadline's won't be kept."
And then after:
"Ah yes, we must do it."
So...
It's a bit difficult to follow,
and completely contradictory.
René Borg, you directed the Shadoks,
these 52 programmes.
How was this cartoon made?
With a special machine called
an animograph,
which allows you to go
more quickly than
with classic animation.
Yes?
Because the animograph only needs
eight drawings
for one second's screening.
The animograph is a device
which allows you to make
a chain of blended images
one upon the other.
It's a very complicated machine.
Why make things simple when you can
make them complicated?
René Borg was a friend,
and we often shared meals during
the 1990's.
The animograph was really
something quite distant,
and he used to talk about it
as being
a time of completely insane freedom.
The first Shadoks were born
just before May '68,
a time of trouble
and absolute chaos.
So, everyone was doing
what they wanted, when they wanted,
and especially
in the Research Department.
He described it as a lively time,
as a unique moment
which he never experienced again
in his life.
So obviously,
he used to tell me about
all the people around Rouxel,
about him, all those inventors,
Goscinny, Uderzo, who used to come
and who used to watch
this machine, which was
an unbelievable miracle.
Everyone said that with that,
they were going to change
the face of animation
and they were telling themselves:
"Yes, we're at the time
when there's a change of direction."
And then fate decided differently,
but that's a bit of a mystery.
And our story could stop there.
As with all the great stories,
we could finish
by saying that they lived
happily ever after,
but...
that would be stretching
your belief a little too far.
Because, to be honest,
it was just at the time when
our series was going to stop
that the real troubles
were starting,
for everyone.
René explained to me
that it went a long,
long way, that they plagiarised
the animograph
and in the end, it hadn't worked.
Dejoux went mad when he found out.
There was a research engineer
who was a very good chap,
highly intelligent
and very creative,
who had found
a sort of animograph, but...
whose layout was a big different.
Right.
It was more certain and different,
it used long, slightly wider films.
Well, Dejoux
didn't like that at all.
It looked like the ORTF
was entering into competition
with him.
You have to understand that
there was certainly only one
animograph in the history
of making the Shadoks.
And, jokingly, I would say
that the Shadoks were not gentle,
because they destroyed
the animograph.
They decided that the machine
was broken.
In fact, it wasn't really broken.
It could have been repaired
and it was still working a little.
It was working.
Which of the two were right?
When you want to get rid
of your dog, you say it's ill.
They criticised Dejoux
for his machine not being reliable,
but they refused to buy him
a reliable, industrial machine
from which to produce animation.
That was something
which disgusted everyone.
That was all.
So these Shadoks, have they really
changed since the beginning?
Because they were born when?
In '68, Jacques Rouxel?
Actually on 1 May 1968,
it stopped.
And at the end of one week,
the viewers were protesting. After
one week, it had started going mad.
You see, some time ago,
the Research Department
presented you with a programme,
and this programme was the Shadoks.
France was immediately
divided in two.
It was like another Dreyfus case.
People sent letters and said that
the Shadoks was a dreadful
programme:
the drawings were bad,
the writers were illiterate.
Obviously, half of these letters
were for and the other half
were against.
In the end, the animograph
had done its job.
In other words,
to make a full series of 52
three-minute long episodes.
However, the machine
was not reinstated by the ORTF.
And then there was also...
I don't know if it's anecdotal,
but they must have come up against
a finance expert in the larger
company
who said: "Listen, how much is
the machine?
50,000 francs? OK, 50,000 francs.
You've filmed an hour with it,
so we're going to invoice it
at 50,000 francs per hour."
Which is obviously
totally absurd,
but that's not surprising for
a financial expert.
Besides, it was easy to lay an egg,
you just had to count to four.
I took a lot of precautions
with Pierre Schaeffer.
In other words,
I used to go and see him
to define a piece of research.
I recorded everything he said to me,
I wrote everything down,
I wrote a report and I had him
sign the report.
And when I got to the result,
it was always wrong.
Well, with my Alsatian nature,
I didn't get along very well
with that.
I found that the result matched
what had been requested etc.,
and as soon as the result
matched the request,
it was no longer interesting.
There was no more research.
So I needed some time before
I understood that precisely
what was interesting was research,
and when there was no research,
there was no point continuing.
I had to do something else.
One of the basic principles
of Shadok logic
was that only by continually trying
did you end up succeeding.
Or in other words,
the more it goes wrong, the more
opportunities there are to be right.
The decision to permanently stop
using it for the Shadoks series
was made by the production
management.
And you have to say
it was a perfect success
from a break-up point of view.
And so this machine was dismantled,
and several elements
were stored
at ESSART.
I wanted to take some
parts, but I was told:
"No, we've found someone, a school."
So I said: "That's great
if a school's interested.
I'm very happy!"
But I never heard anything
about it afterwards.
I went there. I even took René Borg
to ESSART.
We couldn't find
any trace of it,
of the animograph.
Like lots of machines,
like the universal phonogene,
I was ashamed to learn...
It had spent some time
at the Maison de la Radio's museum,
and then they sold it,
because there was
a lot of aluminium in it.
And for the scrap merchant
who bought it,
there was a weight of 200 kilos,
for a couple of pence.
They sold it
and it was cut to pieces.
There are many people
who worked in public services
and who took
things from the archives home
to save them.
Because, then,
there were no regulations,
and that was
quite difficult.
In this case, I don't know
what happened, but I found that
quite scandalous
to have thrown this machine away,
which could very easily have gone
to a museum of cinema.
In spite of the contrary view
of its director, Roberto Gavioli,
Gamma Film decided
to stop investing financially
in the animograph.
But Roberto Gavioli and Jean Dejoux
didn't believe they were defeated.
They decided to offer the machine
to Technicolor in Los Angeles.
The new animograph
went to America
in 1969.
I have some photos
of René Borg and my Dad
in America opening
some enormous crates
containing six tonnes of equipment.
So, Jean Dejoux went to the USA.
He had just signed a contract
with Nicolas Rézini,
boss of Cinerama,
who invited him to work with him
in Hollywood.
The machine went to America,
and I found it some years later.
But at that time, it was set up
in some huge studios in Hollywood,
with a computer
and even more to get at than here.
All the visionaries were interested
in the animograph.
Norman McLaren couldn't help
being interested in the animograph,
Chuck Jones couldn't help being
interested in the animograph,
out of curiosity.
It was also the opportunity
to do something different.
And for those people,
difference kept them alive.
It was a trio of legendary animators
who opened
the doors of Hollywood
to Jean Dejoux.
Bill Littlejohn,
Chuck Jones
and Jules Engel
had come to to France
to test the animograph in
the ORTF Research Department,
and had understood the invention's
importance.
Chuck Jones was one
of the great classics
in the history of cinema animation,
because he learnt his craft
in the American studios.
He worked with Leo Schlesinger
in the Warner studios,
one of the biggest animators,
and he was often introduced as
having been
one of the inventors
of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck,
Porky Pig etc.
But he was also a genius artist,
an extraordinary comedian,
a very elegant man
with a little bow tie.
He was absolutely marvellous.
He is one of the true pioneers
of animation.
Part of the team that gave us
Looney Tunes.
He worked on Bugs,
Daffy, Porky, Elmer, the Roadrunner,
Wile Coyote, Pepe Le Pew.
It sounds like the guest list
at Snoop Doggy Dogg, I know.
Chuck Jones.
When I met him again in Los Angeles,
actually, it was at the end
of 1970.
And he had built
a new machine,
which was red,
you know?
Technically,
it functioned the same way,
but it looked like a piece
of modern furniture,
and it was quiet.
And it was altogether
much improved from the original
we'd seen in Paris.
SPEEDY THE HORSE
Everybody came
to look at Jean's machine.
Everybody in animation.
They were the greatest
and the most visionary minds
who understood
that it was really great,
who liked my father
and appreciated him,
so I say thanks and
hats off to them.
Terrific!
Because Jean had a good reputation,
you know. He was famous.
He was a very famous animator.
You know.
It's like a club.
It's like...
They're like all...
The animators speak
a language of their own.
I met Jean
when I was a student
at CalArts,
and he had come to lecture.
And at that time,
Jules Engel was head
of the experimental
animation department.
CalArts is a prestigious art school
founded by Walt Disney
in 1971.
Strangely, Disney always had an eye
on the future, and he told himself:
"The artists of tomorrow
must be
trained at Disney".
And for the first stage,
he set up this workshop,
this training
university,
this training school
for animators called CalArts,
which still exists today.
But strangely,
CalArts has almost
freed itself
from the creature that is Disney.
And the CalArts students
were told:
"Try to invent something
that would be
your ideal animation."
The animograph
was very influential.
But during that time,
it was just the beginning
of, well,
not even the beginning.
It was before the beginning
of people's idea of computer
animation, and the
beautiful thing about
the animograph
was...
how it would...
It was so fluid to work on.
When the idea of
the animograph appeared,
what was quickly needed
was almost what we ask of
computers today:
to work very quickly,
to be able to preview something,
to be able to correct it
and potentially even to be able
to work at home.
Some sort of telecommuting,
since an animograph
can be taken to your home
and you can have 25 animators
at home
working on their little sequence
all alone.
And it's almost an invention
that's been thrown together,
but which is visionary,
which renders what
computer animation
is today almost tangible.
So, it was the United States
which fully gave Jean Dejoux
and his incredible machine
an opportunity.
Jean worked continuously
on projects for American television
for 15 years.
We realise that, in fact,
the animograph
responded to some criteria,
but not to all of them.
It allowed you
to do animation,
but not all animation.
It allowed you to make the Shadoks,
but today, it wouldn't
allow you to make Frozen.
That's how it is, in fact:
every tool
has its great strengths
and, necessarily,
its great weaknesses.
The animograph did launch
the career of one young artist.
In 1971,
Gerald Scarfe
was sent to Los Angeles
to try out the machine,
and what followed is a rock legend.
They told me there was
this new system
in Los Angeles, the Dejoux system,
and they seemed very enthusiastic
about it
and said that they would pay
for me to fly to Los Angeles
and to make some animation
for the BBC on it.
In animation,
there is...
If you want to make a movement
like that,
the master animator would draw that,
and then he will draw that.
And then you had other people
who were called inbetweeners
who would do all the drawings
in between.
And then when you ran
all the drawings together,
the arm moved.
Well, I actually found
when I got there,
that that wasn't exactly true,
and that the...
Between the master drawing there
and the master drawing there,
this in between was a mix,
a dissolve, you know,
the two images blended together.
And so at first,
when I was working on it,
I was disappointed.
I thought, this is not what
I'm expecting,
but I thought,
well, I'm in Los Angeles,
you know, I mean America. I might
as well try and do something.
I was actually drawing onto this
70 mm film
with a grease pencil,
flipping it over and putting
the colours on the back
like that, so it's very immediate.
It's very raw.
It has a kind of energy
that a lot of films don't have
because they...
they get...
they go through so many
sequences that
their energy
is dissipated, really.
So this is the actual
film I worked on. As you can see,
it's about two inches
by three inches,
and I drew every image.
And you can see how long it is.
This is the drawings that I made.
And this is an image
of a Playboy girl,
Playboy magazine in America.
That's Long Drawn Out Trip.
In Long Drawn Out Trip,
I did every drawing
and hundreds of drawings
and it was a trip.
And in those days,
a trip was what you did on drugs.
It was a very
drug-conscious era.
Not that I was on drugs.
Some people think I was
when I was drawing it.
The only drugs I'm on
are for my asthma.
I just became
addicted and fascinated
by the film
and the possibilities of film.
And I even tried, you know,
just splashing colour on.
Impressionistic, I guess,
is the word
because I've always felt about
animation
that it's a medium
that hasn't been fully explored.
When Long Drawn Out Trip
was shown on BBC Two,
two members of
the Pink Floyd rock group
happened to be watching that night.
"We've got to work with this guy.
He's f***ing mad."
That was my introduction, really,
to the Pink Floyd.
You know, it took a long time
in the United States, for instance,
to have animation
that didn't look like
Disney animation.
When people thought
animation, the first thing
that would come out their
mouth: "Oh, like Disney?"
We went to Filmacion. We went
to all the animator's animation
companies in town.
And, they said: "It's interesting,
but you can't do this,
you can't do that.
This is the way we do it here.
Good luck."
And that was the way it worked.
Their minds were always on the full
animation table. That was the
only way they could think.
In my opinion, the studios didn't
like this machine
for one simple reason,
that they had their process
which allowed them to get into
a slightly bigger degree of detail.
You have to remember that
with the animograph,
you were drawing on a really
small surface
and that allowed them control,
that allowed them to have chains
of keyframes,
that allowed them
to recycle backgrounds.
The existing system
was quite satisfactory.
The problem too, was that
the animograph brought freedom,
and the studios didn't want freedom.
They wanted productivity, efficiency
and above all, they wanted
to be able to reproduce
the same exact thing several times.
There's one thing that amuses me.
They said:"OK. We can't
do Disney on it."
Which is actually wrong because
Dad always told me that
you could do
Disney-style animation,
in other words, fluid.
Having said that, you can't put
40 characters in the image,
given the size of the Kodachrome.
But in any case,
Dad worked with Disney
and that's funny.
And there's one thing that
Dad loved,
and that was being a teacher,
teaching animation at UCLA.
He loved his students,
loved teaching.
He told me a lot about it.
It was a great love in his life.
He even won an Emmy Award
in 1977 for the version
of Peter Pan with Mia Farrow.
They would do photographs
of every single picture
of the video image,
of the live action image,
and then
draw behind that or over it
the shadow.
And then they would do a composite
of the two images.
And Jean was really good
with all that,
you know, he really understood
the technical aspect
of the film-making.
Computer animation came along.
That killed the animograph.
Computer animation killed it.
Yes, and what it did
is change the whole animation
production business.
The 1980's brought in
the age of computers.
The machine for making animation
was therefore
replaced by other machines on which
almost all animated films
would be made.
Dad remained positive to the end,
even when he was in a wheelchair.
He used to say: "I can't walk any
more, but look,
it's great. I have something
that does it for me!"
I never heard Dad say:
"Oh, why this? Why that?"
He said: "Because. Because this..."
or "Blablabla".
It was his way of reasoning,
all the time.
JEAN DEJOUX RETURNED TO FRANCE
DURING THE 1980'S.
HE LEFT PART OF HIS ARCHIVES TO
THE NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE MUSEUM
IN CHALON-SUR-SAÔNE.
GENIUS IDEA!
HE DIED ON 17 JANUARY 2015.
HIS ASHES WERE SCATTERED ON
THE BEACH IN MALIBU, CALIFORNIA.
BAD IDEA
THE REST OF HIS ARCHIVES, INCLUDING
THE FAMOUS SHOE BOX, WAS DONATED
BY CHRISTINE DEJOUX TO
THE MUSEUM OF ANIMATION IN ANNECY.
THE END
TO DATE,
NO ANIMOGRAPH HAS BEEN FOUND.
Translator: Lucy Gay
ACCEPTED IN HIS HOME TOWN."
In the 1960's in France,
a self-taught inventor
presented himself at the ORTF
Research Department
with the bizarre idea
of building a machine
to draw cartoons.
This machine was the animograph,
and its inventor, Jean Dejoux.
Together,
they would travel around the world.
From the Shadoks to Asterix,
from Chuck Jones to Norman McLaren,
from Paris to Hollywood,
via Italy,
here are the unknown
and thrilling adventures
of a visionary
and his wondrous machine.
The TV news introduced to you
last Sunday
an astonishing French invention
talked about in all the papers,
the cartoon-making machine,
a truly revolutionary machine,
the animograph.
We wanted to know more about
the machine itself and, above all,
its inventor, Jean Dejoux.
These little characters, which
I've always drawn mechanically
at my drawing table,
have always made me dream.
I wanted to see them move.
So I first translated this dream
into drawings,
which, even inside
the structure of the gag
I was looking for,
was found in their movement.
Yes, it was very nice.
It broke down into three or four
drawings.
Movement was essential.
And then no, it really had to move.
I had to unblock
all my dimensions.
In other words, it had to move,
make some noise,
talk and have some colour.
I used to see my father
standing at his table, drawing.
He worked a lot
for Paris Match
and other big papers.
He drew cartoons in which there is
quite a lot of movement,
it's true.
But his dream was animation.
I learnt animation image by image,
following this
terribly long process.
Animation is essentially
an extremely slow process.
You do thousands of drawings.
In theory, you do almost
700 to 800 drawings for one minute,
so it was very logical
to try to invent
a machine that could help
this laborious,
artisan process.
He thought that, with television,
there was something,
a joint,
something to find and he found it.
One day, Dad called René
saying: "Listen,
I think I've invented something.
I'd like to show it to you,
maybe I'm mad".
And he showed it to René,
who told him
he wasn't mad,
he had really invented something.
So here is
the forerunner of your animograph.
Yes, exactly. Everything started
like in all the best stories.
The poor young man who arrives
with a cardboard box,
and in this cardboard box
is a mass of wires.
You switch them on
and little characters start moving.
Moreover, he told me during
the last years of his life:
"I would like to write
something and it would be called
'I was born in a shoe box'.
And so he arrived with his
cardboard shoe box
with a mass of films,
prisms, a whole optical thing
I couldn't explain.
In this cabinet, you have
the famous shoe box with which
Jean Dejoux
arrived at the ORTF
Research Department
to present his invention.
Firstly, on the lid,
there is a polarising filter
which you can turn by hand.
On the inside,
there is a system of mirrors
and also polarising filters
combined with two images.
In fact, the system allows
either one
of the images to be seen
or both images superimposed,
by simply progressively turning
the polarising filter
on the lid.
And then,
I started to get lucky because
first of all, I had found a
highly competent engineer,
the engineer Kitroser,
and the company that employed him.
They began working on it right away.
He used to tell me that
this man looked
and listened to Dad's explanation
and told him: "Your thing's good,
but it's a bit thrown together."
Television was the ideal media
for its format,
for its means
of broadcasting animation.
At that time, I went surreptitiously
to this company on
the Rue Cognacq-Jay
through any door I could.
It was Jacqueline Joubert
who had a programme called
"Encounters with..."
ENCOUNTERS WITH...
He went to see her, explaining
that he had his little machine,
his little thing in cardboard
with a little man inside it,
and he needed one of the cameras
to film it.
And Dad told me that he would
always remember a technician
who said, during a silence:
"Oh wow, it's moving!"
So, it worked.
The little man moved,
and that was how it started:
a little man in a shoe box.
It was a primitive animograph.
He showed it to Pierre Schaeffer,
who found it
pretty interesting.
It was perfect timing,
because the Research Department
was very interested
in animation and cartoons.
He had some great artists
like Laguionie,
Kamler, Foldès,
some great animation artists.
That made Schaeffer happy,
and when something made
Schaeffer happy,
you had to do it quickly.
So the animograph,
according to Dejoux's plans,
was ordered from SFOM.
And that's how
the adventure started.
The ORTF developed
a special department
which used to make programmes
that you could
perhaps see on Channel One
or Channel Two,
or on no channel at all
if that was deemed preferable.
So for us, the Research Department,
it was something quite exceptional
in the world.
The fact that that could even
exist was,
in itself, incomprehensible
within the structures of the time,
and it doesn't exist any more.
They called it
the Research Department.
The Research Department is...
It's here. It's all this.
We thought we were going
to go to cold offices,
very modern.
Yet you work here in...
extraordinary outdoor conditions.
The Research Department
begins by looking for researchers.
Consequently,
it means finding musicians,
directors, painters,
artists interested
in modern problems of modern arts
and art techniques. It also means
finding scientists,
electronics scientists,
working with electronic acoustics
and optics interested
in the problems of art,
the formatting problems
of cinema, television
and radio.
Researchers is a term
which is
both very specific and very vague.
We had to be
highly multi-skilled because
we did the whole production,
the organisation, the management,
training, shifting...
It was all research.
YOUR PROGRAMME
WILL BE BACK SHORTLY...
For three years,
we developed
this cardboard box's daughter.
Its daughter is made of metal,
and if you would like,
we're now going
to take a closer look at it.
OK, let me introduce you
to Caroline,
the first born of the large
family of animographs.
Caroline. Why Caroline?
Caroline was the name
of Émile Reynaud's mother,
who was the creator of animation
and even maybe of cinema.
So, with the greatest respect,
we called it Caroline.
Reynaud and Jean Dejoux
should have met, even though
Reynaud died in 1918.
But both inventions,
those of Renaud,
in other words,
the praxinoscope,
the theatre praxinoscope
and the optical theatre
created in 1888,
are similar objects invented
70 years apart.
Yes, there's standard animation
used in cinema,
and there's this one.
What is the difference?
The essential difference
is this.
Here are 24 little drawings
which represent exactly
the amount of work needed
for just one second
of cinematic animation.
In other words,
1,440 drawings,
drawn, then filmed
image by image,
for one minute of animation.
And now?
And now, with the animograph
which makes
thorough use of retinal persistence,
we only need
300 drawings for one minute.
In other words,
the rhythm is of five
or six images per second.
And you can evaluate the result?
We can evaluate
the result immediately,
as we're going to do now.
I can stop the animation.
I can set it going again.
I can accelerate it
or slow it down, and I can
make it go backwards and forwards.
If I don't like one
of the characters
I've drawn very much,
I can take it off.
It falls down onto my pencil,
and I can correct it immediately,
and I can send it back to play
its role in the machine.
In fact, it's a very simple process.
It's more complicated mechanically,
which is why we have
the imposing machine
presented at the MIPE,
the International Market
for Television Programmes
and Equipment.
The first one took place in Lyon.
The MIPE is a marvellous week
because the Research
Department trusted me
three years ago.
It was a real game of poker
deciding to build this device.
And now at the MIPE,
under the banner
of French Television,
we were really delighted to see
that almost all the representatives
from all countries at the MIPE
were interested in this device.
Yes, in the newspapers.
I think it was in 1963.
It was everywhere.
The incredible machine
which revolutionised animation,
and animators
came from everywhere.
Dad talked to me a lot about
Norman McLaren.
There was Bill Littlejohn, who
became a very close friend.
There was Chuck Jones, whom I met
at home before he went
to New York with Dad.
Lots of people who said
this machine was incredible.
I knew Jean Dejoux,
a very charismatic man,
that's for sure.
He was a charmer,
but in a good way.
He was enthusiastic
about his research,
his process.
And he knew how to communicate,
so well that he formed
a close-knit team of people
around him, people who believed...
who believed in
this marvellous machine.
Uderzo made a visit,
Goscinny made a visit
to see the animograph.
Unfortunately,
they had not got to the stage
where the first Asterix cartoon
was made with the animograph.
Because really,
it was too early
or too late,
but anyway,
it wasn't the right time.
The animograph was viewed as
something not frivolous, of course,
but that the possibilities of it,
because they were working on,
used to working on a large format.
And because you had to work
on a small
format, these old guys,
maybe it was their eyesight,
I don't know.
But the...
The first series was made
on a machine
called an animograph
and which forced animators,
in other words, the artists,
to work on formats
which were no bigger than that.
They used to draw on
70 mm wide film,
matt film, and consequently,
it was a tiny little thing.
Kodak used to make it for us,
using the same perforators
and the same celluloid media
as for films.
But they used what was called
Kodatrace,
and Kodatrace is a thing
for artists and such.
It's an unpolished media
that you can draw on very easily.
At the beginning, the Shadoks lay
ordinary eggs,
but as their legs were too long,
the eggs used to break.
Now, the Shadoks lay metal eggs.
Norman McLaren animated directly
on the 35 millimetre film,
which is much smaller
than that,
so this format was not too small.
In fact,
they did a separate film
that they made on 70 millimetre.
Any machine takes exactly
the same formula
as Charles, Mr. Schultz films,
so for me, it was no problem at all.
Hello, Yogi.
In particular, we know that
Norman McLaren,
the great Norman McLaren,
author of a huge number of works,
visited the RTF
at the beginning of the 1960's
to test the machine.
Norman McLaren, who is Scottish,
was born in Glasgow,
has given
animation a new economic sense.
And I'm not joking when I say that,
because he is well-known
all the world over
for having made camera-free films
accompanied by instrument-free
music.
Norman McLaren
discovered that he could
quite simply
draw directly
onto the film and engrave with a tip
animated cartoons
which invented
totally unknown forms.
And as McLaren was a thorough,
articulate man,
he produced
a full report
describing the machine,
and offering some ways forward
for possibly using
the machine in Canada.
In this report,
Norman McLaren, like a visionary,
described what could be
a problem in the future.
Traditional animators
were not ready to use
this new animation process.
Retroactively,
we can remember
that the animograph
was a machine which...
wasn't unanimously welcomed.
It was too early.
It completely dismantled
the mechanics
of traditional animation,
and the "animators"
of animated film,
were confronted
with a new element
which could completely
call into question
the traditional system
and traditional
methods of animation.
There were detractors.
I was open to experiment
in animation
in the spirit of Norman McLaren.
I found the machine a little funny.
It was big and looked
like it was put together
by Meccano,
and it was noisy.
Yeah, but it worked.
Well, a washing machine
is quite silent
compared with the noise
the animograph made.
There was
one experiment made
with the TV news,
which consisted of
me going to Cognacq-Jay
early in the morning.
The journalists
used to give me...
not each time,
but used to tell me
there's this or that subject,
it would be good if we had
a little graphic,
a little drawing,
something to explain the story.
On 25 July 1956, the Andréa Doria,
one of the most beautiful vessels
in the Italian fleet,
would never arrive in New York.
Off the coast of the United States,
the Stockholm, a Swedish boat,
collided with her.
So, I went with the subject.
René Borg went to work,
and we delivered the little 16 mm
film, in black and white,
of course. I took it to Cognacq-Jay,
the film was developed,
and went out that night
on the TV news.
Only the animograph could
have done that,
supplied an animation
so quickly, but obviously,
it was extremely simple.
Ordering a sketch
or a sequence in the morning
and having it in the evening
seemed absolutely impossible.
Except that in the new world
of television, there was no choice:
if we wanted animation,
we had to have something
like the animograph.
And it's exclusive to RTF?
I hope it will remain so
as long as possible.
In spite of its promising
beginnings,
the Research Department
never ordered any machine.
The animograph remained a prototype.
The end of Jean Dejoux's contract
was approaching,
and it was not renewed.
It's true there were
Dejoux contracts that were
very advantageous
for him,
it's true.
But I knew that he had been
"dismissed"
because René Borg had told me.
René told me,
and when he told me: "Your Dad
forgave them, but I didn't.
Moreover, I'm going to write
a book", but the poor man died.
I've read articles and things
which said that Dad
had been scorned,
that it was absolutely disgusting.
But the machine was kept,
and several short films
and mini series
have been made on the animograph.
KNIGHT OF THE HURRICANE
S.O.S
THE ZLOPS ARE ATTACKING!
That morning was
a charming morning
like all the others.
And in all the cities on earth,
you could hear the soft,
daily murmuring
of our smiling,
peaceful civilisation.
Well, I have some memories,
when we were sitting at the table
and he was talking to Mum
and I wasn't all that old.
And there was this word,
"polytechnician, polytechnician,
polytechnician, polytechnician"...
And now I understand.
They really looked down on him
because he didn't have
any qualifications.
When they used to say:
"My dear Dejoux,
there's no future in video",
and so on...
and: "We'll take your patents,
we'll try to pinch your patents
because you're not an engineer."
Those are hard things.
They knock you right down.
So it took him strength
and it took people coming to him
saying that it was wonderful
for him to fight.
FRANCE
ITALY
In 1966,
Jean Dejoux left for Milan
to join Gamma Film,
a company specialising
in animation for the cinema
and television
led by Roberto Gavioli,
with the view to developing
a new animograph.
Roberto Gavioli
managed to convince Jean Dejoux
to move to Milan
to set up
a secret laboratory
within Gamma Film
which hardly anyone knew about.
They worked together
for several years
making a prototype
of the animograph,
a really extraordinary experience.
Italian TV broadcast
its first adverts
via the programme Carosello,
where the principle was
to offer a normal story.
But at the end,
they broadcast an advert.
Famous characters like Calimero
and Alinea
were born from this famous
programme,
Carosello.
Carosello was a cult programme
for generations of Italians
during the 60's
and 70's.
These animations were made
by many great Italian directors,
Sergio Leone,
De Sica and others.
I'm going to read you an interview
with René Borg, OK?
"Fortunately, Jean
had an exclusive contract to use
the animograph
after the ORTF,
if they weren't using it.
So between 1964
and 1967,
he and I made a series
of a hundred
advertisements,
each two and a half minutes long,
in full animation
named Gomma and Matitino:
'The fat rubber and the
little pencil',
broadcast by the RAI channel
in Italy, all thanks
to the animograph
which officially, didn't work.
There's no need to point out that
no one at the ORTF
knew that I was doing it."
It was here that
the animograph showed
its full potential
and was able
to guarantee
a quality image,
while reducing costs.
In reality, the final prototype
made at Gamma Film
was quite a cumbersome machine,
and it didn't reach the goal
of decentralising production
for people to work at home.
But the machine worked!
During this time, another researcher
knocked at the Research Department's
door
with a new idea of animation.
He didn't know it yet,
but his project was going to
revolutionise television
and shake the French society
of that time.
His name was Jacques Rouxel,
and his project was called
The Shadoks.
The first person I met
at the ORTF Research Department
told me, seeing my really simple
drawing:
"That's just right! We've got
a machine
that's absolutely right for this
kind of cartoon."
The Shadoks looked like birds.
They had a beak
and feet,
but their wings were ridiculously
small.
The Shadoks were really nasty.
I don't know how much
the relationship between
the machine, Dejoux and Rouxel
led the drawing
of the Gibis and the Shadoks,
but you can easily see
that the artwork
is a succinct artwork,
and that it was important
for Rouxel
not to make people think
of Walt Disney.
That was something different.
It's true that I don't want very
much. I just want
an illustrated text.
The simplest possible drawings,
the simplest possible characters
to tell my story.
The whole Shadok population
pumped and pumped and pumped.
They pumped for joy,
they pumped with gladness,
but for the moment
for nothing, because
the Cosmogol
was showing up late.
Following a change of director
at the ORTF,
a full series of 52 episodes
of the Shadoks was ordered.
It was produced using
the animograph,
and René Borg directed it.
From Milan, Jean Dejoux asked
his loyal friend to do everything
in order to make it work,
and to prove to everyone
the efficiency of the animograph.
At the beginning, it was
extraordinary.
It was a revolutionary machine:
"It works! Let's do it!"
and afterwards:
"No, the prototype's going
to break down. It's not reliable.
The deadline's won't be kept."
And then after:
"Ah yes, we must do it."
So...
It's a bit difficult to follow,
and completely contradictory.
René Borg, you directed the Shadoks,
these 52 programmes.
How was this cartoon made?
With a special machine called
an animograph,
which allows you to go
more quickly than
with classic animation.
Yes?
Because the animograph only needs
eight drawings
for one second's screening.
The animograph is a device
which allows you to make
a chain of blended images
one upon the other.
It's a very complicated machine.
Why make things simple when you can
make them complicated?
René Borg was a friend,
and we often shared meals during
the 1990's.
The animograph was really
something quite distant,
and he used to talk about it
as being
a time of completely insane freedom.
The first Shadoks were born
just before May '68,
a time of trouble
and absolute chaos.
So, everyone was doing
what they wanted, when they wanted,
and especially
in the Research Department.
He described it as a lively time,
as a unique moment
which he never experienced again
in his life.
So obviously,
he used to tell me about
all the people around Rouxel,
about him, all those inventors,
Goscinny, Uderzo, who used to come
and who used to watch
this machine, which was
an unbelievable miracle.
Everyone said that with that,
they were going to change
the face of animation
and they were telling themselves:
"Yes, we're at the time
when there's a change of direction."
And then fate decided differently,
but that's a bit of a mystery.
And our story could stop there.
As with all the great stories,
we could finish
by saying that they lived
happily ever after,
but...
that would be stretching
your belief a little too far.
Because, to be honest,
it was just at the time when
our series was going to stop
that the real troubles
were starting,
for everyone.
René explained to me
that it went a long,
long way, that they plagiarised
the animograph
and in the end, it hadn't worked.
Dejoux went mad when he found out.
There was a research engineer
who was a very good chap,
highly intelligent
and very creative,
who had found
a sort of animograph, but...
whose layout was a big different.
Right.
It was more certain and different,
it used long, slightly wider films.
Well, Dejoux
didn't like that at all.
It looked like the ORTF
was entering into competition
with him.
You have to understand that
there was certainly only one
animograph in the history
of making the Shadoks.
And, jokingly, I would say
that the Shadoks were not gentle,
because they destroyed
the animograph.
They decided that the machine
was broken.
In fact, it wasn't really broken.
It could have been repaired
and it was still working a little.
It was working.
Which of the two were right?
When you want to get rid
of your dog, you say it's ill.
They criticised Dejoux
for his machine not being reliable,
but they refused to buy him
a reliable, industrial machine
from which to produce animation.
That was something
which disgusted everyone.
That was all.
So these Shadoks, have they really
changed since the beginning?
Because they were born when?
In '68, Jacques Rouxel?
Actually on 1 May 1968,
it stopped.
And at the end of one week,
the viewers were protesting. After
one week, it had started going mad.
You see, some time ago,
the Research Department
presented you with a programme,
and this programme was the Shadoks.
France was immediately
divided in two.
It was like another Dreyfus case.
People sent letters and said that
the Shadoks was a dreadful
programme:
the drawings were bad,
the writers were illiterate.
Obviously, half of these letters
were for and the other half
were against.
In the end, the animograph
had done its job.
In other words,
to make a full series of 52
three-minute long episodes.
However, the machine
was not reinstated by the ORTF.
And then there was also...
I don't know if it's anecdotal,
but they must have come up against
a finance expert in the larger
company
who said: "Listen, how much is
the machine?
50,000 francs? OK, 50,000 francs.
You've filmed an hour with it,
so we're going to invoice it
at 50,000 francs per hour."
Which is obviously
totally absurd,
but that's not surprising for
a financial expert.
Besides, it was easy to lay an egg,
you just had to count to four.
I took a lot of precautions
with Pierre Schaeffer.
In other words,
I used to go and see him
to define a piece of research.
I recorded everything he said to me,
I wrote everything down,
I wrote a report and I had him
sign the report.
And when I got to the result,
it was always wrong.
Well, with my Alsatian nature,
I didn't get along very well
with that.
I found that the result matched
what had been requested etc.,
and as soon as the result
matched the request,
it was no longer interesting.
There was no more research.
So I needed some time before
I understood that precisely
what was interesting was research,
and when there was no research,
there was no point continuing.
I had to do something else.
One of the basic principles
of Shadok logic
was that only by continually trying
did you end up succeeding.
Or in other words,
the more it goes wrong, the more
opportunities there are to be right.
The decision to permanently stop
using it for the Shadoks series
was made by the production
management.
And you have to say
it was a perfect success
from a break-up point of view.
And so this machine was dismantled,
and several elements
were stored
at ESSART.
I wanted to take some
parts, but I was told:
"No, we've found someone, a school."
So I said: "That's great
if a school's interested.
I'm very happy!"
But I never heard anything
about it afterwards.
I went there. I even took René Borg
to ESSART.
We couldn't find
any trace of it,
of the animograph.
Like lots of machines,
like the universal phonogene,
I was ashamed to learn...
It had spent some time
at the Maison de la Radio's museum,
and then they sold it,
because there was
a lot of aluminium in it.
And for the scrap merchant
who bought it,
there was a weight of 200 kilos,
for a couple of pence.
They sold it
and it was cut to pieces.
There are many people
who worked in public services
and who took
things from the archives home
to save them.
Because, then,
there were no regulations,
and that was
quite difficult.
In this case, I don't know
what happened, but I found that
quite scandalous
to have thrown this machine away,
which could very easily have gone
to a museum of cinema.
In spite of the contrary view
of its director, Roberto Gavioli,
Gamma Film decided
to stop investing financially
in the animograph.
But Roberto Gavioli and Jean Dejoux
didn't believe they were defeated.
They decided to offer the machine
to Technicolor in Los Angeles.
The new animograph
went to America
in 1969.
I have some photos
of René Borg and my Dad
in America opening
some enormous crates
containing six tonnes of equipment.
So, Jean Dejoux went to the USA.
He had just signed a contract
with Nicolas Rézini,
boss of Cinerama,
who invited him to work with him
in Hollywood.
The machine went to America,
and I found it some years later.
But at that time, it was set up
in some huge studios in Hollywood,
with a computer
and even more to get at than here.
All the visionaries were interested
in the animograph.
Norman McLaren couldn't help
being interested in the animograph,
Chuck Jones couldn't help being
interested in the animograph,
out of curiosity.
It was also the opportunity
to do something different.
And for those people,
difference kept them alive.
It was a trio of legendary animators
who opened
the doors of Hollywood
to Jean Dejoux.
Bill Littlejohn,
Chuck Jones
and Jules Engel
had come to to France
to test the animograph in
the ORTF Research Department,
and had understood the invention's
importance.
Chuck Jones was one
of the great classics
in the history of cinema animation,
because he learnt his craft
in the American studios.
He worked with Leo Schlesinger
in the Warner studios,
one of the biggest animators,
and he was often introduced as
having been
one of the inventors
of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck,
Porky Pig etc.
But he was also a genius artist,
an extraordinary comedian,
a very elegant man
with a little bow tie.
He was absolutely marvellous.
He is one of the true pioneers
of animation.
Part of the team that gave us
Looney Tunes.
He worked on Bugs,
Daffy, Porky, Elmer, the Roadrunner,
Wile Coyote, Pepe Le Pew.
It sounds like the guest list
at Snoop Doggy Dogg, I know.
Chuck Jones.
When I met him again in Los Angeles,
actually, it was at the end
of 1970.
And he had built
a new machine,
which was red,
you know?
Technically,
it functioned the same way,
but it looked like a piece
of modern furniture,
and it was quiet.
And it was altogether
much improved from the original
we'd seen in Paris.
SPEEDY THE HORSE
Everybody came
to look at Jean's machine.
Everybody in animation.
They were the greatest
and the most visionary minds
who understood
that it was really great,
who liked my father
and appreciated him,
so I say thanks and
hats off to them.
Terrific!
Because Jean had a good reputation,
you know. He was famous.
He was a very famous animator.
You know.
It's like a club.
It's like...
They're like all...
The animators speak
a language of their own.
I met Jean
when I was a student
at CalArts,
and he had come to lecture.
And at that time,
Jules Engel was head
of the experimental
animation department.
CalArts is a prestigious art school
founded by Walt Disney
in 1971.
Strangely, Disney always had an eye
on the future, and he told himself:
"The artists of tomorrow
must be
trained at Disney".
And for the first stage,
he set up this workshop,
this training
university,
this training school
for animators called CalArts,
which still exists today.
But strangely,
CalArts has almost
freed itself
from the creature that is Disney.
And the CalArts students
were told:
"Try to invent something
that would be
your ideal animation."
The animograph
was very influential.
But during that time,
it was just the beginning
of, well,
not even the beginning.
It was before the beginning
of people's idea of computer
animation, and the
beautiful thing about
the animograph
was...
how it would...
It was so fluid to work on.
When the idea of
the animograph appeared,
what was quickly needed
was almost what we ask of
computers today:
to work very quickly,
to be able to preview something,
to be able to correct it
and potentially even to be able
to work at home.
Some sort of telecommuting,
since an animograph
can be taken to your home
and you can have 25 animators
at home
working on their little sequence
all alone.
And it's almost an invention
that's been thrown together,
but which is visionary,
which renders what
computer animation
is today almost tangible.
So, it was the United States
which fully gave Jean Dejoux
and his incredible machine
an opportunity.
Jean worked continuously
on projects for American television
for 15 years.
We realise that, in fact,
the animograph
responded to some criteria,
but not to all of them.
It allowed you
to do animation,
but not all animation.
It allowed you to make the Shadoks,
but today, it wouldn't
allow you to make Frozen.
That's how it is, in fact:
every tool
has its great strengths
and, necessarily,
its great weaknesses.
The animograph did launch
the career of one young artist.
In 1971,
Gerald Scarfe
was sent to Los Angeles
to try out the machine,
and what followed is a rock legend.
They told me there was
this new system
in Los Angeles, the Dejoux system,
and they seemed very enthusiastic
about it
and said that they would pay
for me to fly to Los Angeles
and to make some animation
for the BBC on it.
In animation,
there is...
If you want to make a movement
like that,
the master animator would draw that,
and then he will draw that.
And then you had other people
who were called inbetweeners
who would do all the drawings
in between.
And then when you ran
all the drawings together,
the arm moved.
Well, I actually found
when I got there,
that that wasn't exactly true,
and that the...
Between the master drawing there
and the master drawing there,
this in between was a mix,
a dissolve, you know,
the two images blended together.
And so at first,
when I was working on it,
I was disappointed.
I thought, this is not what
I'm expecting,
but I thought,
well, I'm in Los Angeles,
you know, I mean America. I might
as well try and do something.
I was actually drawing onto this
70 mm film
with a grease pencil,
flipping it over and putting
the colours on the back
like that, so it's very immediate.
It's very raw.
It has a kind of energy
that a lot of films don't have
because they...
they get...
they go through so many
sequences that
their energy
is dissipated, really.
So this is the actual
film I worked on. As you can see,
it's about two inches
by three inches,
and I drew every image.
And you can see how long it is.
This is the drawings that I made.
And this is an image
of a Playboy girl,
Playboy magazine in America.
That's Long Drawn Out Trip.
In Long Drawn Out Trip,
I did every drawing
and hundreds of drawings
and it was a trip.
And in those days,
a trip was what you did on drugs.
It was a very
drug-conscious era.
Not that I was on drugs.
Some people think I was
when I was drawing it.
The only drugs I'm on
are for my asthma.
I just became
addicted and fascinated
by the film
and the possibilities of film.
And I even tried, you know,
just splashing colour on.
Impressionistic, I guess,
is the word
because I've always felt about
animation
that it's a medium
that hasn't been fully explored.
When Long Drawn Out Trip
was shown on BBC Two,
two members of
the Pink Floyd rock group
happened to be watching that night.
"We've got to work with this guy.
He's f***ing mad."
That was my introduction, really,
to the Pink Floyd.
You know, it took a long time
in the United States, for instance,
to have animation
that didn't look like
Disney animation.
When people thought
animation, the first thing
that would come out their
mouth: "Oh, like Disney?"
We went to Filmacion. We went
to all the animator's animation
companies in town.
And, they said: "It's interesting,
but you can't do this,
you can't do that.
This is the way we do it here.
Good luck."
And that was the way it worked.
Their minds were always on the full
animation table. That was the
only way they could think.
In my opinion, the studios didn't
like this machine
for one simple reason,
that they had their process
which allowed them to get into
a slightly bigger degree of detail.
You have to remember that
with the animograph,
you were drawing on a really
small surface
and that allowed them control,
that allowed them to have chains
of keyframes,
that allowed them
to recycle backgrounds.
The existing system
was quite satisfactory.
The problem too, was that
the animograph brought freedom,
and the studios didn't want freedom.
They wanted productivity, efficiency
and above all, they wanted
to be able to reproduce
the same exact thing several times.
There's one thing that amuses me.
They said:"OK. We can't
do Disney on it."
Which is actually wrong because
Dad always told me that
you could do
Disney-style animation,
in other words, fluid.
Having said that, you can't put
40 characters in the image,
given the size of the Kodachrome.
But in any case,
Dad worked with Disney
and that's funny.
And there's one thing that
Dad loved,
and that was being a teacher,
teaching animation at UCLA.
He loved his students,
loved teaching.
He told me a lot about it.
It was a great love in his life.
He even won an Emmy Award
in 1977 for the version
of Peter Pan with Mia Farrow.
They would do photographs
of every single picture
of the video image,
of the live action image,
and then
draw behind that or over it
the shadow.
And then they would do a composite
of the two images.
And Jean was really good
with all that,
you know, he really understood
the technical aspect
of the film-making.
Computer animation came along.
That killed the animograph.
Computer animation killed it.
Yes, and what it did
is change the whole animation
production business.
The 1980's brought in
the age of computers.
The machine for making animation
was therefore
replaced by other machines on which
almost all animated films
would be made.
Dad remained positive to the end,
even when he was in a wheelchair.
He used to say: "I can't walk any
more, but look,
it's great. I have something
that does it for me!"
I never heard Dad say:
"Oh, why this? Why that?"
He said: "Because. Because this..."
or "Blablabla".
It was his way of reasoning,
all the time.
JEAN DEJOUX RETURNED TO FRANCE
DURING THE 1980'S.
HE LEFT PART OF HIS ARCHIVES TO
THE NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE MUSEUM
IN CHALON-SUR-SAÔNE.
GENIUS IDEA!
HE DIED ON 17 JANUARY 2015.
HIS ASHES WERE SCATTERED ON
THE BEACH IN MALIBU, CALIFORNIA.
BAD IDEA
THE REST OF HIS ARCHIVES, INCLUDING
THE FAMOUS SHOE BOX, WAS DONATED
BY CHRISTINE DEJOUX TO
THE MUSEUM OF ANIMATION IN ANNECY.
THE END
TO DATE,
NO ANIMOGRAPH HAS BEEN FOUND.
Translator: Lucy Gay