L'Animographe, ou Je suis né dans une boîte à chaussures (2022) - full transcript

“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