Brainymation

Cartoons are serious business. Especially in China, Japan and Korea. Just about everywhere except for North America. Kiddie fare still rules the roost here with feature length animated film still largely confined to the undersea gardens of Finding Nemo or the soon to be released Shark's Tale, or the sniggering silliness of Toy Story or The Incredibles.

But in other parts of the world, animated film is stretching the boundaries of reality, and posing hard questions about family, individuality, and whether you must be human to be a thinking, feeling soul.

Among the hundreds of films currently playing at the VIFF, there are a number of animated films from Hong Kong (McDull, Prince de la Bun), South Korea (My Beautiful Girl, Mari which captured the grand prize at the Annecy International Animation Festival last year) and Canada. These are not kid's film even though the cute factor is cranked way high in McDull, Prince de la Bun.

A McDull life

The night I saw McDull, the theatre was packed and people were howling with laughter. I have to admit I felt a little left out. The Cantonese wordplay goes flying over the heads of most whities. But there is no mistaking the pathos of the story. McDull is a little pig who just isn't that smart, despite his mother's ambitions for him. In the first McDull film (My Life as McDull), his mother had plans to name him Mcnificent, but changed her mind. Still McDull tries gamely enough. He's in Kindergarten learning useful things like squid catching and creative pissing but when his leg starts to shake uncontrollably, he and his indomitable mother embark on a journey to fix his shakiness.

This second film, which isn't so much a sequel as another version of the same story, we meet McDull's missing father, who has lived his entire life in a place which he can never truly reconcile himself to. It's the story of anybody who leaves home, but never quite leaves the past behind. It is sad, serious and hilarious all at the same time.

Originating from a drawn cartoon script by artist Alice Mak, McDull has grown into something of a small industry based around the sweet little pig. But the film is more than cute animals. It deals with complex issue of Hong Kong, ideas about reunification, both between Mainland China and in Hong Kong and within one family. I've never been to Hong Kong, but the level of detail in the film is extraordinary, buildings crumble only to rise anew, buses and cars are on perpetual fast forward and the stately dance of cranes (not big white fluffy birds) but giant mechanical arms swing in unison over the cityscape. It made me recognize instantly a place I'd never been to.

How dark can they go?

The most intricate part of the story isn't McDull's absent father, nor even the precarious balance between old and new, urban towers and rural cemeteries by the sea. It's the fraught relationship between mother and son. When McDull's mother decides to make up her own fairytale instead of reading Harry Potter to her son, she charts her hopes for him and her regrets about her own life in high absurdist style. The film's layers of complexity also indicate what can be said through the power of cute. This is nothing new, of course, people have been making funny drawing to tell serious stories for a long time. Like the holocaust with mice, or the new book from Art Spiegelman In the Shadow of No Towers. A work which has been already been hailed as a masterpiece of its genre. Scott Thill in Salon writes "This dark, troubling and sometimes hilarious 9/11 comic, created in a jumpy city uneasily balanced between Bush and Osama, may be the finest and most personal work of art to emerge from the tragedy."

Graphic novels have gone from underground to literary credibility in one fell swoop. Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy On Earth won the 2001 Guardian Prize for best first book. The New York Times Magazine recently devoted a cover story to the form and some of its most preeminent players, a number of whom are Canadian including Chester Brown, Seth (whose real name is Gregory Gallant) and Julie Doucet. Graphic novels, like the influx of documentaries, often offer an entirely new look at the events of recent history.

These are not funny stories. Consider Marjane Satrapi, whose graphic memoirs about her experience in growing up in Iran are presented in tiny b/w panels in Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2 The Story of a Return. The first book chronicles her childhood in Iran, a place where she chats with God, and hides her Iron Maiden posters. Persepolis 2 begins with young Satrapi fleeing Tehran in 1984 and ending up in the epicentre of European culture that is modern Vienna. After four years abroad she returns to Iran and realizes that the old adage that one can never truly go home again has some truth to it.

The American approach

Obviously these works come out of the long history of political cartooning, illustration and yes, good old fashioned art. But other than Richard Linklater's rotoscoped Waking Life, no serious animated feature has been made in the U.S. in the last four or five years. Why?

Given the proliferation of graphic novels, it would seem an obvious hop skip and a jump to animated film. The Japanese manga and anime industries skip merrily along hand in hand, but in North America, graphic novels and their dirty little cousins comic books are most often turned into live action feature films, losing along the way that certain ineffable something that made them interesting in the first place.

Daniel Clowe's Ghost World and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor took drawn characters, put flesh on them, and although both films were sort of interesting, there was also something lost in translation. From Hell, the magnum opus of Alan Moore replaced art with real people and lost the art. Comic icon Frank Miller's neo noir Sin City (which will be released in 2005) is directed Robert Rodriguez and features some heavy hitters including Mickey Rourke (as Marv) looking like he's finally let plastic surgery go to his head. Whether it lives up to the style of its originator remains literally to be seen.

Simpsons as lightweights

Cartoons are capable of so much more. Even something like the Simpsons at its peak had a political social consciousness that seems almost shocking given that its home has always been on the Fox Channel. The same can be said about South Park or The Family Guy. But despite some witty satire, and amidst the puerile jokiness, these shows don't really take on any serious ideas. They're comedies, and they still aim low. Blame it all on the infantilization of modern culture, with its toy industry tie-ins, fast food culture and video games? I don't really know.

Manga and its step child anime deal often with difficult subjects like sex, violence, the environment and the future. Sometimes in a surreal science fiction (Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress or Perfect Blue) but occasionally in high realist style such as Tokyo Godfathers which follows three homeless bums when they discover a baby in the trash and must decide whether to keep her or return her to her parents.

Anime's influence on modern culture is enormous and many of the subject matters that it tackles show up in other forms. The Matrix took the informing ideas of Mamoro Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, and made a trilogy out of the idea that that meat and spirit all messily mixed up together in the human condition. The Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, recently released in the U.S., is according to its creator about wanting to be a dog.

'Brink of mind makeover'

Like its predecessor, Ghost takes as it informing idea, the notion of what constitutes consciousness. Human, animal or machine. It also deals with ideas that scientist have begun to recently posit not only as possibilities but as inevitabilities. Tomorrow's People: How 21st-century technology is changing the way we think and feel by British author Susan Greenfield, examines some of the ideas that science fiction has been messing about with for the past 60 years.

Greenfield makes the argument that we humans "are standing on the brink of a mind makeover more cataclysmic than anything in our history. The science and technology that are already at the heart of our lives will soon come to transform not just the way we live, but the way we think and feel. And as we learn to appreciate the dynamism and sensitivity of our brain circuitry, the prospect of directly tampering with the very essence of our individuality becomes increasingly likely."

If you'd been watching cartoons all of this would seem old news. Like they say in Ghost in the Shell "The time has come to cast aside these bonds and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things!" Amen.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee.