Though hardly prolific, animator Cordell Barker has earned a lifetime's worth of critical acclaim.

DETAILS

GIRAF 5 Festival
Quickdraw Animation Society
Wednesday, November 4 - Sunday, November 8

More in: Film

Many colourful adjectives have been applied to the work of Winnipeg animator Cordell Barker, but prolific has never been one of them. His publicist compares the animator to one of America’s premier cinematic auteurs, Stanley Kubrick: No matter how long it takes either one to make a film, it always gets nominated for an Academy Award. Twenty-one years ago, Barker released his popular first film, The Cat Came Back (certainly more widely known than Kubrick’s Fear and Desire). Since then, he has released only two films: Strange Invaders (2002), the alien lovechild of Barker’s real life parental experience and his warped sense of humour, and his latest, Runaway, which screens this week as part of the Quickdraw Animation Society’s Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival (GIRAF).

The methodical pace seems to work for the 53-year-old animator, who completed Runaway last April, just in time to screen at Cannes in May. “We just barely got it finished in time for Cannes,” Barker says. “My rough assembly was submitted and then accepted into competition, and then the race was on to actually complete the thing so I would have something to show.”

Being an award-winning animator affords one a rather unique perspective on the excess and opulence of the popular French film festival. “[It was] really quite an experience, quite an eyeful,” he says. “Having a short animated film, you’re like a fly-spec on the wall that witnesses all the grandeur going past. But still, you have your little slice of it, your little corner of the whole thing. It’s quite a show.” Barker’s film won Le Petit Rail d’Or award for best short film at Cannes and a Special Jury prize at the Annecy International Film Festival.

Runaway takes the popular runaway train metaphor and applies it to a society hurtling blissfully and obliviously to its own destruction. It compartmentalizes social hierarchies, with the chattering classes packed like cattle into a “party car” and the boorish bourgeois closer to the engine, both unaware that the commander-in-chief is an incompetent idiot (voiced by fellow Winnipeg animator Richard Condie). It’s all presented with Barker’s sly, stylized mischief and mayhem and his patented dark brand of humour. Caught up in the film’s momentum, it’s easy to forget that Runaway’s total of eight minutes of screen time represents years of arduous work. According to Barker, his chosen profession definitely contains some masochistic characteristics.

“To be frank, the project just about killed me,” he says. “It was so painful at times to just get through it, to face the storyboard. I’m not just the director; I’m the guy in the trenches, too. I’d have to whipsaw back and forth between working on a specific little shot and then stepping back and looking at the global storyboard and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I have that and that and that yet to face,’ and then stepping back into working on a specific little shot again. It’s really hard doing both.”

It’s all part and parcel of the creative and economic reality of an independent Canadian animator, though — even an award-winning one. “Once the budget is set, it’s pretty hard to then scrape up more money to hire a whole bunch of extra people,” Barker explains. “I was planning for it to be a simpler film. A lot of time, National Film Board films are just done in an auteur kind of cottage-craft way; a particular filmmaker just crafting their little vision of something. This one got grander than what I was originally planning. It’s very hard to go back and say, ‘I’ve changed my vision — I’d like 50 per cent more.’”

In spite of all the pain and hard work, animation represents a lifelong passion for Barker. “I remember once hearing a paleontologist saying, ‘Every kid loves dinosaurs, but I just never stopped loving them when I grew up,’” he says. “That always stuck in my head, and that’s the way it is with me and animation. I never stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons or cartoons of any kind.”

While still in high school in Winnipeg, Barker began an apprenticeship at Ken Perkin’s Animation, where he honed his skills by animating vignettes for the Canadian edition of Sesame Street, and throughout his career, he’s paid the bills by animating TV commercials. “If I wasn’t doing TV commercials over the course of my three films, there’s no way I could survive,” he explains. “I would have had to marry someone who was a brain surgeon with very high income. Doing TV commercials in the midst of all that is what kept me going. For a period there I was doing a lot of commercials — so much so that I didn’t even touch my second film for two and a half years, didn’t even look at it.”

A lot has changed since Barker released The Cat Came Back way back in 1988. Technology has made his job somewhat easier. In the old days, Barker had to physically transport his carefully numbered drawings to an NFB cameraman who would shoot them in series on an animation stand, and then wait two days to get the film back from the lab. Now, he can scan the drawings into a computer and see the results almost immediately. No longer does he have to mix colours, paint them onto cels and then hope they dry relatively close to the desired hues. The biggest change, though, is Barker’s ability to enjoy the fruits of his success.

“I was the classic animator stereotype, even up to like 10 years ago,” he acknowledges. “After Cat Came Back, I was pretty shy and with all that attention, I couldn’t sleep. I was just a wreck. I was thinking ‘Why can’t I just enjoy this thing that I’ve earned?’ At the Academy Awards after Cat Came Back, I was just like, ‘I’m out of here.’ I lost out to Pixar, and there was a party at the consulate and I just showed up to tell the executive producer; ‘I’ve got to go home, I’m just exhausted.’ I didn’t have an ounce of energy to even smile or anything, it was just torture all the way.”

“Just being older and feeling more confident, [I feel] like I belong in the animation world,” he continues. “Before, it was that old classic feeling like you’re an impostor, like it was just a happy accident that your film got attention. It does sort of feel like, I guess I’m doing the right thing.”

With another prize-winning creation behind him, Barker relishes the opportunity to see others watch his film and share in his humour and unique outlook — an opportunity he’ll get at the GIRAF festival this year. “I had a screening in Ottawa last week, and it’s amazing the reactions that I get. It’s like they’re shocked but they find it funny at the same time,” he says. “It’s like a weird kind of social experiment, the way people react to some of these kind of negative [ideas] — like negative with kind of a sugar-coating.”