Friday, May 9, 2008
The Lenny Bruce of animation comes from Estonia, but his influence is felt all the way to "Rugrats" and "Duckman."
Jul 3, 2001 | Look behind the billboards for "Shrek" and "Atlantis" and you'll find a secret world of animation hidden from the general population. It's a world where there are no ducks, no ogres and no shitless big-eyed squirrels. Instead it's populated with animators whose creations rival those of any composer, painter or poet. One of those treasures is Estonian Priit Pärn. An illegitimate conceptual crossbreeding of Lenny Bruce, George Grosz and Jean-Luc Godard, Pärn's animated films are bitingly funny, complex explorations of the effects of ideological systems on human beings.
His work has received roaring applause and fancy awards, but like much of independent animation, Pärn's films are rarely shown outside the festival circuit. In addition to being an animator, Pärn is also a noted graphic artist, teacher and lecturer whose influence is so far-reaching that students from Finland, Switzerland and America travel to Estonia to work with him. And later this year, he'll receive the prestigious ASIFA award from the Association Internationale du Film d'Animation, which is given to an individual who has made significant contributions to the art of animation.
The Pärn phenomenon has reached California via a few relocated Ukrainians and Hungarians at Hollywood animation studio Klasky Csupo. The jagged, uneven palette and the informal sketchy designs of "Duckman," "Ahhh Real Monsters" and, to a lesser extent, "Rugrats" owe a debt to Pärn's graphic style. For those who've come to know animation only through Hollywood films and American television, Pärn's work is as refreshing as it is startling. The rounded, pristinely drawn characters and landscapes that dominate traditional animation are replaced in Pärn's work with a primitive style that rejects comfortable, eye-soothing tints and classical drawing technique. His bold colors and sketchy, childlike drawing leap out at the viewer, loudly announcing, "This ain't no Disney cartoon!"
The first Pärn film I saw was "1895." It's 30 minutes long; typically, an animation short of more than 15 minutes worries an audience -- they prepare to suffer. But at that screening of "1895" I, and everyone else in the theater, sat dumbfounded. It was like watching an animated version of a Monty Python sketch. "What the hell was that?" I said aloud. It shook my senses. I wanted more.
Pärn's most recent film, 1998's "Night of the Carrots," examines the effect of computers and the Internet on contemporary society, as well as the cult of celebrity. The story finds crowds of people, led by the protagonist, Diego, trying to get into a sanitarium-like institution called "PGI." It's not clear why these people want in to PGI; as the narrator says, "Being contenders was their real aim because once they were in they would have nothing to do." In each of PGI's rooms we meet a variety of bizarre characters who want only to escape. The occupants each have a personal dream that, they soon discover, they cannot realize because they are literally plugged into their rooms.
Escape from PGI is possible only during one night when all the rabbits (who control the world through computers) turn into carrots. Contrary to the ominous warnings about a Y2K cataclysm that preceded the new millennium, Pärn instead saw the period during which he was making "Night of the Carrots" as a moment of temporary liberation. For one evening, Pärn suggests, we could step outside of our rooms, away from our computers and embrace the natural world and, with it, ourselves.
Pärn used his main characters in "Night" -- each based on a famous individual -- to examine the cult of celebrity. Just as the Internet offers virtual interaction and experience, within PGI's seemingly glamorous world of fame, there is nothing but loneliness and longing. Not surprisingly, while the film resonates as a fable for our time about the plight of Everyman, it also poignantly echoes aspects of Pärn's own life.
He was born in the summer of 1946, in the Danish-named Estonian capital of Tallinn, while the world was cleaning up a landscape of corpses lost in a battle for the pockets of privilege and two rogues with absurd facial hair destroyed Estonian independence.
As an adult, he worked as a biologist and stuntman (he is not the basis for the Estonian midget stuntman on "The Simpsons"), then turned to animation in the mid-1970s. A designer on three films, he was given the chance to direct his own production, "Is the Earth Round," in 1977. Taking Heraclitus' line that you can never step into the same river twice, Pärn's debut featured a man who decides to walk in one direction to prove that the Earth is round.
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