The Lamentations of a Rocking Chair
Plus: news.
Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate today:
1. On Crac by Frédéric Back.
2. Newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1. Speaking through beauty
In 1982, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were in the United States. They’d come to work with Hollywood on an animated Little Nemo feature. The experience was a frustrating one.
But something good came of it. While in Los Angeles, Takahata went to a screening of The Adolescent (1979), a live-action movie from France. It was touring American theaters as a double bill with an animated short from Canada. Takahata didn’t realize that the short had already won an Oscar earlier in 1982.1
Its title was Crac (1981). Takahata was floored — “completely captivated,” he later said. He had to watch it again, pulling colleagues along.
Miyazaki’s reaction was similar. In his words:
It was a shock to both of us. As we trudged home after the film, I remember saying to Takahata-san, “So, I guess we’re failures, aren’t we…”2
He and Takahata became evangelists for Crac when they got back to Tokyo. Toshio Suzuki, then a magazine editor, heard the raves. “They said that the story, theme and presentation all matched,” he remembered. Even the characters and backgrounds were united in the film’s single, total vision — something Japanese cel animation didn’t do.3
They’d discovered a filmmaker, Takahata later wrote, whose “content and presentation are inseparably linked.”4
Crac’s quiet beauty and emotional pull, and its message about the value of rural living in Quebec, strongly resonated with Takahata and Miyazaki. It became one of their favorite films — and biggest influences. From that point, at least a little (often a lot) of this film showed up in their work.
Crac is about a rocking chair. It’s also about history, and what it means to be happy. The story begins when a man cuts down a tree and lovingly carves a chair from its wood. It stays in his family for decades. We watch life go on: a wedding celebration, the change of seasons, the birth of children, the games those children play. The chair is part of it all — getting painted, broken and repaired along the way.
Then, as modern times arrive, it’s thrown out. Canada’s landscape is destroyed, too, and replaced by factories and identical high-rises. But the chair does find a new life. Although its old world is gone, it survives, and its memories with it.
Crac’s story was relevant to Japan — which had experienced these changes itself. It was a coincidence. Director and animator Frédéric Back was aiming much closer to home.
He was a European who’d lived in Canada since the ‘40s, and he’d come to love Quebec. Crac was his tribute to a local way of life that had faded away — based on his memories and those of his wife, who’d known the old, rural Canada. It was an era, Back said, when people “had the forests to live off and they lived well by the forest.”5
As he put it:
… I expected the film to please Quebeckers, especially. The big surprise was seeing that Americans found it amusing, and that the Japanese found it interesting, and then seeing it accepted around the world.6
Frédéric Back was a latecomer to animation. He’d started around 1968, in his mid-40s, and had slowly worked out his own methods. Fantasia was Back’s earliest influence in animation, but his style owed little to Disney. Much of his drawing and timing were intuitive rather than structured, based on a lifetime as a sketch artist and painter. He was an auteur who did films largely alone — an idea he got from Norman McLaren.7
Unlike McLaren, Back didn’t work for the National Film Board. He had a less prestigious job at Radio-Canada, whose animation department was smaller, scrappier and often under threat of closure. There, he made his name. Back’s Illusion (1975) won awards internationally. All Nothing (1978) was nominated for an Oscar.8
The idea for Crac predated those films. He wrote its proposal in 1973, inspired by a story that his young daughter had composed for school. Hers was Les lamentations d’une chaise berçante, or “The Lamentations of a Rocking Chair.” It was an old, handcrafted chair’s tirade against humanity, which had taken it for granted and moved on to mass-produced chairs with “no personality.”9
The story’s humor and statement appealed to Back. He was an environmentalist, an activist, a tree-planter and an artist with a message — his films always agitated for a better, happier, more just world. Here was a new way to do it.
The History of a Rocking Chair was the name of his proposal, but the project ultimately became Crac. As he said:
That film deals with nostalgia. The title Crac refers to the speed with which change happens to us. Families breaking up, the move from rural to urban settings ... Especially for young people, the change is subtle. There’s not much to remind them of the past, so near to them.10
Back’s first outline for Crac shares a lot with the final product, but its last sequence differs (it’s set in an antique store instead of a museum). He gave the story time to come together. “Crac waited six years for its present ending,” he noted.
Until then, he was working on other things.
Crac’s look, the colored-pencil sketches that became Back’s signature, first emerged during All Nothing. The plan for that project had been to draw on tracing paper — which didn’t work. So, he tested something else:
… frosted cels, a material more commonly used by architects and engineers. This allowed me to reduce the size of the drawings and to use colored pencil, which wouldn’t have adhered to the smooth surface of a transparent cel. The semi-transparency of the frosted cel gives a certain texture to the image and enables great freedom of expression. Wax-based colored pencils (I used Prismacolor) came in a wide range of colors and were readily available.11
With this technique, Back collapsed the stylistic gap between character and background: each one looks like the other. And he got closer to his natural sketching style. In fact, Takahata felt that Back had transferred the art of sketching to animation: the quick, personal drawings of an artist who captures exactly and only what they want to capture, in the moment. Here, impression took over.12
Crac was a new high for this style. It developed Back’s approach to motion, too. The film often moves in an exaggerated and simplified way, but it still feels studied from life — more like sketched movements than vaudeville. In Takahata’s view, Back hooks the audience with “the attraction of human movement as such,” with “the expression of the most ordinary and everyday human activities.”13
Of the small team working with Back, a key member was composer Normand Roger — Back gave him much of the credit for the film.14 There’s no dialogue in Crac, but its folk music plays a storytelling role. For example, it evokes real joy in the dance sequence; and the return of the dance theme at the film’s end is a deep emotional hit. “I worked with traditional musicians who could not read music, but had the real style … they learned by ear very fast,” said Roger.
Back spent more than a year and a half producing Crac. There were around 7,000 drawings, each from his hand. He was a hard worker, always staying late at Radio-Canada. A higher-up at the studio remembered him as “sort of the night watchman.”15
He was a workaholic, a habit driven by his sense of mission. Back had been concerned about animal welfare, war and the environment since his youth — even getting into fights with people who mistreated their horses. He was humble about it, but he was a lifelong activist, and his films were part of it. As he said:
I always felt weak in relation to the dimension of injustice. … One must counterbalance violence. One must react. We can’t accept it. When someone is getting a beating in front of you, the worst thing is cowardice. Intervention is necessary.
On the surface, Back’s anger is more obscured in Crac than in his earlier work. Still, it’s a film dedicated to the same causes, fueled by the same urgent need to act. After finishing it, Back explained:
My films are my gift. I put the very best of myself, of what I believe very deeply, into my work. ... I decided some time ago that I didn’t have enough talent to make revolutionary films. Therefore I would make films that communicate something, films that renew and give new life to the viewer … filmmaking is not just an occupation for me.
The gift of Crac came at a severe cost to him. Its colored-pencil process required a fixative on each cel. Just before All Nothing competed at the Oscars in early 1981, while Crac was underway, that fixative got into Back’s right eye. “I washed my eye out with water, because it was 10 or 11 at night and all the drug stores were closed,” he said.
It did damage. Surgeries followed, which could have succeeded if he’d rested afterward. Instead, he kept animating and ultimately lost his eye. “I should have stopped working for several months,” he later said, “but I continued.”
Nevertheless, Crac came out. It won the Oscar. Back went onstage, in a too-large tuxedo he’d borrowed at the last minute, and accepted his award. He was honored — but, even so, told his producer offstage that it would’ve been better for All Nothing to have won. Its message is more plain.16
Crac deserved it, though. And its added subtlety only makes Back’s statement more powerful. Takahata and Miyazaki came from a different world, but they were stunned in 1982. It changed the trajectory of their work, in ways more obvious (Yamadas, Kaguya) and less. You can read even My Neighbor Totoro as an answer to Crac.
The film’s DNA is inside Studio Ghibli — and inside almost all animation, everywhere. Disney veterans like Glen Keane fell in love with it. Festival-circuit animators like Koji Yamamura fell in love with it. You still see traces of it, even of Back’s approach to staging and transitions, in the work of people who’ve never watched Crac.
Back had hit a new level. Exiting the plane after his return from Los Angeles, he found a dozen of Radio-Canada’s executives there to celebrate his arrival. A reporter heard him say, “I just expected my family.”17 Soon, the Oscar would get him approved to make The Man Who Planted Trees (1987), which would win another Oscar and solidify Back’s place as one of the greatest animation artists.
Yet artistry was only part of the point. Back’s goal with his films was to inspire action, and beautiful images were his means. It’s hard to come away from Crac unmoved — without a renewed desire to appreciate life, or an awareness of the need for change. Like The Man Who Planted Trees, it’s a film with that power.
An earlier version of this article ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on August 29, 2024.
2. Newsbits
In America, it looks like the Bob Iger era is officially over. He stepped down as Disney’s CEO this past week.
On the other hand, in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki is still working and still talking about another film. His latest project is now complete: gorgeous handmade dioramas dedicated to his past work. See them here and here.
Also in Japan, there’s a new animated music video from Ryu Kato, whose creations have fascinated us for years.
American showrunner Matt Braly gave a revealing interview to re:frame about the state of Hollywood. “[T]he value of an individual vision, the auteur vision, it is just in the can,” he said. Braly has gone indie and is currently crowdfunding a new series.
A director from Ukraine, Iryna Tsilyk, received backing in France for an animated documentary about life during the war.
My Life in Versailles, produced in France and Luxembourg, took the grand prize for features at NYICFF. Check out the trailer on YouTube.
Suzdalfest happened in Russia, and the feature prize went to Tied Up by Konstantin Bronzit. Leonid Shmelkov’s dark, surreal movie Restlessness (trailer) was strongly praised by festivalgoers but shut out — controversially.
AnimaxFYB of Ghana won prizes in Tokyo, as part of a program by Japan’s industry to train African talent. Two results so far: The Legend of Asebu Amenfi and the CR Motion+ film Trials of the Spear.
Animation Magazine published its 2026 list of the rising stars of animation. Among them is Nadia Darries, co-director of Crocodile Dance.
Yugen is a stop-motion film from Mexico. In honor of its premiere, AWN shared videos and spoke to director Nayelli Ojeda.
Last of all: we looked into the directing philosophy of Rintaro, the visualist.
Until next time!
Details from Takahata’s book Reading The Man Who Planted Trees (very important today), plus this interview.
From Starting Point 1979–1996 (“Having Seen The Man Who Planted Trees”).
From the 1987 documentary Portrait of Frédéric Back, included in The Man Who Planted Trees Deluxe Edition. We cited it a few times.
Back made these points about his intuitive drawing and timing, and the influence of McLaren, in his interviews for Reading The Man Who Planted Trees and Frédéric Back Exhibition. It seems that Moonbird by John and Faith Hubley was another influence.
The problems of Radio-Canada were laid out in an interview with Ciné-Bulles (Spring 2003). For Back’s list of awards, see here.
Les lamentations d’une chaise berçante is included in Frédéric Back Exhibition, as is his 1973 proposal.
From a 1994 interview with Frédéric Back included in The Man Who Planted Trees Deluxe Edition, cited several times.
Takahata makes these points in Reading The Man Who Planted Trees.
From a 1980s Takahata essay, reprinted in Blink Blank (January 2020). He was describing Back’s films in general here.
Charles Solomon said this in the documentary The Nature of Frédéric Back, also our source for Back’s discussion of his accident.
See the Los Angeles Times (April 10, 1982) and the book Il était une fois Radio-Canada.
From the interview with Hubert Tison included in The Man Who Planted Trees Deluxe Edition.
From the Edmonton Journal (April 7, 1982).
So good to read this again with the updates. Really interesting the connection with Ghibli and so validating to see the inspiration immediately once it's been pointed out.
Thanks so much for this! ‘Crac’ is one of my very favorite films and a huge influence on our whole generation. I’m so glad to know Directors Miyazaki and Takahashi loved it. Thanks for all this background that I didn’t know. Such an inspiring artist, who made such a powerful humane film with so very limited resources. A great example for us in these dark times. Thanks Again!