The Rise of 'Father and Daughter'
Plus: news.
Welcome! This is a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the agenda for today:
1) About the fame of Father and Daughter.
2) Animation newsbits.
A note before we start: the former head of Cartoon Brew, Amid Amidi, is now on Substack. His first post is a great one about Disney’s Ward Kimball and the problem of unfulfilling work.
Now, let’s go!
1 – Joining the canon
In late 2006, Studio Ghibli sent an email. The addressee was an animator based in London, and the contents were brief and direct.
“They said they liked my short film … and said if I was thinking of making a feature film, they would love to do it together,” recalled the animator. “That’s all, bang, in one little paragraph.”1
His name was Michael Dudok de Wit, and he became the first foreigner to make a movie for Ghibli: The Red Turtle (2016). The opportunity was huge — kind of unimaginable. Dudok de Wit was a creator of low-budget independent shorts, and the studio’s query arrived with no warning: “it was so bizarre I couldn’t believe it.”
The short that’d grabbed Ghibli’s attention was Father and Daughter, winner of the 2001 Oscar. It wowed the studio: producer Toshio Suzuki watched it many times. He adored it, as did Hayao Miyazaki.2 Isao Takahata first saw it on TV in the early 2000s and was caught off guard. As he once said:
It was a very pleasant shock, and I was deeply impressed. This must be the best of the best short animation, I thought. I immediately watched it again and again on video. I cannot begin to guess how many times I have seen it. Everything about this work is impressive.
Takahata spent years lecturing on Father and Daughter and the layers it contains. Toward the end of his life, he said that he wanted to write a book about it. The film is a “masterpiece,” he argued, that “moves every kind of audience.”3
The Ghibli people weren’t outliers in their love of Father and Daughter. Neither was the Academy. The film swept in the early 2000s, around the world. One writer noted that it won “the Grand Prix [at] every possible festival at which it was shown in competition.”4
It took major prizes in Annecy, Zagreb, Ottawa, Hiroshima. It took the BAFTA. Even Dudok de Wit’s Oscar acceptance speech won an award — for the year’s shortest. (He received a fancy television set, which he donated to a children’s shelter.)5
For most films, it takes years to reach classic status. Father and Daughter was fast-tracked. Top animators immediately fell for this thing: Koji Yamamura (Mt. Head), Alexander Petrov, Paul Driessen. In 2003, a poll of animation insiders ranked it as the 34th best animated film.6
One of those insiders was Yuri Norstein (Hedgehog in the Fog), who’s called Father and Daughter a “great work.” After seeing it in 2002, he said, “I would love to get to know the author, shake his hand, look him in the eye and, if he’s a drinker, share a sake or vodka with him.”7 Even Norstein’s teacher Fyodor Khitruk was taken. He was in his 80s then, but Father and Daughter became one of his all-time favorites. As he put it:
In this film, absolutely nothing happens — no one kills anyone, or chases them, or even kisses them. A girl rides a bicycle. She does absolutely nothing. ... How did he come up with this? How did he capture my soul? For me, the mystery is not just the film. For me, the mystery is the creative process of making this film and, ultimately, the artist who carried it out.8
When he created Father and Daughter, Dudok de Wit hadn’t done a lot of shorts. Almost overnight, he found himself in the canon — inducted by the very artists who’d inspired him.
As mentioned, not much happens in Father and Daughter. A father says goodbye to his young daughter and sets off in a rowboat. He doesn’t come back. Years pass, and she returns to the spot throughout her life, again and again, on her bicycle. Each scene focuses on mundane, everyday details: riding in the wind, struggling with a kickstand, the wildlife in the polders. Even the supernatural ending is handled in a low-key way.
Dudok de Wit knew his theme carried the risk of cheapness and sentimentality, and he avoided them. The action happens at a distance, with “no direct emotion from the characters’ faces or voices,” he said. Instead, he pulled the feelings out of “stillness and emptiness,” and “the whole context and body language, composition and narrative.”
He also knew that this story of “separation followed by a reunion” was one that “everyone’s seen a million times.” It still had power to him, though. He tried to bring out that power in a finely-cut, simple-but-layered eight minutes. “I wanted to express a kind of deep yearning, a longing,” he explained. “It is a painful yet very beautiful feeling, even if you don’t quite know exactly what you want or miss.”9
Dudok de Wit started the film’s images on paper with pencils and charcoal — the latter with his palms and fingers. His influences were animators from around the world. The work of Poland’s Piotr Dumała, like Franz Kafka (1991), was a reference for the look and feel. So was Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales (1979).
Really, there was a list. Dudok de Wit has long loved Norstein’s Heron and the Crane and Frédéric Back’s Man Who Planted Trees — they’re foundational for him. He’s been deeply into Ghibli’s work since at least the ‘90s. He first learned what animation could be from The Fly, a cartoon made in 1960s Zagreb. (“It was so individualistic and powerful that I was bowled over,” he remembered.)10
And it was at the Annecy Festival, in 1975, that he discovered his desire to animate. “I totally realized I’m home. I’ve arrived,” he said. “This is the universe that works for me.”
In other words, Dudok de Wit was a product of the international animation community — the one represented by Annecy since 1960. In the years when the Iron Curtain ran through Europe, this world was borderless. Before digital video, it preserved and studied films from the ‘10s and ‘20s. Art found its way across every boundary line.
Originally, Dudok de Wit was from the Netherlands. He joined London’s animation scene in the ‘80s, where he worked in advertising. It taught him the craft. Still, he chose this career because of animators like Norstein. “I went into commercials to learn and to survive as an animator. ... But I became an animator to make personal films,” he said. He dreamed of working on his own stuff.11
Beyond his student film The Interview (1978), that didn’t really happen until the ‘90s. And it was fitful even then. His pilot Tom Sweep (1992) didn’t get picked up, and it wasn’t clear that he’d ever have a chance to do personal work like his heroes. As he told Skwigly, he felt that he might need to settle for commercials or “leave animation altogether.”
Things changed with The Monk and the Fish (1994). It was his all-or-nothing swing, drawn “completely from [his] heart.” The film got an Oscar nomination, a César and a special award at Annecy, and the wide animation world noticed him. “Everything — the drawing, animation, music, story and sense of humor — was magnificent,” Isao Takahata said. “I fell in love with it.”
Funding for his work stayed thin, though.12 After The Monk and the Fish, Dudok de Wit had to make Father and Daughter slowly, across four years of part-time work. Yet he was clearly on the inside now: he and his film were part of the tradition. For the music, he worked with the composer who’d scored The Man Who Planted Trees for Frédéric Back.
His hopes for this project were, understandably, modest. He didn’t make hits outside of commercials, and he figured that the lack of comedy would hurt Father and Daughter.
But the film “came in the strongest possible way from my own center,” he said. He hadn’t lost his own parents as a child, but the feelings he explored were personal. And, although he got help with the digital color and compositing, the bulk of the film came straight from his hand. It was his statement, carefully refined and unique to him. It was the kind of film he admired.
In his late 40s, and 26 years after his first Annecy experience, Dudok de Wit won the festival’s top prize. He won at Animafest Zagreb, too — in the city where The Fly had been produced. And his victory at the Oscars spread his film’s name across the globe.
Dudok de Wit was a latecomer: many had cut this path and walked it before him. Father and Daughter follows after aesthetic ideas that Norstein, Back, Takahata and others had already used, sometimes decades earlier. But the richness of what he’d made was obvious. The masters accepted him as one of their own.
Very few short films from the past 25 years have been as influential as Father and Daughter. Its impact on The House of Small Cubes (2008), another beautiful Oscar winner, is hard to miss. A lot of films have copied its structure and its tearjerking quality. And some of those films have made mistakes that Dudok de Wit made sure to avoid — using this subject matter cheaply.
But copying hasn’t tarnished Father and Daughter itself. It has a balance and reservedness, and a careful specificity, that keep it honest. Dudok de Wit was aiming for the upper reaches of animation here, at the depth of feeling that only the best work manages. Others had told versions of this story first, and he knew it. But he made something whose feelings are personal and whose details are real.
The result was a latter-day entry into the animation canon — and a complex one. “Those seeing Father and Daughter for the first time are bound to miss a whole lot. There’s so much packed into it,” Takahata once said. “Therefore, it’s a film you should watch again and again.”
2 – Newsbits
This November, Japan’s Ghibli Park will host painting workshops by background artists from the studio.
In America, preorders of Treasures of Soviet Animation Vol. 2 have begun to arrive — featuring The Snow Queen, The Scarlet Flower and The Key.
A new YouTube channel, Animated Classics, hosts official uploads of shows produced by S4C in Britain. There are episodes of Operavox and Shakespeare: The Animated Tales available already, with more reportedly on the way.
Japan’s Infinity Castle beat Superman’s revenue worldwide.
Far-right actors in America, including Elon Musk, instigated a harassment and threat campaign against artist Hamish Steele over his series Dead End: Paranormal Park.
There’s a political push in Indonesia to create tax incentives for animation. Supporters argue that the medium has proven valuable to the country’s economy. Given the historic popularity of Jumbo this year, they may hold the cards.
In Russia, the venerable Soyuzmultfilm was privatized, although its buyer hasn’t been revealed.
Also in Russia: Sergei Parajanov’s lost short Andriesh (1952) has been found, alongside materials that prove it was originally planned to be animated.
A few of the sales and distribution people behind Flow spoke in Germany about the film’s success, and the strategies that caused it — including a quote from Guillermo del Toro and a “giant inflatable cat.”
A rare and expensive artbook, The Art of Angel’s Egg, will be reissued this month in Japan.
Last of all: we wrote about the ties between animators Grim Natwick and Richard Williams — and Natwick’s unbelievable career.
Until next time!
Dudok de Wit said this in an interview with HeyUGuys, used a few times. The date for the email is mentioned in the interviews from The Red Turtle’s press kit (a major source).
See Cinema Today and the book Michael Dudok de Wit: A Life in Animation. That second one was very valuable today.
Even in 2016, Takahata was still lecturing on Father and Daughter, per Natalie. He expressed his interest in a book during a conversation with Dudok de Wit, published by Academyhills, that we used a few times.
That’s Andrijana Ružić, author of A Life in Animation.
For details about his acceptance speech, see The News and Observer (March 29, 2001) and the ASIFA San Francisco newsletter (September 2000).
Yamamura shared praise for Father and Daughter on his blog. Petrov named it one of his favorite films in the 2003 Laputa Animation Festival poll, published in Best 150 World and Japanese Animation Films. That book is also our source for Norstein’s quote about drinking.
For Norstein’s “great work” comment, see Crest International’s Father and Daughter site.
For Khitruk’s comments and favorite films, see the Big Cartoon Festival’s blog.
These comments by Dudok de Wit about the film come from Anime Land (July/August 2001), Robert-Bresson.com, the Los Angeles Times (March 30, 2001) and the book Secrets of Oscar-Winning Animation. Those last three were used a lot.
For these details about Dudok de Wit’s influences, see this interview with the BFI and this one with Skwigly (used several times).
For details about Dudok de Wit’s hopes in the mid-1990s, and the making of The Monk and the Fish, see Algemeen Dagblad (March 23, 1995).
His lack of funding after The Monk and the Fish is discussed in Algemeen Dagblad (February 12, 2001).
One thing I suspect that many people won't consciously pay much attention to, because it's more of an "ambient" thing, is that the film shows the passing of time in many little details, and that these details also give the story a sense of "place" in Dutch history.
Allow me to explain. When I, a Dutch man, watch this film, I recognize many elements that I remember from old photos and vague memories of Dutch history.
There are changes in clothes between scenes that seem to reflect real-world fashion changes - the most explicit example is how the old lady early on in the film wears traditional Dutch "klederdracht"¹ (folk costume). When the daughter is an old lady herself her clothes resemble a simple "modern" sweater. There are others: when cycling with her friends as a late teen/early tween, the group overtakes a woman with a cloche hat, i.e. the flapper style from the 1920s.
Then in the next scene where she goes on a date, they're overtaken by a bike with a gasoline-powered "hulpmotor". As far as I am aware these were a thing from the 1920s up to the 1950s, after which different form factors became the norm for motorized bikes. Their usage "peaked" in the 1930s (although the design of the one in the film looks closest to a Berini model from the 1950s²).
In the following scenes where she has a family her clothes look a lot like the old photos of my grandparents from the 1940s and 1950s.
When the sea/lake is turned into a polder near the end of the film, that alludes to the polders created as part of the Zuiderzee works³, which would date those scenes to 1940s or 1950s, when the Wieringemeer and Noordoostpolder were drained.
So the film grounds itself with attention to historical details that change between scenes to give both a sense of the passing of time and the rough placement of it. It might be a little anachronistic in moments (the Berini bike), but then again it isn't explicitly a "period piece", it's a poetic film about loss and the relationship between a father and her daughter. It does not need to be 100% historically accurate, the intent is obviously evoking a melancholic sense of the passing of time.
And for me me this really enriches the film with an authentic "feeling" of the Netherlands, the way I remember it despite living abroad for over a decade (funny enough Dudok de Witt had already been living abroad for even longer than me when he made the film). I think that for others who have never been to the Netherlands it may get across that feeling as well. Similar to how I will miss the background knowledge to place little cultural nuances in films from other cultures all over the world, but can still "feel" the authenticity of them.
It's like you concluded: "he made something whose feelings are personal and whose details are real."
¹ Just a few days ago the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision uploaded a video from 1937 celebrating an old woman's 100th birthday. She is wearing the same type of klederdracht: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwMMvTBzvtA.
² https://eysinkclub.nl/fietsen-en-hulpmotoren/
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee_Works
I can never get over how beautifully you guys write about anything. Makes me feel like I’m reading a lover letter, which it is, in a sense.. as always, thank you for sharing! <3