Switzerland animates with 'Max'

Soft money propels ambitious stop-motion movie

By ALISON JAMES

ROMONT, Switzerland -- Switzerland's first stop-motion animation film is making a bid for the toon turf usually ruled by Tim Burton and Nick Park.

"Max & Co." is a hugely ambitious movie by Swiss standards, budgeted at E18.5 million ($25 million), probably a record. The average Swiss film, of which there are roughly 20 a year, is budgeted in the $2.5 million range.

Major coin has come from Paris-based Wild Bunch, which will release the film theatrically in France and is also handling international sales.

Fantasy tale follows half-boy/half-fox Max as he goes in search of his father, on the way finding out about life and love -- and, in a typically European touch, the ruthless, exploitative world of work.

A flyswatter factory and some dangerous, mutant flies are part of the mix. 

Behind "Max" are identical twin co-helmers Sam and Fred Guillaume, with Benoit Dreyer, their partner in a young Swiss-based animation studio, Cinemagination, and vet filmmaker Robert Boner producing.

Cinemagination and Boner's Swiss company Saga are the Swiss producers, while Boner's French shingle Cine Manufacture, the U.K. fund Future Films and Belgium's Nexus Factory are co-producing.

Neither the helmers nor the producer have worked on a feature-length animated film before, nor has the d.p., Renato Berta, known for his work on the films of French director Alain Resnais.

Filmmakers vow that Berta's fresh approach -- often using a single light source to imitate natural daylight -- will influence the look of animated films in the future.

"There is often a cramped, claustrophobic feel to animation films," co-helmer Fred Guillaume says. "'Max' is going to be very different."

To make up for Switzerland's fundamental lack of toon know-how, the production hired an army of European animation talent, much of it from the U.K.

Key crew members have worked on pics including Burton's "Corpse Bride" and "Mars Attacks," "Chicken Run" and "Toy Story."

The puppets for Max and the other half-human/half-animal characters are the work of Manchester-based MacKinnon and Saunders, makers of the puppets for "Corpse Bride."

Spindly limbed Max, definitely a cousin of the Burton film puppets, and other main characters cost a pricey $40,000 apiece and are built with state-of-the-art geared mechanics to articulate the puppets' heads, speech and facial expressions.

Filmmakers pursuaded dozens of animators and technicians to leave places like London and spend a year in Romont, a small town in Switerland, where a temporary studio for "Max" was built inside a former box factory.

"We've eaten a lot of fondue," quips Brit Andy Gent, head of character construction at the studio's on-site "puppet hospital."

In production since March, the film is painstakingly inching its way into being, with 27 individual sets each turning out 2.5 seconds of footage a day.

As always with animated films, the voices -- which will be in French -- were done first. Gallic thesp Laurent Deutch voices Max, with composer Bruno Coulais doing the music.

"It sounds slow, but we've been very rapid compared with other animation films," says Boner, proud the film hasn't gone a day over schedule, even though its budget "kept growing and growing" as the ambition of the project evolved.

The finished film should be ready by April, with hopes that the Cannes Film Festival might be interested. (Boner was behind such pics as Jamshed Usmonov's Cannes-selected "To Go to Heaven First You Have to Die.") Fest berth or not, it's not a bad time to be in the marketplace with a stop-frame feature -- especially one with a European-sized budget.

Several other stop-frame pictures are in the works, including Henry Selick's "Coraline," which will be animated in Portland, Ore., and Wes Andersen's upcoming project "The Fantastic Mr. Fox."

Cinemagination is already developing its next stop-frame feature, an adaptation of the French book "Autobiography of a Courgette." Claude Barras, whose short film "Banquise," screened at Cannes, will helm.

"Switzerland is a small market, but a lot of soft money is available here -- for the right kind of project," Dreyer says. "It's a good place to launch productions."