Animation duo looks to Oscars
When I first met David Fine in the summer of ’72, there was nothing about him that screamed “FUTURE OSCAR WINNER AND FOUR-TIME NOMINEE!”
He was 11, for god’s sake, one of five long-haired preteens in Camp Tamarack’s Cabin 5 in bucolic Bracebridge, Ont., a likable, slightly shambolic character who reminded me of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, but feistier.
Who would have guessed he and his artistic partner and spouse, Alison Snowden, would become category killers in Oscar’s Best Animated Short division:
Nominated in 1985 for Snowden’s student film Second Class Mail, on which Fine collaborated.
Nominated in ’87 for George and Rosemary, about two “golden agers” in love.
Won in ’94 for the squeamishly entertaining Bob’s Birthday, about a dentist in the throes of a mid-life crisis.
Nominated this year for the whimsically provocative Animal Behaviour, its fate to be determined at the annual blowout on Sunday.
“All my friends said — jokingly — ‘Say hello to Lady Gaga!’ ” says personable North York native Fine, who attended the recent annual Oscar lunch with fellow nominees from all categories.
“If you go on Twitter, you’ll see pictures I’ve posted of us with Lady Gaga and Spike Lee. They were just standing there.”
This is nothing. At his first Oscars, in ’85, he found himself in the bathroom next to comedy legend Bob Hope.
“I’m standing at the urinal beside Bob Hope saying, ‘Oh, hi’ and he’s going, ‘How ya doin?’ ”
Fine, at 58, is the same guy I remember from camp: an irascible smart-aleck who is blunt, self-deprecating and engagingly irreverent.
“I was dysfunctional,” he confides when I press for his own impressions. “I didn’t always fit in and I wasn’t a big party animal. I was goofy.”
How did this translate into a career in sparkling comedic animation?
“Like a lot of people who are creative, I found an alternate avenue of expression because I was a little uncomfortable,” he says with the maturity of a life considered. “These things don’t always manifest themselves as you expect. Someone can be a very funny and creative and outgoing person and you think, ‘That guy’s gonna be a comedian for sure!’ And they become a very funny accountant.”
Fine’s own future was never in doubt, having embarked on a filmmaking career in his teens with his pal, documentarian Ron Mann, before attending film school in England, where he met future wife Snowden, veered into animation and moved back to Canada.
“This is the first short film since the last one in ’94,” he says from the couple’s home in Vancouver, where he and Snowden have spent years toiling in TV animation. “They’re a ‘boutique’ thing. We were more focused on getting our work to the general public. But then we felt like doing a personal film where we had control and the NFB gave full autonomy.” Enter the giddy, irreverent
Animal Behaviour. Playing like an episode of the old Bob Ne
whart Show — with a gaggle of eccentric patients pouring their hearts out to a mildmannered therapist — this humorous morality play casts animals instead of humans, with a cagey pig, aggressive ape and high-strung leech whining about eating disorders and relationship issues.
The sensibility seems familiar, a blend of Monty Python wit, Second City satire and Woody Allen irreverence, qualities I remember in their nascent form when Fine was a wild-eyed, slightly dishevelled camper with the kind of plucky resolve we associate with WWE wrestlers and the wisecracking raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy.
“There are people we’ve met with issues who say, ‘Look, that’s how I am: deal with it!’ ” he says, refusing to tip his hand, thematically.
He laughs. “We wanted to play with the question of how we behave. We don’t expect animals to change their behaviour; that’s how they are!”
It’s easily the most laugh-outloud funny of this year’s animated offerings — three of them Canadian — an otherwise bittersweet collection that revels in relationship dysfunction. Consider:
Bao, a heartwarming Pixar flick by Toronto’s Domee Shi about a broken-hearted mother who finds renewed purpose when a steamed dumpling springs to unexpected life.
Weekends, a meditative tone poem by Canadian Trevor Jimenez about a young boy shuttled between his divorced parents’ residences in 1980s Toronto. Late Afternoon, the lyrical story of a dementia patient swooping through her past as her mind loses touch with reality.
One Small Step, a portrait of a father-daughter relationship that recognizes the fragility of growth and will leave you sobbing in recognition.
“Between single parent families, Alzheimer’s and animals under analysis, they’re sort of bleak,” says film impresario John Tutt. “My takeaway is that it’s a reflection of society and what families are like. Animation can say things that live action can’t.” For his money, Animal Beha
viour is the one to beat because it taps into a Canadian tradition that worships at the altar of the eccentric, offbeat and comically absurd.
“The National Film Board laid the groundwork for these films, for reflecting the country back on itself,” Tutt says. “Every year you see them pop up at Oscar time.”
For Fine and Snowden, it has less to do with tradition than following their muse, with their fourth trip to the Oscars, 25 years after the last, as meaningful as the first.
“It never gets old,” says Fine succinctly. “The first time was unbelievable and the second time was ‘Holy cow!’ and the third time was ‘What, again?’ and what can you say for the fourth time? I’ll have to think up some rhyme about it.”
What does it mean in a practical sense?
“You’re forever known as an Oscar-winning filmmaker,” he concedes without bragging. “It’s the apex of achievement and everybody’s impressed. “It may sound like I want to show off, but it’s so delightful to see the joy in people’s faces when they see it on the shelf in my studio.”
He pauses, his feisty spirit never long at bay: “But we can’t rest on our laurels. We have to create!”