Behind The Scenes of Animation

My favorite animations since childhood have been Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Night Before Christmas and the good old Molletje. And now that I'm browsing IMDb's list, memories full my mind of escapes to the theater. First one ever was Aladdin with my big sister. Then, somehow, the parts changed and I became the cool auntie taking her kids to the movies. The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wall-E, Toy Stories and yes even Alvin and the Chipmunks. Ultimately, it is the story that satisfies the viewer's thirst for miracles but undoubtedly animation still takes my inner child to higher levels.

To find out how animations actually come alive before we hit the theaters, me and my fellows popped in to Anima, a Finnish animation production company. Anima is well present in Finnish TV: political satire Itsevaltiaat and sitcom Pasila probably ring a bell to most readers along with many commercials upon which Anima Boutique has had their hands on. 

However, the specific reason why we wanted to visit Anima was the amaze over how an award-winning 3D movie Niko and The Way to the Stars, which was sold over 120 countries, arised from a small Finnish company. In discussions with Production Manager Sini Lindberg, we went through issues from business to production along with specific techniques used, all in all get the idea what does it take to make animation movie. And let me tell ya - a lot.

The animation industry is highly competitive. No need to emphasize the freedom that stock exchanged studios, like Disney owned Pixar and DreamWorks which goal is to release two movies per year, have compared to  entrepreneurs. However, this doesn't mean that you can't compete with the big fishes. To achieve the quality set by the West, you just need to join forces on a broader level. 


Niko and The Way to the Stars was Anima's second 3D movie and naturally European level co-production with A.Film, Magma Films and alike. When compared to an in-house production, the creation of funding and production networks takes more time. And obviously, when the distribution of production is scattered all around Europe, the risks of errors increases the amount of iterations. Rendering doesn't turn out the way it's supposed to.  To notice that the snowball, which your figure was supposed to throw is missing actually starts a snowball effect to correct the error. Thus to succeed in complex co-production you need to have  spot-on management.

www.nikomovie.com

As usually in the movie business, sequels are the rule rather than exception. In animation, however, this has many advantages. In stead of the full process of modeling, designing and surfacing figures, the main characters are already existing and ready to be remolded to your imagination. In the limits of new script, you can probably re-use also some of the sets. All this enables faster overlapping production processes. To what extent this is benefited can be seen if Niko's next adventure is released.


It would have been interesting ponder upon how the marketing approaches used differ for a small production company/co-production and across different target markets.  Movie and TV business in general is the playground for transmedia storytelling and how this was used in Niko's case was out of our time available. But definitely something I'm going to look into if and when the sequel is coming up.