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Cartoon characters masturbating and having sex might shock those raised on a wholesome diet of Disney animation and The Flintstones. Yet cartoon porn is a flourishing sub-genre of the animation industry; a Google search elicits more than nine million matches.
It is even the stuff of advertising. An X-rated 90-second cartoon sex romp created by Auckland-based animator Laban Dickinson became an edgy online viral campaign promoting a men's hair wax product. He isn't certain if it resulted in increased sales of hair wax but he does know that "drawing boobs for a year was pretty fun". The cartoon, which features breasts, nudity and erections, was certainly controversial: one disapproving blogger wrote: "All I see are nasty cartoon people looking like they're doing it." But the commercial, based on the idea of tattoos coming to life, quickly succeeded; it was emailed around the world so enthusiastically it even ended up back in the animation studio's own inbox. It also received recognition from Dickinson's peers in the advertising industry, being shortlisted for a Cannes Lions award last year and winning an award from the Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association.
Art runs in Dickinson's family. His father was a cartoonist; his grandfather taught design at the (then) Auckland Technical Institute. Zap Comix, the San Francisco-based underground comic of the 1960s, which Dickinson describes as "very twisted" was another source of inspiration. As a high school student growing up at Muriwai Beach, he combined his love of surfing and drawing by working as a cartoonist for Kiwi Surf Magazine. In seventh form he won a scholarship in design for his portfolio of animation work. At around the same time the Tarzan movie came out and steeled Dickinson's resolve to work in animation. "I was big into Disney," he says. "Beauty and the Beast got me the first time I saw that."
The local animation industry, that Dickinson is proudly part of, is booming. "New Zealand, this year, has got more international product out there in the market than ever before," says Brent Chambers, managing director of Flux Animation Studio and a 20-year veteran of the business. He lists television series such as Jane and the Dragon, Staines Down Drains, Master Raindrop, The Adventures of Bottle Top Bill and Milly, Molly (popular kids' shows made here and screening in several countries, including Australia and the United States) as examples.
New Zealand animation companies are capitalising on the fact that today US networks are open to the idea of working with production partners. "Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network used to just buy an idea and make the whole series themselves, but now they'll co-produce," says Chambers. The Master Raindrop comedy adventure series, based on Asian folklore, was a collaborative effort between parties in Singapore, Australia, Germany, China as well as New Zealand.
Chambers believes the small size of the New Zealand market forces industry players to be creative and innovative and to continually broaden their skills, giving them the vital edge they need to participate globally. "Everyone's trying to find the thing that looks the most different from everything else that exists," he says.
Around the country and overseas, increasing numbers of New Zealanders are putting their skills and training as animators to good - and very diverse - use; proof positive that childhoods squandered on comics, cartoons and violent movies are anything but misspent. For many, such interests served as a seamless transition into the dazzling realm where new worlds are being created like never before, thanks to a heady blend of technology, imagination and sheer chutzpah. Animation is widely applied in New Zealand-made TV advertisements, series and feature films as well as in emerging fields such as viral internet campaigns. Animators and visual effects artists are also key players in the development of cutting-edge video games.
Dickinson's role at Flux Animation Studio has allowed him to explore a variety of animation styles. As well as the hair wax porn piece, he was responsible for a five-minute film called A Dark and Silly Night, the Westpac "doodle" advertising campaign and a Disney-esque Mother Earth commercial. Not a bad CV for a guy who dropped out of a three-year course at Freelance Animation School after just three months to take up a job offer at a now defunct animation company; a move he describes as "the best decision I ever made."
The 26-year-old says the opportunity to work in both 2D and 3D animation was part of the attraction of working at Flux. 2D is created the old-fashioned way by drawing separate images on paper which, when viewed in rapid sequence, give the illusion of a character moving while 3D animation is created on computers.
"2D is Disney Lion King; 3D is Toy Story. That's how I explain it to people," says Dickinson. "2D has a flat quality, I would say. We draw everything by hand, clean it up, go over it, make our drawings nice, then we scan it in the computer and we colour it." It's a labour intensive process. According to Chambers, about 27,000 separate drawings are required for a half-hour animation.
If the creation of other worlds and alternative realities is an inherent part of film and television, it is quite possibly the be-all and end-all when it comes to video games. For Sydney-based Erik Charlebois, a 3D animator who currently works as a visual effects artist on a game called L.A. Noire, the achievement of hyper-realism is his constant obsession. Described as the next generation of game and due for release next year, L.A. Noire has big shoes to fill. It will be published by Rockstar, the organisation responsible for the iconic Grand Theft Auto.
"You're building a world," says Charlebois. "It's a very immersive world. It's a sandbox world. You can go anywhere and do anything. All the detail's there. You have a whole world to explore."
When the 26-year-old talks about detail and realism, he's not kidding. Los Angeles in the 1940s has been recreated for L.A. Noire. Period costumes and events have been painstakingly researched and details of crimes that happened at the time play a role in the game. "They really tried to submerge you in that era. I think that's new. We haven't really had that level of, like, mirroring reality," he says.
Charlebois' visual effects include cars exploding, flame-throwers, breaking glass and crashes - in short, "stuff that makes the game look cool".
It's a natural progression from his previous work on movies in Toronto, Canada. "For Fantastic Four we had to make some guy stretch his body lots," he says. "[For] Resident Evil we had to do a lot of digital zombies and digital crows."
Look him up on the internet Movie Database (IMDB) website and his plot keywords are "murder", "blood", "death" and "extreme violence". His movie credits include Balls of Fury, Shoot 'Em Up, Dead Silence and Happily N'Ever After. This is one guy unlikely to be working on an ethereal Disney movie any time soon.
Like his counterparts in the wider industry, Charlebois was transfixed by comics as a child. "I'd choose a comic book based on what the artist's style is. And I'd actually try to duplicate it, draw in that style," he says. "It was all about the art. I didn't really give a shit about the story." Despite having worked overseas for most of his career, Epsom-raised Charlebois remains a patriot. "New Zealand's a world player, it really is. Weta put it smack on the map; it did a lot for our industry."
Chinese-born Sun Si (or Spring as she is known here) is a 2D animator who came to New Zealand in 2002 to study English at a language school. Casting around for a vocation to complement the degree she already had in advertising, which had focused on art and drawing, she came across a two-year course at South Seas Animation School and signed up. While studying, she won a character design competition for creating "a little space girl" with yellow hair.
As it turns out, it was prophetic that as part of her prize she was presented with a DVD of the first series of bro'Town - a home-grown animated TV series featuring predominantly Polynesian characters. Today, Spring is one of 30-odd animators at Firehorse Film in central Auckland working on series five of the show. (Each 30-minute episode takes about two months to create.)
As a young girl in Wuhan, central China, she devoured Chinese and Japanese comic books and films; the work of Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki was a particular influence. Animation is now her passion. "I love it a lot. It's like magic," she says. "Use your pencil, just a blank piece of paper and you can make the character move and make their cute faces and funny actions and also you can make them talk."
The 28-year-old herself becomes animated when asked to name her favourite bro'Town character - it's Jeff, a barefoot 14-year-old Maori boy who loves reggae music. "I like his look. He's silly and cute," she says. And easy to draw? "Actually Jeff is not that easy. Jeff is carrying a guitar all the time, [he's] got a big hat and when he takes off the hat, the hair is quite complicated." Her favourite film of the moment is Horton Hears a Who, an animated children's movie in which a miniscule universe exists within a single speck of dust. "It's so good," she says. "I liked the tiny world."
Wellington-based Weta Digital is Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning company responsible for the digital effects on such epic feature films as The Lord of the Rings, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, Bridge to Terabithia and King Kong. It's the undisputed industry leader and Flux's Chambers says that "all the kids in the training schools are wanting to go to Weta".
Victor Huang (29), one of a 40-strong contingent of animators at Weta Digital, is currently working on the movie Avatar, scheduled for US release next year. He shifted from his native California to work on King Kong in 2004 - 10 years after viewing the ground-breaking CGI (computer-generated imagery) movie that determined his future career.
"Jurassic Park was my favourite film and I just happened to love dinosaurs. I wanted to get into that industry," he says. "That was the first time that I actually saw, you know, a living, breathing creature done on the computer. I didn't know how they did it so I just started researching."
His penchant for animation was evident even as a schoolkid. "I'd always be either drawing in my school books or drawing little animations like on the corners, making little flip-book animations. I always did really good in art classes and was crap at maths and English."
Huang cut his teeth in the industry working on Maximo, a PlayStation 2 video game. His big break into film was on the Matrix sequels; he animated the Sentinels (which he describes as "flying, sort of squid-looking robots"), a car chase sequence as well as a scene involving more than 100 fighting Agent Smiths. At Weta he made King Kong fight the T-Rexs and - in a digital recreation of one of cinema's most classic scenes - animated King Kong climbing up the Empire State Building.
Feature film animators are not entirely computer-bound. They often find themselves physically acting out scenes in the character of the creature they are working on. "There's no way you can animate a scene unless you've sort of acted out the shot you're animating first-hand," Huang says. "A big part of the day, I'd say, is actually performing. We actually get up out of our chairs and go to the animation performance room, and either look at ourselves in the mirror acting our scenes out or video-taping ourselves."
Confidentiality clauses, non-disclosure agreements and a high level of secrecy are hallmarks of the ultra-competitive animation industry. Our photographer wasn't allowed to shoot inside Weta Digital's premises - perhaps an understandable precaution considering the high stakes involved and the astronomical budgets they are charged with. It's been reported that King Kong cost US$300 milllion ($409 million) to make.
Staines Down Drains, a children's animated television series and one of Flux Animation's projects, had a $10 million budget. A half-hour animated show usually costs between $300,000 and $350,000 to make, says Chambers.
"It's weird, because our business moves in slow motion," he says. "Staines Down Drains took almost eight years to get financed and then two years to make. So then it'll take another eight years to make its money back; I might be dead by the time it makes any money. That's the industry we've chosen. It's just gruelling. Twenty-seven thousand drawings and they're all good drawings and, you know, probably an equal amount of drawings got torn up and thrown out along the way."
But for those bitten by the animation bug, it's clear the art and creativity involved in the process are far more important than the profit or the remuneration it generates. And, Dickinson, for one, doesn't resent that he was paid just $150 a week when he started out in the industry.
"If I wasn't getting paid to do it I'd still be doing it. Animation's my life," he says. "You know, it's the last thing I think about when I go to sleep at night."
