Naked on primetime TV

By REBECCA BARRY

Mario Gaoa sounds a bit like Zoolander when he explains the shock value behind bro'Town, TV3's new adult cartoon.

"The biggest offence people will take is when they see my character and think to themselves, 'How can a guy be that handsome?"'

Gaoa, Oscar Kightley and Shimpal Lelisi have returned to the studio where their comedy stage-show characters - along with fellow Naked Samoan Dave Fane - were transformed into two-dimensional form; their cutting Polynesian satire into a series nicknamed "The Simpsons of the South Pacific".

The process has been "quite a trip", says Kightley, and until recently the room was humming with up to 30 animators. But for now, it is practically empty, a wooden shell that echoes when you walk through it, with just a few couches and a drum kit sitting idly at one end. Only remnants of the mammoth production remain: crumpled bits of paper lying about featuring simple outlines of the show's main characters: fourth form brothers Vale and Valea and their mates Mack, Jeff the Maori and Sione. Then there's the flamboyant fa'afafine, the "useless" dad and a cast of cameos that includes Lucy Lawless, Helen Clark, Stacey Jones, Carol Hirschfeld and Nesian Mystik.

Inspired by Fat Albert, The Simpsons and Southpark, the four members of the stand-up comedy team wrote the show based on their experiences as Polynesian teenagers in the suburbs.

Kightley claims that gave the comedians a unique vantage point for which to write the show's "twisted moral tales".

"I like to think of it as how I was growing up," says Gaoa. "High school with the boys, doing stupid things, running to the tuck shop, running away from your mates trying to have your donut for yourself and all that jazz."

Lelisi: "You weren't abused, lost your mum, had to go on Oprah?"

Gaoa: "No I didn't talk to Dr Phil or anything like that. No one touched my bum while I was at school either."

Set in the fictional town of Morningside, the characters are based on those of their stage show, which was widely praised at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002.

"If it can work on Scottish people," says Kightley, "it will work on people in Dunedin. They are Pacific Islanders but not once do you hear 'We're Samoan', or 'We're Niuean'. You know it. It's in the world without it being pushed down you. It's so New Zealand. We didn't set out to write a story about Polynesian teenagers.

"There's no tapa in the cafe, it's just what it is. Thing is, you experience life differently because you're a different colour. You'd get different service in a shop than I would."

Gaoa grew up in the real suburb of Morningside and was in the fourth form with Lelisi. But they chose the town name for the same reasons the Simpsons reside in Springfield - because it inspires hope.

And hope they needed, as animated projects are fraught with difficulty, particularly in New Zealand, where the budget and pool of talent required to produce it are inevitably small.

Accordingly, bro'Town hasn't exactly been a stroll in the Otara markets. It took four years, more than 100 artists and $2 million to produce six half-hour episodes - three months to complete one. In other words, jokes chief animator Maka Makatoa, making bro'Town was a "pain in the arse".

In 2000, producer Elizabeth Mitchell was approached by a representative from American cartoon network Nickelodeon, the same woman who had discovered European kids' cartoon Rugrats and brought it to worldwide attention. This time she was looking for ideas Downunder.

Mitchell, a mate of Kightley's from their days working as journalists at the Auckland Star in the late 80s, had conceived a great one. She'd just seen the stage show, Naked Samoans Talk About their Knives when the concept of bro'Town dawned on her.

"The boys are 30-35 and the characters are 14, so animation seemed to make lots of sense."

The Nickelodeon representative eventually left the company, so Mitchell pitched the idea to TV3, where she had previously worked as head of promotions. But having never made a TV show wasn't doing her any favours securing funding, and NZ On Air was initially hesitant to bankroll the production because of the huge expense and logistics involved.

"When I first talked to them they made me very aware that it was an incredibly long shot and that it had a bad history of animated projects. A lot of them were burnt on delivery. They said they'd be watching us very carefully to make sure that doesn't happen again."

Eventually the agency agreed bro'Town met their commercial and cultural mandates - "irreverent and funny" they said - and fronted up with $1.45 million. The remainder was provided by private investors and familiar brands in the form of product placement.

Other than two locally produced children's animations, bro'Town is the largest animated television project of its kind in this country.

The funding, of course, was just the beginning. It was also the Naked Samoans' first go at writing for television. Accustomed to writing two-hour stage shows, they came up with a 70-page pilot, 46 pages too many for a half-hour show.

"That was a whole new discipline," says Lelisi. "We had a lot to learn."

They got around the problem by treating the creative process with as much humour as the script itself, taking breaks from brainstorming to play mini golf or video games, and calling on respected comedy script doctors Dave Armstrong and James Griffin to help condense their ideas.

"We were nervous," says Kightley, "but the producers had to come and say, 'This is too tame, just be yourselves."'

While the writers were getting the hang of things, bro'Town had exposed other problems.

"There's just not enough animators here," says Mitchell. "We advertised extensively and talked to everyone who could animate within New Zealand and got heaps of them on board, trainees straight out of animation schools.

"People just wouldn't do it - here and overseas - they wouldn't do it for the money. In Canada they get paid 100 times more than we paid. That's for commercials. We're so way down the bottom end."

Having set up production company Firehorse Films, (the studio in which we are now), Mitchell engaged another New Zealand-based animation studio and one in India, where labour costs are cheaper.

But finding locals with experience was proving to be a challenge.

"For a show like this it's really hard," says Makatoa. "If it was all circles and squares, man, it would be a piece of cake. In 3D animation they use computers so they can keep a character looking exactly the same while it's moving around. We're trying to do the same thing but it's all hand-drawn.

"It's not like The Simpsons. These guys have separate eyelashes and actual features."

Mitchell is now in talks with Winz about setting up a course in the down-time between shows to bring potential artists up to speed.

The slog has been worth it, she says, and judging by a glimpse of some preview tapes, she's right.

"bro'Town is hilarious," she says. "It touches on issues that people maybe don't want to talk about so much."

In one episode Jeff the Maori grapples with the idea his friend is a genius: "Does that mean he's a homo?"

In another, the boys win a school quiz competition against fictional schools Howick Beijing College and Queen's, obviously a poke at a certain private boys' school. News presenter John Campbell, voicing himself, proclaims the bro'Town team "the first really dumb school to make it into this event".

bro'Town doesn't confront racism head-on, says Kightley, but it does incorporate jokes drawn from what the Nakeds perceive are common racial prejudices - the Indian dairy owner with the impossibly long name, the slovenly, alcoholic Samoan dad in socks and jandals, the kind of mild, cultural back-stabbing that goes on among peer groups, yet is sanitised on TV.

"We're not saying anything new," says Kightley. "We're just reflecting what is said in bars and lounges and offices and schools around the country.

"You know it's true because people laugh."

Though they don't want to second-guess how viewers will react to some of the politically incorrect themes, Mitchell says they are expecting letters of complaint from the Samoan church and "liberal whities". Her line of defence? Everything is abused equally.

"It's no-holds-barred. People kind of watch it with their hands over their faces and there's a lot of looking at each other going 'Oh my God, I can't believe they're saying this on TV'."

All of the characters are stereotypes, says Gaoa. You get the impression Kightley feels a bit irked by this. Just because Polynesian productions are in their infancy, he says, people shouldn't think of bro'Town as representative of the culture.

"When Archie Bunker came out, people didn't say, 'Look at that arsehole racist white guy - that means all white guys are arseholes and racist'.

"You don't watch Jackass and go, 'All white guys are crazy - they jump off buildings.' Mickey Mouse says stuff and you don't think, 'That's representative of mice'.

"We're not trying to speak for all Samoan people growing up in New Zealand. It's just the story of bro'Town. This isn't about all Islanders. It's about these boys.

"At the end of the day, it's a cartoon, it's not 20/20," he says.

"If you watch this and draw your own conclusions about what that says about brown people, then you don't know any brown people."

LOWDOWN

WHAT: bro'Town, New Zealand's cheeky new adult cartoon series.

STARTS: Wednesday, September 22, TV3, 8pm WHO: Written by comedy team the Naked Samoans: Oscar Kightley as Vale, Shimpal Lelisi as Valea, David Fane as Mack and Jeff the Maori, Mario Gaoa as Sione.

A BIT LIKE: Southpark meets Billy T James.