From July 29th, starting in Rio, to August 10th, ending in São Paulo, the 22nd Brazilian International Animation Festival, Anima Mundi 2014, took place. As one of the Festival’s honored artists (the others were Bob Balser, Eric Goldberg, and the Guillaume Brothers), I was interviewed for its catalog.
Here is the interview:
Anima Mundi: -When did you start to become interested in animation?
Céu: – When I was still very young. My brothers were already in school, and when I was four or five, I spent most of my days alone at home because I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. It was the 1960s, and because of some terrorist attacks, the army had closed our street. So, I would grab any scrap of paper I had and create stories for myself. My father was an accountant and had stacks of old forms. I would use the backs of the forms and turn them into flipbooks and storyboards, kind of intuitively.
Anima Mundi: – You’ve created many animated characters. What’s the difference between the character creation process for personal projects, like FAREWELL, and for advertising campaigns?
Céu: – The advertisers who hire me want me to be involved in the creation of their films, and they don’t want conventional scripts. So, it’s not that different from creating characters for entertainment films, for example, where it’s important to know how to manipulate archetypes. It’s important to remember that, above all, animation is an illusory and sensory experience, created to sustain the viewer’s attention. FAREWELL, however, is a kind of unusual film, created almost thirty years ago. If I lived in a more interesting world, this would be the only kind of film I would make. Because it’s a purely aesthetic animation experience, without any commercial concerns. With the creative process focused on deconstructing discourse and revealing the paradox of reality.
Anima Mundi: -How do you articulate creative freedom and ethical concerns in your production on environmental themes?
Céu: I don’t separate them. This may sound obscure and pretentious, but every piece I do, including those for which I’m commissioned, incorporates my ethical and environmental concerns into the creative process. During the 1990s, I wrote an article on the relationship between mass communication, knowledge, and the environmental crisis. Incredibly serendipitous, the article caught the attention of two international scientific institutions, IUAPPA and IAS. This earned me a couple of small research grants, allowing me to develop my study of an ethical proposal to address this issue. I decided I should stay in Brazil to implement this proposal, and now I’m a kind of lone lunatic, talking to myself. But at least I use this ethical proposal I developed in everything I do. It’s a kind of private code.
Anima Mundi: -Can you tell us a little more about the importance of NUPA and how the film production in the project came about?
Céu: NUPA was the result of many years of experience, researching and reflecting on a way to connect animation production to the genuine needs of a community. A way to reconcile the professional and personal development of young people in poor neighborhoods, while simultaneously using artistic production to address the schizophrenia of large cities. And all this focused on developing formats and languages that would encourage Brazilian animation to find its own innovative solutions. NUPA was funded by the São Paulo Municipal Department of Culture and was doing very well until it was closed, in a very disastrous way, in my opinion, by the new Secretary, in 2013. Films were produced more collectively, which I believe is the future of animation. I will explain this process during my talk at Papo Animado. For now, the NUPA films that the public knows are those from PAULICÉIA, but we were experimenting with new formats, and, at Anima Mundi 2014, we will debut another NUPA experience, which was still unreleased, the ANIMATED KABARET.
Anima Mundi: -What inspires and motivates you when creating scripts and characters?
Céu: – Find a way to love and spread love. Sounds corny, doesn’t it? Sorry, but that’s what I believe.