Cordell Barker created a monster called The Cat Came
Back. His 1988 animated short, which he made at the National Film
Board, haunted him.
“Oh yeah, I just lived under the shadow of that thing forever,”
Barker admits on the phone from San Francisco, where later that day, he
will present to Pixar. “In a way it’s sort of a curse, when your…”
Barker stops, gathers his thoughts and starts over. After The Cat
Came Back came out, he thought, “Oh my god, how do I make my second
film? That one hit too big.”
Barker eventually made a second animated short. Strange
Invaders came out in 2001. His first two films both received Oscar
nominations and 16 other awards, states a short NFB biography. It also
states Barker “returned to advertising” and directed commercials for
big brands, such as Bell Canada and Nike.
The animator now accepts the notoriety of his first film about the
futility of challenging feline power. On this current tour with the
NFB, which celebrates its 70th anniversary and International Animation
Day, Barker is introduced by a moderator, who asks, “How many of you
have seen The Cat Came Back?”
“Almost invariably I hear this, ‘Oh,’ and all these hands go up,”
Barker says, laughing.
He’s made peace with the fame. Barker’s also made a departure, he
says, with his third film, Runaway: “Visually, and thematically,
it’s quite different. It’s a much deeper film than the other two.”
In thematic terms, Runaway, which follows a steam-train on a
collision course with a cow, satirizes this society’s need to consume
at all costs. Set against recent climate talks in Copenhagen, the
timing is perfect. “I just have this foreboding feeling,” says Barker,
who’s warily observed urban sprawl throughout North America while on
tour.
In Runaway, the locomotive rumbles along with a bumbling
engineer in charge. His diminutive assistant is charged with stoking
the engine’s fire, an increasingly desperate job as raw materials run
out. “He had to have a tentative quality,” says the animator of the
fireman, voiced by Leonard Waldner. “He’s the hopeful everyman,” a
voice of reason that’s small, easily shouted down or ignored but one
that, Barker adds, “might nag at you.”
One railcar carries the common rabble. Aristocratic passengers
occupy another. For these figures as well as their surroundings,
Barker’s drawing style calls to mind classic New Yorker illustrations.
“That’s exactly what I was after,” he says. “And another thing I was
really influenced by was the old Masterpiece Theatre opening,
based on the illustrator Edward Gorey. It had such a stately quality
but they were very sort of dark observations of society.”
Barker went for a “storybook” look for Runaway. “I timed it
out so it had just the right amount of flattish, side-to-side feel to
keep that remove. But I would, of course, judiciously break that so I’d
have certain things coming forward, like when you zoomed through the
centre of that train car.”
Writing, directing and drawing the film himself (with some scenery
help from an assistant), the Winnipeg born-and-based Barker took
several years to make Runaway. During the process, he created,
then trashed whole parts of the story, working hard at getting the
film’s “internal timing” right, so the action didn’t seem chaotic and
sensationalist, but graceful and, again, satirical—showing “the
determination to go down a disastrous path but have a happy time going
down it.”
There’s also “global timing.” “I was very lucky with the timing for
the release of the film, you know, on the heels of Bernie Madoff and
the whole meltdown and the blind Wall Street greed,” says Barker,
adding, “It was perverse luck.”
Barker’s presentation in San Francisco was a dry run for his
appearance in Halifax and other Canadian cities. “I recognized where I
went a bit long and I have to be more concise,” he says. “I gotta
really work out my timing of how I’m presenting the thing.”
He’s speaking about, appropriately, “animation timing.”
The making of Runaway
The Cat Came Back
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2009.