Battle of the Belge

>> Belgian filmmaker Raoul Servais melds politics and art

by SARAH MUSGRAVE

A dozen shorts may seem like a small body of work for a man who found his calling in animation while watching Felix the Cat back in the early 1930s. But if there's one thing that distinguishes the films of Belgium's Raoul Servais, it's his time-consuming refusal to use the same technique twice.

"When a film is finished I always say, 'I hate that style now, I want to find something different,'" the timid 70 year old muses. "And I have to renew it all over again--in keeping with my tendency of making life difficult for myself."

The resulting oeuvre looks like it could have been created by a series of groundbreaking animators. But the prize-winning films are tied together by Servais' humour, breathtakingly inventive images and themes of alienation and oppression.

Chromophobia, inspired by childhood experiences during WWII, features an angular army who blast the film's colours off the screen. Servais explored language through text balloons in To Speak or Not to Speak, the Vietnam War in the monochrome etchings of Operation X-70 and layered live action and animation--a technique known as Servaisgraphy--in surrealistic works like Harpya and Taxandria.

"I'm still an idealist, I'm still naive," Servais says of his passion for the medium, a passion which led him to found the first school of animation on the European continent in 1961.

He's been called "anti-Disney" for his favouring of the artistic over the commercial. "Everyone thinks, 'Oooh Disney, that's animation,'" he says. "They make some good ones, but it's become a synonym for animation."

He recounts a screening at the Disney offices in the '70s: "I was worried because the quality of what I make is so poor compared to them. 'You must be a happy man,' they told me, 'you can make the kinds of films you want. When we think of a new script, we have to think what Walt would want.'"

Not surprisingly, the screening went over well--not that Servais witnessed the reaction. Painfully shy, he never watches his own work. If forced to stay in the viewing room, he says, "I just cover my eyes." :

Eight of Servais' films screen at Cinematheque quebecoise, Wednesday, Feb. 16 at 7pm