by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it’s no wonder animator Paul Driessen has pretty much dispensed with dialogue in his unique, inventive cartoons. It’s not just that animated films are made up of 24 images every second. It’s that his films will sometimes place two, three or even, in his magnum opus The End of the World in Four Seasons (1995), six concurrent, interlocking narratives on screen at once. Were his deceptively loose and light drawing style any more complex, to say nothing of the interference voices might bring, such films would risk incomprehensibility. As it is, they keep audiences engaged and delighted, repaying the careful attention they require with thought-provoking laughs and inspired surprises.

Driessen’s own life is something of a multiplied narrative, following him from his native Holland to Russia and back (after WWII, his dad was the Dutch ambassador), then to London, on to Montreal, back and forth with Holland again, and now summering in France and wintering here. Spain and Japan factor in, tangentially.

Upon graduating from Dutch art school in the early ’60s, Driessen had his sights set on an illustration career. “I tried to be a cartoonist,” he says over early-morning coffee in his Plateau apartment. “I pitched magazines like New Yorker, Punch and Paris Match. What did I know? I just tried. Sometimes you get lucky.”

He did, but not in that field. Scrounging for work, he landed a spot at the Cine Cartoon Centre in Hilversum, Holland. “I didn’t know anything about animation beyond Disney. I had to look the word up in a dictionary. There was no tradition of animation in Holland at the time, but this was the early ’60s, the beginning of commercial TV in Holland.”

Pepperland ho!

Driessen, under the encouraging eye of the Centre’s American director Jim Hiltz, took to animation like a fish to water. He recognized the possibilities of the medium, and likewise, after the Centre shut down in the later ’60s, the medium recognized his. Canadian animator George Dunning, an NFB man, was in town scouting for talent for a forthcoming feature, to be made in London. Thus did Driessen find himself on board the good ship Yellow Submarine.

“The way it was made was very loose,” recalls Driessen of the Beatles’ cartoon feature. “When I started, there wasn’t even a script. People had ideas, including myself. My English was pretty bad at the time—I did storyboards based on songs I didn’t even understand. But it was very much a product of its environment. This was the ’60s and London was at the centre of that.”

Dunning did Driessen a second good turn by clueing him in to Canada’s National Film Board once Yellow Submarine had wrapped. Under the guidance of the famed Norman McLaren (Dunning’s mentor), the NFB’s animation side had developed a deserved reputation for daring originality and artistic merit.

“When I came to Montreal in the early ’70s, the NFB was having one of its peaks in animation. I was right in the middle of that, just by chance. I started at the French department—they were much more open, a younger department. The English side was much more established and they worked for Ottawa a lot, on more commercial, very verbal stuff. Being a minority in North America, the French didn’t want language used so much. You’d think it would be otherwise, but it wasn’t. In order to get their films distributed, they had to be more creative. It took me a while to realize that, but when I started there, I really liked it.”

What Driessen liked best was the freedom to do his own thing, something unimaginable in commercial animation. “I always stuck to my own little world and stayed there. At the NFB, I would maybe pick things up subconsciously, but it was more that, within my own world, my own style, I picked up a certain direction. I found out what I really liked about film, exploring how you can work on the big screen, what you can invent in the narrative sense—how far you can go.”

Twisted myths

Driessen had his own vision, refining it first with the loosely eco-themed The Lost Blue and Air! (both 1972), then with the magical, almost psychedelic An Old Box (’75) and Cat’s Cradle. That last title, from ’74, sees Driessen’s knack for linking disparate stories into a cohesive whole take shape. In this case, it was a single black line that would tie the situations, funny to frightening to surreal, one to the other. By 1980’s On Land, at Sea and in the Air (a Dutch production, this time), he had begun cramming the multiple storylines together on screen, in this case as a triptych, the thirds of which periodically fed into each other. It also had a slightly raunchier edge than what he might have got away with in stodgy Canada, though Driessen’s humour leans more to the morbid, the bitter and the absurd (witness The Writer from ’88, or the shades of The Addams Family in the hilarious Uncles & Aunts shorts).

The poly-narratives came to a head with The End of the World in Four Seasons, in which as many as half a dozen situations unfold, and interact, on screen at once—a complicated mechanical process, to say the least. “There’s always a main story,” Driessen notes of that film. “The surrounding stories are mainly cycles, but they do have little stories as well. The problem is, the audience doesn’t know when the cycle stops and something happens. I had to make sure that it happens when there’s not too much action elsewhere on the screen. It’s hard for the audience, but for me it was a challenge to see how far I could go and still keep you interested.”

Given the predominantly non-verbal nature of his films, exaggeration and even clichés are as necessary as the wacky sound effects. But Driessen has a way with them, flipping them and twisting them in unexpected, if often understated, ways. 3 Misses (’98, also a Dutch deal) has a ball undoing familiar figures from the popular imagination of both America and Europe (guess who gets Snow White at the end?).

“It’s easy to go for a cliché. I use a lot of fairy tales, legends and Biblical stories because people know them. You don’t have to explain them, they’re archetypes, and you can give them a little twist. You think you know where I’m going because you know the story, but then I show you another side to it.” :

Paul Driessen retrospective at la Cinémathèque québécoise
on Oct. 22, 24, 29, 30 and 31.
See listings for details

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