The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 50

ft 01 A boom in adult animation has spawned a swag of up-and-coming Australian animators ready to take on the studio-based giants. Story by Meaghan Shaw OUR HORNY RHINOS go cruising down the main street looking for action. Loud music blares from the radio: Doofi Doofi Doofi Doof. They're trying to get to billboard posters. Viskatoons co-produced the highly successful children's animation series L'il Elvis with the Australian Children's Television Foundation, which finished production last year.

Viska is convinced Australia has the skills and talent to produce the next Simpsons or South Park, or the like. "We're up with the rest of the world in production savvy but what we really need are courageous networks," he says. "It's the old creative conundrum: they'll take the programs if they have the Jungle Bar at the end of the strip, but they get distracted on the way and never quite make it That's the way it is in Rhino Carboys, an adult-oriented i animation series of 13 half-hour episodes now being developed by the Melbourne tjy. ce8 FORDt manual, 3NA CS IVM a JMA CS JUW. Afl ty II ill A CS lM FFALCC e3o Tood XWflll film production company Viskatoons.

Another "adult" series, Dogstar, is being developed by Media World and Artist Services. It's about a family of intergalactic removalists who are dysfunctional but heroic at the same time. This series of 26 half-hour episodes has a theme of good-versus-evil running through it Cartoons for grown-ups? Why not? It's been nearly eight years since Matt Groening's The Simpsons hit our screens, a show that inspired a range of funny, adult-oriented animation programs such as Ren three half-hour programs of adult short films which will be shown on SBS next year. Animators from around the country were asked to submit short films (no longer than five minutes) to the project More than 200 applications were received, from which 13 were chosen for the first two programs. The third program is in production at the moment Swimming Outside The Flags not only reveals the vivacity of the Melbourne independent animation scene (eight of the 13 films selected are from Victoria), but it showcases a range of talented, award-winning animators who rarely get the chance to show their work on television.

These animators include Adam Benjamin Elliot, the Young Victorian of the Year, who won last year's AFI award for animation, and Sarah Watt, who won the best short film at the Venice Film Festival in 1995 with Small Treasures and is now directing a half-hour family television special called The Way Of The Birds, which has a resale to Channel 7. "Australia has produced the most extraordinary collection of animators but their work is generally only seen in corporate video logos or commercials or in kids' television," Masel says. "The work (contributed to Swimming Outside The Flags) is really astonishingly good." SBS is so pleased with the way Swimming Outside The Flags is shaping up, that it is working with Dennis Tupicoff, a well-known animator and former VCA lecturer, and Fiona Cochrane to develop a 13-part half-hour series of funny adult animation called Ha! Ha! Ha! It is similar to Swimming Outside The Flags, in that different animators will contribute short films to each episode, but it is more structured, with each episode based on a theme, such as love, sex, death or food. It should be completed sometime during the year 2000, but financing remains a key issue as SBS cannot Sketch comedy: Gobbler, a send -up of a fast-food chain from Viskatoons. And Stimpy, Duckman, King Of The Hill, and the recent phenomenon South Park.

But where are the Australian adult animated series? Peter Viska, the director of Viskatoons, has a handful of adult-oriented animation series in development As well as Rhino Carboys, he is working on Metro City Circle, a show about the interaction of people on public transport (which he recently presented to the four main track records overseas but if you ask them to be the prime decisionmakers on whether a show's going to go ahead or not, they tend to shy off it and hedge and not commit1' Except SBS. Ever since the pioneering Eat Carpet began screening its short adult-animation films from around the world, interspersed with Australian contributions, SBS has developed a reputation for showing cutting-edge animation. Barbara Masel, the commissioning editor for drama at SBS Independent, says the broadcaster has been actively seeking Australian independent animators to come up with adult series. SBS, along with the Australian Film Commission and the state funding bodies, has invested in a project called Swimming Outside The Flags Gobblers, which is a a. 1 networ networks); up of a fast-food chain; and Billboard Boy (halt-way between a children's and adult series) about a boy who solves his puberty problems by escaping into Rabbit Net-56k For a limited time $199yearor The wild bunch Barbara Hooks catches up with the man behind some of our most unusual creatures U4iJllltbLiJ4il ter than either on their own.

But they have to find their own voice to do it I just liked the animals and it was celebrating their existence as much as anything." Two-and-a-half years in the making, Bunch Of Fives was shot at the rate of one minute a month or three feet a day. Born in America and raised in St Louis and the UK, Hitchcock, makes his screen debut as a puppet garbage collector in Banjo Frogs. Nick Hilligoss does most of the animation on his own, too, but he does enlist the help of an assistant for a "crowd In Turtle World, Nick found himself "directing" 16 monkeys commuting through the (urban) jungle by monorail, buying and selling in the 8hrsday, up to ITT Ti fl 60hrsmnth OCIAL-CLIMBING monkevs. duelline Ph- ns cms KRnnni.Uu.i3r7 banjo frogs, Irish-jig CondMora anAr Offlc Hours: 2pTV-10pfY, 7 day HltpJwwwmbbltcom.au E-mail: KifoQfabbltconi.au 1999Spadal ging possums and Qmbo-dancing cock roaches these are TECH INFO Pty Ltd PROVIDES ACCESS TO THE INTERNET FOR 1299 PER ANNUM OMNO YOU 120 HOURS USE PER MONTH. 56k AND 33.6k MODEMS, FREE ACCESS SOFTWARE.

ACCESS TO E-MAIL, WORLD WIDE WEB, IRC AND NEWSGROUPS. WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT ft HOSTING FOR BUSINESSES. WEBSITE: http:www.tecMnfo.cofn.au Hilligoss studied fine arts and graphic design before joining the ABC 14 years ago as a model maker, scenic artist and designer, fabricating giant cockroaches for The Big Cig and animating dinosaur sequences for Nature Of Australia. Drawn to the marketplace below or busily keeping up with the Joneses next door. "It's easy enough when you've got one or two characters, but when you've got 16 it's pretty hard to remember what each one was doing by the time you get back to it for the next shot" mom exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Fanciful and funny, his ecological fables drew their inspiration from a number of sources. The idea for last Monday's film, Turtle World, a Gaia-inspired parable about the exploitation of the world's natural resources at the hands of yuppie monkeys, came to him at, 3am, almost Banjo Frogs (25 January) came to Hilligoss during a walk beside the creek near his Melbourne home. A devoted fan of Australian frogs, he was struck by the contrast between the beautiful, but raspy green tree-frog and the ugly, but sweet-voiced banjo frog. "The green frog of the story is an ugly duckling. He tries to join the chorus of the banjo frogs but can't make the right twanging sound.

He doesn't quite know what he is, but when he finds out he reaches his full potential and discovers that the music made by both gf6upsof frogs togetneVis bet some of the delightful characters from the ABC's A Bunch Of Fives, a series of five new shorts by award-winning animator Nick Hilligoss. Hilligoss made his first film for the ABC's natural history unit with a Sunbeam Mixmaster and latex, whipped to soft peaks and baked in a low oven for four hours. Called Once Upon Australia, it told the only wildlife story the unit's talented cinematog-raphers couldn't capture on film the story of Australia's pre-history, using models of 40 extinct animals and the painstaking frame-by-frame animation techniques so familiar to fans of Wallace And Gromit It was such a hit that executive producer Dione Gilmour commissioned Hilligoss to make, A Bunch Of Fives, a series' of nWmlnute 'films' Starting 25 January 1999 NATIVE FRENCH TEACHERS STUDENTS MAXIMUM PER CLASS ADULTS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS fW 7 tm VCt, mmwki, altar dmmmt) Enrolments taken now For a FREE ASSESSMENT TEST please call 9525 3463 Nick Hilligoss is ready to start work on his next series of eco-friendly films, but there's a catch the shift to digital broadcasting means his old camera isn't up to the job any more, and a new camera kit is extremely expensive. There's also the question of whether the ABC can afford lb fund him. All of a sudden, the theme that drives so much of Nick's work, scarce resources, comes VncbmftTrtablyolese to home.

natural history unit because "it is the only area of the ABC that understands it can take forever to do Nick works in a tiny, makeshift studio doing everything himself -writing and producing as well as designing and building his three-dimensional sets and their latex occupants. "You could say that casting actors for me is literally casting them in a mould, says J17 jo. AU.IAMCC FRANC AM DC MELBOURNE Mbi 9 l5d www.vtaitntau-alaano.