Blogging Woodstock: Ready, Set, Activism!

A still from Bill Plympton's dark take on animation with "Idiots and Angels."

Nikki Goldbeck, the deputy director of the Woodstock Film Festival, is the point person for organizing filmmakers’ visits to the festival. This year, some 80 filmmakers are coming to discuss their movies, the highest number ever, which Goldbeck sees as a testament to the festival’s growing success. “It really makes a difference,” she says. “You can go to the movies any time and see a wonderful film, but to be able to listen to the filmmaker afterward and hear what he or she had in mind is very special.”

Filmmakers are in abundance on day two of the festival. Bill Plympton, the wildly creative cartoonist who has brought his new animated feature, Idiots and Angels, here, is so pumped up that he’s drawing cartoons on postcards for anyone who wants one. A regular at the festival, Plympton has had great response to the shorts he’s screened here before, so bringing the feature here was a no-brainer. “I love the Woodstock Film Festival!” he proclaims. “Everyone’s so friendly. People stop to offer you a ride, even if they don’t know who you are.”

That kind of fellow-feeling is largely absent from Idiots and Angels, a dark, fiendishly inventive fable about a thoughtless lunk who’s forced to confront his conscience when he suddenly grows a pair of wings. If Franz Kafka and Robert Crumb had a lovechild, this might be it, though Plympton’s style is resolutely his own. To be sure, this is not Disney/Pixar fare: the film contains graphic violence, much bawdiness, and a generally dark vision that’s lifted only slightly by a marginally happy ending. “It’s darker than my usual work,” the filmmaker admits, going on to say that the film is about “the battle we all have between our angel and our idiot side.”

In a marked difference from a lot of current animation, Plympton’s movie has an old-fashioned, handmade quality. This is no accident. A self-confessed computer “idiot,” Plympton draws an outline of each frame, which assistants then color digitally. And, speaking of Pixar, Plympton mentions that his film, at $150,000, had approximately 1/100th the budget of a Pixar feature. Thanks to computer programs like Flash and AfterEffects, aspiring animators can now produce films relatively cheaply, he says, which might change the game considerably.

Dan Stone, the director of the dramatic environmental documentary At the Edge of the World, is not so upbeat about the prospects for documentary filmmaking. “The general feeling in Hollywood is that documentaries are dead,” he says in the post-screening Q&A. Really? Stone goes on to report that he’s fielding several distribution offers for his doc, a tense, exciting account of the confrontation between a ragtag group of environmental activists and Japanese whaling ships in the frozen Antarctic. So maybe things aren’t that bad after all.

At the Edge of the World has a lot of buzz at the festival, and it’s easy to see why. Stone and his brother Craig (also Stone), who directed and produced the movie respectively, didn’t know quite what footage they’d get when they accompanied the Sea Shepherd, a mission to protect Antarctic whales from Japanese whalers. (Killing whales is banned under an international treaty, but the Japanese have exploited a loophole that allows whales to be killed for research purposes.) They got lucky, witnessing two dramatic confrontations, an epic storm and a tense rescue of two lost crew members. They also found a natural leading man in Captain Paul Watson, who broke away from Greenpeace and founded Sea Shepherd because he was frustrated with Greenpeace’s inactivity on the whale issue. With his bushy white beard and lofty rhetoric, Watson is an Ahab of sorts, though he’s chasing the whale-catchers, not the whale. Whatever you think of the politics of his people, who’ve been dubbed “eco-terrorists” by the Japanese and who enjoy a frosty relationship with Greenpeace, there’s no denying their bravery and commitment to their cause. Expect a wide release for this exhilarating documentary.

Adolfo Doring’s Blind Spot might be a tougher sell. Another environmental documentary, this is a harsh look at the future of Earth as fossil fuels begin to run out. Doring combines beautiful footage of nature, industrial landscapes and urban decay with an impressive brain trust of talking heads drawn from academia and journalism, each making the case that life on Earth is going to change dramatically very, very soon. The movie’s thesis can be summed up in the title of interviewee Richard Heinberg’s book: The Party’s Over. (In fact, that might have been a better title than Blind Spot.)

Blind Spot is devastating, but it’s also a little long and academic. In the Q&A, Doring and producer Amanda Zackem make a slight dig at the ending of An Inconvenient Truth, saying they wanted to “create an awareness, not come up with easy solutions like changing to energy-saving lightbulbs.” That’s fine, but after seeing their film, it’s only natural to ask, “What can I do?” One audience member, who said she was crying throughout the movie, suggests taking it to high schools, “where people are young enough that they want to do something, and not old enough to feel hopeless.” It’s a great suggestion, and I hope Doring and Zackem do it. Making back your investment is nice, but you don’t always have to wait for a major distribution deal to get your movie to the right audiences.

See the trailer for Idiots and Angels here

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