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The Belgian history of animation is filled with delightful shorts, memorable features, and forgotten treasures. Jean-Paul Walravens, better known as Picha, may well be one of these most important Belgian animation directors, yet little of his work is still known to younger generations, locally or internationally.<\/p>\n
Picha, 82, started working as a cartoonist in the 1960s and acquired international fame for his works in French satirical magazine Hara-Kiri<\/em> and American publications such as National Lampoon<\/em> and The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n In the 1970s, he turned filmmaker, bringing satire and adult animation to the big screen with the infamous feature Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle<\/em> (1975). His second feature, The Missing Link<\/em> (1980) brought him to the Cannes Film Festival, while his third film The Big Bang<\/em> (1987) was released throughout Europe.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Picha continued working on animation projects in the Nineties, including works for younger audiences, like Zoo Olympics.<\/em> In 2007, he finally managed to finish one of his long-gestating features, Snow White: The Sequel<\/em>, but in the post-Shrek<\/em> era, his satirical take on fairy tales felt behind the times and it bombed.<\/p>\n Afterwards, he left animation for good and turned to painting, and his work was slowly forgotten, remembered only by animation historians and satire buffs. Now, a new documentary, Picha Against All Odds,<\/em> produced by the French-Speaking Cinemath\u00e8que de la F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Wallonie-Bruxelles and directed by Belgian filmmaker Luc Jabon, unearths Picha\u2019s legacy and recontextualizes the work of this European pioneer of adult animation.<\/p>\n Ahead of the documentary\u2019s world premiere at the Anima festival in Brussels, Cartoon Brew<\/em> sat down with the film\u2019s director to learn more about the documentary.<\/p>\n Cartoon Brew:<\/em> Why a documentary on Picha today?<\/strong><\/p>\n Luc Jabon:<\/strong> Initially, this project came from a request from the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que de la F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Wallonie-Bruxelles which for several years has released a certain number of portraits of filmmakers seen by filmmakers. At one point the question arose of making a film around animation and its past. It is within this context that the figure of Picha emerged. So to me, it wasn\u2019t a deliberate choice, but upon meeting Picha, I was struck by his journey as an artist, and what he experienced during his decades-spanning career. And that\u2019s where my desire to tell something about this somewhat unusual artistic journey was born. It was only as the film progressed that I fully felt the relevance of the questions that satire and pastiche posed yesterday and still pose today. <\/p>\n In 2006, Picha was the subject of another documentary, My Uncle from America is Belgian.<\/em> How does your film fit alongside that one?<\/strong>
My Uncle from America is Belgian,<\/em> a film by Eric Figon and Fran\u00e7oise Walravens [Picha\u2019s niece], is a rather intimate portrait of Picha. It\u2019s a very beautiful film, quite impressionistic, which had already done this work of portraying the man behind the artist. What interested me instead was to create a narrative based on Picha\u2019s works and the movements of his career, and so that is how I modeled my filmmaking approach. <\/p>\n