Michael Dudok de Wit

A Life in Animation

Andrijana Ruzic

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429771279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics
• Index: Computer Science

This unique survey of the career of Michael Dudok de Wit discusses all of his works and offers a glimpse into his private life. The biography of this European master of 2D animation, born in the Netherlands and based in London, is the first complete overview of the well-defined and canonic opus of this humble genius. Visually and thematically, Dudok de Wit's poetic and singular style of animation differs from the rest of contemporary independent animation production. This book reveals what still challenges and thrills Dudok de Wit in the art of animation and why he persistently continues to believe in the beauty of hand-drawn animation.

Key Features

• The complete animation production of Michael Dudok de Wit, never-before reviewed in one volume

• 
  
  

• An all-embracing approach regarding this auteur, unavailable elsewhere in one place (his biography, his peculiar method of work, his extracurricular activities)

• 
  
  

• An ad hoc glossary of animation written by Michael Dudok de Wit and a critical reception of his body of work with a wide contribution of his colleagues and collaborators

• 
  
  

• Filmography and bibliography

• 
  
  

Author

Andrijana Ruži? graduated in History and Criticism of Art at the Universita degli Studi in Milan, Italy, where she fell in love with the medium of animation. She specialised in the History of Animated Film under Giannalberto Bendazzi's mentorship. For the past six years, she has curated the section dedicated to animated films at the International Comics Festival in Belgrade, Serbia. She is a member of the Selection Board of Animafest Scanner, the symposium for Contemporary Animation Studies at the World Festival of Animated Film held annually in Zagreb, Croatia. She writes about animation and art for the Belgrade weekly magazine Vreme.

CHAPTER 1

Biographical Notes

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.¹

ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON¹

1.1 Early Life in the Netherlands – A Private Arcadia

Michael Dudok de Wit was born on 15 July 1953 in Abcoude, a small village south of Amsterdam, as a second child in a family of long-standing protestant tradition. His father, Robert Dudok de Wit, the descendent of a 17th century old Huguenot family of French origins, was trading in raw sugar, perpetuating a traditional family business passed on over nine generations. His mother, Mireille, originally from Lausanne, Switzerland, gave birth to four sons. In 1954, his parents decided to move to the scenic village of Laren, near Hilversum, a city located in the province of North Holland. The family lived in the serene atmosphere of an old brick house immersed in a vast garden and a small coniferous grove, surrounded by heathland, meadows and canals.

My father commuted every day to his office in Amsterdam, as regular as a clock, and my mother chose to be a full-time mother and a housewife. Family life was structured by regularity, security and comfortable habits. My parents were a beautiful couple. They didn’t believe in disagreements and they constantly strived for kindness and harmony. I admired them and I aspired to become like them. One of my mother’s gifts was to create an ambience of friendly elegance at home. She was romantic and I was too, but of course, I had to learn eventually to adjust to real life.²

One of his first memory consists of a dream that stuck with him forever. He was sleeping temporarily in his parents’ bedroom, so he must have been really small.

I woke up from a dream, a sort of abstract nightmare. In this dream I witnessed huge dark cubes drifting across the sky and the sight was both terrifying and fascinating. Thinking back, I still consider it a strange dream.

The four boys grew up in a post-war period that was full of optimism since the last traces of the Second World War had completely vanished. The school that young Dudok de Wit attended was also his father’s school, situated only one kilometer away from the family house. The neighbourhood was safe, and everybody knew each other. As soon as a child learned to cycle, he/she could ride a bicycle wherever they wanted. “The society where everybody cycles has an easy, natural homogeneity. Everybody has a bicycle in the Netherlands. In that sense, it’s a socialist country at heart”, said the filmmaker. He and his brothers grew up as bilingual children, with a Dutch and Swiss cultural background. Even if she was very fluent in Dutch, his mother Mireille spoke French with her children. This was unusual at the time and made him feel different, an “outsider”.

In the early school years I was the only bilingual child in my class and the only one who travelled abroad in the summer. Travelling was still a relatively new phenomenon back then. Even during my early adolescence I felt that I had one foot in the Netherlands and one outside, which I really liked.

The family travelled to French and Italian beaches for the summer and went skiing in the winter. They often went to Switzerland, where his mother grew up, in an old house near Lake Geneva. The young man loved staying at his grandmother’s home where he would live in “an atmosphere of togetherness with cousins, uncles and aunts”. With his parents and brothers, he also spent summer days on the long Dutch sandy coast along the North Sea, near the town of Noordwijk. Even if it was always a joyful experience, his parents didn’t feel the need to explore the Netherlands more extensively. “We lived in a beautiful village, immersed in nature. We had our garden, and, in a way, we were happy where we were”.

Looking after the animals and manual work around the garden, terrariums and water ponds was an essential part of artist’s Dutch childhood. The family also had lots of animals: ponies, chickens, ducks, rabbits and guinea pigs. Dudok de Wit would feed them and was rewarded with extra pocket money by his parents. He especially enjoyed paying night visits to the stables where his favorite ponies were kept, on the edge of the small grove. He would talk to them, caress them and breathe in their warm scent. The continuous presence of various domestic animals had a huge creative impact on the boy.

I had a very physical awareness of nature around me and I believe that this has fed my sensitivity as an animator. For instance, in the behaviour of chickens you recognize the behaviour of a human being. Chickens have a sense of hierarchy and they have to prove and justify it every day, like we humans do. I would interfere with their hierarchical habits and watch how they would react. I would observe the movements of the cockerel: he was pretending that he was not looking at me, but he was. Another example is motionlessness. All creatures, from the smallest insects to the largest mammals, demonstrated distinctive moments of stillness. They had their unique way of alternating between moving and not moving. Years later I recognized these observations of behavioral timing in my animation.

As an “outsider” child, he often felt the need to not only be alone, but also to reconnect with social life at any given moment. The small community of Laren, the house and the family and the beauty of the Dutch landscape were his private Arcadia.

As a child I was outside a lot. I would cycle to the polder with a bucket, just to catch frogs and aquatic insects from the canals. Later I would sleep in the garden in my cotton tent. I liked the night. I was also fascinated by the ambience of our old house at nights. I would also go in the garden in the evening just for the pleasure of it. We lived near heather moors³ and I would cycle across the moors to school. They were part of a vast nature reserve, gorgeous in all weather conditions: snow, rain or mist. They would be covered once a year with lavender coloured flowers. The attraction of the flat polder landscape too lies in its vastness, in its infinity. When you cycle there, you are very aware of the sky and the horizon. Faraway in the distance, you spot a tiny profile of a poplar tree or a church bell tower. All this space was exhilarating.

His father was “contained, stable, calm and thoughtful” and was good with architectural drawings and construction work. His mother was “artistic, intuitive, Mediterranean, emotional”. She had studied at an art college for a year. Although she was a talented painter-illustrator, her specialties were clay sculpture and ceramic glaze paintings. From early on, children were stimulated to draw, read books and play musical instruments. The young artist very much enjoyed fairy tales, and one of his peak childhood experiences was the discovery of the public library in Laren.

The library with its wooden bookshelves had this ancient, quiet atmosphere and to come back home with two books to read was such a joy! I was about ten when we got our first TV. Until then, my father would read stories to my brothers and me every Saturday evening. We would sit around the table, making drawing inspired by the stories. Halfway through the evening we were allowed a bottle of Coca Cola, which was kind of exotic.

Among the first stories he read were the comic strips from the weekly magazine Donald Duck. His favourite ones were by Carl Barks⁴: “the best stories by far, visually and narratively”. The Tintin books by Hergé⁵ also met with immediate approval in their home. The family library contained some old books from his parents: Heinrich Hoffmann’s⁶ cautionary stories for children Der Struwwelpeter, Wilhelm Busch’s⁷ black humoured children picture stories in rhyming couplets Max & Moritz and Marten Toonder’s⁸ books. Dudok de Wit particularly enjoyed reading Dutch books about colonial life in Indonesia and the jungle’s evocative magic. For him, Indonesia was the “other Holland”, a faraway mysterious country. His adolescence period was marked by school days, drawing activities, solitary bicycle rides, quiet library afternoons and evening readings to his younger brother. The family had a record player in the house, and he remembers enjoying especially Prokofjev’s Peter and the Wolf and the music of his mother playing the piano. In the Sixties, there was an explosion in popular music and the discovery of bands like The Beatles, but his preferences soon went to rock and blues music:

“My brothers and I loved music. For me, music became a huge doorway to explore my emotions and to understand originality. I’m referring to rock music from the late sixties, early seventies and especially to the explorative music from the British progressive rock groups such as Pink Floyd and Gentle Giant. I also discovered unusual music from other European countries, especially from Germany and the hypnotic intelligence of jazz-rock”.

In his teens, he studied languages and sciences at the local gymnasium, but, somehow, his inquisitive and daydreaming nature prevailed. He told his parents: “I want to leave school and discover things in my own way”. His mother in particular was very sensitive to her son’s aspirations: “Why don’t you study arts abroad and have it both ways?” she replied. When his parents offered financial support for his studies, he assembled a portfolio in order to apply to the Beaux Arts in Geneva. Finally, in the autumn of 1974, a young and enthusiastic Dudok de Wit left Holland and moved to Switzerland.

1.2 Geneva and “the Incredible Freedom of Student Life”

Judging from the quality of his portfolio drawings, the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts commission directed the young man to the so called “black and white department” where he attended courses on engraving, etching, woodcut and life drawing. He was fascinated by the manual process involved in printmaking and the preparatory work and rituals that lead to the production of printed art:

I liked the fact that we had to prepare our materials and that we had to get our hands dirty, and I loved the smells. The final result would always come as a surprise. With printmaking we create our picture in mirror image and this opened my eyes. The mirror image taught me about composition and space.

Aquatint and black and white photography became his new passions. In his engravings, he played with modulations and grain textures and, with photography, he discovered the beauty of film texture. The themes of his early etchings as a student often had an oneiric and surreal nature. Ever since his childhood, he was influenced and inspired by the sublime etchings of the Dutch painter and printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). In the early Seventies in Europe, the comic strip art form expanded in an incredible way, with new styles and new subjects touching on politics, sex, violence, mysticism, drug-fueled surrealism, madness. During this period, he discovered the art of the Italian comic book artist and illustrator Guido Buzzelli (1927–1992). Vividly impressed by Buzzelli’s style especially in depicting madness, Dudok de Wit realised that he wanted to specialise in visual narration. In his spare time, he conceived and drew comic strips for student magazines, experimented with magic markers and discovered the joy of storytelling in pictures. He invented an unnamed character, a very simply designed round-headed humanoid creature, and put him in all sorts of bizarre and comical situations.⁹ He came to an awareness for the first time that animated films “combine the beauty and the power of comics and the beauty and power of music”.

In 1975, he attended the International festival of animated film in Annecy, France, for the first time and watched all the films, from early morning to midnight. It was a small festival compared to today’s format, and the audience would sit in one theatre. Nonetheless, amidst “all the amazing Annecy programs”, he discovered artistic freedom, poss...