Oscar-winning stop-motion filmmaker devoted his life to storytelling

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

Canadian animator Jacobus (Co) Hoedeman almost didn't make the short film that won him an Oscar at the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony.
As a full-time animator at the National Film Board, Mr. Hoedeman needed the approval of a committee of NFB filmmakers before starting work on his 13-minute stop-motion animated film The Sand Castle. According to his 2021 autobiography Frame by Frame: An Animator's Journey, his whimsical story idea initially received only lukewarm support but after much debate 'the project was accepted, and I would happily play with sand for the next year or so.'
After filching a supply of sand from a local farm, Mr. Hoedeman built a set at the NFB's Montreal studio and created a cast of sand characters who frolicked on a dune, dancing and shapeshifting before finally banding together to build a castle. His puppets were sculpted from a foam rubber mattress, given internal wire 'skeletons' and then soaked in latex before being coated with sand. He worked on the film full-time for more than a year and faced several setbacks, including a weekend theft of half his puppets and a pungent assault on his film set by a cat that used it as a litter box. In his autobiography he called it 'my perfect film.'
His hard work was rewarded with the Oscar for 1977's best animated short film, 25 years after the NFB's previous Academy Award for Norman McLaren's stop-motion documentary short, Neighbours. (Minutes after The Sand Castle's win, the NFB won another Oscar for I'll Find a Way in the live-action short film category.)
Mr. Hoedeman, an internationally renowned animator with 32 short films to his credit, died in hospital on May 26 after an eight-year battle with multiple myeloma. He was 84.
Jacobus Willem Hoedeman was born on Aug. 1, 1940, in Amsterdam, less than three months after Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. Like their neighbours, his parents, Anna-Maria (Holtkamp) and Gosen-Jacobus Hoedeman, a tailor, faced five years of brutal military occupation that included constant threat of forced-labour camps, strict curfews, and near starvation during the Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter) of 1944-45.
At age four, young Co was in poor health, so he, his twin brother, Ferry, and older brother, Jos, were taken 85 kilometres east by bicycle to live in the countryside with different relatives. Mr. Hoedeman did not return to his family in Amsterdam until the country was liberated by Canadian troops in May 1945.
As a youngster in peacetime, Mr. Hoedeman spent long hours with his grandfather and father at their tailor shops, doing simple jobs and playing with scissors and leftover fabrics. Those sewing chores served him well later as he designed puppets and built props.
Uninterested in academics, Mr. Hoedeman left school at 15 and entered the film business as a junior animator in the 'trick-film' department of Multifilm, a multi-faceted movie studio that later grew into Cinecentrum. Here he learned stop-motion animation, where still objects were painstakingly moved infinitesimally and filmed a frame at a time; he used the technique in television commercials and movie title sequences, and as special effects in documentaries.
Eager to explore his new trade, Mr. Hoedeman devoted his evenings and weekends to film and photography studies that continued through his obligatory two-year stint in the Dutch army where he was posted to a military film unit. But after returning to his old job, he became restless and dreamed of escaping the constraints of commercial work for the sort of experimental animation being produced in Canada by the NFB, whose films he had studied as a student.
With his new wife, Dukke van der Werf, and a 35mm-reel of his animated clips, 25-year-old Mr. Hoedeman sailed to Montreal in November, 1965, to apply for a job at the NFB's sprawling, factorylike headquarters. He was hired within a week and eventually settled into the French-language animation department even though he barely spoke French. The newly formed French unit — which used music and sound effects rather than dialogue to better reach large audiences — attracted many immigrant filmmakers including Mr. Hoedeman's Dutch friend Paul Driessen, a cartoonist from Cinecentrum's puppet department.
'The French unit was full of inventive people who used imagery instead of language,' Mr. Driessen says. 'We never sought advice or connection with the English department. The French [animators] wanted to learn to do things their own way ... [we] were separate worlds.'
It was a perfect place for Mr. Hoedeman, who developed new skills as he worked with different materials and camera technology. 'Co was one of the top people who went from one technique to another. He could improvise very well and was passionate about learning new things,' his old friend says.
By the 1970s, the young couple had three children and after a few years in Hudson, Que., moved in 1974 to a rundown 100-acre farm near Alexandria, Ont., that nudged the Quebec border. Together they raised their son and two daughters, and tended a menagerie that included pigs, two horses and a cow, learning essential farm skills as the need arose.
'The farm was for fun,' recalls youngest daughter Anouk Hoedeman, now 55, who remembers her father as playful and a joker. 'But the chores started at 6 a.m.'
She recalls how her father applied the same skill set on the farm as in the animation studio. 'He had patience and an innate ability to figure things out in almost an instinctive way. ... How to run the farm, the tractor, fix the baler.' Chores did not always go smoothly – a fall during a roof-patching job left Mr. Hoedeman with a broken jaw and several missing teeth.
Maintaining a rustic back-to-the-land vibe, the family had no television. Movie nights were courtesy of a borrowed NFB 16-mm projector and his family had to visit a neighbour's house to watch the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony.
Ms. Hoedeman chuckles at the memory of seeing her father on the small screen wearing a tux. 'I didn't know what the Oscars were and wondered what was going on the next day at school when all the teachers were very excited about it.'
During the 1970s, Mr. Hoedeman became fascinated by Inuit culture and travelled to the Arctic several times to research traditional stories, enlisting Indigenous artists and carvers to craft characters for his stop-action films. They worked with soapstone, skins and paper, and often stayed with his family when they travelled south during production of his four northern films.
After his Oscar win, invitations poured in from around the world to attend conferences, give workshops and judge international competitions. His travels included Czechoslovakia, China, Japan, the United States, Mexico and Venezuela as well as across Canada, where he taught master classes and worked with novice filmmakers. In 2003, Cinémathèque québécoise presented a retrospective of his films.
After divorcing Ms. van der Werf in the 1980s, Mr. Hoedeman moved back to Montreal and later married artist Joyce Ryckman, who joined him as a writer and artistic consultant for most of the films he made after 1989, including his 2011 passion project 55 Socks. The 55 Socks film, set to a gentle poem about the Hongerwinter in the Netherlands, came at the end of a difficult three-year contract with private producers to turn his successful short films about Ludovic the teddy bear into a 26-episode television series. Convinced that Ludovic was losing his charm to crass commercial considerations, Mr. Hoedeman battled with scriptwriters, producers and broadcasters, giving up his director role early in the three-year process.
By contrast, 55 Socks allowed him to work with a new media – black silhouettes inspired by a Dutch tradition of shadow play called schimmenspel.
Mr. Hoedeman worked with the NFB for half a century, continuing his relationship with the agency as a freelancer and independent producer after being laid off in 2004. He made his final film, The Cardinal, in 2016, fronting all its costs himself. A cancer diagnosis the following year inspired him finally to retire.
Chris Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, notes that 'Co's films exemplified his commitment to pushing the boundaries of animation, ... [balancing] themes that resonated with both children and adults, never shying away from complex topics.'
'His works ... invited viewers into seemingly whimsical worlds that, upon closer inspection, offered deep reflections on the human experience.'
Mr. Hoedeman leaves his wife, Joyce; former wife, Ms. van der Werf, and their children, Nienke, Nathan and Anouk; stepdaughter, Jessica; five grandchildren, and five of his eight siblings.
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