When Don Bluth's high-profile animation company, Sullivan-Bluth, went out of business in September 1995, 300 people lost their jobs.
Despite its part in global successes like An American Tail and The Lion King, the Islandbridge, Dublin, studio fell to international business interests. Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and 80 key staff went to work with Rupert Murdoch's Fox Animation Studios in Arizona, where their most recent work is Anastasia.
Today, an Irish industry that was dominated by big firms such as Sullivan-Bluth, Emerald City and Murakami Wolf is now peopled by smaller, leaner companies dividing their time between production-for-hire and developing their own projects.
Monster Productions, one of the biggest outfits in Dublin, was built out of the ruins of Sullivan-Bluth. Principals Gerard O'Rourke, Andrew Fitzpatrick and Owen Binchy were all part of the management there. O'Rourke remembers: "When Sullivan-Bluth was going under, the three of us bought some of the equipment and decided to set up on our own. We got a contract immediately with TVC in London for The Wind in the Willows. We also worked on Space Jam with Warner Brothers - we had 50 people working on that project. For Anastasia, we worked with Fox Animation, and have also worked on Gurin with the Fox Tail - a classic Scandinavian story."
As ex-Bluth staff, the Monster folks have inherited a classical pedigree which keeps them working at the top end of the market. They have set up a distribution company, Monster Distributes Ltd, and earlier this year launched three new projects: Tap End Tales, a 26-part series about bathroom inhabitants battling the evil `Detergia'; The Easter Storykeepers; and The Legend of St Patrick, for which they received production funding from the Irish Film Board.
an expensive business
Animation is a high-cost, labour-intensive industry. Even a 10-minute section of a movie can represent nine months' work.
Behind every project is an assembly line of animators, assistant animators, clean-up artists, checkers, production managers, producers and directors. All the work is scanned, painted and image processed.
There are three main areas in animation: television series, television specials and features. To go from concept stage to seeing it on the page can take a long time and cost a lot of money. Like everything else, there are varying degrees of success - of which the zenith is seeing your cartoon characters included in "Happy Meals".
Being financially successful demands a combination of creativity and business acumen. The two don't always go hand in hand. As Gerard O'Rourke says: "Most artistic people are artistic and they don't have great business acumen. Some of them have great business acumen - they should be accountants - but the majority of them don't. They don't know where to start or how to go about things."
Monster Productions is a well established company, with status as a manufacturing company that helps it to get funding. However, O'Rourke says its biggest problem lies in taking out employment grants - which are given on the basis that the employee will have a steady job. The changing nature of the animation business means that it is difficult to guarantee employment for a set amount of time. "You have to keep the person employed for a number of years, otherwise the grant becomes payable immediately. We've been lucky, we've kept going for two years without a break, but we can't put someone in a permanent, pensionable job very easily.
"Production-for-hire work pays the overheads and pays the bills and gives us money towards development. It's not as if you're selling something, because when a company makes a movie, they make it and finish it and it could be a year before they decide to make another one, so you've got to find another company that is ready to take you on. "Broadcasters won't commission a second series in the middle of a first series. They normally take a break for four months and then approach you. Then you have to `re-crew' - and try to get the same people."
Dublin-based Moving Still Productions this month won a prestigious international TV contract. A series called Animated Tales of the World will bring together 26 stories from around the globe to be screened in 80 countries in the year 2000. Moving Still will contribute an Irish legend, How Fionn Became Leader of the Fianna.
Last summer Network 2 screened another Moving Still film, The Ship of Fools - an ambitious half-hour feature about sectarianism; BBC Northern Ireland will show that film next year.
