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Thursday 8.3.2001
The Animator Heikki Prepula Constructs Worlds from Paper
"That's where I stand and keep grinding", smiles Heikki Prepula and points at his animator's tool, the special effects table. The table is quite simple: four lamps, a desktop and a camera that is hanging above it.
The actors from Prepula's new animation have been organised into neat stacks at the corner of the table. They are legs, heads and eyes of billy goats, all cut from paper. Prepula is making an animation based on a folk-tale of three billy goats. On the table, under a sheet glass, is an image made from paper cuts: three billy goats peer behind a fence.
Heikki Prepula and the special effects table.
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Grinding is possibly too fast a word to describe making a paper-cut animation. The paper goats come to life when they are moved ever so slightly, photographed twice and then moved again. It takes 24 photos to create a one-second piece of an animation. Only a man with Buddhist patience can make a paper-cut animation that is few minutes in length.
"Usually I can get about eight, ten seconds of an animation done in a day; if the material is difficult, maybe only a couple of seconds", estimates Prepula. "The most difficult photos can't be put together in a day. Once I have thrown everything on the floor, so I think I have grown patience-wise."
The Charm Based on Roughness
Heikki Prepula, the father of Kössi the Kangaroo and about twenty other animated characters, has grown patience-wise during thirty years and 26 animations. In the end of 1960s he picked up paper and scissors as his tools and hasn't put them down since.
"I have never even tried to do these with a computer, there wouldn't be any sense to make things looking like these with a computer", Prepula says and points at the goats under the sheet glass of the special effects table. "In a way their charm is based on roughness, the end results are rougher in a way."
Paper becomes alive on the desktop of Heikki Prepula.
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Money was a factor when he chose paper-cut animations. It is more expensive to create a full-scale animation that is drawn on acetate transparencies picture by picture, because you would need a bigger working team.
It is easy to think that working alone was a natural choice for Prepula, who seems a bit shy.
"This is more or less a one man's work. I have always done the drawing and filming on my own. Music, on the other hand, is teamwork, and so are editing and mixing."
The Käytöskukka animation series made by Heikki Partanen in the 1960s also influenced Prepula's choice of technique. According to Prepula, the adventures of Hinku and Vinku "showed so clearly" that you can make animations with paper cuts.
"The Käytöskukka animations have been made by using paper cut techniques 'correctly'. You can see that the paper-cuts move independently of each other. They are naive, but that is part of their charm", says Prepula.
"On the other hand, I use the paper-cuts 'incorrectly', I am aiming for a full-scale animation with paper-cuts that really can't be bent to do that. I have developed my own technique that is a combination of these both."
The technique is laborious, so making the animation can take years. And even after the animation has been finished it may still take a few years before the income from screenings cover the costs of production. Along with animations, Prepula earns his living by drawing caricatures and so-called drawings of the day to newspapers.
Prepula Won't Abandon His Child Viewers
So far, Heikki Prepula's animations have been made for children, even though they have very adult thoughts lying under the surface. At the moment it seems that animations for adults are growing in popularity. Last autumn Aardmann's The Chicken Run allured also adults to the movie theatres to chuckle to the undertakings of the wax-animated poultry. The jokes in the popular South Park cartoon series also unfold a bit better to a more mature audience.
Prepula won't stop making children's animations, even though the thought of transferring the paper-cuts to the world of adults has crossed his mind.
"In a way that would mean betraying the child viewers. The feedback is usually 'when does the next one come out' and 'will you still do more'. I haven't really had a chance to try with animations for adults."
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