Israel's innovation pushes its animation industry into the big league
August 2, 2009
By Gwen Ackerman
Israeli animation artist Alex Orrelle helped create The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Monsters Inc. during the time he worked at Pixar Animation Studios.
Now he's back in Tel Aviv, where he opened his own studio in 2005. His company, Crew 972, competes for work in Europe and Hollywood - one of many start-ups in an industry that captured world attention when the Israeli animation film Waltz with Bashir was nominated for an Oscar.
"It had a strong impact on the image of Israel as an animation-savvy country," said Orrelle. "When I call up an animation studio outside Israel, they are no longer surprised.
"We are definitely seeing business opportunities expand."
Waltz with Bashir, a documentary about an Israeli soldier's experience fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war directed and written by Ari Folman, sold to distributors in about 50 territories, according to The Match Factory, the company that handled the rights sales.
Global box-office sales for distributor Sony Pictures Classics were about $11 million (R89m) as of May 14, the online box-office reporting service Box Office Mojo said. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award this year and won the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe.
David Chissick is the founder of Chissick & Company, a company based in the Israeli city of Herzilya that invests in and advises media and technology companies. He estimates that as much as $100m has been poured into the growing Israeli animation industry in the past five years.
The value of the global animation industry was $158 billion last year and is projected to reach $249bn by 2012, says Sandeep Sharma of the Bangalore consulting company Digital Vector.
Folman's team, which completed Waltz with Bashir on a budget of $2m, was now developing a new full-length animated movie based on a science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, said lead animator Tal Gadon.
"Waltz with Bashir was semi-independent, low-budget, and everything was new," he said. The new film would be produced on a bigger budget, he said.
The Israeli industry is dependent on a small core of freelancers, which Chissick says is growing steadily.
"If you look at the number of people working at the moment and the number of courses there are, the industry has grown four times compared with what it was eight years ago," Chissick said.
Jerusalem-based Animation Lab, founded in 2006, is working on The Wild Bunch, a story of flowers defending their meadow from genetically modified corn stalks. The production team is setting its sights on the first Israeli Oscar.
In an airy restored warehouse, once the country's mint, computer experts sit with storyboard artists, animators and software writers working on a series of interactive worlds to accompany the movie.
"The industry here is contagious and small," said Erel Margalit, whose Jerusalem Venture Partners invested more than $10m in Animation Lab three years ago. "It is as much about technology as it is about culture, a culture daring to start to do something from scratch."
Animation investors say the Israeli industry benefits from the inventiveness of the technology industry, which accounts for about half of the country's exports.
David Simon, the former head of DreamWorks Animation's television studio in Los Angeles, said he saw one of the first real-time three-dimensional cameras on a trip to Israel, adapted from technology originally used on the tip of a cruise missile. That application of military technology to film was unique to Israel, he said.
"This is something you don't see very often in other countries," Simon said. "In the US, it is the entertainment technology companies that create for the defence department. It's the other way around."
The Box, a cross-platform media company outside Tel Aviv, has struck out in a new direction with an interactive television series called CelebZ. It features cut-out animation and tells the story of celebrities who flee paparazzi to create a walled city.
What sets The Box apart is the virtual animation studio platform created for the internet that invites its audience to write as much as 25 percent of the storyline.
Using a drag-and-drop video-board platform, viewers can create and post a clip that is then rated by the rest of the audience. Winning segments are incorporated into the series and the creator gets as much as $1 000 and a screen credit.
The series was bought by Bezeq's Yes satellite broadcaster and can be viewed on the Walla! Communications website.
"Israel does things faster and comes up with unique ideas," said Chissick. - Bloomberg
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