SA’s animators are bossing the business, bagging two global awards at last month’s Annecy festival. Whether the medium is sand or software, dreams are the key.

In the age of YouTube, any fool can make and distribute a movie, and too many fools are doing so. Some even become millionaires by shovelling unspeakably stupid home videos into the maw of Generation Z.But do not despair. The flame of true filmic storytelling is guttering bravely in the gale of cat videos and vacuous teen monologues - and it's crackling in South Africa's vibrant animation scene.Last month, two South African productions took gold at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, arguably the Oscars of the animation world.story_article_left1Stick Man, a 26-minute TV feature made by the acclaimed Cape Town studio Triggerfish in collaboration with UK production company Magic Light, took the Cristal award for best TV production. And Naomi van Niekerk's sand animation 'n Gewone Blou Maandagoggend (An Ordinary Blue Monday Morning), based on the poem by Ronelda Kamfer, bagged the Jean-Luc Xiberras award for best first film.The two winners are vastly different. Stick Man, based on the picture book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler about the father of a family of sticks and his mission to get home in time for Christmas, is a superbly polished 3D production. It employed a squadron of animators that swelled to 70 at the peak of its production schedule.Co-directed by Daniel Snaddon of Triggerfish and the London-based Belgian Jeroen Jaspaert, Stick Man was broadcast by the BBC as a Christmas special last December, when it was seen by nine million viewers. It represents another giant leap in Triggerfish's emergence as a world-class feature studio.By contrast, 'n Gewone Blou Maandagoggend is just three minutes long, and made entirely by Van Niekerk. Its brevity is deceptive: it carries a bigger emotional payload than most feature-length films, providing a bleakly beautiful analogue to Kamfer's poem about a day in the life of a Cape Flats ghetto child.Van Niekerk creates her mutating dreamscapes in a flat in Linden, Johannesburg. She strews and sculpts fine sand on a lightbox, over which she suspends a stills camera plugged into stop-motion software. It takes her a month of full-time work to make one minute of animation."It's like Zen gardening all day," she says. "I do enjoy the process of working alone, because I don't really have to explain my ideas. The explanation is in the execution. So in some ways it's faster than animating with a team, but it is demanding, especially since I have to work behind blackout curtains. My studio is near some coffee shops - at least I can hear people having fun, which keeps me a bit sane."Van Niekerk studied drama at the University of the Witwatersrand, specialising in set design, and won a scholarship to study puppetry in France, where a teacher noted her fascination with transforming shapes and encouraged her to animate. When she saw the sand animations of Canada's Caroline Leaf, she knew she had found her medium.She was astounded by her victory at Annecy - and pleased that solo stop-motion animators can compete with the dizzying digital feats of large studios."There are so many talented young animators in South Africa," she says, "but for some reason they all want to work for Disney or Pixar, and at Annecy it became clear to me that you don't have to try to be like everybody else. It's a cliché, but it's true."A stop-motion film with a sometimes shaky camera was up against all these super well-produced 2D and 3D films - but what got it there was precisely that it was raw, or honest, or different.full_story_image_hright2"A good story is a good story," says Van Niekerk, who also does live animation-and-music performances with guitarist Arnaud van Vliet (their project is called Dryfsand)."If you want to become an independent filmmaker, you have to find your themes and then get busy. In the animation world, everyone is always waiting for pre-production funding, which will always come in two or three years. There are lots of industry excuses for not making their films. If you want to make a film, just make a film. Don't get distracted. Stick to your guns. But that's an awful expression. I don't have guns!Snaddon and Triggerfish are sticking to their guns on another battlefield: the brutally competitive global market for high-end 3D feature animation.Most South African animation studios supply the advertising industry, but ever since the 1990s, Triggerfish has put all its eggs in the features basket - drawing on the commercial animation sector's skills base to make globally distributed films like Kumba and Adventures in Zambezia.mini_story_image_hright1The Stick Man deal was landed after Studio Soi, a German company that had worked with Magic Light on The Gruffalo, had to turn down the project due to other commitments.Triggerfish's bosses wined and dined Jaspaert in Cape Town to seal the deal - and more coups are likely, with the rand's Mickey Mouse status giving Triggerfish and other local studios a competitive edge when jostling for work with technically comparable studios in Europe or North America.The typical South African animator used to be a pasty-faced white male video-game junkie - but that's changing fast, says Snaddon. "Of our 12-strong animation team, five are black or female."Next up for Snaddon and his team is another co-production with Jaspaert and Magic Light - two 26-minute adaptations of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, to be premiered this December.For more about Van Niekerk's work, go to dryfsand.com. A movie about the story of Triggerfish can be viewed attriggerfishstudios.com..