11-year-old animator’s Holocaust film debuts at Comic-Con

 

 

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – Two years after surprising animator Bill Plympton with his ability to mimic Plympton’s drawing style, 11-year-old Perry Chen is making his debut at Comic-Con as the animator of a 6-minute Holocaust short,  Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest.

Chen will appear on a panel with his mentor Plympton, and the short film’s director, Kevin Sean Michaels, at 3:45 p.m., Sunday, July 24, during the five-day Comic-Con at the San Diego Convention Center.  If all goes as Chen told me on Wednesday he expected it would go, he will be answering questions about his drawing style and tools, and his reaction to the story of the late actress Pitt’s experiences as a child prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.

The computerized drawing project was assigned to him by Michaels and Plympton about a year after they met at a previous Comic Con, when Chen and his mother Zhu Shen stopped by Plympton’s booth.   Comic-Con is an annual blow-out for the entertainment industry that started in 1970 as a gathering for comic book collectors and has grown into an extravaganza attracting movie stars, directors and producers, as well as nearly 150,000 paying fans.

When Chen visited Plympton’s booth, the animator drew for him the ‘Hot Dog’ canine character from one of his animated films.  Chen took the paper and drew a nearly identical character besides Plympton’s.   So impressed were Plympton and Michaels, who was standing nearby, that
they suggested that they all work together on a project some time.

Chen was game, even though he never had done animation before, and was unaware of how much work a 6-minute animation really meant.  But, he said he learned that every second of animation requires 24 frames on his computer (using a Wacom tablet with Tim-Boon software).  That meant Ingrid Pitt:Beyond The Forest required him to create from storyboard drawings by Plympton approximately  8,640 frames – a project that took him an estimated six months to finish, working after school and on  weekends.  Chen will go into the sixth grade at Torrey Hills Elementary School next semester.

Both of Chen’s parents have doctorates in the sciences, his father in molecular biology-genetics, and his mother in biochemistry.  In the process of Chen’s developing career, his mother became more and more interested in films and film making and served as a producer on this project – finding the right equipment for her son, arranging for him to be tutored in the computer software’s use, and lining up sponsors.   Even as this film is the
debut as an animator for Chen, it is a debut as a producer for Shen.

Ingrid Pitt, who died last year, was known as am actress who played in a variety of horror movies, as well as for portraying Heidi, a beautiful undercover British agent, in the Clint Eastwood movie, Where Eagles Dare.  In the animated short, she narrates the story of her escape with her mother from a forest outside the Stutthof Concentration Camp, in Poland, where Nazi guards had taken her to be shot. Before the execution could be accomplished, the Nazi guards were strafed by Russian planes.  In the confusion, Pitt and her mother played dead in a ditch, and eventually were found by Polish Partisans who were about to shoot them until they realized Pitt and her mother were Polish too.  The animated film ends with the Partisans listening on the radio to a speech by Winston Churchill announcing the end of the war.

Although the subject is a somber one, the movie is not particularly gory – and youngsters can watch it without nightmares.

Said Chen about Pitt’s concentration camp experiences: “I thought that the story was sad but I thought that it needed to be told so that this history
would not repeat itself again ever in the future…. One of the things a lot of the Holocaust survivors do is keep their painful memories a secret … but I
don’t think that is a good idea, because then no one will know about the stories that happen…”

Although he never met Pitt, he was able to exchange emails with her, and one of the questions he asked her was what ambitions she had.  “She said she would like to see her granddaughter’s wedding, and unfortunately she never got to – she died in 2010,” at age 73, Chen said.

Chen said Plympton chose him to do the animation because he was about the same age as Pitt was when she escaped from the Nazis, and could bring to the project a kid’s perspective.   There is a scene, for example,  of faraway trees becoming the legs of a Nazi guard as seen by a child.

Could he imagine himself in Pitt’s situation?  “Well yeah, if I was Jewish, maybe, it would be really scary,” he responded.

Suppose he lived in a society where all blue-eyed people were locked up and persecuted, and the authorities said if he tried to hide them or to not report them, he would be locked up too—what would he do?

“I could still say that I didn’t see any,” he responded promptly.  “I wouldn’t report them at all, I would just deny seeing any of them. But if they had a way to monitor you, like if they put tracking chips in you, then I would rather keep myself in prison then have a bunch of people who are innocent and didn’t do anything being put there.”

Chen has been serving as a young movie reviewer for the San Diego Union-Tribune in a program that Lisa Sullivan, editor for the
Night & Day section, explains generally pairs professional reviews with those written by readers, thereby providing balance between critics and general viewing audiences.  She said Chen was already reviewing movies on his own website before Union-Tribune editor Jeff Light recommended him for the job following a meeting with the boy’s mother.  Sullivan said perhaps because he is an animator himself, Chen looks more deeply than some other youngsters at the films, examining cinematography and technique as well as basic plot.  “His critiques are more sophisticated than kids talking about things blowing up,” she said. Because Chen is just 11, he is restricted to reviewing “G-rated” movies for the newspaper.

In addition, Chen and his mother have become acquainted with Dan Bennett, a freelance writer and movie critic for the North County Times who also is the prime mover behind the San Diego Children’s Film Festival.   One year the festival attracted a delegation from Mainland China, and Zhu Shen served as a greeter and hostess, according to Bennett.   Now U.S. citizens, she and her husband were born in China, whereas young Chen was born here.

Plympton had come to the children’s film festival at Comic-Con to show his work, The Fan and the Flower, about an unusual love affair between the two. Having enjoyed the film, Chen and Shen followed Plympton to his booth… and to new careers.

Ingrid Pitt: Beyond The Forest will not only be shown at Comic-Con, but also will be shown the following week when the San Diego Children’s Film Festival moves to the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.

Asked what he expects in his future, Chen said he is “doing an animation by myself called Sticks and it is about a stick figure who walks along and sees a pencil and soon begins drawing his own adventure.”

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