Moebius
Jean Giraud's stunning cartoons scan like movies.
"The Long Tomorrow" could have been the prototype for Blade Runner. His designs have appeared in Tron, Alien, and The Abyss.
But attempts to turn his stories into movies have always fallen through. Until now.
"The Airtight Garage" is headed for the big screen, produced by legendary Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa and animated by the people who brought you Akira.
By Mark Frauenfelder
Will next year be remembered as the year that French comic book artist Moebius finally conquered America? Will kids get to cruise in spaceships across his frozen, ochre planet-scapes, courtesy of their neighborhood location-based-entertainment theme park? Will moviegoers have the opportunity to groove on the cool computer effects of his animated The Airtight Garage? Will they recognize Moebius as the same artist who gave them the space suits in Alien, the characters in The Abyss, and the designs in Tron?
Maybe. Jean Giraud - aka Moebius - is widely recognized in Europe as the gifted creator of surrealistic western, science fiction, and fantasy comics, but he's practically unknown in the US, except among the discrete group of adults who read comic books. Giraud has tried several times to make a movie, but he hasn't been able to break his run of bad luck.
If creative genius were all it took to make a movie, Giraud would have made one long ago. He is regarded by many critics as the artist who changed the look of science fiction, not only in comic books but in films as well. "Moebius was a major precursor in gritty, ground-level science fiction. Before Moebius, science fiction was glistening starships," says Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, the Seattle comic book company responsible for the brilliant Love & Rockets, Eightball, and Hate. "Graphically, his work was a revolution. Moebius is one of the few European cartoonists who's big in the US, because he funneled a lot of American influences into his comics."
"The Long Tomorrow," a story written by Dan O'Bannon and drawn by Giraud that appeared in the French magazine Metal Hurlant in 1977, has a dystopic urban feel that can be described in two words: Blade Runner. No wonder Giraud has helped to flesh out the visions of movie directors Ridley Scott and Jim Cameron.
Moebius's first opportunity to make his own picture came when he teamed up with Chilean filmmaker Alexandro Jodorowski to create an adaptation of Dune (not related to the DeLaurentis/David Lynch disaster of the same name). The money for Dune ran out somewhere between the time Giraud finished designing the sets and characters and the time cameras were supposed to roll. His next project, Starwatcher, was slated to be the first feature- length animated movie to be made with 3-D computer graphics. But the film's producer died in a car accident, and shortly thereafter it was discovered that the French production company bankrolling the film was FF85 million (US$15 million) in debt. (Many suspected the car accident was no accident.)
Then, in 1990, Soyuzmultfilm, a Russian animation studio, announced that it was bringing one of Giraud's most famous comic book stories, "The Airtight Garage," to the screen. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the movie deal. It seemed that Giraud just couldn't crack the movie nut. Now, independent movie maker Philippe Rivier wants to change that.
In the '60s, in a provincial town in the south of France, young Rivier would queue up behind the rest of the villagers making their weekly pilgrimage to Nimes's magazine store. They were all waiting to buy the latest copy of Pilote, in which the new chapter of Jean Giraud's Lieutenant Blueberry awaited them. Giraud's weekly comic strip, scripted by Michel Charlier, told the story of a US Cavalry lieutenant in the Wild West. Completely unlike the American comic books of the day, it aimed to imitate motion pictures, because, as Giraud explains, "for my generation, pictures, especially American pictures, were synonymous with culture, total art, philosophy."
Lieutenant Blueberry remains his most popular work, based on unit sales of books, but after a decade of drawing in a conventional genre and style, Giraud felt that his personal expression was being cramped: "I was looking for something that would allow me to maintain contact with another universe." That something was a radical departure from drawing cowboys and Indians on the Great Plains. "All of a sudden, in the late '60s and early '70s, I discovered the American underground, Robert Crumb, and all that jazz, and I felt 'the times, they were a-changing,' and consequently, I found my own personal way of expression through Moebius."
In 1975, Giraud and a couple of other experimental French cartoonists started a magazine called Metal Hurlant (republished in the US as Heavy Metal). It was in Metal Hurlant that French readers - and movie directors around the world - discovered not only a fine storyteller and cartoonist, but an artistic genius. By the '80s, Giraud was creating sets and costumes for motion pictures, and in 1985 he was awarded the highest French award for cultural and artistic achievement by President Francois Mitterand.
Now, twenty-five years after the cool summer mornings spent reading Blueberry on the sidewalk in front of the newsstand, Philippe Rivier is seeing one of his dreams come true. Rivier has picked up the pieces that the Russians dropped and has signed on to produce The Airtight Garage as an animated feature. "It's a treat to be working with somebody with such an incredible imagination, because it makes you realize that all the little parts of life that you think are so important don't matter that much," says Rivier. He says that he has secured the US$20 million production budget, and that a famous rock group (rumored to be U2) will provide the soundtrack.
This might be the start of another sad "Moebius can't make a movie" story if it weren't for Kurosawa Enterprises USA, which has hooked up with Rivier and Starwatcher Graphics (Giraud's US corporation) to produce The Airtight Garage. Kurosawa is working on securing a worldwide distribution deal, and is supporting the animation production in Japan.
Japanese film master Akira Kurosawa and French comic master Moebius make a complementary team. Giraud started out making Western comics and then moved into science fiction. Kurosawa directed Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, which became the basis for two world-famous westerns: The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. His film The Hidden Fortress foreshadowed the plot of Star Wars.
Rivier says that one reason he was so excited to have animation buff Kurosawa involved with the movie project was that the director has access to Japanese animators. The Starwatcher movie never got past a six-minute demo because nobody involved in the project realized how expensive it was to make a full-length movie using only high quality 3-D computer graphics. This time around The Airtight Garage will use a combination of traditional cel animation and computer animation. The cel animation will be done in Japan under the direction of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose animated feature Akira was a huge hit in Japan and a cult classic in the United States. Like Giraud in his cinematic approach to comics, "Otomo uses traditional cinematography techniques for animation," says Rivier. "His angles and camera movement look like real life movies." The computer animation will be done in the United States. Though Rivier says he's been talking with Jim Cameron at Digital Domain, they haven't chosen a studio yet.
The move from making comic books based on western movies to making science fiction movies based on comic books is just one of many odd, circular trips Giraud has taken. His definition of the Wild West sounds like a description of cyberspace: "It's about the contact with nature, not completely primeval but not yet under the control of man; it's about technology that is already impressive but retains its human dimension; it's about the forces of government trying to exercise pressure but failing."
Giraud is optimistic that finally his movie will be made. If all goes well The Airtight Garage will be in full production by the time you read this, and released by Christmas of 1995. "This is like a dream about to come true, because I have been wanting to make this film for quite a few years now. But the truth is, it would have been difficult to do it the way I envisioned, because the computer technology was not available yet. I am now hopeful that we'll be able to create the kind of striking and powerful images and effects that I hope to employ in faithfully conveying the universe of The Airtight Garage."
If Giraud's movie hopes come to fruition, an interactive version of The Airtight Garage universe might appear on our planet as well. Avatar Partners, the virtual reality development company from Boulder Creek, California, that makes the financial product vrTrader, is planning to develop a family of virtual reality games based on the film. Their ambitious project includes home games (for Sega, 3DO, IBM, and the upcoming Nintendo/SGI gamebox), tele-games in which people play in a graphical MUD, and a location-based environment. Peter Rothman, president of Avatar, plans to develop the games parallel to the movie's production and to incorporate computer animation developed for the movie into the games.
Giraud is familiar with the computer as an artistic tool. His first experience with digital art was his work on Tron. "Later I began experimenting with my son's Amiga system, and eventually I learned how to do real artwork using paint box programs."
Giraud views the computer art process as a "form of pure graphic expression. I personally am fascinated by its seemingly direct link with the unconscious mind. I've noticed that, after a while, you start using the computerized tools like a sleepwalker. You travel half-consciously through its infinite and incredibly flexible range of forms and colors for hours and hours, without an actual pen, brush, or a tube of paint. You can enter an unbelievably complex domain, where you can break a picture, take it apart, change it, put it back together, start it all over. Computers make artistic expression and the expression of the unconscious mind one and the same thing. A true artist doesn't become warped or lost because of this infinity of possibilities, because he learns to recognize, to feel the moment when his true oeuvre has emerged and is there."
As much as he enjoys using computers, Giraud is not about to throw away his brushes and Bristol board. "There are still some forms of pleasure derived from putting a pen to paper that you can't yet get from working on a computer."
Giraud will surely derive some pleasure from making the film version of The Airtight Garage; but it has also become a matter of spiritual survival. Of his prior experience with the film industry, Giraud says, "I discovered that people who make movies regard filmmaking almost as a matter of life and death. They feel they're going to die if they don't make their films. I am starting to understand that."
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