Sylvain Chomet interview

Sylvain Chomet, director of Belleville Rendez-Vous and now The Illusionist. Photograph: Paul Cooper

Sylvain Chomet talks about his new film "The Illusionist" -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jun/10/sylvain-chomet-belleville-rendezvous-illusionist

The biggest problem [in making the film] was finding the animators. Like the music-hall acts in the film, animators had become convinced by Hollywood that their time had passed.

"A lot of animators, basically people who can draw, got scared by these wankers from Disney saying that 2D animation is dead, that it was only going to be 3D and Pixar from now on. It is just typical shit by people in ties who don't know what they are talking about. Are they saying that Aardman is dead, too, then? I mean how stupid are these people? Saying 2D is dead is like saying that a car race is the future of the Tour de France."

"We had trouble because the fantastic animators we found had got really stressed because they thought after our film there was not going to be any 2D any more. Some were driving buses or retraining. People really had been made to believe that the end had come. The truth is that animation is always mixing things up: pen and paper, stop motion, puppets, 3D. Suddenly this bizarre competition has been created. What it is, one more time, is this American reflex to kill off the competition, to say that you can only do it one way and destroy everything else that went before. The whole society is like that. They destroy what they have to build something new. They end up with no roots to draw on, nothing to compare their work with to see if it is good or not. American culture is in real danger of starving itself to death. You just have to see what Hollywood is producing to see how narrow it is getting."