Rotoscoping Allows The Tolltaker to Roam the Earth by Steve Janas

What dark magic is it that makes the eponymous fiend wander his dismal, subterranean catacombs in the animated short The Tolltaker? Alas, the name alone’s not apt to inspire vivid acts of imagination: it’s called rotoscoping.

Although it’s now done on computers, the process dates back to 1917, when animation pioneer Max Fleischer invented it to turn his brother David into Koko the Clown, Fleischer’s signature creation. It gets its name from the type of projector that Fleischer developed to create the effect. The image would be projected onto a sheet of frosted glass, on the other side of which an artist would be tracing the image’s outlines, one frame after another, literally turning reality into cartoons.

During the 1930’s, rotoscoping inserted a dancing Cab Calloway into Betty Boop cartoons and made a proto version of Superman fly in an early animated serial. It also found frequent use in the Soviet Union, where it appealed to social realist sensibilities in vogue at the time.

Contemporary American animation fans will easily be able to spot the process in films like Heavy Metal and Richard Linklater’s mind-bender A Scanner Darkly (which, incidentally, shares a member of its animation crew with Tolltaker: Philly-based animator Monique Ligons). It also created the surreal, pencil-sketch world of one of the most iconic music videos of the 1980’s: Take On Me, by Norwegian band Aha.

The king of American rotoscoping is indisputably Ralph Bakshi, whose animated features were trippy, violent and at times downright pornographic. Beginning with his profane Fritz The Cat in 1972, Bakshi made a total of seven feature films, including genre classics like Wizards and an early, animated version of Lord of the Rings, which earned him a dedicated, world-wide following.

The Tolltaker has about two minutes of rotoscoping, which was created by a team of animators who turned the first floor of director Steve Janas’s Philadelphia-area townhouse into an ad hoc studio. Running the show (the animated portion of it, anyway) was co-producer Lavinia DeCastro, who chose as her lieutenant a fellow graduate of the Art Institute of Philadelphia named Jake Hoisington. They both oversaw a total of around a dozen animators, working on laptops set up on folding tables in Janas’s living and dining rooms.

To explain the specific way the rotoscoping process is used in The Tolltaker, Hosington hosts a short, two-minute feature, which can be viewed on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzBboAzvF2I.

The Tolltaker tells the story of a young boy named Bobby growing up in Northeast Philadelphia in the early 1970’s, in the aftermath of Vietnam, whose increasingly desperate belief that he’ll see his MIA father alive again rests on a cheap metal charm bracelet, inscribed with his father’s name, that he wears on his wrist. Unfortunately, this is the very prize sought by the Tolltaker, a corpse-like ghoul that Bobby encounters on an expedition into a local drain pipe.

“Tolltaker” Film Spotlights Philly as an Animation Hub
A young boy’s obsessive belief that his father will return safely from Vietnam takes on the distorting power of psychosis in “The Tolltaker,” a new short from Philadelphia-based filmmaker Steve Janas that mixes live action and animation.
“Tolltaker” won two awards – for Best Short Film and Best Experimental Short Film – at the first film festival in which was entered, the 2011 Jersey Shore Film Festival. It’s an adaptation of a feature-length screenplay of the same name that itself was named a semi-finalist in the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition, held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
Produced entirely in and around Philadelphia, with local cast and crew, the film spotlights the burgeoning talent pool of the Philadelphia area, named by Moviemaker Magazine as one of the top five cities in the country to be a filmmaker. Most of the animation was done by students at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, as well as by pros like Monique Ligons, whose previous credits include Richard Linklater’s trippy masterpiece “A Scanner Darkly.” Original music and sound design is by Emmy-Award winning composer Rodney Whittenberg.
Both the film and screenplay are adaptations of a novel by James Sneddon, a native of the same Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood in which the story is set. In fact, as a child, James would crawl into the same tunnel used as a location in the film with a notebook and flashlight to write fanciful short stories. “Tolltaker” would be Jim Sneddon’s first – and only – novel. Although, like the short film, it won the first competition in which it was entered (which resulted in its publication), James Sneddon died unexpectedly shortly afterwards, leaving a wife and two daughters.
“The Tolltaker” tells the story of ten-year-old Bobby Burke, whose father has, by the summer of 1973, been MIA in Vietnam for three years. Bobby believes in the power of his magic charm bracelet – called the Safekeeper – to bring his dad back home, but he’s dismayed that his mother, who has begun dating a new man, appears to be moving on with her life. Now, to make matters worse, Bobby has come upon a demonic creature known as The Tolltaker living in a nearby storm drain, who seems intent on snatching the Safekeeper from Bobby’s wrist and keeping his father from him forever.
Watch the entire short film on Vimeo:
You can also watch a 2-minute feature on the rotoscoping animation process used in the movie here:

Contact Steve Janas at Stevejanas@yahoo.com

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