Cinevue

Cinevue: How did you come up with the idea for YEAR OF THE FISH?

I have had a long-term interest in film adaptations of folklore and fairy tales. YEAR OF THE FISH is my first feature-length film, but I had already made several short film adaptations such as LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (starring Christina Ricci) and LITTLE SUCK-A-THUMB. I have always found these stories to be incredibly rich in terms of content and emotion: they tap deep into the human experience and also seem to be especially ripe for translation into the visual media. In my research of the Cinderella fairy tale type, I came across what is considered to be the oldest known variant of the tale, a Chinese folk story recorded around the 9th century, some 800 years prior to the better-known European versions. Since at that time I was looking for a project to make locally in New York City, it occurred to me to take this ancient tale and transport it to modern-day Chinatown.

Cinevue: How did you decide to rotoscope the film?

Since the story contains some magical elements, I felt we needed a technique to situate the images somewhere halfway between reality and dream. This was the primary aesthetic reason for employing rotoscoping. The visuals are based in "real life" but they are also flowing, painterly, impressionist...it allows the story to veer seamlessly from the modern-day into the fantastic.

Cinevue: Can you walk us through the process of rotoscoping? Most people are probably only familiar with it because of television commercials or Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE. How does it work?

"Rotoscoping" is a catch-all term that defines the process of taking live-action film or video and using it as a guide for painted or drawn imagery, thereby creating an animation based on the original live-action footage. The technique was invented in 1914 by Max Fleischer (the creator of BETTY BOOP and many others) and has been used by Walt Disney (in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES), Ralph Bakshi, and most recently by Richard Linklater in both WAKING LIFE and A SCANNER DARKLY.

In the case of YEAR OF THE FISH, we shot on inexpensive miniDV video and then loaded all the footage into G5 Macs where we then "painted" over every other frame to create 12 frame-per-second animation. We used a program called Studio Artist and employed both frame-by-frame hand animation and a broader, interpolated auto-rotoscoping technique based on research into the cognitive neuroscience of the nature of human visual perception. This way, we were able to accomplish with three people what would normally employ 40 full-time animators. We were also able to enlarge the frame size to high-definition, incorporate the color palettes of artists such as Cezanne and Van Gogh, and apply them to our digital canvases, turn daytime footage into night scenes, etc.

Cinevue: I think the animation gives the film a really nice surreal feel. How do you think the film would have been different had it been done with normal film?

This was a very low-budget film, so I knew in advance that the only thing we could afford to shoot on was video. Film was never an option. And the thing about video is that it has a very harsh, almost hyper-realistic aesthetic. This may be appropriate for some scripts, but this one needed to be dreamy, magical and beautiful. So the rotoscoping allowed us to shoot on video but transform the feel of the film into something very different.

And there were practical considerations as well. We were able to shoot with no lights, a tiny documentary-sized crew, with a consumer-sized camera. This proved invaluable for shooting in Chinatown because it allowed us to be incredibly unobtrusive. We never had to lock up a street and we were able to move very fast and get into some challenging locations. And because we never imposed ourselves on the local shopkeepers in this way, we enjoyed the full support of the local community during production.

Cinevue: Do you have any major influences in film or animation?

Linklater's WAKING LIFE was a huge inspiration in showing how someone could pull off a feature-length animated film on a budget and overcome the aesthetic limitations of shooting on video via rotoscoping, though he goes for a very different style than what we do in YEAR OF THE FISH. Other influences for this film include Camus' BLACK ORPHEUS and Ahn Hung Tran's THE SCENT OF THE GREEN PAPAYA.

Hua Hsu is the editor of CineVue. A frequent contributor to Slate, he will join the English Department at Vassar College in the fall.