An animated Israel

August 5, 2009 - 8:34 AM by David

The interactive Israeli TV show 'Celebz' created by local animation studio The Box.

Everyone recognizes that Israel is an animated society – full of movement and action. But it’s less apparent that Israel is also becoming a stronghold of animation – you know, the computer-generated kind.

In the wake of the success of Oscar-nominated film Waltz With Bashir, the country’s bubbling animation industry is finally getting noticed internationally, and for the burgeoning animation studios producing top industry standard level material, it’s perfect timing.

Gwen Ackerman over at the Bloomberg new agency recently wrote an excellent overview of the Israeli animation industry – focusing on Tel Aviv’s Crew 972, which boasts Alex Orrelle who helped create The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. during the three years he worked in California at Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar Animation Studios, and on Jerusalem-based Animation Lab, founded in 2006, which is working on The Wild Bunch, a story of flowers defending their meadow from genetically modified corn stalks.

“[Waltz With Bashir] had a strong impact on the image of Israel as an animation-savvy country,” said Orrelle. “When I call up an animation studio outside Israel, they are no longer surprised. We are definitely seeing business opportunities expand.”

Proving the point that animation is no kid’s game, Ackerman talked to David Chissick, founder of Chissick & Co., a company based in Herzliya that invests in and advises media and technology companies. He estimates that as much as $100 million has been poured into the growing Israeli animation industry in the past five years.

“If you look at the number of people working at the moment and the number of courses there are, the industry has grown four times compared to what it was eight years ago,” Chissick said. Orrelle, the animation artist, agreed, saying an increasing number of Israelis were taking up animation as a profession, while others are returning from studies abroad.

And, as usual, even with something as unrelated as animation, it eventually all comes back to the ingenuity of Israelis and our innovation by neccessity quality derived from having our literal backs against the wall throughout our history.

The founder of the Animation Lab, successful venture wunderkind Erel Margalit, put it this way.

“It is as much about technology as it is about culture, a culture daring to start to do something from scratch.”

Even, a non-Israeli, David Simon, former head of DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.’s television studio in Los Angeles, said he saw one of the first real-time three-dimensional cameras on a trip to Israel, adapted from technology originally used on the tip of a cruise missile.

Now, that’s something that Tweety Bird definitely could have made use of.

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