Issue 129 – State of the Animation Nation

admin | July 7, 2009

: Ralph Christians and ‘Niko & The Way to the Stars’

Jamie Hannigan talks to producer and founder of Magma Films Ralph Christians about the challenges of working in Ireland.

Ralph Christians started his career as a journalist in West Germany before moving into producing documentaries and live-action drama in Scandinavia. A chance location scout to Connemara led to him resettling in Galway, where he runs Magma Films and is the man behind animated films and TV-series like Niko & The Way to the Stars, The Ugly Duckling and Me! as well as the upcoming Thor and Ooops! Noah Is Gone...

Jamie:How do you find being located in Galway? Is it an advantage or disadvantage for working internationally?

Ralph: It’s a disadvantage, an absolute disadvantage… It’s not Galway, it’s Ireland in general now for live-action and animation. I mean Ireland has a very positive perception everywhere, you know, there are no prejudices towards Ireland. If you say, ‘I’m from Ireland, we want to co-produce something’ it’s great but we have very little home support. We are one of these guys who go out to finance and we say we have 5% in place or maybe 10% in place, but then you see people from similar-sized countries, like Norway or Denmark or Finland. They say, ‘Okay, we want to do a co-production, we have 40% from our country, or 50%.’ And this has very much to do with the role of the broadcaster.

So rather than the Film Board, you reckon RTÉ…

The Film Board is fine, the Film Board is – when it comes to animated feature films – a very, very good support. The broadcaster is a total zero factor, and of course, in other countries, this is not the case. For example, we got €900,000 from the Finnish broadcaster for Niko. In Ireland, if we are lucky, we get €20,000.

Do you think that RTÉ’s policies are going to change in relation to this?

I don’t think so. I think there is a very big problem and this is that the funding in Ireland has very much to do with Irishness. Because when you look at something like a film like The Secret of Kells from our friends in Cartoon Saloon, it was tailor-made for funding in Ireland: it had Celtic signs, and a Celtic theme, and the Book of Kells. So it got BCI funding, it got… I don’t know what… Maybe Arts Council, it got Film Board and it got RTÉ funding. It got everything because it was so Irish. And, unfortunately, it didn’t work internationally and it didn’t work in Ireland. It didn’t work with the audience, the kids. In my opinion, that’s a catch-22. We are in Ireland and we talk constantly that Ireland should be export-orientated, but if we do an international movie that we want to export worldwide, it is harder to get funding here, except from the Film Board, because people say it’s not Irish enough. And I think, to make a movie with say, a GAA sport, only to get BCI funding, it’s not worth it because, at the end of the day, it will not work.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 129.