A Bright Future for the Philippines Animation Industry
Aug 23, 2023Season 2Episode 18
Carmina and Patch
After settling the score that she did not imagine Mazinger Z's "pectorally-endowed" opponents from the last episode, Carmina and Patch discover Fil-Am animators making waves in the US before delving into the history of the Philippine animation industry. They also discuss celebrated original Pinoy animations across the spectrum of drama, comedy, and romance. Drop in and learn why Pinoys deserve recognition in this growing and much-loved creative space!
Congratulations to Iti Mapukpukaw (The Missing) for winning three major awards at the 19th Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival: Best Supporting Actress for Dolly de Leon, NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award, and Best Film.
After settling the score that she did not imagine Mazinger Z's "pectorally-endowed" opponents from the last episode, Carmina and Patch discover Fil-Am animators making waves in the US before delving into the history of the Philippine animation industry. They also discuss celebrated original Pinoy animations across the spectrum of drama, comedy, and romance. Drop in and learn why Pinoys deserve recognition in this growing and much-loved creative space!
Congratulations to Iti Mapukpukaw (The Missing) for winning three major awards at the 19th Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival: Best Supporting Actress for Dolly de Leon, NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award, and Best Film.
Welcome to FilTrip, a podcast where we explore everything fun, weird, and in between about the Philippines. And now a quick shout out. Check out Manila Candle. Manila Candle features Filipino inspired scents like Tagaytay, Palawan, Ube Halaya and Buco and Mango. They also have fun ones like Ay Nako and Bahala Ka Sa Buhay Mo.
Patch:
Enjoy their car fresheners, wax melts and merchandise too. Visit manilacandle.com and take a trip to the Philippines through their scents.
Carmina:
Back to our show. Today's trip is a culture trip when we explore Filipino customs and way of life. And today we're going to continue a very interesting discussion that we had last episode when we were talking about our favorite cartoons when we were growing up. So we kind of teased it last time, Patch, right?
Patch:
We were laughing about my recollection of a certain robot.
Carmina:
Yes.
Patch:
It was vivid in my uh , memory that this robot had unique weapons and it's her boobs were missiles.
Carmina:
I know you went down a rabbit hole 'cause it bothered you so much.
Patch:
<laugh> . I was disturbed. It really was , uh, a robot. As a matter of fact, she was part of the Mazinger Z franchise.
Carmina:
What's she called again? <laugh> .
Patch:
Aphrodite A
Carmina:
Whoa .
Patch:
I guess she was created from the remains of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Anyway, see, I remember the important things.
Carmina:
How do you improve upon that weapon? <laugh>,
Patch:
You don't, honestly,
Carmina:
I mean my imagination is running wild right now, but okay, let's leave Mazinger Z behind.
Patch:
<laugh> . In our research, we came across animation in the Philippines, right?
Carmina:
Before I hand it to you for the history, I was also reading so much about the Fil-Am animators who have been making waves here. This episode is about the animation industry in the Philippines. But since I found these, I just wanted to mention them.
Patch:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Carmina:
Pixar released a short film titled Float and it featured the first Fil-Am lead characters.
Patch:
The creator was Filipino, right?
Carmina:
His name is Bobby Rubio. He worked on other Pixar films like Up, Inside Out, and The Incredible Stew, and I loved all those films. So he apparently works with two other Fil-Ams, Nelson Bohol and Paul Abadilla and get this, Patch - Nelson included a nipa hut on another very famous film Finding Nemo.
Patch:
Hmm.
Carmina:
Did you even notice that? I didn't even notice that.
Patch:
No. I don't know if you came across the same, like, trivia about it. Do you remember this part in Finding Nemo when there was this diver and on the goggles it said P Sherman?
Carmina:
Yeah.
Patch:
It's because a lot of Filipino animators were working on that film and it was a shout out to them because of our Filipino accent, we say fishermen as "pishermen."
Carmina:
Oh my gosh. I did not know that.
Patch:
Isn't that cute?
Carmina:
That is so cool.
Patch:
Yeah.
Carmina:
And also speaking about Finding Nemo , we know that it had a sequel, right? Finding Dory.
Patch:
Right.
Carmina:
Paul Abadilla also worked on Finding Dory and Monster University too, which is something that I like as well. And then there's another animation called Blush on Apple TV. Have you heard about that one?
Patch:
That one I did not hear about.
Carmina:
It's about a gardener-astronaut who crashed lands in an empty planet and there he meets another person who crash-landed. It has a very sad backstory that we'll link in our show notes involving the wife of the creator, Joe Mateo , a former Disney animator. So I won't spoil it here. Just go to the show notes and read up on it.
Patch:
Carmina , did you come across Bobby Pontillas?
Carmina:
No.
Patch:
Bobby Pontillas is a Filipino-American animator whose film was nominated for an Oscar. It was a short film called One Small Step.
Carmina:
Patch, he actually did win in 2019.
Patch:
There you go. So you know, hopefully more Filipinos win 'cause certainly there's so much talent as we'll discuss in this episode.
Carmina:
Just let me go into a little bit about the current state of affairs of Philippine animation. So these are some statistics from the 2022 GDP and Employment Report about the Philippine animation industry. In 2022, it contributed approximately 0.6% to the country's GDP. And it was apparently an expansion from before and primarily driven by such a huge growing global demand for animated content.
Patch:
It is over $300 billion in the US and in Japan, it's approximately one point 31 trillion Japanese yen.
Carmina:
And of course, as we know, the Philippines is a very prominent player in the strategic outsourcing space. The industry generated approximately 40,000 jobs in 2022 alone. It really is growing in significance in the Philippines employment landscape.
Patch:
If we have the support, can you imagine how much it can contribute more in the Philippine economy?
Carmina:
Both the Film Development Council of the Philippines and the Animation Council of the Philippines support a strategic vision for the local animation industry. And both organizations are very active through funding, networking opportunities and really developing the local talent.
Patch:
I really want to talk about the history because in this research, I was trying to understand how did we get to where we are right now. Do you remember Larry Alcala ?
Carmina:
Yes. I used to look forward to his cartoons in the paper.
Patch:
Right? So for me, he was the OG, right?
Carmina:
Yeah. Is he the one who embedded his profile? It became kind of a national game to spot it, right?
Patch:
He was the pioneer. But in 1941, animation arrived in the Philippines a few months before World War II as a special effects support for the film Ibong Adarna.
Carmina:
Ah, I know that movie too. <laugh> .
Patch:
Yes, uh , familiar to us Filipinos. And in 1953, that's when the comics illustrator and cartoonist Larry Alcala created a short black and white video depicting a girl jumping rope and a boy playing with a yo-yo. And eventually animation was used to sell some products. And in fact, in 1955, Jose Zabala Santos and Francisco Reyes created a six-minute commercial for cooking oil featuring Juan Tamad .
Carmina:
Oh, <laugh>.
Patch:
Yeah, another iconic character for us.
Carmina:
For those who need the translation, Tamad means lazy. So I guess you can call it Lazy Juan, or if you Americanize it, it's Lazy John <laugh> .
Patch:
Right. And then in 1974, Severino Nonoy Marcelo created a seven-minute animated short film, Annie Batungbakal as the pilot episode for the Tadhana film. Now Tadhana is very important in the history of Philippine animation because it is the first feature-length animated film and was released in 1978 during the pre-Martial Law era of Ferdinand Marcos . It was used primarily from that administration's perspective.
Carmina:
Oh , so you mean propaganda <laugh>.
Patch:
Exactly. I think it encouraged a lot of Filipino animators to show political and social issues through their work. In short films, two prominent artists were the Alcazaren brothers who used Claymation and a lot of their work talked about social issues at that time. And one such work is the Pagpula or Becoming Red, which was released in 1984. So the eighties came, and local animators would explore making cartoon narratives geared for the public. Such works include Ang Panday.
Carmina:
So Patch , the first Filipino made cartoon for TV was Panday, Panday. In English is Carpenter Right? Or builder, something like that.
Patch:
Right.
Carmina:
And it was created by Jerry Garcia in 1986 based on the comic book character of the same name produced by Carlo J. Caparas. And it began airing in November of 1986.
Patch:
A couple of other prominent animation series, Captain Barbell and Darna. Darna is the Wonder Woman of our <laugh> culture, I guess, right?
Carmina:
Yes. I mean, I love Darna, don't get me wrong, but there definitely are callbacks to Wonder Woman , <laugh>
Patch:
<laugh> .
Carmina:
We were so lucky because when we were growing up in the eighties, that really was considered the Golden Age of the Filipino animation industry. So we were kind of exposed to all of these emerging talents.
Patch:
What's interesting though is even with this so-called Golden Age, unfortunately animators struggled to create fresh content due to the high cost of production and a drop in the demand for Filipino animated films. And this is when I guess we started subcontracting work for foreign studios. This was in the eighties.
Carmina:
I read that in 1991, the Foreign Investment Act was signed into law. And that kind of opened up all kinds of foreign investments in the Philippines. Before that, local businesses were very protectionist and they were really very vigilant against introducing foreign influences into any kind of industry. And this is really what paved the way to subcontract and outsource projects. And it made a huge impact on the Filipino animation industry. And since then, the trend in animation is that foreign companies set up local studios which allowed local artists to train for international animation projects. Among the first is Burbank Animation Inc. And then Asian Animation, Phil Cartoons and Toie. And there were also Imagine Asia Inc . and Digital Eye Candy. So these companies were at the forefront of increasing demand on local animators.
Patch:
Some of the animation done in the Philippines were Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo.
Carmina:
What?
Patch:
Yes. And then for Toie, there was Dragon Ball Z and Slam Dunk.
Carmina:
So in the beginning, animation was apparently something that was taught peer-to-peer or through on-the-job training, or Filipinos going to the US or Europe to study animation elsewhere. And then in the late eighties, there slowly started offerings for practitioners and newcomers, but they weren't really formal education vehicles. And then in the late nineties, different training centers that really tackled IT, branched out and started offering education to animators related to software. So by the 2000s, there were many undergraduate degree courses in fine arts and multimedia arts that also incorporated animation in their curriculum. By the time the 2010s rolled around , even universities, colleges and high schools included animation in their courses.
Patch:
Most of our animators are cartoonists. They graduate with a fine arts degree. So Toon City , which is a prominent studio in the Philippines, they've done a lot of work for Walt Disney. They are going to partner with a university in Cebu.
Carmina:
Mm.
Patch:
They're going to try to elevate the fine arts program for those who specifically want to go into animation. Their goal is for these graduates to be industry-ready.
Carmina:
As we said in the beginning, there is so much demand for animation worldwide.
Patch:
While we are very happy, Filipino animators having work available to them in the Philippines, one of the articles I came across, they mentioned it's like a shoe factory. They only put together the product, but the shoe itself is not something that they own.
Carmina:
Mm-hmm <affirmative> .
Patch:
What the industry is trying to do is to concentrate more on original content. Globally, there's so much demand for unique stories and we have so much to offer as far as our Philippine folklore, origin tales, for example, Trese in Netflix here in the US.
Carmina:
Yeah, we talked about that in our very first episode.
Patch:
I was kind of disappointed to learn that it was produced by some Malaysian or Singaporean company.
Carmina:
Why?
Patch:
Yeah, I mean , of course I am not saying that necessarily a bad thing, right? Because the fact that these international corporations are interested in Filipino content is still a good thing, right?
Carmina:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>
Patch:
There's quite a few noteworthy animated films based on our folklore, et cetera . Some of them include Dayo sa Mundo ng Elementia featuring monsters from fables and monsters from our culture. And there's also M anang Biring.
Carmina:
So Manang Biring is a comedy drama again about a terminally ill old lady who has accepted that she was gonna die until she receives a letter from a daughter who's been living abroad and returning for the holidays. The way the movie was made is very, very unique, and we'll put a link in our show notes. It's basically based on the actors portrayed that makes them look like cartoons.
Patch:
Oh.
Carmina:
It was made using a technique called the roto-scoping technique, which is animating on top of live action footage.
Patch:
Okay .
Carmina:
And critics said it made the whole experience really more poignant than it would've been if it was just straight animation or straight live action.
Patch:
Okay. Speaking of that type of animation, that film was by Carl Joseph Papa . I came across another work that's more recent, it's called Iti Mapukpukaw, which is a full-length animated feature film.
Carmina:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative> .
Patch:
And it uses the same technique. The topics that this animator chooses to work with are often very controversial, especially for our culture, which is very conservative in the Philippines.
Carmina:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative> .
Patch:
But this particular film, it's so unique. I saw clips of it. So the main character does not have a mouth.
Carmina:
Ah.
Patch:
And the way he communicates, I believe is by writing. But there's so many back stories to why he doesn't have a mouth. And the issues incorporated in the storyline, I'm not going to spoil it for anyone, but talks about abuse. I don't know how to say it without spoiling <laugh> .
Carmina:
Okay. Don't spoil. 'cause I'm sure people are now gonna be curious. But what year was it created?
Patch:
I believe it was released this year. 2023. So do you remember this award-winning Filipino Dolly DeLeon?
Carmina:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative> .
Patch:
She is the mom in this feature film. I really wish that it would be available here because I'm curious and I'm very excited to watch this film.
Carmina:
Yeah, I really hope so. I'm gonna watch out for that too.
Patch:
Speaking of trailblazers, there's also another work Dayo ng Elementia, which is notable for it being the first Philippine animated film.
Carmina:
So just to interject, the English translation of what you just said is the Wanderer In The land of Elementia. So Dayo takes the honor of being one of the first, certainly not the only first, but one of the first feature animated films. And the storyline included a lot of mythological characters. The deeper meaning had to do with having courage to face his problems. So the main character Buboy, was introduced as someone who was being bullied by his classmates. And instead of fighting back, he just let himself be bullied. Again, not to spoil anything, there will be a certain point in his life that will force him to fight back. And a lot of Filipinos loved it because a lot of our pop culture was represented like the giant wooden spoon and forks displayed on the wall. <laugh> <laugh> or the Last Supper painting. I'm gonna stop there because uh , if I continue to gush , I'll definitely spoil it.
Patch:
There's also another work Metanoia , which takes the award for being the first animated film presented in 3D.
Carmina:
Mm.
Patch:
I guess this is another pioneering work. So it represents Filipino culture by highlighting traditional games played by kids in the Philippines. And I remember a previous episode that we did , uh, that featured the traditional games that we don't see anymore . Well certainly not , certainly not here where we are, but even in the Philippines, right?
Carmina:
Right.
Patch:
It also highlights the issue of children spending more time in the computers instead of playing outside and playing these traditional games. Our main character is a boy named Nico and he hides in his room and does what he's good at, which is playing a popular computer game, Metanoia. And that's where our adventure starts.
Carmina:
I think I couldn't help but notice that a lot of these things that we're mentioning were, you know, kind of older, right, and I'm really looking forward to newer offerings from Pinoy animators tackling very Pinoy themes.
Patch:
So I came across another interesting work. It's a romantic comedy. It's called Hayop Ka, The Nimfa Dimaano Stiry, which is one of the few, again, that is for the mature audience.
Carmina:
In, other words, rated R.
Patch:
<laugh> . Yes. The main character is a cat salesperson.
Carmina:
<laugh> . I saw a YouTube clip of this.
Patch:
So she gets into this romance with a wealthy dog named in Inigo <laugh> .
Carmina:
Yes <laugh> we should say that this pussycat
Patch:
<laugh>
Carmina:
Was portrayed very provocatively. It's so funny and cute.
Patch:
<laugh> And fittingly, the guys are dogs. <laugh>, but...
Carmina:
So there's basically a love triangle, right?
Patch:
Yes. It's very entertaining.
Carmina:
So Patch, there's this animation festival called Animahenasyon, which is the Philippines' Animation Festival. It's celebrating its 17th year, and they're calling for entries right now from all Filipino filmmakers until September 15th, 2023. It's an annual festival organized by the Animation Council of the Philippines, and it aims to encourage production of original content, recognize Filipino talents in the field of animation, and encourage creative excellence and competitiveness. We're gonna link in our show notes the description of this festival and the eligibility requirements, in case anybody wants to enter this.
Patch:
You sound very interested in it, Carmina, are you , are you thinking of maybe <laugh> perhaps turning perhaps our lives into <laugh> animation because in fact, it's very cartoonish <laugh> .
Carmina:
Well, the only figures I'm capable of drawing are stick ones. Oh. So not for me, but maybe someone might be inspired. <laugh> .
Patch:
For me, on a personal level, I'm very excited to come across all these works of animation. And it gives me much hope that not only in the animation industry, but even in just the creative industry in general, there is clamor for original content, not necessarily just the celebrity-oriented features that we were used to growing up. So there's much to look forward to in the Philippine animation industry.
Carmina:
And I'll be cheering them on from the sidelines because I certainly cannot contribute.
Patch:
<laugh> . Me neither.
Carmina:
And with that, that's our episode. We hope you join us on our next trip. O siya, siya.
Patch:
Ingat. Thanks for listening to FilTrip with Carmina and Patch. Support FilTrip through Patreon or PayPal. And follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever all podcasts are downloaded.
Carmina:
Thanks to Filtrip's sponsor Solepack, a functional shoe accessory bag. Visit thesolepack.com for more details.