We're not making a movie; we're building an industry here, says Jorge Estrada Mora, producer of the Argentine animated 3D film Metegol (Foosball, 2013). He has reason to think so. Argentina's animation history reaches as far back as the very first animated film ever, El apostol (The Apostle, 1917), but 3D animation is another matter altogether and it was director Juan Jos Campanella's sworn purpose to make such a movie indistinguishable from those spawned by Pixar and DreamWorks on a yearly basis.
He's succeeded. It cost $22 million dollars, which by his own admission at a press conference in July the film wouldn't recoup even if all 40 million Argentines went to see it twice , but it still manages to be a humbling lesson to Pixar: the movie cost $10 million dollars less than Pixar's cheapest movie, and ten times less than its most expensive movie of a whopping $200 million budget. And yet it looks virtually indistinguishable from your average Pixar flick. What gives?
Director Juan Jos Campanella began work on Metegol as early as pre-production of his earlier movie, El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, 2009). He hired El secreto's novelist and screenwriter Eduardo Sacheri to work on the Metegol screenplay and juice up the football angle, since by Campanella's own admission he himself knows squat about football , and then went on a quest of sorts to put up an internationally-mixed team of lead animators (paired with hundreds of younger, lesser, cheaper talents) while sparing as many studio execs as he could. I always ask what the executives bring to the table, Campanella said. Because in my experience it's never been anything good .
The result was a gorgeous film that broke Argentina's best opening week record with 700,000 spectators, and halfway through its 16th week at the theaters, it's managed to rake over 2 million viewers, ranking it high in Argentina's Top 5 of historically most-seen films. Although its $78 million gross is impressive and more than doubles Campanella's El secreto's gross, it has a long way to go before it starts turning a profit overseas (international releases are due next month as distributed by Universal Pictures).
It goes to show that, much like Metegol's lesson on inclusive yet wise team-building, you can accomplish pretty much anything in the long run. Also, mirroring the movie's plot about underdog passion, Campanella's production manages to soar all the way up into the big leagues on a comparatively frugal budget. If the movie manages to be as successful abroad as it was locally, the big animation studios will have a thing or two to reconsider about their bloated films.
Link to New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/10/metegol-argentine-animated-film-juan-jose-campanella-hollywood.html
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We're not making a movie; we're building an industry here, says Jorge Estrada Mora, producer of the Argentine animated 3D film Metegol (Foosball, 2013). He has reason to think so. Argentina's animation history reaches as far back as the very first animated film ever, El apostol (The Apostle, 1917), but 3D animation is another matter altogether and it was director Juan Jos Campanella's sworn purpose to make such a movie indistinguishable from those spawned by Pixar and DreamWorks on a yearly basis.
