Juan Padrón: Behind Elpidio’s back

Juan Padrón confesses that his only ‘failure’ in animation filmmaking was brought by Elpidio Valdés, his noteworthiest brainchild. A six-installment series called ‘Elpidio Valdés contra el Aguila y el León’ (Elpidio Valdés Against Eagle and Lion) that he shot in the mid 1990’s in coproduction with Telemadrid, was not as well received by Cuban viewers, he says, as that charismatic character’s previous adventures. For that one time, it didn’t work.

“In the movie I didn’t make Elpidio a ‘friend’ of Spain, but no sooner had I introduced a Spanish character than many thought I was being soft on the Spaniards. That time I had to tell stories that they don’t accept, like their losing the war in Cuba, and needed a Spaniard to say it,” he remembers.

“I also changed Elpidio’s design to make him more heroic. My story was based on historical facts such as the U.S. intervention in the island, when the Cuban flag was lowered and the U.S. flag was hoisted. And since I was being true to history, the Americans lowered our flag and Elpidio resisted, but ultimately he was forced to oblige, which he did. You can’t lower the flag on Elpidio. Cuban audiences couldn’t dig it; children were saying that Elpidio Valdés would have put up a fight.”

From that experience –that left him with bitter memories– Juan Padrón learned a lesson or two: “On one hand, you can’t easily change Elpidio. He’s a perfect mambí who doesn’t act like a real-life one,” he adds. “On the other hand, the audience calls the shots.”

Nonetheless, Elpidio Valdés’s saga is a well-made product. His story began a few years ago, when Padrón and his brother Ernesto (also an animator and cartoonist) were about ten years old and lived in a sugar mill town in Matanzas province, where their father worked.

“Ever since we were kids we wanted to tell stories, read a lot of comic books and tried to draw them by ourselves with scripts we invented. We also wrote scripts for 8-mm films we shot, like a story of a soldier who gets lost, and worked with other children who wore plastic helmets to act as little soldiers. We always felt that restless vocation for telling stories and make drawings.

“Later on we bought some very cheap how-to books that we used to learn to draw horses, flowers, etc., and every time we managed to save a little amount of money we would buy one of those books and started to do the exercises in them. We also learned from Emilio Freixas, a Spanish cartoonist who had made a number of books on drawing and comic strips.”

Five or six years later, Padrón began to ‘sneak’ in the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) helped by his cousin Jorge Pucheux, then assistant cameraman.

“I used to come to Havana and sneak in the animation studios to watch the professionals at work. Thus I learned to use India ink and other things by paying attention to their ways and then doing my own work.”

During those days he began to draw caricatures and send them to magazines Bohemia and Mella. It was precisely at Bohemia’s premises where some caricaturists first noticed young Padrón’s talent.

“One of Mella magazine’s sections was called ‘El Hueco’ (The hole), the last one in the colored edition, made by Virgilio Martínez, Newton Estapé and Silvio Rodríguez. My shift came every five weeks or so, but then Silvio and Newton quit and Virgilio gave me the weekly page. I was 16 then, and making so many funny jokes per week, drawing them down and having them ready for print was brutal training, albeit the best I’ve ever had, so much so that I improved my designs and got quicker at coming up with jokes.

“Around those days I had another job as animation assistant for ICRT (Cuban Radio and Television Institute)’s Film Production Division, where I had as a teacher a Catalonian cartoonist named Juan José López (quite famous in Spain nowadays) who taught me everything I could possibly learn. He was like a tutor to me. I would show him my every sketch to have his opinion and guidance. I learned so much from him.

“Australian animator, illustrator and scriptwriter Harry Reade, who lived here for many years, was also my teacher. He made the first Cuban animated movie to get a prize (‘La Cosa’). From him I learned many things about scriptwriting, telling a story, using the proper narrative effects in a given case… I gained experience too with Tulio Raggi, an excellent cartoonist and animated film director, who taught me to solve drawing problems. I always tried to stick around those I looked up to, people whose styles and techniques I liked, and kept learning from them.

Being drafted for military service was equally productive, since he was assigned to the Armed Forces’ Film Division and learned to use 35-mm animation cameras. So by the end of his term Padrón already had several tools (scriptwriting, drawing, animation filmmaking), which would make of him one of Cuba’s most important cartoonists.

In the 1970’s he complemented his theoretical qualifications by studying in the University, where he majored in Art History. By then he cooperated with ICAIC and therefore had that opportunity.

Those years signaled the beginning of his fascinating relation with that amusing, very criollo guy regarded today by many as his best creation.

How did Elpidio Valdés come about?

“Do you remember that around those years we saw in Cuba over 70 samurai films? I made a comic book for Pionero magazine about a samurai called Kashibashi and a 19^th –century Cuban that I said was a mambí. For his name I chose Elpidio Valdés to make him similar to Cecilia Valdés, and drew him right off, without any sketch. What came up was a cartoon with hair like this and a little moustache, and then I made a script. Kashibashi had the leading role, but there was this guy (Elpidio), and when I found out that whatever he said, or rather, that whatever I thought he said and did made him so much funnier than the Japanese, I reversed every sketch I had, twelve pages in all, and started the story over with Elpidio in the leading role.”

You departed from the script….

“Yes, he just came out of the blue… You see, in the beginning this character was always based in other countries, never in Cuba, because at that time I barely had any information about war in Cuba, so I searched and shortly after started the comic book about Elpidio Valdés in Cuba.

Have you always tried to use humor as a function of education?

“Quite a struggle that was, trying to convince people that cartoons were not only for children. I’ve always had a liking for documenting my work. If I’m making a vampire feature set in the 1930’s I look for vintage journals and photographs to see what cars, clothes, etc. were like. If I’m making one about a past epoch, I’d like it to be true to life. You even get to stumble upon attractive things that prove useful to entertain people, and that makes your findings all the more enjoyable.

“When I was shooting Elpidio Valdés I didn’t know what Spanish military uniforms looked like. For six years I visited museums to take photographs of rifles and read Spanish Army manuals. I would find an heliograph, for example, and tried to learn how it worked, and so it happened with the leather cannon, and subjects for Elpidio Valdés films would come out of those findings, so I could teach children a couple of things unknown to me until then. They would have a good time and learn something in the process.

“There were other films I made in those years out of sheer resolution, such as one about the origins of bicycles, aerodynamics, that kind of stuff. But at the same time I would do things for adults: stories of executioners, vampires… Some were wondering how I could make a black-humor cartoon followed by another for pioneer students. Just an ability I had.

“As to humor, I see it as a sort of training process. It’s about imagination: you think of a situation and find a joke for it. It’s a mystery of the mind. When you have a character the whole thing is much easier, because I say: If I put Elpidio in an elevator that will break down, everybody knows he’ll go for the cables to climb his way out, and a funny situation will spring out. ‘Vampiros en La Habana’ (see below) was a several months-long study process of scriptwriting and design before it was funny. Argentinian cartoonist Quino said once that it’s like being seated with a sheet-card before you and an empty mind, and suddenly a ghost appears and whispers an idea in your ear. It’s a mystery to me, like making music. I have many ideas jotted down in little pieces of paper, a sort of list of ideas, and sometimes I look at it for months, even years on end, and nothing happens, and all of a sudden an idea pops out of thin air and I’ve got my comic book.”

Elpidio is his best-known cartoon character, but Juan Padrón has created many others similarly welcomed by children and adults alike.

“The ‘Filminutos’ were born when I thought of making a marketable kind of no-words, no-subtitles film. These movies for children attracted children’s book writers, so I wanted to get the caricaturists involved, which we did twice with those from DEDETE*, but before long they changed their mind (lots of pain and little gain). Thus the initial impetus brought about by ‘Filminutos’ gradually faded until it wound up a yearly series made by ICAIC’s animators.

‘Filminutos’ are part of Cuban cinema’s exclusive package of worldwide sought-after products. “They were made”, Padrón points out, “in seven-part jokes that foreign TV stations buy on a one-by-one basis. We would be talking about something else had ‘Filminutos’’s uniqueness and wittiness failed to convince, by a mere glance, other ICAIC’s animators, the Board of Directors and, finally, the Cuban people as a whole.”

Padrón reminisces about Cuban animation’s first steps and how it gradually took in along its way the changes that have laid the groundwork for so many successful products made in the last few decades.

“We used to make very instructive materials on coffee-growing, air-raid cover, and so forth. Then in the 1970’s they decided to provide the Animation Division with as much color film as we wanted. We had it developed in Spain or Czechoslovakia. Told to work for children, we increasingly leaned toward the pioneer students organization. It was a good thing, because we brought them scripts that they tore apart. They don’t like stories about little ants and silly things like that. I always tell an anecdote about Onelio Jorge Cardoso, who did just that with some children and when he finished a little girl told him, ‘What an asshole you are!’.

“Officially speaking, everything we did was oriented to children. You could not come up with a script for a vampire movie. I took to the studio three ‘Filminutos’ that I had made on my own, and they said, ‘Hey, that’s so cool, let’s hope for a go-ahead!’, so we organized a screening for ICAIC Board members, who watched with a deadpan and then asked, ‘How many of these are you planning to make per year?’ We replied, ‘Just one’; and they went, ‘No way, you have to make 20 of them!’. They had second thoughts as soon as they saw it was engaging and green-lighted the making of materials for youths and adults over a children-only strategy.”

In the mid 1980’s Padrón stirred up audiences with one of the funniest movies in Cuban cinema’s history: ‘Vampiros en La Habana’, a cult film in some parts of the world. Almost two decades later the vampires return with a rather different approach in the sequel ‘Más Vampiros en La Habana’.

What do you expect from ‘Más Vampiros…’? Why so much time between one and the other?

“Well, I had run out of ideas to follow in the vampire subject. Besides, for some time (6 years) ICAIC gave up on animated films until they realized that a full-length film is a program within itself that keeps people working for years, the type of project that allows animators and background colorists to show off. But not one good idea crossed my mind and I was afraid of repeating myself. People usually say a sequel is just more of the same and often compare it with the first part. I believe parts one and two are quite different: the former was a localist sitcom, the latter an adventure film.

“During post-production,” Padrón says, “I remember the Spanish producers complained about words they didn’t understand, you know, Cuban slang expressions, but step by step they got convinced thanks to the technicians’ own experience that audiences catch the drift. For instance, they don’t know the meaning of ‘sió!’… but they get it means ‘shut up!’ when the guy covers his mouth with his hand to say it.”

There’s a period in Padrón’s life that can’t be overlooked in this interview. His family name is ‘suspiciously’ frequent in ICAIC. Both his son Ian and his brother Ernesto are devoted creators: the former makes documentary films and the latter is an animator. As a child, Ian always labeled Ernesto as a better cartoonist than his father Juan. (Ernesto assures he still is).

“I’m glad Ian chose filmmaking to express himself, because when he was a little boy I didn’t know whether he would grow to become a fireman or a scientist, it was so maddening! I would have liked to see my children drawing. I used to sit with them to do it, but they never fell for it. Now, Ian did show as a kid that he had a liking for telling stories. He would see me with a comic strip before me and ask what I was doing. ‘Go away,’ I’d say. I have to think of a script for Elpidio Valdés.’ And he’d go, ‘Ha! Piece of cake!’, and with that he would sit anywhere, write a script in a notebook and bring it to me. Very often his little stories gave me a clue for my own strip. In those cases I would write on a corner of the page: ‘Ian’s idea’. Once published, he would show it to all his friends and brag, ‘Look, I write the scripts for Elpidio Valdés!’.

“On one occasion we had a screening of an Elpidio Valdés film for ICAIC Board members, and I brought Ian along. He kept saying throughout, ‘You’ll see what happens now!…’ Then-ICAIC President Julio García Espinosa asked him, ‘But do you know the whole film off by heart?’ And Ian replied, ‘Sure, I’m Elpidio’s scriptwriter!’ That’s what he thought himself to be, and how Elpidio Valdés is likely to have contributed to Ian’s fondness for cinema.”

Padrón’s daughter Silvia prefers Psychology. I ask him about her name, which happens to be as well the second name of Elpidio Valdés’s female counterpart (María Silvia, the heroine). “All women in my family are named Silvia: my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and my ant.”

Talking about influences, he admits that in addition to some individualities he owes to Warner Brothers’ cartoons, as well as to “Czech marionettes we used to see in past decades.”

Elpidio Valdés is once again frolicking in Juan Padrón’s latest plans. “We are making 5 seven-minute short films and working on a new Elpidio feature; pre-animation is scheduled for 2004, but the script should be ready by next December.”

He is quick to describe his mambí character’s conception for this new batch of movies.

“We keep him alive because I’m reconstructing the Independence War. I’ve been advised to take him out and continue his saga with Elpidio’s son or grandson, but I don’t like that idea. There’s still many things to tell about those times.

“When the first films were released I was surprised to see children stand in line in the mornings and adults in the evenings, and realized many people liked them. I used to pay a great deal of attention not to lose that. In meetings with pioneer students I would ask them, ‘What is María Silvia like?’ The girls would say: ‘She’s got long hair,” and so on, and then the boys would go, ‘No, don’t put a woman there, women are always falling down and have to be rescued!’, to the girls’ outcries. At any rate, María Silvia is a woman who fights alongside Elpidio, without ever falling down nor having to be saved as we see in other movies, and I neglected that in this feature (‘Elpidio Valdés contra el Aguila y el León’), thinking that I could do whatever I wanted with Elpidio and get away with it, forgetting that people make you pay for your acts.”

His passion for his personal projects matches his excitement about the state-of-the-art equipment recently installed in the Cuban Film Institute’s new Animation Studios, a very special situation according to Padrón.

“We’re talking here about 500 minutes worth of cartoons per year, but mind me, it’s like talking of a six-foot-tall, 200-pound person when we’re still in the baby stage. We’re working in the hope of forming new directors and qualifying new animators. We want a school to teach animation and related techniques: composition, background coloring, technology.

“We’ve been delivered a tool. It’s like making sculptures with a hammer and a chisel and then getting a little pneumatic drill. We’ve got to train more directors. There are many newcomers who draw very well, but some don’t want to direct. I developed a plan based on how the Japanese learned, as mentioned in Kurosawa’s biography: there was a teacher and a group of trainees whom the former helped until they could film by themselves. We have a course on scriptwriting every student has to attend; those who don’t have to leave the group and return at a later stage. Our purpose is to have finished scripts that any author interested in directing can use until his/her film’s completion. It’s not a workshop of ideas, but of movies, which will allow us to define who can direct and who will take care of other animation areas. It’s like searching a river for gold, picking out the pebbles until you find a nugget.

“We’re old,” he adds, “and can only make so many more movies. This new course is made for the young. Then I will come in my wheelchair to see the future presentations they invite me to. That’s how I learned, by sticking with those who knew the trade. So let the new arrivals take the opportunity, ask all the questions, and put specific projects into practice.”

Our dialogue comes to an end, and the photographer seizes the moment to attempt at a few close-ups. Juan Padrón seems to shake off certain attitude which made us think of him as a shy man to give us warning that he has a black eye. “Don’t worry, the designer will see to that,” says the photographer. “Fine, just don’t paint it blue!,” Padrón demands with a smile.

---ooOoo---