Vietnamese cartoon makers work for Hollywood

VietNamNet Bridge – While Vietnam’s animated film industry is at its infancy, many Vietnamese people are working for European and American animated film companies.

A scene from "Igor", which had the participation of Vietnamese painters.

As one of the first cartoon painters trained in HCM City after the country’s unification in 1975, Mr. Ton That Thac is now 51 years old. Thac studied 2D cartoon techniques in France.

“In my age, animated films were produced on old-fashioned computers of the first generation, with the Unix operating system and the C programming language,” Thac recalled.

Thac worked for several years in Japan and the Philippines as a cartoon painter before foreign-invested small-sized cartoon studios were set up in HCM City, to exploit the low-cost, hard-working and intelligent laborforce here.

Pixi Box was among the first cartoon studio of this kind in HCM City. It was established by a French – Jacques Peyrache – in 1994. The studio was based in a small office in HCM City’s hub. It recruited several tens of Vietnamese painters, who worked under the supervision of foreign experts.

Pixi Box is a link in a chain of cartoon studios that involve in the process to produce animated films for Europe and Hollywood.

Thanks to Pixi Box, Thac and many Vietnamese painters who studied cartoon making techniques could return home to work.

Vietnamese technicians also contributed to this film.

This was also the time when cartoon studios in the world began to change 2D to 3D technique. Vietnamese staff of Pixi Box were the first Vietnamese who were trained with the 3D technique.

Foreign-invested cartoon studios like Pixi Pox, Hahn Film, Spart* and Virtuos-Spart* have helped train many Vietnamese technicians and painters who can participate in various stage of animation producing process.

Nobody knows that animated films like “Igor”, “Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas” and “Fairy Tale Fights” have the contribution of Vietnamese painters because they are distributed under the name European or Hollywood producers.

There is a big group of Vietnamese-origin technicians working for cartoon studios in Hollywood. The audience can read Vietnamese names like Huy Nguyen, Quan Tran, John Truong and Dennis Duong in the introduction of the most famous animated films like “Madagascar”, “Ice Age” or “Brave.”

Foreign-invested cartoon studios in HCM City are dependent on their overseas parent firm. There was an event in late 2011 that the domestic film industry neglected: Virtuos Group, a big provider of digital entertainment software products in the world, bought Sparx* cartoon studio in HCM City and re-named it into Virtuos-Sparx.*

Virtuos-Sparx* is one of Virtuos Group’s cartoon studios in Shanghai, Chengdu in China, Paris and Tokyo. This studio employs around 100 Vietnamese.

The number of well-trained cartoon makers in Vietnam is not low but who can group them up to build Vietnam’s cartoon industry?

Khai Tri