But the argument that the ads couldn’t have been made in Australia doesn’t stack up for people who work in the industry locally.
One animator who spoke anonymously out of fear that being identified would see him blackballed by advertising agencies said: “There’s not a lot of stop-motion craft-based work being written for advertising, so when you see something like this, you go, ‘I wish I could have worked on that’.”
“There’s definitely enough creative animators and stop-motion artists in Australia who would be able to create something very similar to that,” says Darren Bell, lecturer in animation at the Victorian College of the Arts. “We definitely have a talent pool here that could match what was done in this campaign.”
“The standard of work and talent available here is more than capable of achieving that sort of thing,” concurs Glen Hunwick, a veteran animator whose Glen Art Studio produced ads for many years. “There’s fantastic people here.”
For proof of that, look no further than Adam Elliot, the writer-director of Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet. From his studio in Melbourne, he recently completed his second feature, Memoirs of a Snail. Last week, it was awarded the top prize at the prestigious Annecy Animation Festival in France.
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“The animation industry here is not what it is in Europe,” he says, “but we do have, and have had, a long history of making really high-end TV commercials.”
Elliot approves of the Telstra ads – “I really like what they’ve done, and congratulations to them for doing this campaign. It looks great” – but believes there’s nothing in it that would put it beyond the cost or capability of local animators.
“Everyone we employed on my film are all local, very skilled, and do ads – and they’re all desperate for work. So it is a shame,” he says.
By the same token, he concedes that what is missing here, in contrast to Europe, is an industry that is centralised, organised, and readily tapped when a big project comes along.
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“I certainly don’t blame Telstra for what they’ve done. They just wanted a look, and stop-motion is very much going through a golden era because of Guillermo Del Toro (Pinocchio) and Wes Anderson and Tim Burton.”
In Elliot’s view, it’s not that we don’t have the talent, it’s that keeping the talent in the industry, and in the country, is tricky because there’s just not enough work of precisely this sort.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and Twitter at @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
