Trivia / Marcell Jankovics

• Approval of God: Jankovics has spoken approvingly of fanvids that sync up his films with music, even if he doesn't personally care for the songs or their genres. He believes this shows his works have a wide appeal.
• Box Office Bomb: When Son of the White Horse brought in only half of the expected viewers, Jankovics's directorial career took something of a hit as Pannonia Film Studio began concentrating on more marketable, general-appeal cartoons.
• Creator Backlash: He generally has a critical view of his projects and is always ready to point out their flaws, as well as offer an explanation for them.
  • He wasn't too happy with his breakout series Gustavus, as the shorts' Dark Humor targeted everyday people rather than those in power. His proposal to make Gustav a high-ranking boss for one short was even shot down. He got even more disenchanted from the series when one of his acquaintances called it dumb nonsense, and began looking into making more serious and artistic stuff from then on.
  • Of Johnny Corncob, his first theatrical feature, Jankovics admitted he should have downplayed the surreal fairy tail elements in the plot's somewhat more realistic first half, instead of carrying the same dreamlike styling through the entire film. He also confessed to not putting enough research into the movie's folk symbolism, though he happily noted that he accidentally got some of the symbols right.
  • Initially he outright claimed to dislike watching Son of the White Horse because of its arduous production and since the end product was far too removed from his original plans. Given the chance, he'd scrap and redo one third of the entire thing. Still, he always thought the film was good and these days he considers it the high point of all his films.
  • Unsurprisingly, since the completed film has nothing to do with the early proposal he had signed on for, he hates The Emperor's New Groove. Originally called Kingdom of the Sun, the film was conceived as a serious mythological drama along the lines of Johnny Corncob, until Disney rebooted the project from the ground up and made it into, in his words, "a horrible Las Vegas comedy show".
  • Jankovics was generally relieved The Tragedy of Man got made at all, but he reckons that the first scene to be completed, in which the Biblical Adam rejects transhumanism and space travel (a Take That! against the Star Wars franchise Jankovics has always openly hated), seems antiquated in retrospect, as modern sci-fi has long outgrown the style of clunky, old-school space craft design seen therein.
• Creator Breakdown: Most of his films put him on the verge of one. Johnny Corncob's production was so tiresome that Jankovics fueled his pent-up frustration into animating (and performing the painful grunts for) his Oscar-nominated short Sisyphus. Later, he was glad just to be done with Son of the White Mare and immediately shifted attention to some other work to just to keep his sanity. That other work ended up taking up over a third of his life, and he was relieved he got to see it through to the end.
• Executive Meddling: Hit practically all his shows and movies, but Son of the White Mare suffered the most. Jankovics aimed to make a film that presents the "essence" of every folk and fairy tale and showcases the circularity of time. Unfortunately, Hungary's Communist regime thought this went against Marxist ideology, forcing him to rethink the project from scratch. His original message was preserved in a more subdued form, but this is one idea he couldn't fully explore.
• Saved from Development Hell: Spent 28 years toiling away on The Tragedy of Man bit by bit, six of which was actually spent working on it, with the rest going into collecting funds and promotion. The film, which went into pre-production in the early '80s (as a different project, no less), hit screens in 2011. In 2015, he also managed to salvage the opening scene of a never fully realized cartoon retelling of The Bible, which was incidentally the project that had evolved into Tragedy.
• Troubled Production: One of his career's constants. Generally, most directors doing big productions at Pannonia Film Studio had to put up with bad working conditions. Supplies, technical equipment and mere space were scarce or of low quality, concept art and painted animation cels literally littered the floor as there was no way to archive them. Very, very few pieces of original production art survived as a result.
  • Jankovics basing his absurdist short Sisyphus on Johnny Corncob's production says everything about how he had felt about it.
  • Son of the White Mare, for starters, is not the film Jankovics wanted to make, it was the only one his bosses let him do when his original proposal was deemed anti-Marxist. Years went by for research and numerous script treatments, until the director almost forgot his goal. Work was done in a crummy shack-like construction, with bad materials that rendered whole scenes unusable, and under-talented animators, who at one point staged a protest for a pay-raise due to the film's overwhelming artistic demands. One of them genuinely cried under the work stress, so the director and other staff members had to jump in to animate. The crew even had to apply for extra jobs to buy more animation tools that the studio couldn't afford.
  • The Tragedy of Man went south straight from the get-go. Originally an in depth Bible adaptation to be co-produced by a North American partner in the early '80s, the financiers stepped down after years of pre-production. Jankovics reconfigured the project into a Hungarian literary adaptation of a story long considered neigh un-adaptable. Communism and Hungary's traditional studio system collapsed right as animation was about to get started, leaving Jankovics with no staff or funding. The film's scenes were created out of order, with years passing between each as he desperately tried to get money and animators. At one point, even The BBC rejected him, arguing his movie was "too Hungarian" despite featuring no scenes set in Hungary. The director made an entirely new film in the meantime (Song of the Miraculous Hind), went back to do some work on the aborted Bible series, and even had a brief and unfruitful stint at Disney, until General Motors licensing his Sisyphus short for their 2008 Super Bowl commercial finally got him in the clear money-wise. After 26 years, the movie was complete at last, but the voice work begged for a redo, which prolonged production for another two years. The film's message about humanity's struggle over the ages is just as much a reflection on his own career.
  • The aforementioned Bible animated film from the '80s never saw the light of day, but he did cobble together a sort of test scene and release it in 2015. He claims the 26 minute episode was finished "relatively fast", which in Jankovics's timescale means eight years.
• What Could Have Been: As one of his oft-repeated quotes go, "if he had made all which he didn't make, he couldn't have made all which he did make". Jankovics argues he would have needed two lifetimes to realize his abandoned ambitions.
  • His unproduced '80s Bible film. After having spent years writing scripts and devising thousands of character designs and scene layouts, the project's co-backer disappeared. All that's left of it is an elusive 26 minute "pilot" called Genesis or Creation (not to be confused with the Genesis scene from The Tragedy of Man), released as a pack-in bonus DVD in Jankovics's self-illustrated Bible book and never officially released anywhere else apart from festival screenings. The book itself, which adapts the Bible all the way up to the Books of Kings, was made using Jankovics's old layouts, but plans for a continuation were shut down due his other works.
  • Son of the White Mare was meant to be a retelling of every classic folk tale trope, carrying a message of history's and culture's repetition, under the title A tetejetlen fa ("The Tree Without a Top"). The finished film's 12-headed dragon was also meant to be a walking criticism of modern urbanization, but Communist censors demanded such themes be toned down, thus the creature appears as a mix between a living city and a digital computer entity.
  • He was once offered a position in the communist party, which might have given him more freedom over his own art and more leverage against censors. Jankovics declined the offer, in part because the state's politics went straight against his own Christian, right-leaning ideology.
  • The Air India commercial, the work that introduced Jankovics's trademark "metaphorical metamorphosis" animation style, was originally to be directed by fellow avant-garde animator György Kovásznai. When he turned the offer down, Jankovics stepped in and the rest is history.
  • Johnny Corncob's director was chosen via a studio-contest in which he had teamed up with two other directors who both happened to share his basic ideas. Though they won together, the other two decided to step back immediately, allowing Jankovics greater freedom to expand his style and make the film his way.