Click. The video screen goes black. Then we find ourselves in the middle of a classroom where a bunch of all-American kids are learning French. Someone points to a drawing of a poodle on the blackboard, beside which are written the words “Le chien.” Poof, the poodle jumps off the blackboard and is transformed into a gray cartoon poodle with a bright pink bow and a big red tongue lolling out of her mouth. The kids follow behind the poodle.
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And wham! We’re in the middle of the Champs-Elysees and the kids are following the poodle underneath the Arc de Triomphe, past the Eiffel Tower and into the cathedral of Notre-Dame, where a Jimmy Durante-nosed hunchback clad in drab olive is swinging back and forth on a rope. A girl in red grabs the rope and zoom, at the end of the rope is a big helium balloon. And now the kids are flying above Notre-Dame, the poodle clinging to the girl’s foot. But Oh no, the ruckus wakes some demonish gargoyles who take out their peashooters and kerpow, they pop the balloons. Slam! The kids fall to the ground on the stage of the Moulin Rouge and start high kicking with cancan girls in foofy skirts. And then, home at last, we’re back in the classroom and the poodle is just a chalk drawing on the blackboard. It sticks out its tongue and slurrp, licks the girl at the front of the classroom. Yeccchhhh!
“We had worked at places with names like the American Film Group,” Kendall recalls. “We decided, ‘OK, we need something fun.’ We went through a thesaurus and picked out several funny sounding words. We said, ‘Calabash! Yeah! Calabash!’”
They work out of Tree Studios on Ohio Street, and although they’re usually working under very tight deadlines, the place always seems mellow and relaxed. The stereo blasts out anything from Moody Blues to Monty Python. The bookcases are filled with the works of Picasso, Chagall, Disney, and Seuss. And the workers are an incredibly youthful bunch–film students, artists just out of college, and others who before arriving here had never animated in their lives. Few of them escape unscathed. “Once you’ve been animating awhile, it begins to take over your vision,” says Wayne Brejcha, one of many free-lance animators who works here. “You look at a movement in real life–like the way Jennifer’s elbow is moving right now–and you wonder how many drawings it would take you to make it.”
