RIGA - At 41, Signe Baumane seems comfortable with the fact that she doesn't make much money. She has spent the past 15 years producing a handful of short animated films in Riga and New York, getting by with commissions and grants whenever she can and living as modest a lifestyle as possible. "If you saw where I sleep here in Riga" - in the astrology school that her sister runs, she says - "you'd feel really bad for me."
We're sitting in the Rija Film Studio, which is best known for its work on "The Triplets of Belleville" (2003), but also has produced some of her best work. The computers in the office all look a little worn and outdated, but the place is filled with brilliant draftsmen and women. There are scattered drawings of one of the studio's other prize artists, mostly repeats of a fox-like character in different poses.
For a decade now, she has lived amid such conditions, traveling back and forth between New York, which she loves, and Riga, which she tolerates. But in doing the kind of work that doesn't pay well anywhere, Baumane has managed to put together a series of films that are alternately absurd, vicious, hilarious and sad.
"Tiny Shoes" (1993) is a fairytale about a young girl who slays a dragon in order to obtain shoes so a prince will love her. The cartoon involves an acorn tree growing out of a dragon and a bizarre Freudian connection with the girl's father. It was inspired by an unhappy marriage.
"Dentist" (2005), which has earned her a collection of audience awards at international film festivals this past year, verges between the sadistic and, at one point, the homoerotic.
Baumane summarizes her current project "Veterinarian":
"It is about a veterinarian who fails to save an animal. He gets very sad and depressed but then he goes to sleep. In his dream, all the animals he has saved, along with the animal he didn't save, join together and hold hands. And in this he finds forgiveness and love."
Is this one of her somber films?
"All my films are somber."
If the plotlines sound haphazard and indistinct, it's reflected in the way Baumane speaks about her work and herself. A documentary that ran on Latvian television presented her as melancholic, a woman still nursing the scars of a traumatic marriage. But, in person, she has an infectious manic quality. She talks about everything she does with a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness logic.
Birth, etc…
Baumane was born in a small town on the border with Lithuania and spent a good part of her childhood on the move, following the whims of her parents. One day, her father was in the bathroom when he read an advertisement in a newspaper he intended to use for toilet paper. Irrigation engineers were wanted on Russia's Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Japan. The family went.
They returned after three years, during which Baumane learned to speak Latvian with a firm Russian accent, which horrified her parents. (The accent is gone now.) She was a bookish girl, but rarely bothered with children's literature. She remembers reading Victor Hugo when she was eight, which is also about the time she tried her hand at writing. The Czech author Jaroslav Hasek's comic novel "The Good Soldier Svejk" was a favorite.
She spent five years studying philosophy at Moscow University, but somehow, after all that, she realized she wasn't up for a life of academia.
She married young to an alcoholic. "Your 20s are for wasting time," she says. "I wasted them in a wrong relationship." The marriage produced one son, now 19, who in an act of rebellion decided that he never wanted to be an artist. He wanted to do something to make money.
In 1991, as everyone's currency was on the verge of becoming completely useless amid the end of Soviet rule, Baumane's father had to get rid of his stash of cash. All the gold had been bought up, so he decided to go ahead and buy a satellite dish.
At the time, she spoke no English, but she fell in love with "The Simpsons," one of the most literate cartoons ever made. "When you can't speak the language you study all the details more closely." The look of the show impressed her and helped her craft the odd movements of her second film, "Tiny Shoes." Like the Simpsons, the characters in that film all have yellow skin.
Baumane was also fascinated by Bill Plympton's famous ads for MTV. She met him a few years later in 1995, when she first got to New York. At that time, she was trying to scrape by selling drawings on the street, not earning enough to pay for a subway token. But she managed to find the famous maverick animator and get a job.
Ten years on, moving between two continents, she seems to have become more assured in her craft and more conscious of the kind of life she wants to live. In Latvia, "everyone is out for himself." She likes the people she works with at Rija, but complains that the culture of filmmaking here is more of a job. "Everyone comes in and works from nine to nine and then goes home to their family."
"I feel so isolated [in Riga]," Baumane says. "There's no professional playground."
In New York, she is surrounded by a culture of other animators. Everyone is helping each other out. She goes from one party and festival to the next. "It's a big extended family. You are part of something greater than yourself." She has better accommodation there, sharing a small loft in lower Manhattan's Financial District.
At the moment, Baumane is applying for American citizenship. When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, she had a hard time sleeping for a week. All her liberal American friends were talking about leaving the country. But she realized her tears were a sign of patriotism for her newfound home - sadness for the fact that it had just re-elected a moron - which seems to have nurtured her hippie instincts better than anywhere else.
The craft
Sitting in front of a computer in which the sketches for her new film are being mounted, Baumane zeroes in on one frame in which a heavy line has created an unwanted shadow. These are the tedious details of her work, which she handles enthusiastically.
Does she feel closer to her work when it's in sketch form than when she sees the fully realized finished product with colors?
"When we were making 'Tiny Shoes,' everyone loved the sketch scenes. We were all laughing hysterically. And then when we put in the colors, it seemed to have lost something. I was so depressed. After a couple of months though, I realized it was still good." Perhaps cartoons are just more personal in their earliest roughest incarnations.
Were the simple dress of the characters in her cartoons a sign of a Russian influence?
"No, I just don't draw clothes very well."
Two months ago, Baumane started taking drawing lessons for the first time in her life. "All my friends told me not to do so. They said I had such a nice style and that I would ruin it if I took lessons." Still, she wants her characters to move better, to be a little more graceful.
Baumane doesn't seem conscious of any direct influences.
"It's one of my great disappointments that I am not cultured." Though she talks about admiring Kurt Vonnegut and Jorge Luis Borges, to whom her work seems to have some obvious similarities, she says she is not influenced by anything. Everything is just the product of her own strange mind. She can't be like "Quentin Tarantino, you know, with all of his references."
"When I was growing up I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't have a command of Russian and I couldn't write well in Latvian. Animation is how I write."
