Co Hoedeman, the Canadian animator and director best known for winning an Oscar for best animated short in 1977, has died. He was 84.
Hoedeman died Monday in Montreal, the National Film Board of Canada, for whom he directed 27 films during his career, said. No cause of death was specified.
“Co Hoedeman was a master animator whose long career at the NFB was distinguished by innovative filmmaking and powerful humanitarian themes,” Suzanne Guèvremont, government film commissioner and NFB chairperson, said in a statement. “He cared deeply for the well-being of children and was also a fierce defender of the importance of public filmmaking. The NFB and the Canadian animation community have lost a dear friend and colleague. Fortunately for us, we have his legacy of beloved works, which embody so much of his unique spirit.”
A master of stop-motion animation, Hoedeman earned his Academy Award statuette for Le Chateau de Sable (The Sand Castle), a 13-minute puppet animation short for the NFB. The film features a sandman and the creatures he sculpted out of sand. The creations then build a castle and cheer the completion of their new home, only to be interrupted by an uninvited guest.
Born in Amsterdam on Aug. 1, 1940, Hoedeman as a child enjoyed using his hands to make puppets, kites and other figures. In his 2021 biography, Frame by Frame: An Animator’s Journey, he wrote: “At a time when there was no television and little access to any kind of entertainment, puppet shows were the most brilliant experience imaginable. Puppet theatre and puppet animation have a lot in common. The animator and his team, just like the puppet master in a puppet show, are in control of everything: the storyline, the movements, the sets, the puppets, the animation and the emotions of the audience.”
Hoedeman started his career working in TV commercial production in Holland. But after seeing the films of NFB pioneer Norman McLaren at an animation festival, he came to Montreal in 1965 with not much more than a film reel in hand to possibly work for Canada’s publicly funded film producer in its animation unit.
“I fell in love with [NFB films]. I was fascinated by the making of experimental films. We decided to emigrate to Canada,” Hoedeman recalled in the 2013 short documentary Making Movie History: Co Hoedeman. In the film, he recalled not being especially fazed by the Oscar nomination for The Sand Castle: “So what? Perhaps it’s my Dutch character, being overly pragmatic, perhaps. I don’t know.”
His reticence extended to the Oscars when Hoedeman thought another nominated NFB film in that year’s competition, Ishu Patel’s Bead Game, had been announced as the winner. “So I got up to congratulate him. But no, no, no. It wasn’t him. It was me!” Hoedeman recalled of that dramatic moment he became an Oscar winner.
After directing his early films with the NFB, well before the age of computer-generated animation, including his award-winning Oddball (1969), Hoedeman traveled to then-Czechoslovakia in 1970 to study puppet animation. Returning to the NFB, he began a series of iconic stop-motion films for the Canadian producer, using old-school techniques like a 35mm camera on a tripod and a film set.
Those included the 1972 film Tchou-tchou, which was created with wooden blocks and received a BAFTA for best animated film. During the 1970s, Hoedeman created a series of animated films based on Inuit traditional stories, working closely with artists from Nunavut and Nunavik.
Following The Sand Castle, Hoedeman continued to experiment with a range of filmmaking techniques and themes. In 1992, he worked with Indigenous inmates at the La Macaza Institution to create The Sniffing Bear, a cautionary tale about substance abuse.
In 1998, he began work on a beloved children’s series about Ludovic, a young teddy bear, available in the NFB collection as Four Seasons in the Life of Ludovic. His final film for the NFB was Marianne’s Theatre in 2011.
That was followed by collaborations between the NFB and Hoedeman, now an indie filmmaker, including the 2011 film 55 Socks. That project drew on his childhood memories in Holland during World War II and especially during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45. He would also adapt his Ludovic character into a popular children’s TV series.
In 2003, the Cinémathèque Québécoise and the NFB paid tribute to Hoedeman with the exhibition Exposition Co Hoedeman – Les Jardins de l’Enfance in Montreal.