On a Friday afternoon in September, Vicente Canales’s iPhone began to vibrate with messages almost immediately after a private screening at the Toronto International Film Festival of an Argentine film called “Metegol.” Three film distributors in South Korea wanted to buy the rights from the firm run by Canales, a rumpled Spanish rights agent.
It was a big turnaround for the movie, an animated feature about the table game known as foosball (or, in Argentine Spanish, metegol). Two years earlier, when the film’s producers were pre-selling the rights based on a script and a teaser—a common practice—a Korean group had offered two hundred thousand dollars, far below the five-hundred-thousand-dollar asking price.
“They liked the story, but they said, ‘You’re asking too much. To pay you that, we have to watch the movie,’” Jorge Estrada Mora, a producer for the film, told me.
That was before this summer, when almost two million people in Argentina watched “Metegol,” about a geeky kid named Amadeo whose foosball figures come to life and help him take on a professional soccer team, in order to save his town and win back the respect of his sweetheart.
Now Canales says he found himself hosting a bidding war in his suite on the nineteenth floor of Toronto’s Hyatt Regency. One group dropped out at three hundred thousand dollars, but the other two continued until bidding reached the asking price, according to Estrada Mora. That Monday morning, Estrada Mora and Canales came to an agreement with Seoul-based Korea Screen.
According to Canales, Korea Screen’s C.E.O. “said it had a production quality that could proudly stand alongside any Hollywood animated movie.” Canales added, “He was very surprised that an independent production could achieve that level.” (I couldn’t reach Korea Screen for comment.)
With its hometown success behind it, the new question is whether audiences outside of Argentina will get it. Universal Pictures has bought distribution rights for Latin America and Spain, and other companies have picked up Russia, China, the U.K., Portugal, Turkey, the Middle East, Italy, and Poland. The producers are also in negotiations with distributors in the U.S., Estrada Mora told me. Premières in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil will begin next month. If the film is successful, it would represent the latest step toward relevance for animated features made outside the U.S., and could influence how Hollywood makes animated films in the future.
* * *
Soccer is a national obsession in Argentina, the birthplace of the star players Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, but “Metegol” was designed to be more than a home-crowd pleaser. Directed in Buenos Aires by Juan José Campanella, a star in the Latin American film world, the 3-D film had a budget of twenty-two million dollars. This was tiny by Hollywood standards, but people in the Argentine film industry believe “Metegol” is by far the most expensive Argentine movie ever made.
“I think this is the first film made in Argentina where we knew from the beginning that even if every Argentine saw it twice, it wouldn’t make its money back,” Campanella said at a press screening in early July.
Like the movie’s protagonist, Campanella was an un-athletic youth, and he became a paunchy adult. But after gaining some forty pounds while writing the “Metegol” script, he worked himself into the body of a near athlete. This physique, combined with his closely cropped beard and the black flat cap he prefers, sometimes gives him the aspect of a longshoreman.
In 2008, a young Argentine producer named Gastón Gorali approached Campanella with a short monologue in the voice of an arrogant soccer star, written by the late Argentine cartoonist Roberto Fontanarrosa. “Though he never says it outright, you begin to realize that he is a foosball player,” Campanella said. “After saying he’s a great soccer player, he begins adding details like, ‘I remember that glorious afternoon when we scored a hundred and twenty-seven goals.’” Intrigued by the story, and by Gorali’s claim that an animated feature based on it could be made for two million dollars, Campanella agreed to direct.
Two years later, after Campanella won the foreign language Oscar for “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), his agent, John Ufland, fielded more than a dozen invitations to consider Hollywood directorial gigs. But Campanella declined, deciding instead to stick with his plan to use the foosball monologue to make an animated movie—a film unlike anything he had ever done, yet whose ambitions (and budget) grew nonetheless. He also decided to do it in Buenos Aires, a city without an animated-movie industry.
Campanella and his longtime producer Estrada Mora, a Colombian petroleum entrepreneur, kitted out a ten-thousand-square-foot animation studio and brought in experienced animators like Sergio Pablos, who owns a Madrid animation studio and was an executive producer of the 2010 animated hit “Despicable Me,” to teach them how to run the production. Live-action directors, Pablos explained, “are accustomed to having actors on a set and immediate results”; in animation, scenes are minutely planned and the audio recorded before a single frame is animated. And because each animator produces only an average of four seconds a week, there is almost no chance for multiple “takes.” As Campanella learned animation, he wrote the script with Eduardo Sacheri, the author of the book on which “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” was based.
To keep costs down, Campanella and his producers contracted a small number of top animators, like Pablos, and paired them with young—and inexpensive—Argentine computer artists. To convince artists to work for less than their usual salaries, they positioned the Oscar-winning Campanella as a Woody Allen-like auteur and played up Buenos Aires’s reputation as an exotic hot spot.
In addition, the producers inked discount deals with technology companies and did not hire any of the expensive executives that fill Hollywood studios.
“I always ask what the executives bring to the table,” Campanella said. “Because in my experience it’s never been anything good.”
Even though the twenty-two-million-dollar production meant leaving out details in hair, grass, and water, which would have been expensive to animate, the quality of the animation is indistinguishable, to the average movie-goer, from major U.S. studio films. “The same movie would have cost a minimum of a hundred million dollars in Hollywood,” Pablos said. (Canales pegs that number at closer to fifty to sixty million dollars.)
There were tense moments. On a sweltering day in February, the electricity went out in the converted warehouse in the affluent Bajo Belgrano neighborhood where two hundred animators were working on the film. It was the third time in fifteen minutes that that part of the city’s weak electrical grid had collapsed. Campanella’s smile tightened. Without electricity, the animators could not work, and Campanella had only two hours to review the day’s progress before he was to travel to Los Angeles. He exclaimed some choice words in Spanish about the whore who gave birth to the electrical grid. Then he joked, wryly, “DreamWorks is doing this. They won’t let us succeed.”
* * *
Born in 1959, Campanella remembers his youth in nineteen-sixties Buenos Aires as an innocent period before the Dirty War, in which up to thirty thousand people in Argentina were “disappeared.” The re-release of “Singing in the Rain” in the early nineteen-seventies sparked his interest in movies; he says he saw it twenty-two times in two weeks. After studying film at N.Y.U., Campanella eventually directed “Love Walked In,” which generated positive buzz from the 1997 Sundance Film Festival’s selectors. But critics panned it upon its 1998 release. The write-up in one newspaper was so brutal that Campanella stole copies from the doorsteps of his West Village neighbors.
Today, Campanella voices a lament common among Hollywood directors: the executives pushed him to remove the movie’s edge and ruined it in the process. “That didn’t just happen to me alone,” he said. “American film hasn’t made me cry for twenty years.”
Campanella continued to direct American TV shows, but the experience instilled in him a fear of making movies with Hollywood involvement, and on Estrada Mora’s advice, he returned to Argentina in 1998 to make “El Mismo Amor, la Misma Lluvia” (“Same Love, Same Rain”). The movie, about a writer whose life spirals out of control, was meant, he told me, to be a “vacation” from the United States. But he decided to stay, refreshed by working without studio interference.
“I found my voice here,” he said.
* * *
The low-cost “Metegol” arrives as Hollywood animators are desperate to cut spending. Budgets have ballooned because of labor and development costs, and the survival of studios like DreamWorks Animation and Pixar increasingly depends on every one of their few films becoming international blockbusters.
According to Edmund Helmer, whose Web site, BoxOfficeQuant, tracks Hollywood economic statistics, the average budget for a major animated feature in 2009 was $101.4 million; blockbusters like “Cars 2” and “Toy Story 3” have had budgets of two hundred million dollars. Many of these make back what they spend. But when films fall short, it can cause financial catastrophe. After DreamWorks Animation’s hundred-and-forty-five-million-dollar “Rise of the Guardians” flopped domestically, the studio, which releases two or three films a year, took an $86.9 million write-down and laid off three hundred and fifty of its twenty-two hundred employees.
One animated film that successfully broke the Hollywood big-budget cycle was Illumination Entertainment’s “Despicable Me” (2010), budgeted at sixty-nine million dollars. Christopher Meledandri, C.E.O. of Illumination Entertainment, saved money by hiring few executives, outsourcing animation work to France, and adopting more stylized animation than that of hyper-detailed movies like “How to Train Your Dragon” or “The Croods.”
Meledandri told me that smaller budgets are not only more prudent; they also allow for more movies with character that can succeed without appealing to everyone.
The strategy seems to be working. “Despicable Me” earned more than five hundred million dollars worldwide in 2010, paving the way for its recent sequel, which cost an estimated seventy-six million dollars and has earned more than eight hundred and forty million dollars.
Campanella, with “Metegol,” hoped to go a step beyond “Despicable Me,” which had been made by a Hollywood studio and with Hollywood money. He would produce a Hollywood-quality animated feature without Hollywood involvement—and at a price that would allow it to turn a profit even if it never sold a single ticket in the United States.
* * *
“Metegol” is full of childhood magic and underdog heroics, and astutely plays on the fame of international soccer icons. The nerdy protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance to FC Barcelona’s Argentine star, Lionel Messi, while the villain has the arrogance and good looks of Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo (whose smug grin and perfect hair have made him a real-life villain for soccer fans worldwide).
The movie, even though it embraces universal themes and looks like a Hollywood product, also feels distinctly Latin and Argentine, from the characters’ Italianate gestures and soccer-mullet hairstyles to their ironic, rapid-fire humor.
“Most of the times when studios outside of Hollywood make films, they feel like the stories we just came out with, a year or two behind and with a lesser budget,” said Simon Otto, the head of character animation on DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon.” “‘Metegol’ felt like, here’s somebody who’s telling a story of a cultural thing that’s local to where the movie was made, that would never be made in Hollywood but that has universal appeal. That piques my interest every time.”
The question, now, is whether audiences outside of Argentina will get it. The combination of high technical quality with cultural specificity could be what makes “Metegol” an international hit with a public bored of homogenized fare, or it could be its downfall; Hollywood has dominated the film world for so long that American culture is the one foreign audiences most easily absorb.
For Victor Glynn, a longtime business associate of Estrada Mora who bought the U.K. rights, the movie’s cultural differences—such as the male characters’ physical expressions of affection for each other—are not an issue, in large part because “Metegol” is animated. Dubbing allows the script to be modified for each market, and the story is broad enough to work in most cultures.
Glynn recently finished dubbing a version with the “Harry Potter” star Rupert Grint playing Amadeo; in this English version (called “Foosball”), which played at the London Film Festival earlier this month, jokes were changed to fit English humor, and the well-known BBC sportscaster Jonathan Pearce was hired to voice the commentary during the movie’s climactic final game.
Estrada Mora says that he imagines “Metegol” as the start of a “Toy Story”-like franchise that could make Buenos Aires a more visible player in international animation. It will be hard to attract big investments to a country as economically unstable as Argentina, but if that happens, it will represent a giant leap forward for Argentine filmmakers.
“I believe that we’re not making a movie; we’re building an industry here,” Estrada Mora told me in February. We were sitting in his film- and oil-company offices, which overlook Buenos Aires’s San Martin Plaza. Behind him, the plaza slopes down to the Retiro train station, a grand French-styled building that has seen much better days. Behind it sits Villa 31, a shantytown where children play soccer on bald dirt pitches as they dream of becoming the next Messi.
Photograph of Juan José Campanella by Alvaro Barrientos/AP.
