It’s Not Just a Visual Style--It’s a Vision

American readers and moviegoers know the work of Jean “Moebius” Giraud--even if they don’t recognize his name.

In films from “Tron” to “The Fifth Element,” the influence of the French comic book artist-illustrator-designer can be seen, as well as in such graphic novels as Frank Miller’s “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.” The recently released “Digimon: The Movie” also clearly bears the hallmarks of his style: characters drawn in strong lines with areas of flat pastel color. It’s a clean, simple look that diverges from the more detailed designs in other anime films.

Although Giraud has influenced the designs of science-fiction and fantasy projects in the U.S. and Japan, he initially attracted widespread attention in the mid-’60s for “Lieutenant Blueberry,” a serial graphic novel set in the American West, which he drew for the French weekly magazine Pilote. As his style matured, he began to write as well as draw his comics and graphic novels, and increasingly turned to science-fiction settings. His visions of the world to come attracted the attention of Hollywood studios, and he contributed designs for “Tron,” “Willow,” “Masters of the Universe,” “Alien,” “The Abyss” and “The Fifth Element.”

Giraud is currently at work on the story and designs for “Through the Moebius Strip,” a computer-animated feature slated for release in 2002 that will be animated in Hong Kong and mainland China. A friendly man who speaks English fluently, the 62-year-old artist talked about work in a recent interview at a studio in Marina del Rey, where he was surrounded by sketches and storyboards for the new film.

Born in Nogent-sur-Marne, near Paris, Giraud displayed an early aptitude for drawing. His imagination was fired by the great 19th century illustrators, whose work he discovered as a child. “When I was a boy, we had shelves of books in my room--big books from the end of the 19th century, with red covers and gold on the spine,” he recalls. “When I was good--or when I was ill--my grandmother would give me one of them. So the books were connected to a kind of loneliness, but also to a kind of freedom: I was comfortable in my room, discovering. The title of the series was ‘La Tour du Monde’ (A Trip Around the World) and they were a little like National Geographic, only with beautiful woodcuts instead of photographs. Those illustrations were the first food for my eyes.

“One day, I discovered a drawing that was somehow different from the others--the same, but better. I discovered after a time it was by Gustave Dore,” Giraud adds with an enthusiasm that remains undimmed after more than 50 years. “I realized I was already in search not of perfection, but of a kind of hierarchy. When I read comics with other children, I had the same reaction: Look for the best drawings, the best artists, the best stories.” Giraud studied at the School of Applied Arts in Paris, where he wrote and drew his first western comic strip, “Frank and Jeremy.” In 1960, he began working as an assistant to the noted Belgian artist Joseph Gillian (“Jiji”) on another western series. Around the same time, he started drawing darkly funny strips for the French magazine Hara-Kiri, which he signed “Moebius”--technically a term for a strip of paper connected in a loop that permits drawing to flow uninterrupted and cover both surfaces of the paper. In 1963, he and writer Jean-Michel Charlier began the adventures of Mike Donovan, alias Mike Blueberry, a U.S. Army officer who has been framed for murder in the post-Civil War West. The “Blueberry” saga runs to 24 volumes, with an additional 12 volumes of two spinoff series.

After illustrating science-fiction novels in France, Giraud co-founded the magazine Metal Hurlant, the ancestor of the American Heavy Metal. His popular comic series “Arzach,” “The Airtight Garage,” “The Long Tomorrow,” “The Incal” and “The Man From Ciguri” have influenced a generation of artists and illustrators in Europe and America. His American publisher, Dark Horse Comics, reports that Giraud’s graphic novels have sold more than 35,000 copies in this country, a very respectable figure for a foreign artist’s work.

On a trip to Hong Kong last year, Giraud visited his friend Arne Wong, whose Cuckoo’s Nest Studio is one of the main suppliers of animation for American television. They had met while working on “Tron” and had been looking for a chance to collaborate. Wong introduced Giraud to computer graphics producer Raymond Neoh (“Butt Ugly Martians”), and Neoh introduced Giraud to computer-animation expert Frank Foster. One of the founders of Sony Pictures Imageworks, Foster was scouting facilities in Asia to do offshore production. The four men established a quick rapport: Foster will direct “Through the Moebius Strip,” and Neoh will produce, with Wong serving as associate producer. Foster brought in his old college friend, screenwriter Jim Cox (“FernGully: The Last Rainforest”), and what began as a rather tenuous idea of Giraud’s quickly solidified into a real story--and screenplay.

“At that time, I only had the concept of a very strange star ship in which a family lived like space gypsies. But they’re really farmers who carry their land with them, which is an interesting idea,” recalls Giraud. “I also had the title: ‘Through the Moebius Strip.’ It was obvious that the Moebius strip could be a kind of portal to danger and adventure. Jim took the story and turned it into a metaphor for ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ Instead of a beanstalk, it’s a connection through time and space to another galaxy. Now the story is a kind of fairy tale but transposed to a science-fiction setting, Moebius style.”

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Computer animation has yet to produce convincing human characters. Even in the groundbreaking “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2,” the humans felt less convincing and alive than the toys that surrounded them. In the disappointing “Titan A.E.” and the Japanese series “Blue Submarine No. 6,” artists have attempted to blend 3-D computer-animated effects and vehicles with conventional, two-dimensional characters. The result has been a jarring disjunction between the characters and their surroundings, as if two films had erroneously been combined.

“Fortunately, the problems of realistic humans are ones I don’t think that we have to completely address in this project,” says Foster. “We’re attempting the very stylized look of a comic book come to life in 3-D. We’re looking at tools that allow us to get a shaded look but blended in what we call Moebius-style rendering, which preserves a lot of his comic book style. I don’t think we’ve seen that before. There’s no mix here of 2-D and 3-D imagery: It’ll all be 3-D.” Although Giraud has contributed ideas and designs to a number of films in the U.S. and in Europe (including Rene Laloux’s “The Time Masters” and a never-realized attempt to film a version of “Dune,” unrelated to the David Lynch flop), few, if any, of those films have captured the artist’s distinctive drawing style--a situation Foster hopes to correct.

“My challenge is to retain Jean’s vision of the story and the style of his artwork as much as possible. Fans know Jean as a storyteller, as well as an artist,” he says. “My job is to adapt the available techniques to capture the feeling and the mood and the atmosphere that Jean’s envisioned. The story goes through abrupt changes in mood, cutting from the happy, sunlit bio- sphere to the rainy, dark planet of the giants, so it’s quite a challenge to retain those contrasts and preserve Jean’s style.”

But preserving Giraud’s hand-drawn, highly linear, two-dimensional visions while transforming them into three-dimensional, computer-generated environments presents daunting challenges. “Jean has drawn settings that we have to build in the computer, which means they become physical geometric sculptures that have to be very precisely specified,” explains Foster. “Another artist takes Jean’s drawings and does something like architectural drawings of them. We’re trying to retain as much of the hand-drawn look as possible--not every line is straight, although the computer would prefer it.”

To illustrate the problem, Giraud holds up a sketch he did of a fantasy landscape. Castles perch on rugged cliffs, looking down on a forest that the artist has suggested, rather than rendered in detail. The drawing is lively, with a few hastily sketched lines suggesting masses of stone and foliage. “Here, I’ve drawn a mushroom forest--which I did very quickly, brrruupp, to get a certain rhythm,” Giraud says. “Mushrooms have a way of looking alike--almost geometrical.” Picking up a second piece of artwork, he continues, “When the artist did his version of this drawing, he drew the scene mushroom by mushroom, and each mushroom is a little bit different. His drawing is more precise, but it lacks the energy of the original. ‘Through the Moebius Strip’ should be a Moebius movie, but my style should not become a trap. I would like to set the style of the film but keep it open to contemporary visions of the future, which will give the young artists the opportunity to express themselves.”