Clive Smith dreamed a movie. So, he created a graphic novel.
That’s a roundabout way of doing things, but Smith, one of the co-founders of Nelvana, regarded as Canada’s premier creator of animated TV shows, has never been one for straightforward. His latest pivot, The Rather Unusual Adventures of Ice Cream Girl and Mr. Licorice, which he unveils this weekend at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, is a lavish, colourful and highly idiosyncratic 128-page graphic novel that has been years in the making.
Nearly 20, in fact. “We were staying in Berlin in this fabulous hotel,” Smith says during a Zoom call when prompted to explain the story’s origins. It was late in the day, and lying on the bed, he fell into a sort of dreamy reverie. But it unreeled like a film, “about a young man with a condition that caused him to see the world as a cartoon. It was so real. And there were scenes that were actually playing to me.”
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Waking, he asked his wife Melleny Melody, a voice actor and musician with the stage name Melleefresh, to make some notes. Looking at them the next morning, he saw the germ of a story.
In the story, young Stretch Beaconsfield lives in a city that is recognizably Toronto, rendered in muted earth tones. To his alarm, his world is being invaded by a cartoonish reality of garish pastels, balloonish buildings and improbable beings. The meaning of the invasion – and what it’s trying to tell Stretch – is at the core of the tale.
There’s more than a little autobiography in the story, Smith says, “because I’ve always looked at the world as a cartoon.”
A product of 1960s era British art schools when they were hotbeds of innovation – he attended Ealing Art College at the same time as the Who’s Pete Townshend – he stumbled into animation more or less by accident. He worked on animated TV series and even contributed to 1968′s Yellow Submarine. (“Everybody in London who could hold a pencil worked on it. I did three drawings.”)
When that work dried up, a friend told him about a chance to work as an animator in Canada. “I just laughed,” he says. “Why would I want to leave London?” He overcame his reluctance. “It was an offer for one year. And I thought, what is a year?” More than half a century later, and now 80, he’s still here.
“Clive was what you would call an eccentric Englishman,” Nelvana co-founder Patrick Loubert says, recalling his and fellow co-founder Michael Hirsh’s first meeting at Smith’s house. Aspiring filmmakers, the two needed an animator. “One of the things that impressed us,” says Hirsh, “was he was capable of doing it all: design, storyboard, ink and colour, paper cut-up, claymation.”
“And,” adds Loubert, “he owned a truck. So, we gave him a third of the company for that.”
They incorporated in 1971 as Nelvana, named for a Canadian comic-book character of the 1940s.
Nelvana grew slowly throughout the 1970s and, by the end of the decade, the three felt they were ready to take on an animated feature. Rock & Rule told the story of an evil rock star, Mock Swagger, and his plans to destroy the world. Their finished movie, which featured the music of Debby Harry, Lou Reed, Earth Wind & Fire and others, was wildly ambitious and nearly killed them, making a little more than $30,000 on a budget of $8-million.
Nelvana faced a reckoning. Instead of shutting down, the founders took whatever commercial work they could get, starting with a Care Bears movie that turned into a surprise hit. They took the company public, and started creating their own shows: now-classics such as Inspector Gadget, Babar and a host of others. In 2000, when Corus Entertainment bought Nelvana for $540-million, it was Canada’s largest animation house, and one of the biggest the world.
Nearly 60 at that point, and with enough money, Smith might have grabbed a metal detector and headed for Florida. He kept going. It was then that the idea for Ice Cream Girl began taking hold. Originally, Smith thought it would be a live-action film that incorporated animation, but that idea proved cost-prohibitive.
But as a graphic novel? That might be doable. He knew nothing about them, but he didn’t let that stop him.
Helped by Jennifer Lum, a seasoned publishing professional with a strong background in graphic-novel production, Smith assembled a team that he directed as if he were doing an animated film. Lum found him Millena Shang, a recent graduate of Sheridan College, who drew the novel’s representations of the “real world,” rendered largely in subdued earth tones. It’s contrasted by the cartoon stylings of Chuck Gammage, a veteran animator who has collaborated with Smith since the 1970s and also worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, making him ideal for the book’s reality-meets-cartoons premise.
In all, a dozen people worked on the book – remotely in large part, because of COVID-19. Originally scheduled for completion by the spring of 2023, the project’s complexity pushed it a year later.
After the Toronto debut, Smith will be at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival with the book next weekend.
The Toronto event is one of the largest festivals of its kind in North America, typically attracting more than 25,000 people over the weekend. The crowd skews young. Looking at Smith, who will be there selling his book, they may not realize that this Englishman with the wispy grey hair created a lot of the TV cartoons that they watched in childhood, including Little Bear, Franklin, Babar and The Adventures of Tintin. He may indirectly be the reason they’re there. And he still has something for them now.