In a village where people have lost the ability to dream, one old man dons a magic hat to dream on their behalf.
When the time comes to pass his mantle to a young successor, corporate forces, of course, want in.
This is the premise of Petaluma animator Gene Hamm’s new hand-drawn feature, The Dream Hat, screening May 10 at the Petaluma Arts Center.
If the plot sounds like an allegory—capitalism versus creativity—one is not wrong. But it’s also a celebration of storytelling, music (17 original songs) and the singular passion of an artist who has spent nearly five decades drawing his dreams into reality.
“I’ve been an animator since 1978 when I got my first job on Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of The Rings,” says Hamm, who has called the North Bay home since his “Gumby” days. That’s right; he also worked on the beloved stop-motion, green clay dude with the convex arc head—and his horse, Pokey.
His early credits read like a kid’s Saturday morning fever dream: Smurfs, Superfriends, Plastic Man, FangFace, and music videos for Michael Bolton (Everybody’s Crazy) and Big Trouble in Little China. He even worked under a young James Cameron in the art department of Battle Beyond The Stars.
“Everything I learned in school; they teach you how to be a starving artist,” Hamm says with a laugh. “But at Hanna-Barbera, I took classes at night and learned from some of the best teachers. One of my teachers [worked on] Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. They taught me how to get 30 usable drawings out of me a day. That was really valuable.”
Hamm later taught animation at Academy of Art University for 15 years. But it wasn’t until he embraced newer technology that he fully seized control of his storytelling destiny.
“The cool thing is that because of the new technology, you can be a one-man show,” Hamm says. “It used to be only rich people could make films. Now you can do stuff on your own, and it doesn’t have to have a big budget.”
Hamm’s first solo feature, Hell Toupee—animated entirely in his apartment during the pandemic—is currently streaming on TubiTV, SmashTV and Fawesome. “When it was a 28-minute work-in-progress, it won Best Animation at the Hell’s Kitchen Festival in New York City,” he notes.
For The Dream Hat, Hamm animated using a graphics tablet (a computer input device that allows users to create digital artwork) and Adobe Animate (a multimedia authoring program—formerly known as “Flash”). It’s not his first go at the story—he originally created a shorter version decades ago, only for the computer company behind his software to go bust mid-production. “The new one is 77 minutes long, and it’s done the way I always wanted to do it,” he says.
The DIY spirit extends to casting. “You can source talent from all over the world. They can literally phone their performances in, record at home and send them to you,” he explains. The film also boasts a marquee voice actor: Julie Newmar, best known as Catwoman from the 1960s’ Batman TV series.
Looking ahead, Hamm is already deep into his next feature—another musical odyssey he describes as his “Yellow Submarine.” Fortunately, he doesn’t need to don a magic hat to dream big—just a graphics tablet and vision.
The Dream Hat plays at 5:30pm, Saturday, May 10 at the Petaluma Arts Center, 230 Lakeville St. Tickets are $15-$20 and available at bit.ly/dream-hat.
