“Cadaver” is newest from Oak Park filmmaker

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A dissection with complications in “Cadaver.”

Updated: February 24, 2012 9:43AM

From a commercial perspective, notes Oak Park native turned Los Angeles producer/filmmaker Jonah Ansell, there’s no good reason to make a short film.

Especially when it rhymes.

And when it’s animated.

And when an ambulatory corpse is the leading man.

Nonetheless, Ansell has recently completed the eight-minute animated short “Cadaver,” featuring teenage Oak Park fashion blogger/maven Tavi Gevinson (a family friend) and starring Christopher Lloyd and Oscar winner Kathy Bates in a poetic romance about a guy who wakes up dead — and has one last goodbye to say to his wife.

“It’s kind of a fable, but it’s also a road trip and a love story,” said the 1999 Oak Park River Forest High School grad, who basically spent his entire young life playing baseball before deciding to take a swing at creative endeavors.

New game

Ansell has had a lifelong interest in the arts — especially movies and particularly comedies — but from the age of 5, baseball was his passion. In fact, he got as far as pitching on the college team at Amherst before making “the unfortunate discovery that despite an arm like Sandy Koufax, I had a brain like Woody Allen.”

On the upside though, he said, he discovered writing.

Inspired by The Onion, Ansell started a satire magazine at Amerst called the Amerst Hamster. Then, in his senior year, he co-founded a website for selling sports apparel called Rivalfish and decided to attract customers by writing humorous content. By the time he and his partners sold Rivalfish.com to the National Lampoon organization, it averaged 150,000 monthly readers.

As unlikely as it might seem for one person to have a gift for both athletic and artistic pursuits, Ansell confounds the odds further by demonstrating a considerable knack for business. After selling Rivalfish, he became director of global business development for the social-media marketing firm Omnicom, where he helped triple the company’s size in two years. Instead of accepting an offer for an equity partnership, however, he was thinking about making movies.

That was not a totally random decision. As a kid in Oak Park, he had made amateur comedies with a friend along the slapstick-comedy lines of “The Naked Gun.” He had also directed an award-winning sports-comedy TV pilot titled “Fish Fry” during his days at Rivalfish. So he moved to LA in 2006 to study film at USC, then launched JAMS, his own marketing and production company, where he consults on “stories that sell” for corporate and government clients, and develops projects for film and TV.

And writes and directs entirely non-commercial (though the stars are all on board for a feature version) little rhyming valentines to literally undying love.

One reason Ansell spent a year working on “Cadaver” may be that he romance is on his mind in general, having recently been wed to Jamie Peisel, a former Northwestern University tennis player. But the film’s origin goes back further, to a day when a sister in medical school (he comes from a family of doctors) emailed him for help on an assignment to write something creative appreciating the life of a cadaver she was assigned to dissect the next day.

Heart stopper

Ansell quickly knocked out a poem about an old guy (eventually voiced by “Back to the Future” star Lloyd) who wakes up on the dissecting table and stops a med student (Gevinson) from removing his heart until he says one last thing to his wife (Bates).

Ansell then forgot about it. Except he didn’t.

“I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” he said. “I kept getting drawn back to it and rewriting it. For some reason, this was something I really connected with emotionally.”

Apparently, the same was true for his first-choice dream cast, which he never expected to secure, but did, and for singer/songwriter Neil Young, who gave him almost unprecedented permission to allow Gevinson to sing his song “Heart of Gold” in the film.

Ansell is working on getting the animated short into circulation, and it screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival earlier this month. A version of “Cadaver” will also appear as a limited edition graphic novel in mid-2012.

“When I look back on the way things have gone during the making of this film, it’s kind of unbelievable,” he said. “Everyone we wanted has said yes, all along the way, and we were shocked every time.”

See an HD trailer and find out more about “Cadaver” at cadaverthefilm.com.