CONTORTED PASTA

For the last month or so, I've been volunteering with a grassroots organisation of animators offering feedback to animation hopefuls who might be at a disadvantage for the sort of connections and attention that are often necessary to get into the industry. Ideally this would be for minorities and people living a long way from an opportunity to make those connections. There is no way of policing this on the sign-up sheet, however from what I've seen, people have been remarkably honest about this.

I think its founders may have been hoping to uncover some hidden gems of talent they could hook up with a job. I am sure this has happened some – the 'job recommendations' messageboard gets a few new posts every week – but from my end, reviewing 2D animation hopefuls and the occasional character design person to relieve the backlog there, I am mostly frustrated at the apparent lack of quality teaching when it comes to basic drawing skills. I have repeatedly had to tell someone who's just spent three years of their life at animation school that, in short, they need to go away and learn it all again properly from a handful of books and online tutorials. Who is getting away with bilking these students? If you're going to put no effort into milking a hopeful generation for tuition fees, then at least throw some free online tutorials at them so the resulting graduates make your nothing school look good! One afternoon on Google should bring up enough tutorials for a semester, and you can have a couple beers while you're at it.

Along with the frustration I am also perplexed as to how, in this age of tech-savvy youth doing everything online, and an internet crammed to the gills with learning resources if one but looks, people can get to an employable age without basic fundamentals. When I fell in love with animation and determined to make it my life, I was lucky enough to have occasional feedback from some pros, but most of my work was done hand-in-hand with the animation art books at the West Jordan Public Library. Somehow I still learned how to use basic construction to build a drawing in 3D, and that the best thing I could do was take a sketchbook around with me everywhere and draw everything I saw. Nowadays the internet is FULL of skilled professionals shouting advice into the void, and explicit tutorials, and working artists' blogs and portfolios. I know what a boon this is because I am now teaching people in their first year of animation school who are better than I was when I applied to Disney! At the same time, there are people graduating animation school who aren't where I was in high school. What gives?

I am having to remind myself that it is not my job to fix others' educations singlehandedly. Yes, it is a problem. Yes, I can fix it. But it is not my job, and in fact it is keeping me from doing my job. But ye gods, it is stoking the fires of righteousness and making me want to march through the land shouting THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

I've been wanting to get to the animation festival at Annecy since 2012 when Paperman premiered there, but every year there's been some reason why I can't make it. This year, I made a pact with a friend to book accommodation early so we would have to go, and luckily that paid off. I just returned last night from a week's worth of animation nerdery, architectural beauty, and cheese (so much cheese), and while more will probably be written, here's a quick rundown of a few things I learned:

• The French for 'screening' is séance, a fact I shall treasure forever
• Just because it's in the mountains and by a lake doesn't mean it won't get really, swelteringly, paralyzingly hot
• Annecy is not, as I had been led to believe, a small town. This impression came from people who live in LA, in comparison to which pretty much anything smaller than London is small town.
• However hot Annecy gets, Lyon gets much hotter. I must never go to Lyon.
• Buy your bread before noon
• Unexpected vocabulary differences between French and Québecois: myrtille for bleuet, parking for stationnement
• There are astonishingly few places that will sell you a coffee and a pastry and a place to sit down for an hour or so
• On the other hand, the springwater standpipes everywhere are pretty great

All in all it was a fabulous experience – I don't think I've ever been to a film festival before, nevermind an animated film festival, so was expecting something more along the lines of a comics convention. Something about all coming together to share the experience of films, rather than buy and sell each other's products – and reconnecting with so many people I knew from so many different places – gave it a lovely sort of family reunion atmosphere. An assortment of 'in group' experiences helped that too: shared exasperation for the heat, queuing for screenings (séances!), and little Annecy rituals like throwing paper airplanes at the screen while waiting for the show to start and making fish-popping noises in the darkness between shorts in a programme, but a major one was that everyone had the same song stuck in their head, because this little film played before every event:

Watch on YouTube

There you go, now you're part of the family.

I started this as a demo for my animation class, but it really needed the second scene, so I threw that together tonight. A week, in bits, for the first part, about 4 hours for the second! I'm determined not to get too precious with it – I have a dozen other things making demands on this week – but at some point in the future may add a bit more wind effects to Cherry to tie him in a bit better. And, you know, finish the drawings, or something. But right now my wrist is saying "You did WHAT??" so it's time to call it a night.

A very happy, supremely satisfied night.

(Of course they would not be out on a windy hillside without their hats, especially in August when this is supposed to take place! But I needed practice drawing them hatless, so have fudged meteorology and human physiology for the purposes of aesthetic. I'll just ... pack my bags for when the history police get here.)

Tonight, I am at a crossroads.

I can either go out and get groceries (which means dinner, lest I go all night on the digestive biscuits with cheese I had at 4), or I can 'watch' Wolf Hall for the second time in a week while tying down animation until 1 a.m.

I think we all know how this story goes.


ETA: PLOT TWIST

I'm actually hungry and my shoulders are stiff and I am foolishly optimistic that the newly-returned students have cleared out of Sainsbury's by this time of night. (It's probably the low blood sugar.)

The 'vintage' Disney season continues at Picturehouse, now onto films which came out during my childhood. I missed Little Mermaid last week, which I have mixed feelings about – on one hand, I don't think I've seen it in the cinema since I was seven, but on the other, I have seen it on DVD and as such I am not overflowing with regret that I missed seeing it in enormous crystal-clear detail. It's a good film, entertainment-wise, but only just coming out of Disney's 1980s slump in technical and artistic standards.

Despite having seen it on the big screen fairly recently, however, I knew I had to make an effort to go see Beauty and the Beast this week. I cannot overstate the impact it made on my childhood – Hunchback made me want to become an animator (20th anniversary and still no sign of that being rereleased, alas), but purely on the receiving end, a peculiar, bookish, independent 5th Grader getting a Disney movie about a peculiar, bookish, independent young lady was a Big Thing. I probably would have ended up much the same without it, but to have that sort of affirmation at a formative time of life meant a lot. It's experiences like that that make me symathise with the push for representation of minorities in the media – if such a small thing meant so much to me, how much more would an analogous thing mean to someone far further from what's currently considered media-mainstream?

Having watched the video to the point of memorization, seeing this movie again was almost an opposite experience to Jungle Book. I could write about surprising details or things I know now about the production that colour my viewing, but the latter you can find in Dream On Silly Dreamer and the former via an attentive eye and a Blu-Ray player. I'm coming to the end of a short lunch break so I will keep it to this: As much as Beauty and the Beast was a trip down childhood's memory lane, it was also a re-acquaintance with people who were role models and then colleagues. People love to point out how characters are designed and animated to reflect the actors providing the voices, but when I watched this film I was seeing the animators. Anyone who's worked with Ruben Aquino would find him in Maurice, and there is an undeniable Nik Rainieri-ness in Lumiere; somehow Philippe is Russ Edmonds despite being a horse (Russ also animated Phoebus in Hunchback, you may note the similarity), and Glen Keane is all over the Beast if you know what to look for. Most bittersweet of the reacquaintances was James Baxter, though – he supervised Belle when he was quite young, but his scenes stand out by a mile, and it was so good to see his 'handwriting' again. He animates in CG for Dreamworks now and does a very good job of it, but CG smooths everyone out, so that joy of finding the really special sweet in the candy bowl is a thing of the past. It made me a bit wistful to experience it again, but at the same time, there are so many really excellent up-and-coming 2d animators that I hope it will be a future joy as well. It's become clear to me in teaching and animating here in Europe that the sky is the limit and there are dozens if not hundreds of keen and talented people out there raising the bar every day – it's a little personally dispiriting to see it pulled so quickly and so far out of my reach, but fantastically inspiring all the same, and I'd rather be inspired than smug any day.

This afternoon, thanks to Picturehouse's current 'Vintage Sundays' series of animated film screenings, I got to see Disney's 1967 Jungle Book on the big screen for the first time.*

I remember watching it on video a fair bit as a kid, though I don't remember particularly liking it. There was something unsatisfying about it; in retrospect I think it may have been how it was just a loosely assembled collection of episodes strung along a 'must return Mowgli to the Man Village' throughline rather than anything that builds drama or character. I liked the tune of the girl's song at the end, but I didn't like her or her unsettling coquettishness (she's what, eight? even as a small child I knew that was wrong) and I didn't understand why Mowgli had to go live with the humans when anyone would be better off with animals. I also didn't understand why there was jazz in the jungle, or the Beatles, or why the animals had English accents and Mowgli sounded like Beaver Cleaver. And I thought the art style rather too anaemic for depicting a jungle. I think the last time I watched the film all the way through was in high school, but it stuck with me so little I'm not sure.

In the intervening years, I've learned a lot about animation, worked at Disney and learned about its history, and picked up the requisite historical pop-culture background knowledge, as well as some awareness of uncomfortable racial undertones, the British presence in India, and Kipling's motivation for writing the stories. On watching the film again, this did help – though I also wondered if perhaps I knew more about the latter two than the people who made it did.

I knew that coming in with this adult perspective was going to change the film for me; I also knew that seeing it in the cinema would make a big difference, though I didn't know what to expect from that. ( Here is how it went )

Luckily the emotional side, which had left me so cold as a child, has been saved by an external force: not to deliver any spoilers, but the finale of Cabin Pressure makes allusion to Jungle Book, and because the former handles character arcs and emotional lives so much better than the latter, all I had to do was graft in the feelings as instructed and voilà! Some semblance of depth. Pure pixie dust.

Next week is The Little Mermaid ... I actually know people who worked on that one, should be interesting in an entirely different way ...


*Perhaps not strictly true: I was born at the end of the era in which Disney periodically re-released classic films, and I know my parents took me to a few of those, though I don't particularly remember Jungle Book being one of them.

Dear Guys,

I admire you. I respect you. I've studied your work, and in some incredible cases, actually got to work with you. You're kind, intelligent, talented people, with stories to tell and a passion for your craft. But I've just about had it with the hand-wringing over the death of traditional animation.

I graduated animation school a month after traditional animation 'died' the first time (at Disney, anyway; it followed everywhere else shortly after). I worked other animation-related jobs through the years when most of the commercially produced hand-drawn animation in the world was being pumped out of sweatshops in the Philippines, to fill the spaces between Saturday morning ad breaks as cheaply as possible. I jumped on the moving train the first time Disney brought 2D 'back to life', and for three glorious years you had to put up with really excited young whippersnappers like me learning the ropes of the old ship, then after that either jumping ship or getting pushed off when Disney changed its mind and 'killed' 2D again.

Brothers, I come to bring you the good news: 2D is not dead. 2D LIVES! It's just not living at Disney! Disney does not hold the power of life and death over the medium, YOU DO! If you want there to be 2D animation in the world, DO SOME 2D ANIMATION! You have the power, you have the skill, God knows you have the experience, the only thing stopping you is your moping! Yes, Disney gave up on 2D, and yes their abandonment of that legacy is sad and possibly short-sighted and all that. But if you look at it another way, did they not also ... set it free? Would Jamie Lopez have made Hullaballoo if he were still at Disney? (No: he pitched it and they turned it down.) Would Glen Keane have made Duet? Would Andreas Deja be making Mushka? Not only has the talent been freed up, but you don't have to compete with Disney anymore! Back when Disney was The Main Game, they even called the shots of the competitors: woe betide any film that couldn't be mistaken for a Disney film. Now you can do ANYTHING! There isn't a monolith for people to compare it to!

Since I left the studio, I have been working almost nonstop on hand-drawn productions, and have had to turn down at least as much work as I've been offered. I keep being asked by recruiters if I can recommend anyone, and I keep having to tell them that everyone I know is busy. There is so much traditional animation happening – high-quality, too! – that it would make my 2002 head spin. You just need to lift your head up out of the Valley to see it. If you think I'm being foolishly optimistic, remember when we were in the Pit of Despair and you all shut your office doors and Negative Nellie grumbled away in the cold dark cubicle? That was me! If stepping out of the dungeon and seeing the real state of the wider animation world has changed me this much, it can you, too!

I really wonder sometimes whether it's animation you miss, or the six- and seven-digit salaries and being treated like a star. Well, the 2D of today can't bring you the star treatment or big bucks, so if that's what you're after, then find another job that will bring it – your killer animation skills and experience can translate into so many other jobs, if you bend your stiff neck and apply yourself. If you price yourself out of the burgeoning 2D job market, or refuse to take a gig that isn't exactly what you want, then ego is your problem, not the medium. However, if you really genuinely miss traditional animation for its own sake, then please, please, make yourself known; we need you. It takes a couple weeks tops to learn Flash well enough to animate, a few days for TV Paint – not as fun as paper, maybe, but talk about instant gratification! Come, brothers, and join the revolution! We're taking hand-drawn animation back from the bosses and bringing it to the people ourselves! It never belonged to the studios in the first place, they just convinced us it did, and if you continue to believe them then you're letting them win. After all they've done to you, you're going to let them win?

Well, now, I've got to go make some coffee and settle down to another 12-hour day of making drawings come to life, because animating is the best job in the world and I'm not letting it go softly into that dark night. Who's with me?

(No, seriously – I need to know how much coffee to make.)

Viva la animación!

Tealin




In case anyone is wondering about the gender balance in this letter, I did consider opening it up, but I tried to remember one single female animator despairing about the death of 2D and couldn't: they all seem to have put on their big girl pants and got on with things. The new generation is more than half female and in many cases they're leading the charge, so I'm not worried about them. You go, ladies! Show 'em how it's done!

I worked on Paperman, I love Paperman, but my all-time hands-down full-stop favourite animated short film is Wild Life. If you haven't seen it already, please do so now, so the rest of this entry doesn't spoil you. It's thirteen minutes and change; watch it in the dark with headphones or good speakers, if you can.

I'm pretty sure the filmmakers weren't aware of it at the time, but they made it just for me. I felt this when I first saw it, and I felt this whenever I watched it with my lights out at lunch at Disney, or on my laptop late at night at home, or on my iPod on a windy autumn night on the Canadian prairie when I was up in Edmonton for my grandmother's funeral. I had thought it was on account of the polar parallels, identifying and perfectly portraying iconic Alberta imagery and atmosphere, and just being so darn Canadian in ways both trivial and profound, but recently I discovered the thoughtfulness extended to embedding a significant detail that has passed under my radar for years. Toward the end of the short, the protagonist writes a letter home, which is delivered in voiceover before it's revealed onscreen:


Tradition has it that if February 2nd is cloudy, spring is on its way, but if the sun shines, there will be six more weeks of winter. Americans have added a groundhog and its shadow to this superstition, but it seems to date back through Candlemas to Imbolc in pagan Europe. If the end of the film took place on the evening of February 2nd, the day on which E.T.W. wrote the letter, then the starry sky indicates it was a clear day, and the implications thereof may have influenced his actions.

I LOVE IT WHEN FILMMAKERS THINK ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING. And even more when they don't make a big deal of it, just leave it there for you to pick up, even if it takes you a while.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch it again. I may be some time.

PAPERMAN PAPERMAN PAPERMAN!

I'm embedding a small version because it looks nice, but the film is best watched full screen with the lights off and the sound up! Click the little gear thing at the bottom of the player, switch it to 1080p, go full-screen, sit back, and enjoy.



Want to know why this time last year my blog was nothing but radio links and OHYATs? THIS IS WHY.

You're welcome.

It's been a year now since the Independent Shakespeare Company ruined me for all other Shakespeare ever* ... and now that they have successfully knocked off the competition in bard-related matters, they've started on dramatic entertainment in general. I saw the trailer for Dreamworks' upcoming Rise of the Guardians and all I could think was how much better the ISC's Puck, from A Midsummer Night's Dream, would have been as Jack Frost.

Unfortunately there is no extant video of his performance, so I can't give you a direct comparison, but they have just posted their photo album for the show so maybe you can get some idea ...

There's at least one show of Midsummer each week from now until Sept. 2nd! Check out their calendar and go! (And/or see one of the other shows, they're all good, and Winter's Tale closes this weekend so you should get on that one ...)

*Remarkably, I have enjoyed moments of The Hollow Crown so far, but this is definitely an anomaly and likely due in large part to my not having seen them do any history plays ... There will be a lengthy post on the Henry IVs at some point when I can be bothered to sit down and write it but now is not that time.