Animation as animism
Nov. 26th, 2005 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Pictoplasma: Characters in Motion is a two-day conference happening in Berlin this weekend, a "celebration of contemporary character design in animation, music visuals and motion graphics". The event seemed somewhat cramped compared to last year's conference, with the small (but elegant) Kino Babylon unable to match the bohemian grandeur of the Cafe Moskau.
I drifted through the rooms with mixed feelings. Character design is a strange field. It seems to attract designers with a twee Hello Kitty sort of sensibility (for some reason many of these people are Swedes, like the little group sitting in front of us at the "Characters in Narration" screening, Swedes with Japanese girlfriends, cuddling and giggling at the anthropomorphism on screen), but at the same time it attracts highly ambitious visual types; after all, if your cute little mouse or rabbit becomes a mascot for some campaign or the hero of some hit movie, you're made for life. So character animators display this odd combination of tweeness and thrusting ambition, tender-mindedness and opportunism. Actually, most successful characters have the eye-to-head and head-to-body dimensions of babies, and babies share this combination of weakness and opportunism; they use their cuteness to manipulate us, tapping into our mammalian programming like the most cynical advertisers.
The best of the short films Hisae and I saw was Kathi Käppel's mysterious, lyrical "Tiny". (Watch her film "Superman" here.) Käppel is with Berlin-based agency Monogatari, which is the Japanese word for "tale". Her film was about the life cycle of insects. What I liked were the colours and shapes; Käppel has a way of reducing insects, fairies, rocks and leaves to abstracted rainbow lozenges which challenge us to recognize them. This ostranenie of semi-abstraction allows her to avoid the anthropomorphism and brash cuteness which afflicts so much work of this type. Watching some of the other films, though, it crossed my mind that character animation might be a form of animism; this is a world where inanimate objects like a crowbar, a shirt or an egg can, with the simple addition of a pair of big, cute eyes, become living beings. Is this a modern manifestation of "the old religion"?There was also something impressively monastic about the drawing area upstairs, a place laid out with anglepoise lamps, light tables, pencils and pads. Here visitors to the conference were encouraged to sit down and doodle in flip-books. The room had something utopian about it; usually, left to their own devices on a Friday night, people tend to smoke, drink, flirt, schmooze, and jabber into phones. But here, instead, we all craned intently and intensely over sketches, mostly in silence, combining solitude and togetherness, austerity and playfulness. And actually, it was a lot more fun than smoking and drinking. Here's what Hisae drew, a flipbook in which an anglepoise lamp morphs into our rabbit Topo:
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 08:18 am (UTC)i think he had some stuff at the Venice Biennale too.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 08:32 am (UTC)Love the flip book though. Really ingenious. What did you draw though?
Reminds me...
Date: 2005-11-26 08:55 am (UTC)I guess I could always try to redo it all, and I've been recently thinking about it, but the voices I made, although they didn't really speak but "squeek", were the comical points which made people laugh at the moving images. (not that they were NOT funny on their own) No one got the sinister calender flipping through the months and then finally falling off the wall with a groan.. In my twisted little world, that's hystical, but a joke only for me alone I suppose.
Sorry about sharing so much, but as I said, animation is still a love affair for me..
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 09:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 09:44 am (UTC)If that is so, then
I don't like my own drawing style much at all...
Date: 2005-11-26 10:02 am (UTC)Re: I don't like my own drawing style much at all...
Date: 2005-11-26 11:02 am (UTC)Yours are sort of "crazy" expressive on that level..
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 12:25 pm (UTC)In L.A. and giving thanks - and i think perhaps I should. The story so far: I was a folk singer who invented new romanticism - a taste of this can be found on the Devils album. In 1985 I had a hit record - everything was electronic and I was a bit of a ninny. For my next record I grew my hair and reverted to the folk style. I was dropped. So I started the Lilac Time & made 4 albums between ‘87 and ‘91. We brilliantly avoided the charts but went off the rails in the process. In ‘93 I made Music In Color for EMI. It was an extravagant Floydian gesture in a grunge and shoe gazing world. I was expecting plaudits and applause but the album was ignored and I flew to Winston Salem North Carolina and lived in the Holiday Inn with the Velvet Crush and started to record the Duffy album. Before being dropped by BMG I managed to make I Love My Friends too and then reformed the Lilac Time to make Looking For A Day In The Night - lilac6 and Keep Going. As if these 14 albums weren't enough I then am asked to help in the making of Intensive Care before traveling the world playing it to people. And it's sunny. Thanks xxx
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 12:37 pm (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/animation-nights.shtml
The expressionistic pitch for unions and a welfare state was amazing,
especially for an American visiting the UK.
You would have loved Automania 2000, a short predicting a world so filled with cars people eventually just lived in them, being unable to move them anymore...
Re: I don't like my own drawing style much at all...
Date: 2005-11-26 01:23 pm (UTC)I've been for a walk and a chance to think about my original comments, I think that the thing I most dislike about the current school of twee anthropomorphism isn't that they're putting the humanity in but sapping humanity out. It reminds me in a way of what you say about skulls & goth. A large part of the visual arts seems to have a problem with humanity in the raw: either filtering it through melodramatic images of death or by smoothing everthing out in pastel colours and synthetic textures.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 02:15 pm (UTC)Well, at least one of my characters is there, anyway. :-)
Re: Reminds me...
Date: 2005-11-26 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-26 11:55 pm (UTC)Re: Reminds me...
Date: 2005-11-27 09:22 am (UTC)thanks for the tip!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-27 06:56 pm (UTC)Thank you for a very useful view on the festival (i was only at the shynola talk, saw some films i had already seen and flipped thru the flipbooks for a little bit). I myself felt that I don't belong much anymore to that world of worshippers of cuteness (most of the talks by the filmmakers except shynola seemed quite boring to me, as were the questions addressed to them, the peterpanesque clothing accesories and the obsession with limited edition toys), but you've described perfectly the little patch of skin that still unites me to them...
I found really striking the way that all of the flipbooks made succeeded in making a little something, a joke, a story, a surreal haiku like hisae's, instead of the rambling that usually follows giving a piece of blank paper to the audience, as if all the people involved had been swept together by a desire to make something with enough punch to make somebody smile strongly, or laugh, or remember it forever. A very capitalist attitude in a way, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-27 10:28 pm (UTC)