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A look at animation history via Cartoon Brew's archives.

One of the better-known shorts made by John and Faith Hubley is Moonbird, from 1959. This film came about when the Hubleys made a secret recording of their two sons one night, playing a game in which they pretended to be hunting for the elusive Moonbird. The result was a soundtrack with a complete narrative, courtesy of the two children; the Hubleys and their studio then visualised the story to create the film.

It is surprising how well Moonbird works, considering that its story is simply two kids making things up as they go along. The personalities of the children come through very strongly and much of the recorded dialogue is inherently funny, as when the younger boy tries to recite “Hey Diddle Diddle” but has trouble remembering past the second word.

Moonbird was followed by the 1967 film Windy Day, based on the same concept but using the voices of the Hubleys’ two daughters. This short is much looser, with a transformative element as the two characters morph from one identity to another. Instead of a single narrative, the children deliver a free-flowing conversation which makes several twists: The two girls start by playing at being a knight and a princess, and later play at being animals; between these sessions they discuss birth, adulthood, marriage and death in the half-grasped manner of children.

Windy Day was shown at the 1968 Cambridge Animation Festival; amongst the people who saw it were producer Colin Thomas and animator William Mather.

“We were blown away by the use of raw unpolished sound with a highly controlled medium like animation”, said Mather in an interview I conducted with him in 2011. In 1975 the two put together a pilot film entitled Audition, based around a recording of Mather’s son talking to an organ player as he auditioned for the role of a choirboy.

The film is very different to Hubley’s shorts. Aside from a very brief sequence in which the boy imagines the organ turning into a monster, it does not take place in a world of childhood fantasy: Its aim is instead to recreate the conversation in more straightforward cartoon terms.

The Hubleys sought to create fantasy films when they made Moonbird and Windy Day, and turned to the taproot of so much fantasy: the imaginations of children. By contrast, Mather and Thomas created a film which was closer to documentary. It is worth noting that Thomas was a documentary filmmaker, and that BBC Bristol – the branch for which the two men made their pilot – has a strong documentary tradition.

The pilot led to Animated Conversations, a six-part series produced in the late-1970s by various directors. Mather contributed Hangovers, based on a recording of a barmaid and her customers, but the best-known shorts for this series were made by Aardman founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton.

The two Aardman shorts take quite different approaches. Down and Out is a literalistic portrayal of an elderly man being turned away from a hostel which – unlike Mather’s shorts – lacks any humor; its emphasis is instead on pathos. Confessions of a Foyer Girl, on the other hand, plays its material for laughs. A young cinema employee discussing the banal details of her day-to-day life is contrasted with the glamorous and exciting world of the movies.

Lord and Sproxton’s work on Animated Conversations prompted Channel 4 to commission its own series of animation based on natural dialogue, this time made entirely by Aardman: Late Edition, Sales Pitch, On Probation, Early Bird

Aardman’s subsequent work in this format includes Creature Comforts by Nick Park. As well as ranking as the single most famous example of the approach, it is one of the more playful in using its soundtrack. As the film is framed as a series of short interviews with various characters, Park was able to home in on the soundbites with the most comic potential. The earlier shorts built themselves around large chunks of undigested conversation, but the whole point of Creature Comforts is that the interviewees are quoted completely out of context.

Creature Comforts became an entire franchise, and in is now the key example of what is, today, a full-fledged genre of animation.

Sometimes the approach can serve a practical use. Animation students are often assigned the task of working to found soundtracks as lipsync exercises. “The Trouble with Love and Sex,” a 2011 episode of the BBC documentary series Wonderland, focused on people undergoing counselling; when it ran into the problem that these people were not comfortable being filmed, it simply used their voices, the visuals being animated by Jonathan Hodgson.

Meanwhile, other animators returned to the daring ethos of the Hubley shorts. Chris Landreth’s Ryan plays with intertextuality, using animation to illustrate interviews with and about animator Ryan Larkin. Sylvie Bringas and Orly Yadin’s’s Silence presents a child’s eye view of the Holocaust, alternating between harsh, woodblock-like sequences for the camp scenes and a softer, more childlike style for the postwar sequences.

There are three general approaches taken by these films. The first is a literalistic portrayal of the conversation, as with the melancholy Down and Out, the lighthearted Late Edition and the harrowing Waltz with Bashir (the last of these being the only feature-length animation of this type that I am aware of.) The second approach creates comedy by placing ordinary dialogue into an unusual situation, as with Creature Comforts.

Finally, the third approach uses animation to illustrate the more subjective aspects of the soundtrack, usually by attempting to recreate the mental state of the speaker. Examples include Silence, Ryan, Marjut Rimminen’s Some Protection, Paul Vester’s Abductees and Andy Glynne’s Animated Minds.

Jan Svankmajer once remarked that “animators tend to construct a closed world for themselves, like pigeon fanciers or rabbit breeders.” When an animated film uses unscripted audio, what we see is pure fantasy, but what we hear is an actual moment in time—the closed world of animation is suddenly opened up to stark reality.

IMAGES AND VIDEO IN THIS PIECE
1.) Still from Moonbird
2.) Still from Windy Day
3.) Audition
4.) Still from Confessions of a Foyer Girl
5.) Still from Creature Comforts
6.) Clip from “The Trouble with Love and Sex”
7.) Still from Waltz with Bashir

This is actually the first picture I drew on my phone with the Magic Brush app. and you can see I was trying to figure out what in the hell these crazy brushes were and how to control them.

Me if I were transformed into some kind of beast and I met a little baby chick (in the snow).

This past semester I gave all my writing classes a choice for their final project. They could write me piece of creative writing in any style, or we could create a magazine together as a class. They would do all the writing and basic article designs (one article per student) and I would put it all together and get it professionally printed. It turns out only one class, Class 095 (one of my best and most adventurous classes) was interested in creating a magazine. The other classes wanted the path of least resistance, and they knew what to expect from a creative writing piece.

Well, I think Class 095 would all quickly agree that creating the magazine was a much harder job, even though it was a lot less writing. But I think they would also agree that the other classes missed out on a more interesting experience. First of all they quickly found that writing something shorter is not easier when you are trying to do it well, and secondly they found out that design does not mean slapping a couple of pictures and a title on an article. Yes, you may look at this and say, “Well, that is not very professionally designed, and there are lots of mistakes.” I’m sorry you couldn’t see all the work the students put into this then, because in the process you would see the improvements through multiple drafts and how much they learned with each one. These are mostly students who had never written an “article” before, and they certainly had never designed one. 

I will be truthful and say that I was disappointed in a number of them for being lazy with their articles at the beginning (and yes a couple of them made it through to the end being lazy), but I really pushed them and made them realize that because I had a lot of experience with creating a magazine I wasn’t going to let them off easy. Then they put in the work, although I hear they bitched about me a lot online and in their dorm rooms. Anyway, I think they were very proud of the final product and I’m proud of them for following through and trying something new. Although, I am really glad only one class chose to do it because it was a hell of a lot of extra work for me. 

NOTE: In typical Chinese fashion a lot of students just ripped their images off from the internet, but I at least tried to enforce that they had legitimate credits for all of the images they used (and they learned that a www. or website name is not an art credit). But I am very happy to point out that a number of students created their own photographs or artwork. All the big photos and the cover art are student work! 

Good Ol’ Class 095!

What can I say except, “I survived third semester, and all I got was this lousy underarm chafing from sweating so damn much and having to work in deadly heat all day for six days straight.” 

Actually I got out of it easy. The majority of the the teachers, including Becky, got sick from the heat during the week. Anyway, the stupid, pointless and much-loathed “Third Semester: English Camp” is now over, but I made sure it wasn’t a total loss. I did make a splash (oy, bad joke). 

Because it is so hot I started a tradition last year of including water in my third semester class. Last year I brought a water gun to class and anyone who did not participate, or got the wrong answer during trivia, or complained, or generally annoyed me, got squirted. This year it was water balloons. I played a game at the end of class that had absolutely nothing to do with English and was only about how soaked I could make a few students. But on the last day a lot of students were going directly to the bus to go home after class, so I didn’t want to get them wet. I turned the game around and let the winning team of students try to soak me. They were very hesitant to do so (the whole teacher respect thing) but they eventually gleefully got into it. I retaliated a little but only at their feet. It was fun and a student hiding in the doorway got some pictures for me. 

Luckily third semester has now been cancelled for future school years, so my tradition was short lived. 

The mysterious and melancholy Yellow Girl visits another rainy ancient Chinese town. This time it’s Xidi 西递. 

Recently we went on a very wet trip to the “Yellow Mountain” area of China. The rains kept us off the mountain, but we visited a couple of excellent ancient villages. If you want a more detailed look at our trip, Becky did a nice entry about it on her blog. From me you will only get a bunch of photos. I loved the colors of the ponchos and umbrellas against the black and white village and stormy skies. 

I think I will call this photo essay “Yellow Girl in the Village of Rain and Shadows.” Yes, that sounds sufficiently ridiculous and overblown enough. 

I introduced my Art Club group to egg decorating this week in honor of Easter. Most of them didn’t really know about egg decorating and no one had ever thought to try it before, yet they all were excellent at it. I consider myself a pretty decent egg decoration type guy, but many of these first timers blew me away. I think part of it was that they had no preconceived notions of what an “Easter Egg” was supposed to be like. Here are some pics of students and their eggs on a stick.

I’m pretty noobish with watercoloring my drawings. And, for some reason, I never really tried just watercoloring without line drawing first. Even though I’ve seen plenty of people do such things, I’ve never thought to give it a shot myself until I started admiring the incredible work of these two fantastic art beings (one is MCFC favorite Eleanor Davis). So while out drawing some of the gnarled little “bonsai style” trees, which I like to do here on campus when it is so darn nice out, I decided to give it a shot. Rough, but a passable first effort and encouragement enough to give me the nerve to try some more. 

I’m sitting here doing thumbnails for a picture book and I’m realizing that once again I’m complicating things. It’s an extremely bad habit of mine. You can see by these first thumbnails that I’ve envisioned one cluttered picture book. 

So, I went looking around the internet for some inspiration for simplification. I came across a very interesting blog about children’s book art and design called The Apple and the Egg. Honestly, for me it is a little bit too weighted towards the hipper-than-thou books made to delight us designers and artists than books I actually believe would appeal to modern children, but it also has a lot of wonderful finds and excellent sketchbook peeks. 

There are some entire books featured too! Among those I found one of my new favorite bedtime books, and a book that couldn’t be more simplified yet complete, Dinosaur vs. Bedtime!

This book is so perfect in its execution that it just puts a big old smile on my face. Also, it remains hip and “designy” without throwing that in your face and knocking away the smile. I’m glad to find out about this author (apparently I’m out of the loop a bit since he seems to be quite popular and this is from 2008). 

By the way, if anyone else out there is doing thumbnails / storyboards for a picture book (or anything sequential in nature) you would be remiss not to check out this excellent tutorial by picture book master Uri Shulevitz.

I’d say that about 90% of the ideas that I have that I truly like have come from dreams or half-sleep. I’ve become pretty good about capturing them over the years (with varying success) but that means I have a huge backlog of ideas I like that I’ll probably never get to. I guess there are worse problems.

This one was based on something that I said in a dream and it made me wake up and smile. So, I repeated this little rhyme in my head over and over until morning. I think I was even saying it in other dreams. That can work with small ideas like this, but sometimes you get that big idea that can pick you up out of bed even on a cold night and make you write in the dark on whatever is at hand. I equally love and hate those. 

The Hospital of Wild Sorrows


Dossy 1


Friend of Dossy


Dossy 2


The Heavy Men

My friend Sean Hurley (aka Sherwin Sleeves) is an incredible writer and storyteller, both on the page and in the traditional vocal sense. He has written and produced a podcast called Atoms, Motion and the Void for a number of years and he now is working on a YA book called The Rulebook and Calendar of Kittery Embers which he has been serializing as he finishes chapters. You should really give it a listen and if you are in the publishing world you should get in touch with him because he is now looking for an agent and publisher for this story. 

The above images are character and style idea sketches I’ve been doing purely out of love for the Kittery Embers story. I of course would love to do illustrations for the actual book as well if it ever came to that (ahem). 

This video starts off a little bouncy but stick with it if you want a peek at what it’s like to go to a local vegetable and meat market here in Lin’an, China. This was made last summer when a student and I were filming various things around town.