A Wholly Subjective List Of Animation Obsessions
Dancing meat (raw). Feathers McGraw. He-Man. Hubleys. More.
Some years ago, I came across an article in Sight & Sound written by Chris Petit, seasoned critic and director of Radio On (the only good British road movie). It was quite simple: a list of his cinematic obsessions, chosen according to no other explicit criteria.
I love the list. I also note the lack of animation. In the interest of balance, then, here’s an homage to Petit’s exercise, this time with one criterion: animation only.
Learning from Svankmajer that one can animate with raw meat.
Brakhage’s Mothlight, at both 18 and 24 frames per second.
He-Man singing 4 Non Blondes, and all that potential of early YouTube culture.
The animal puppets in Hello World!
The (French) voice acting in I Lost My Body: unusually understated.
The plasticine waves in Ryo Orikasa’s Datum Point.
The clouds in Manabu Ohashi’s Cloud.
The Brothers Quay’s grimy, oxidised textures and troubling lightscapes.
Christopher Nolan commissioning a film from the Quays.
Pixar in its Joe Ranft era.
The world of Cars, which is adapted to human needs yet contains only talking vehicles, who have no passengers to transport but seem unbothered.
Bill Tytla’s animation (any).
Characters’ run cycles in video games.
The mother’s devastating expressions at the end of Ruth Lingford’s Death and the Mother—including the final one, unseen by the camera.
Channel 4’s swaggering days at the forefront of auteur animation—and Clare Kitson's book on the subject.
The spectacle of photorealistic lions singing in the 2019 remake of The Lion King.
The close-ups that work: Chuck Jones’s Grinch, C. Bagley Beetle at the start of Mr. Bug Goes to Washington, Seita crying for the first time in Grave of the Fireflies.
Jones’s memoir, Chuck Amuck.
The silence as Marco realises that his mother is not onboard the ocean liner in 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (neorealism in animation).
Takahata’s use of deep space.
The melancholic houses in the distance in Miyazaki’s backgrounds.
The existence of Fantasia.
Oskar Fischinger’s sad dalliance with Hollywood.
Te Wei’s impossible career.
Mati Kütt’s dreams.
Howard Ashman slipping words like “genuflect” and “coterie” into Disney songs.
The little shadows cast by cels on backgrounds in the analogue days.
Vinland Saga’s characterisation of King Cnut.
The awe of the prologue to Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Evelyn Lambart’s colours.
Bob Clampett’s Bugs Bunny plummeting to Earth in Falling Hare.
Cartoon physics, exalted by the poet Nick Flynn.
The Masstransiscope (train journeys as cinema).
The troubling softness of Sterling Holloway’s voice.
The pleasure of watching pronounced parallax through the shifting layers of a background.
The Beatles’ tortuous, ongoing affair with animation.
The uncanny floatiness of the character animation in Waltz With Bashir, which only heightens the sense of dissociation.
McLaren’s definition of animation as “not the art of drawings that move, but the art of movements that are drawn.”
“Lisa on Ice,” and all other Simpsons episodes that move us.
The seaside scene in Tale of Tales—the strange sense of having seen it already in a past life.
The man planting trees in The Man Who Planted Trees—and of course his name, Elzéard Bouffier.
Familiar cities revealed through artists’ eyes: London in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Paris in Gay Purr-ee, Edinburgh in The Illusionist.
Dahee Jeong’s Movements (metatextual experiments as comedy).
Animation made by children in schools and workshops.
The King and the Mockingbird—the only film I remember my grandad owning on VHS.
The psychedelic forest in Boy and the World.
Normand Roger’s many, many scores.
Paper airplanes at Annecy.
Animation by Marcell Jankovics playing in a Super Bowl ad.
Documentary voices used well: the Hubleys, Bill Mather, Aardman.
The sad whale in a toxic sea in a film from my childhood whose title I’ve forgotten.
The girl being asked to hand over her organs in exchange for a night out in Alison de Vere’s The Black Dog.
A postcard memory from Osamu Dezaki.
Tomás Pichardo Espaillat.
Mary Ellen Bute.
The multiplane shot through the village in Disney’s Pinocchio (depth in cel animation).
Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie.
The presence of death in The Book of Life.
The gruesome metamorphoses in The Wolf House.
Scientific and medical visualisations (animation as lifesaver).
Emma reading her ex a story she’s written in Félix Dufour-Laperrièrre’s Ville Neuve, nudging the film onto a poetic plane.
The lemon rolling into the drain in When the Day Breaks.
Gollum.
The quavering grass in the exterior shots of Pingwings—a ghostly trace of the animator’s footsteps as he walks to and from the puppet between frames.
The family reacting to the German bombing of a ship in Scarborough in Dudley Buxton’s John Bull’s Sketch Book.
Real wars in animation (animation depicting the otherwise unshowable).
Animation as propaganda.
The stunning, tragic first-person motorbike sequence that closes Bobby’s in Deep.
Gromit’s eyes.
The almost throwaway revelation in The Wrong Trousers that the criminal penguin is called Feathers McGraw.
The Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen.
Michel Gondry’s Lego-animated video for The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl”.
The intensity of Rosa Salazar in Undone.
The lurching tilt down to reveal the feet at the cliff’s edge in Craig Welch’s Welcome to Kentucky.
The horror of the giant scarred teddy bear in Akira.
The city montage sequence in Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell—heavily urban yet ethereal.
Sébastien Laudenbach’s brushstrokes.
Salarymen blooming in Koji Yamamura’s Mt. Head.
Daffy Duck spitting out “Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!”
The supporting cast of ghouls in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Buttons for eyes in Coraline.
Eisenstein on Walt Disney: “I’m sometimes frightened when I watch his films. Frightened because of some absolute perfection in what he does.”
The dancing in The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl.
Scrat.
Facial expressions in Joanna Quinn’s films.
Peter Chung’s Rugrats pilot.
The camera tripod squatting and stretching in Man With a Movie Camera, which introduces yet another kind of vitality to the film at a late stage.
The war machine sequence in The Thief and the Cobbler.
Marie Paccou turning parasols into animation.
Nikita Diakur’s Fest: the exposed rigs, the diabolical music, the pigeon falling off the roof—the whole absurd lot.
The Twitter account Eastern European Cartoon General.
The set representing Riley’s mind in Inside Out.
Fifty million bricks perched atop a house like a cuboid megalith in A Town Called Panic.
The way it’s getting harder to tell what animation even is.
Very nice list. I'll share a few of mine.
- The way that you can completely change your character model to reflect the feelings of a character. Miyazaki does this really well, think Ponyo, or the constant changes to Sophie's emotional life, and how it effects the witch's curse in Howl's Moving Castle.
I think it can look far more natural in animation than it would with "digital makeup" in a live action film. Or having a live actor transition into CG. (I know, this leads back to some semantic questions, but you know what I'm talking about)
- The mixture of unscripted audio with animation. Documentary or otherwise. There's something fascinating about mixing the spontaneous and unexpected with animation, which requires meticulous planning, no matter how loose your style is. Whether it's Creature Comforts or the NFB film Ryan or the Hubley shorts, it's fascinating.
- Pixilation
I recently found out there was a term for making stop motion animation with live actors. Taking something you could easily do in live action, but you give it that stop motion jankiness. Yet, it's still precise and controlled. Weird, underused, and a beautiful technique.
- The trend of hand drawn effects in commercial CG features.
- Related, the use of animating CG characters on 2s. (is there a term for this technique?) You can make your stuff look as 'smooth' as possible on a computer, yet people realize there's something about the limitation of movement that draws the eye.
Richard Williams was wrong, and Frank Thomas was correct, in my estimation, 2s do sparkle!! (dare I say, 3s do as well)
- The fact that when making animation, you have complete control over the weather.
- The facial animations in Tokyo Godfathers
- Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson's approach to directing acting in animation.
- The creative use of materials in stop motion animation. I was thinking about Jiří Barta's The Pied Piper, and all of those eerie characters sculpted from wood, and taxidermy mice. (although I gotta admit, raw meat is up there)
I could go on and on, but this is a fun exercise!!
This is a fantastic piece with a really fresh angle! It covers all this ground and raises so many things to think about, but makes it all feel breezy. Great stuff. (And it was a real surprise to see the stillness article linked here -- thank you for the shout-out!)