The Signpost #1: Lines, Spirals, Shere Khan
What to watch, read and listen to in the animation world.
Move Madly posts take shape through a process of distillation. (Maybe that’s why they go well with whisky, as Coleen Baik recently suggested.) The subjects I write about are plucked from an ever-shifting mental list of ideas for articles. These in turn are boiled down from a cloud of musings on animation, many of which come to me, naturally enough, while I’m watching animation or engaging in the discourse around it.
When things I’ve watched or read or listened to inform something I’ve written, I cite them with hyperlinks or footnotes.1 But far more often, they prod my thoughts in fun directions without directly inspiring a post. I’ve been looking for a way to share more of these.
Enter The Signpost, a new regular feature in which I recommend animation-related stuff I’ve been lately enjoying. I’ll spotlight films and shows, interviews with the people who make them, books they’ve written on the side, pieces of critical analysis, and much more. Not all of it will be new: I’ll drop in some gems from the archive. Not all of it will be good, but all of it will be interesting.
Today’s post is free to all, but future Signposts will be paywalled. If you like what you read—here or elsewhere on Move Madly—please consider signing up for a paid subscription. You’ll be helping keep this distillery in business.
🎥 What I’m watching
PLANTING: no lie in nature
Animation, like everything else, faces the daunting question of how to address the ecological crisis, both through what it talks about and how it is made (after all, animation production can quickly become hungry for energy and materials). British producer Animate Projects presents an answer with its PLANTING project, which commissioned three filmmakers—Lewis Heriz (who has a Substack), Simon Hamlyn and Karen Okpoti—to explore people’s relationship to nature in and around the city of Derby.
The resulting films are playful and thoughtful in their approaches to their subjects, which include the UK’s first public park and a garden sanctuary for struggling people. The filmmakers expanded on their practice in an accompanying online panel, in which they talked about recycling acetate sheets and incorporating found materials like flowers into their films. I like Okpoti’s striking comparison of the way people litter, contributing to an accumulation of rubbish without seeing it, to the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse. And I was moved by this very simple observation from a participant in Heriz’s film: “There is no lie in nature. Nature always tells you the truth.”
Watch Green Lung by Simon Hamlyn below:
Uzumaki: spiralling out of control
I’ve written about how I want to see more animated horror being made. Japan has always been ahead of this game. Like many, I was very excited for Uzumaki—admittedly a US-led production (via Adult Swim), but made with Japanese collaborators and based on Junji Ito’s cult manga about a town overrun with menacing spirals. We’d been sporadically teased across five years with moody monochrome images, which appeared to capture Ito’s style faithfully.
Now that the first few episodes have finally dropped, anticipation has flipped into disappointment. Episode One is atmospheric, scenes of quiet foreboding alternating with violent lashings of Ito’s body horror—but there are already problems with pacing and animation quality, which become far more apparent in the woefully janky Episode Two. The series has already become a cause célèbre, sparking online debate about working conditions in the anime industry and an extraordinary intervention from producer Jason DeMarco. “I can’t talk about what went down but we were screwed over,” he writes. A horror story indeed.
📚 What I’m reading
Shiyoon Kim: getting the tiger right
Kim is a top character designer and concept artist, with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and many Disney films among his credits—he worked on Hiro and Baymax in Big Hero 6 (2014). So when he writes tutorials on drawing and storytelling, as he often does on his Substack, they’re worth reading.
He recently posted an excellent one about an iconic scene in The Jungle Book (1967) where plummy tiger Shere Khan threatens Kaa, the mystical snake. Comparing a story sketch by Bill Peet with an animation drawing of the same moment by the legendary Milt Kahl, Kim meticulously demonstrates Kahl’s “extraordinary ability of understanding what to exaggerate and what to simplify” in the transition to animation. He pores over the subtleties of Khan’s anatomy in Kahl’s hands, in the process teaching us a lesson in the genius of the Disney greats, but also in the requirements of animation.
Vulture: a listicle done right
For a generalist publication, Vulture has always had a marked interest in animation. For example: in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, as white actors stepped away from voicing animated characters of colour in the US, an editor commissioned me to look into what voice actors in other territories thought of the issue—a very interesting question that few if any others were asking.
Around the same time, the website published a listicle of the highest order: a sprawling, deeply researched rundown of the 100 most influential sequences in animation. The feature takes its mission seriously, running the historical gamut from the 19th-century proto-cinema of Charles-Émile Reynaud to the innovations of contemporary works like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Steven Universe (2013–19), and taking a far more open-minded view of animation art than lists like this tend to do. Crucially, each write-up is accompanied by an embedded video of the sequence. This is a wonderful resource which I’ve come back to several times over years.
📻 What I’m listening to
Skwigly: stop-motion roundtable
I’ve been unable to attend much of the British Film Institute’s landmark stop-motion season, for baby-related reasons. So I’ve compensated with the pacifying tones of eloquent filmmakers talking about puppets, as featured on this episode of the Skwigly podcast, which ties in with the season.
Osbert Parker, Joseph Wallace, Suzie Templeton and Robert Morgan are four of the most characterful stop-motion directors in the UK, which itself is a kind of puppet superpower. They have distinct ways of talking about their art and craft (although, when asked which stop-motion filmmaker they’d most want to dine with, they all seem keen on Jan Švankmajer). This makes for an engrossing discussion with all kinds of fun tangents: I was particularly intrigued by Parker’s reflections on whether lines are a naturally occurring phenomenon—thoughts that informed his film Timeline (2021; watch the trailer below).
By the way, the Skwigly podcast has one of the richest archives of interviews with animation filmmakers you’ll find anywhere.
Trashfuture: AI’s inroads into animation
The merry band of cynics over at left-wing podcast Trashfuture have recently been talking about animation. In one episode, they bring in animation writer Rusteen Honardoost and writer-storyboard artist Nora Meek to talk about the encroachment of AI into the industry, which is central to the ongoing negotiations between studios and union The Animation Guild.
The guests speak insightfully (when the hosts give them the space to do so). Among other things, they note that kids’ content is particularly vulnerable, as children are unlikely to complain about the dip in quality that the rash use of AI will entail. They touch on a frustrating truth: in many quarters of the industry, there is a disdain for children’s shows—a sense that young viewers are less discerning and will tolerate lower production values. The episode is here, and the discussion of animation starts around the 35:30 mark.
A related item in a different episode (from 47:00) covers the apparent use of AI in the production of the pilot for The New Norm, a new anti-woke animated sitcom exclusive to X (you read that right).
Footnotes, an academic once said to me, are where the really interesting stuff happens. That is sometimes the case, but not in this post.
Such a nice surprise to see this today Alex - thank you for watching. And yes, Matt is a seemingly bottomless well of wise words!
Love this format! Great post.