Marimo - Issue 02 - Phantasmagoria

ISSUE

02

Phantasmagoria 15,50€

To animation and beyond www.marimomag.com Co-founder & Creative Director Adeline Marteil adeline@marimomag.com Co-founder Ingrid Mengdehl

Fonts Arazatí family Cavita Rounded family Rogliano family Alacena family

by TipoType Cover art CROM

Chief-editor Adeline Marteil

Marimo magazine Issue 002 - Phantasmagoria ISSN 2557-9223 Published in December 2018

Editors JoyNoël Elett Brice Fallon Ko Ricker

Marimo S.A.S 15, rue Vergniaud 92 300 Levallois-Perret France

Assistant editor Laura-Beth Cowley

©2018 Marimo magazine All right reserved All material in this publication may not be reproduced, transmitted or distributed in any form without the written permission of Marimo.

Translation Yasmeen Kharrat Printed in Czech Republic by PBtisk a.s. on FSC certified papers from the Munken range

by Arctic Paper

With kind support of our generous Kickstarter backers: Sophie Arouet Assembly BrightCarbon Carl Samantha Bastien Barbara Carswell Laura-Beth Cowley Edward Culbreath @natallyillustrations Sara & Mickaël Donati Véronique William & JoyNoël Elett Jorge Orozco Fonseca Ronan Guilloux Viviane & Serge Guilloux David Hury L & L Hury Clémentine & Hervé Marteil James Mcfarlane Stephen Monger David Perlmutter

Welcome The Marimo’z are excited to present our spooky second issue.

Throughout its short history, Marimo has faced ongoing challenges — whether it’s an economic hurdle or a fast approaching deadline, our growing team has had much to learn from every new experience. We come from a variety of fields, among them animation, academia, and journalism, and we are all determined to make use of our strengths in order to keep the adventure going, step by step. By continuing to refine the magazine’s format and content, we Marimo’z have set a high bar for the future.

Just like with animation itself, it takes time and sweat to make the magic of Marimo happen, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our wonderful Kickstarter backers. To everyone who contributed to our campaign: we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping make the production of our sophomore issue possible!

Sorcery is at the core of the following pages. The art and industry of animation have always given rise to an extremely powerful form of storytelling, especially so when a work’s inspiration is founded in our deepest dreams and nightmares.

Animation’s suitability as a medium of ghostly and necromantic tales is proven by the vast repertoire of phantasmagoric animated works. When it comes to dark matters such as death, demons, and other monsters that haunt our imagination, animation has the ability to embody grim storylines for both young and old, whether it means exposing small children to difficult subjects, or allowing mature viewers to face their most visceral feelings. Whoever the audience, the animators profiled in this issue have found the dreamscape to be a deep well of inspiration, and we doubt they will ever exhaust its potential.

Who is behind these macabre creations? Who are the storytellers of “the other side”?

Who envisions this other reality? Why have so many of them chosen this apparently “childish” medium to tell their most tremendous tales, and how do they go about it?

Like you, we at Marimo are enchanted by the witchcraft of animation, and we’d love to explore some of the answers to these questions together.

We hope you enjoy sinking your teeth into this haunted reading!

Adeline

Contributors

Zay Balami Writer @zazouzay zbalami.weebly.com

Cole Delaney Writer coledelaney.me

Guy Carnegie Poet @gcdesigndevelopment guycarnegie.co.uk

JoyNoël Elett Writer @thejoyfulnerd

Robbie Cathro Illustrator @robbiecathro robbiecathro.com Alessia Cecchet Writer @alessiacecchet alessiacecchet.com Lorenzo Cervantes Writer @LBCowley laura-bethcowley.co.uk Laura-Beth Cowley Writer @lorenzo.cvts @lolovantes CROM Illustrator @crom_cristianortiz Tom Deason Illustrator @_tom_deason

Ian Moore Illustrator @iam.ian.m

Any-Mation

Ian Failes Writer @vfxblog Brice Fallon Writer Ben Lewis Giles Illustrator benlewisgiles.format.com David Hury Writer davidhury.com Vanessa Lovegrove Illustrator vanessalovegrove.co.uk @vloveg

Timothy David Orme Writer timothydavidorme.com Ruth Richards Writer Ko Ricker Writer ko-ricker.com Eric Rittatore Writer @EricRittatore Sam Shaw Illustrator @samshawdraws Marta Zubieta Illustratorr @onirical_zubieta

Ben Mitchell Writer @benlmitchell ben-mitchell.co.uk Sophie Monks Kaufman Writer @sophiemonkskaufman @sopharsogood

Special thanks to: Clémentine & Hervé Marteil, Ronan Guilloux, the ace Alix Abanda, Axel Luzayadio (Le Blog de Cheeky), Les Éditions Issekinicho, and the wonderful editors who helped bring this issue into your hands.

10 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Contents 10

The walk from the gate

13

Lanterna magica

15

Robertson's Phantasmagoria

16

A brief history of macabre in animation

19

amela Pettler P Breathing new life into the Addams Family mausoleum

23

hantom Boy P Hovering between life and death

27

Into the realm of the Forgotten Forest The inspiration that led to creating a new animated series pilot with Cartoon Network

30

ropes and themes of folklore T in Japanese animation Case study: A Letter to Momo

33

Rosto Somewhere between waking and sleeping

34

roken screws and dusty puppet eyes B Mise-en-scène in the Quay Brothers

36

obert Morgan R An unceasing series of nightmare visions

38

he little factory of the great thrill T LAIKA Studios

48

things you need for a good feature 3 A good script, a good script, a good script

53

Harryhausen and his dinosaurs

54

ortfolio: Red Nose Studio P Bringing life to illustrations with stop-motion animation

Smoke & mirrors

66

FX: the ultimate illusion V Matte painter Yvonne Muinde on making the unreal, real

68

ow did they do that?

H VFX pros love being fooled by illusions, too

70

Deep in the uncanny valley

74

Watchlist

76

Playlist

80

The Glassworker

86

ringing your ideas to light B A look at the challenges of the animation business and team building

89

omen who animate W Perceptions, prejudice and the fight for change

94

omen in animation W 12 personalities

11 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

62

Essay

THE WALK FROM THE GATE

12 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Guy Carnegie

Essay

The walk from the gate is a two-headed beast, By day there is nothing to fear in the least.

Beautiful flowers and trees boast their wares, An orchard of apricots, lemons and pears.

Gargantuan trees, thick with leaves reaching high, Almost so much that you search for the sky.

Squirrels and pigeons, all manner of creatures, Nature euphoric, in all of it’s features.

At night when the time comes to put out the bin, One makes out the streetlight that soothes one within.

But then coming back in the other direction, Causes a moment of quiet reflection.

The walk from the gate is around sixty seconds.

The bin is put out and a comfy home beckons.

The walk back now technically is just the same, Only now there’s a feeling I’m part of a game.

The darkness is palpably clear in these fences, One’s eyes straining, coupled with such heightened senses.

Tricks of the moonlight transforming a thicket, The pantomimes started, did I buy a ticket?

The walk from the gate is a two-headed beast, By day there is nothing to fear in the least.

But night time has managed to hijack my thoughts, The walk from the gate is a walk of all sorts.

13 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

How can one minute now seem to be five?

Why does this garden now seem so alive?

I’m sure I just saw a dark figure dash by, But I know in the day I’d not batter an eye.

WithPhantasmagoria kind support

Since 1991, TVPaint DĂŠveloppement crew has been developing with heart and soul a versatile 2D animation software called TVPaint Animation, to bring efficient digital solutions to traditional animators all around the world.

14 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

tvpaint.com

Phantasmagoria

Lanterna magica According to Goethe, the world without love was "like a magic lantern without light". The magic lantern is a pre-cinema device where images are projected onto a wall or screen in a dark environment. It is a closed box containing a candle, and light filters through a hole on which a lens is applied.

The earliest slides, support of the projected illustrations, were hand-painted on glass. Later, inventive mechanisms were devised to achieve basic moving pictures. Over the years many technical evolutions occurred, but the magic within remained intact.

In small villages, and in the squares, the real and the fantastic, romantic, legendary, and mythical lived together on the painted slides. The Count of Cagliostro used it to feed his own fame. Ingmar Bergman elected it as a symbol of human beings' primordial fantasy. For Francis Ford Coppola, the cinema, in its integrality, came from the first magicians and lantern shows.

Ghosts, devils, gargoyles, dreams, and nightmares also took life, helped by old special effects and the talent of the lanternist, both operator and showman who was the real liaison and interpreter between “real” world and the “fantastic” one.

Invented by Dutch physicist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629 – 1695), the magic lantern spread rapidly in European Courts both as an attraction and didactic tool–functions that tend to merge and overlap in such suggestible periods in which science and imagination still went hand-in-hand.

Without knowing it, popular imagination was being shaped and recoded, later to be ready to welcome and celebrate Lumière Bros' Big Revolution. But the Lantern has survived, continuing to pulse its suggestions in the dark, to benefit some nostalgic loyals to that era of mystery, enchantment, and–perhaps–lost innocence.

15 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Text by Eric Rittatore

16 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

Robertson's Phantasmagoria The illusion of afterlife Text by Cole Delaney Illustration by Vanessa Lovegrove

I

magine walking into Pavillon de l’Échequier in Paris one spring evening and sitting with several friends, hoping to experience a new theatrical event. As the candles are extinguished plunging the hall into darkness, the spectral drama unfolds. Smoke creeps across the room and people rush forward to the host asking to see phantoms of the past. Spectres hover above, winking in and out of existence, and people begin to flee the theatre in terror. Whispers or claps of thunder causes others to draw swords, or cry in panic. The host, Étienne-Gaspard Robert, or better known as “Robertson”, through his Fantoscope, conjures image after ghostly image, moving them closer to the petrified audience, keeping his promise and bringing the dead back to life. This is Phantasmagoria.

The most interesting part of Phantasmagoria is probably the crude indications of early animation. His Fantoscope was on wheels, so it could move forward or back, to create the illusion of the spirits growing larger. Also, the aperture could be adjusted to allow more light through the magic lantern, which made the ghost glow with more intensity as it rapidly approached. Robertson’s adjustment to the magic lantern also allowed him to use multiple slides in a single projector, which could create a crude semblance of movement. A face was given brighter eyes, and then that slide could be removed to create the illusion of life in the phantom.

Phantasmagoria is central in the history of imagination. A mixture of dark, smoky, moving imagery as spectres crept in and out of existence around the audience, mixed with the eerie voices projected by a ventriloquist and accompanied by the unsettling tones of a glass harmonica; you can imagine the chilling effect it could still have today. Thankfully, through his Mémoires, he left detailed instructions on how each effect was created. This is close to 80 years before Eadweard Muybridge began his pioneering work on animal locomotion. Robertson’s adaptations on the magic lantern marked an important step toward the idea of successive images being played over each other, creating movement in order to animate, which of course means, to “bring to life”.

17 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

In 1797 France, as Robertson began his Phantasmagoria, there was a heavy interest in the macabre following the Reign of Terror (1792-1794). If executions weren’t enough, the public could now witness what they thought happened after life. Robertson had a similar dark interest since childhood and because he was a scientist, his equal interest in optics led him to early magic lantern shows. Following these, he developed many of his own techniques to make a new type of event: an immersive, horror spectacle. But also to help it stands out from the eventual copycats that emerged as his secrets were revealed.

Phantasmagoria

A brief history of macabre in animation Text by Cole Delaney Illustrations by Vanessa Lovegrove

L'Hôtel Hanté : fantasmagorie épouvantable In 1907 J. Stuart Blackton used stop-motion to show a dinner making itself in “The Haunted Hotel”. The relatively close up shot allowed animators to study the technique while the length of the sequence removed any doubt of previous visual tricks such as wires to move props. The short film was so successful in France, that over the next decade, the French term for animation was le mouvement américain and influenced many filmmakers including Émile Cohl.

American innovators

18 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony series began with the short “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), where skeletons dance and make music in a cemetery. A very literal example of the danse macabre. The gothic backdrops would carry a thread throughout Disney’s catalogue, like the landscape and themes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), and the “Sleepy Hollow” section in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). Conversely, the Fleischer Brothers explored darker tones with Betty Boop shorts, highlights including “Minnie the Moocher” (1932) and Cab Calloway’s rotoscoped performance in Snow-White (1933). Other studios were dabbling in the otherworldly too, like Famous Studio’s The Friendly Ghost (1945) which introduced Casper.

Smaller screens and bigger audiences In 1953, UPA released their gothic short “The Tell Tale Heart” (1953) from Edgar Allen Poe’s catalogue and due to its dark subject matter, earned the first X rating for animation in the UK. As well as UPA, Hanna-Barbera also dominated the small screen and in 1969, released Scooby Doo, Where Are You! followed by The Funky Phantom (1971). They also brought back the Addams Family in Scooby Doo, marrying the macabre styles and granted them their own animated show in 1973. In Britain, Cosgrove-Hall released Count Duckula (1988), rooted in the European Gothic fiction of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with an anatidaedian twist.

Phantasmagoria

Eastern perspectives With the advent of television, Gothic subculture in music, and global economies cross pollinating culture, the gothic influence crept into eastern animation, albeit with their own style. Kuri Yoji explores a surreal, macabre landscape in the darkly compelling “The Midnight Parasites” (1972). Though the biggest influence is in Goth-Loli, which is a cross between the Lolita style with a darker influence, exemplified in Amane Misa from Death Note (2006). Kawamoto Kihachiro’s “IbaraHime matawa Nemuri-Hime” (1990) model animation reimagined the story of Sleeping Beauty, rooted in European Gothic culture.

Don’t stop believing

Goth girls have more fun With the emergence of the Gothic subculture in music, goth identification became individual, rather than just a setting or tone. Married with the resurgence of animated cartoons through the 1990s, these individuals, primarily “Goth Girls” began to populate series. Examples include Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice (1989), Andrea from Daria (1997) and in more recent animation, Mai from Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005), Marceline from Adventure Time (2010) and the Librarian from Hilda (2018). Moving back to re-establishing the gothic as an environmental presence rather than just character, Over the Garden Wall (2014), and the online GIF shorts of OivaviO Motion Stories (2014-18) set themselves apart by grounding in the macabre.

19 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Animating the macabre seems to go hand in hand with stop-motion.

Even with the greatest care, movements still feel uncanny.

In Prague, Jan Švankmayer’s output militantly stuck to the surreal, culminating in Alice (1988), known for its dark and uncompromising design. His work deeply influenced the gothic animation of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Burton carried this style consistently through his stop-motion projects. Paul Berry’s “The Sandman” (1991) is an important short that continued the macabre style, similar to the work of the Brothers Quay.

Henry Sellick directed Nightmare, and then adapted James and the Giant Peach (1996) before joining Laika Studios and settling their style in Coraline (2009). They carried this forward through Paranorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), and Kubo and The Two Strings (2016).

20 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Interview

Interview

Pamela Pettler

Breathing new life into the Addams Family mausoleum Interview by Laura-Beth Cowley Illustrations by Sam Shaw based on Charles Addams' characters

“Click, click...”

When you were growing up what kind of stories did you gravitate towards?

I loved reading books with dark humor, even as a small child.

My father was a Professor at U.C. Berkeley, originally from Prague, and my mother grew up in London, so they both imbued me with a lifelong love of reading, as well as their shared mordant wit. I loved Roald Dahl (especially his adult short stories), Edgar Allan Poe, and the Gothic Romantic novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

What is your favourite film?

That’s a hard question to answer with just one film! I think I would say Edward Scissorhands. But I also like Kind Hearts and Coronets.

How did you start screenwriting?

I have always written, even as a little girl. I also loved music, and played piano and viola, and after a year at a conservatory in Geneva, decided to study music in college. I figured you don’t become a writer by “studying English”, but by living life! So I got a Ph.D. in musicology and taught college for a number of years before realizing I was truly meant to be a writer. I moved to

Los Angeles when I got married, and started over in my new career.

I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote lots of spec scripts, which got me an agent, and then I went to every possible pitch meeting, and eventually people started offering me jobs. My first assignment was writing a televised after-school special about a 12-year-old boy who turns into a werewolf for two minutes at a time. I think it is simply what I do. I gravitated towards the kind of writing I love best; dark, funny fantasy!

What consideration do you have to make when changing quite macabre or dark subject matter into family films?

I love writing dark movies with a streak of humor and sweetness, something the whole family can enjoy. I think if you write with sympathy and humanity and a wicked bit of wit, your movies can connect with everyone of every age.

It’s a matter of tone, of being on a certain wavelength, and I get there completely intuitively. I check in with myself: does this feel right? Is it somehow too mean, too scary, too dark? I’ve been writing this way all my life, so I have an intuitive feeling for what is right. The real key is to know that you CAN go dark, you don’t have to be sappy or trite, even if you’re writing to include children. Children, too, have a complicated emotional life and a welldeveloped sense of dark humor! (Look at Wile E. Coyote if you doubt it.)

What are your thoughts on horror or creepy stories that are initially intended for a child audience?

At the end of the day, I write for myself and for other adults with a wicked sense of humor. I know that something with a dark streak can work for everyone because I spent every night making up stories for my son when he was growing up. I don’t really write straight horror, or even straight “creepy” stories, but stories that have what you might call a “wicked wit”; slightly twisted, but always emotionally real and always positive and sweet.

21 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

T

hey’re mysterious and spooky and altogether kooky and they’re coming back to the big screen in fully animated splendour in October 2019. The dark and comical wit of Charles Addams is once again being reinvented, this time in CG. We were fortunate enough to get some time with the delightful weaver of the macabre, screenwriter Pamela Pettler. Pettlers' previous writing credits included Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Gil Kenan’s Monster House. No stranger to the gothic and the supernatural, she was a clear choice when revitalising the classic, unusual family we all secretly hoped to be a member of.

Interview

22 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

“ It’s about finding your tribe, your true, artistic, emotional self and allowing yourself to live your life.”

Interview

What can you tell us about the difference between writing for live action, CG animation, and stop-motion animation?

That’s a very interesting question. There are absolutely some imperatives for every medium. In live-action, for example, writers and directors often depend on reaction shots, or the look on someone’s face, and you can’t do it as well with animation, or at all with stop-motion. So you have to take this into account when you’re writing a character’s reaction; they have to have a line or an action, you can’t just write “on Victor’s wistful face, we dissolve to.” You have to give Victor a line or an action (“Bending his head in sorrow, Victor looks down at the jasmine blossom”). When writing for stop-motion you have to take into account the limits of hand-moved maquettes; “She dissolves into a thousand little butterflies” becomes “She dissolves into a butterfly.”

There’s another funny need in animation: on some intuitive level, the audience needs movement on-screen (if you will, animation). So you always have to have some kind of action happening on-screen. We as humans are always picking up tiny inflections of expression or the look in their eyes with live actors, but with animation, you can’t get that, so you need to replace it with something happening: the person is sketching, perhaps, or something is happening in the background.

When it comes to writing character and story, I have to say that I write all my scripts exactly the same way. I think about the character’s humanity, and who they are, and how they drive the story, and write it in a pure kind of way. I can always adjust for limitations or necessities later (much of production rewriting is exactly that, anyway!).

What can we expect from the new story?

I had so much fun working with the original material of Charles Addams’ original cartoons, in all their macabre glee and side-splitting wit and humor. I grew up with his cartoons in The New Yorker, and it was blissful to work with those unforgettable characters and to write their dry, wicked, but always relatable personalities. I think Uncle Fester was a particular favorite of mine to write dialog for.

I wrote a script that is wonderfully dark, wonderfully touching, wonderfully human, and with a real sense that the Addams Family stands for all of us who are a “little bit different”. THEY’RE the normal people in the movie, everyone ELSE is weird! It’s dark, funny, and lots of fun for the whole family. Conrad Vernon is a wonderful director with a fantastic sense of animation that jumps off the screen at you, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how he brings it to life!

23 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Corpse Bride, for example, was about how the dead are less inhibited, and so they teach the living how to really live. It’s about finding your tribe, your true, artistic, emotional self and allowing yourself to live your life. With Tim Burton’s imagery, the “dead” were quirky and often funny, and always in some way appealing. We created what may seem at first blush to be a “horror” movie but in fact is a very sweet, touching story, in which some people happen to be living underground. Likewise, Monster House was about three kids that no one will listen to, and even the scares had a sense of humor.

Essay

24 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

©2015 - Folimage / Lunanime / France 3 Cinéma / Rhône-Alpes Cinéma

©2015 - Folimage / Lunanime / France 3 Cinéma / Rhône-Alpes Cinéma

Essay

Phantom Boy Hovering between life and death Text by Ruth Richards

2. a. A thing (usually with human form) that appears to the sight or other sense, but has no material substance; an apparition, a spectre, a ghost.

Phantoms are associated with the illusory, with ghosts and spirits, with hauntings and with death. Some of the earliest experiments with moving images, magic-lantern shows, were popularised by phantasmagoria – ghost stories – in which spectral images, apparent to sight but not to touch, were projected on screens, used to frighten and amaze audiences. Rather than seeking to frighten its audience, the 2015 animated feature film Phantom Boy (dir.

Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol) takes this traditional understanding of a phantom and incorporates within this ghostly apparition a childlike sense of wonder.

T

he film opens with Léo, 11, reading a detective story to his little sister, Titi. It’s his last night at home with his family before he goes into hospital for an extended stay, to receive treatment for a serious illness.

Titi is too young to fully understand why Léo has to go for such a long time, but she is nevertheless worried, asking her brother if he’ll be gone a long time. Léo is honest with her; it’s a serious illness and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone, but he has a secret to share with her: “Something strange happened when I first got sick. Something absolutely incredible.

Do you want to know my secret? You can’t tell anyone, okay?

Okay, listen up. You’ll love this.”

It isn’t long before we learn Léo’s secret, too. We next see him when he has been at the hospital for month, and has lost all his hair. The family are waiting for test results to determine whether the treatment is working. Léo’s mother, who visits every day, comforts him and promises to stay until he falls

asleep. As Léo lies down and closes his eyes, his phantom rises from his body, a ghostly double. We watch as Léo glides through hospital walls and visits his family at home. Even though Léo has told Titi his secret, she only imagines that she can see him, reading to him and talking to him as if playing a game. Léo can only silently observe.

PHANTOM ENCOUNTERS Phantom Boy is the second film from Felicioli and Gagnol.

Animated in the same distinctive style as A Cat in Paris (2010), it is part crime fiction, part noir, and part superhero story; the narrative is more than a little like the detective stories that Léo loves to read. The film sees Léo using his newfound phantom power to help police officer Lieutenant Alex Tanner and journalist Mary Delaney bring down the self-described criminal mastermind, “The Man with the Broken Face”, who is holding the city of New York to ransom, threatening to release a computer virus that will send the city “back to the Stone Age”.

Léo first meets Alex in the hospital, after the officer has been found injured and left for dead at the docks. Alex wakes to find himself in the hospital waiting room, and instinctively tries to comfort a distraught Mary. He quickly realises that Mary has no idea he is there, as his hand passes right through her. It is here that Léo appears; he leads Alex back to his physical body, unconscious in a hospital bed. Still confused, Alex’s phantom begins to disappear, disintegrating into particles of glowing blue light; Léo quickly reunites phantom and body before Alex disappears completely. Léo saves many other patients whose phantoms have separated from their bodies – an elderly lady who fell down the stairs, a man whose phantom was waiting for the bus at midnight. People, like Alex, who do not realise what has happened to them.

If these people are not returned to their bodies in time, they will fade away and disappear completely.

25 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition of the word “phantom”:

Essay

“ The phantoms can be understood as doppelgängers – uncanny doubles of living bodies, familiar and unfamiliar, omens or encounters with death.”

When Alex next meets Léo, with phantom and body “united”, he remembers him only as a dream. Léo is ecstatic that Alex remembers him at all – normally, people don’t recall their phantom experiences. He tells Alex: “I helped you wake up.

I often do that with people who are sick.”

He soon proves to Alex that what happened was no dream, explaining that whilst no one can see or hear his phantom, he can still talk to and hear others through his physical body. Léo explains that whilst no one can see or hear his phantom, he can still communicate with others through his stationary physical body. As a phantom, Léo exhibits a freedom of movement that is impossible in his corporeal form. When he flies, his phantom stretches and elongates as he loops through the sky; he bends and distorts as he passes through solid objects. He is at times transparent, and sometimes forgets his own immateriality, getting frightened when a truck suddenly appears but passes through him harmlessly.

26 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

LIFE AND DEATH Léo’s adventures as “Phantom Boy” could be understood as the fantastical storytelling of an imaginative child with a love of superheroes and detective stories, an escape from a less than ideal reality. But Léo’s actions in his phantom form have material consequences. The more time he spends as a phantom,the more tired and sick he becomes. Significantly it was when Léo became sick that his phantom abilities emerged, and his phantom and his physical body are never totally disconnected. The phantoms Léo helps return to their bodies enter this state unexpectedly, due to accident or injury – they quickly lose the memory of their phantom wanderings when they are not in danger of dying. Léo, constantly hovering in a state of uncertainty, between life and death, not only retains memory of his phantom, but the ability to freely enter this state, between the corporeal and incorporeal. But like the phantoms he helps, Léo will also fade and disappear if he strays too far or too long from his physical body: “Well, my phantom can’t actually leave for too long. Otherwise, he’ll fade away and so will I.”

Near the end of the film, Léo nearly disappears for good after straying from his body for too long. Falling into a coma, his doctor remarks that although his blood tests should have signalled a hopeful recovery, it’s “as if he went beyond his limits.” The body and the “spirit” cannot exist fully independent of each other indefinitely.

STRANGENESS AND WONDER In one sense, the phantoms can be understood as doppelgängers – uncanny doubles of living bodies, familiar and unfamiliar, omens or encounters with death. And yet Léo, occupying the space between death and life, does not exude a sense of the uncanny; as Hélène Cixous notes, that which we would find uncanny in real life, is not so in fiction: “Fiction (re) presents itself, first of all, as a reserve or suspension of the Unheimliche: for example, in the world of fairy tales the unbelievable is never disquieting because it has been cancelled out by the convention of the genre.” (546-547).

Léo sometimes expresses a certain ambivalence about his phantom, telling Titi (of his “secret”) that it is both strange and incredible. He later says of his abilities to Alex, “It’s funny, isn’t it? Actually, it’s not that funny. It’s just weird.” That which allows him to escape the stresses and worries of the hospital, and to stay close to that which is comforting and familiar is also a reminder of his precarious existence. The excitement and freedom that Léo’s phantom affords him cannot but be tinged with a sense of sadness when we remember what makes possible its existence. Ultimately though, Léo takes pride in his “secret powers”, his phantom excursions as much about exploring this new access to his reality as they are about “escaping” day-to-day life in the hospital. In this way, Phantom Boy takes the traditional notion of the phantom and infuses it with a different sense of strangeness, melancholy and wonder. No longer that which is simply frightening, the film uses the notion of phantom as apparition to play with the boundaries between body and spirit, the embodied and the spectral, filtered through the eyes of an adventurous, imaginative child. “My name is Léo.

I’m 11 years old, and I have a secret. I am a hero.”

Essay

©2015 - Folimage / Lunanime / France 3 Cinéma / Rhône-Alpes Cinéma

27 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

©2015 - Folimage / Lunanime / France 3 Cinéma / Rhône-Alpes Cinéma

28 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Work In Progress

Work In Progress

Into the realm of the Forgotten Forest The inspiration that led to creating a new animated series pilot with Cartoon Network Interview by JoyNoël Elett

M

adelein Treviño is a graphic designer and illustrator.

She recently won the Girl Power: Pitch Me The Future award at Mexico’s Pixelatl Festival for her short “El Bosque Olvidado (Forgotten Forest)”, which is now becoming a pilot for Cartoon Network.

Tell us about the woman behind “Forgotten Forest”.

I was born and currently live in Monterrey, Mexico. The first memory I have is of drawing; I feel it is the clearest way I can say something. My parents tell me that when I was in kindergarten I sold my drawings for 1 peso to buy tacos.

I always put my heart and soul into the things that I do, no matter the project, just for the simple fact that I like to do what I do.

What inspired the storyline of “Forgotten Forest”?

My mom, Martha, is a very important part of this, even Marty's name is based on hers. She has more courage than anyone I know, and she has always encouraged me to live life fully and to enjoy it completely. I seek to create characters who are not afraid to explore and to be themselves, and I feel I identify with Marty. The different ways in which we see the world is what makes life wonderful; we can make any situation an adventure.

29 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

“Forgotten Forest” follows the adventures of Marty, a girl lost in a forest of strange creatures, as she searches for her grandmother. Along her journey she meets fantastic characters, such as King Raccoon and a jazz-loving wolf.

30 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Work In Progress

Work In Progress

“ Jazz can make me feel very melancholic or completely happy, two important sensations for the series.”

How did it feel to win Cartoon Network’s coveted award?

When I arrived at the festival I felt like the new girl. In general I am a very quiet person, but I am not shy, so if you give me an opportunity to talk, I will happily take it. Winning was an enormous satisfaction, the simple fact that they heard me is something I appreciate.

Girl Power: Pitch Me The Future award was created in 2018

by Cartoon Network Latin America and Mexican animation festival Pixelatl as part of their ongoing award partnership. This year Cartoon Network looked for new and innovative voices, specifically in the under-represented female creatives community. Girl Power: Pitch Me the Future was an opportunity for female animators and creators in Latin America to bring their unique show ideas to Cartoon Network Latin America.

To be considered for the award, the project must fit into Cartoon Network’s editorial values, must be an original idea, and communicate humour and authenticity.

31 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Marty is guided by a jazz-loving spirit. What emotions behind the music made you choose jazz in particular?

Jazz can make me feel very melancholic or completely happy, two important sensations for the series. It serves to add personality and mystery to the character of a very solitary wolf.

Some of the characters represent an internal part of Marty or speak of what surrounds her. For example, those little voices that follow her all the time and say no to everything, or the Raccoon King who can sniff out easily forgotten things that still retain great value. I think we all imagine our life with a soundtrack, so I would like to experience creating the Marty soundtrack. We may be listening to happy sounds and suddenly jump to something more melancholic, including complete songs (whether original or classic).

Project

Tropes and themes of folklore in Japanese animation Case study: A Letter to Momo Text by Sophie Monks Kaufman With thanks to anime expert Michael Leader for acting as consultant on this piece

A

nime is so popular that attempting to pin the form down to sweeping tropes is a bold undertaking that is well above this writer's pay-grade. Instead of macro, we're going micro by looking to this one 2011 title. A Letter To Momo, directed by Okiura Hiroyuki and made by studio Production I.G concerns an 11-year-old girl who moves to an island with her mother after her father dies. Colourful hijinks ensue after three havoc-causing yokai spirits, visible (almost) only to Momo, arrive. Despite this, the story remains anchored by the emotional undercurrent of a child learning how to grieve for an absent parent while relearning how to love the present one.

32 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Here are four elements of this beautiful and entertaining movie which speak to the wider phenomenon of folklore-driven Japanese animated works: 1. The mischievous yokai Yokai are supernatural beings that flourished within folktales during the Edo period (1603-1868), but originated much earlier — references date back to the first century. They are often shape-shifting spirits who manifest in the human realm via seemingly inexplicable happenings. Momo is spooked by strange sights and sounds — a shadowy figure boarding a busboat with her mother, distant voices, missing food — until the divinely weird-looking figures of Iwa, Kawa and Mame reveal themselves to the young girl. While incurably mischievous, this trio are well-intentioned guardians sent from “Above” by her father to watch over Momo and her mother. The fact that these creepy cuties are an elusive blend of vice and virtue makes them beguiling, especially when they dress up and dance!

2. A child dealing with adult tragedy Big weights on small shoulders are a common motif in similarly folklore-inspired anime films such as Spirited Away (2001), in which Chihiro has to save her parents after they are turned into pigs, as well as the tearjerker Grave of the Fireflies (1988),

which features young Seita’s attempts to keep his little sister alive as American fire bombs fall. Momo’s burdens, on the other hand, are more emotional rather than practical, but real and trying all the same. She is haunted by regret that she argued with her father before he died and swings between embodying a passionate, problem-solving nature and a grief that cannot be fixed. Initially she misses the signs that her workaholic mother, too, is consumed by sorrow. Momo's dealings with the yokai provide her with company as she works through volatile feelings and comes to see what she still has in the form of her mother.

3. Art that portends the supernatural Often, a spirit's arrival is foreshadowed by its depiction in a work of art that the young hero stumbles across. Early on in A Letter to Momo, Momo finds an illustrated storybook from the Edo period that contains black and white drawings of the grotesque figures who, little does she know, will imminently become her companions! Once they arrive in full garish colour, acting more like clowns that mythological deities, this historical anchor helps to lend their presence a sense of ancient gravitas.

4. The magical possibilities of nature A dichotomy between metropolis and countryside runs through Japanese culture. A Letter To Momo begins with Momo and her mother relocating from Tokyo to the quiet island of Shio via boat, retreating in grief to a natural haven where they can lick their wounds. Instantly, the magical possibilities of this new world are evidenced as the yokai descend from the sky in the form of drops of water. Water as an elemental home for yokai is also seen in Yuasa Masaaki’s Lu Over The Wall (2017), which features an exuberant mermaid-like yokai who drastically changes the life of an unhappy boy. In Momo’s case, supernatural elements entertain as they complement the realistic subject of a bereaved girl trying to settle into a new location, with new people and a new ambience. The island is a site for both spirits and spiritual regeneration.

Project

Š 2012 "A Letter to Momo" Film Partners

33 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Š 2012 "A Letter to Momo" Film Partners

34 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Interview

Reruns ŠAutour de Minuit

Interview

Rosto

Somewhere between waking and sleeping Interview by Ben Mitchell

What prompted the branching off of the Thee Wreckers Tetralogy from the original Mind My Gap series?

I was wondering how I could introduce my music to an audience so I decided to make my own Fantasia where, instead of animating classical pieces, I'd visualise my own songs. That was the start of the tetralogy in 2008 and now I've finished it with “Reruns”.

Do you have a specific process to capture that dreamlike quality when you're developing the look of the films?

Originally I planned to shoot it with underwater puppets in an aquarium while still working with things like digital facial replacement. To keep a very sad and long story short, the tests were disappointing, so we had three weeks to come up with a new plan. That's how “Reruns”, the way it is now, was born — out of necessity.

Of course I loved to see these different techniques come together and create an even more “lucid dream” effect.

We did shoot some live-action — three characters are shot completely dry-for-wet, shooting three times as fast, using wires or moving on a ramp, to achieve watery movements.

Actually I wanted it to seem like very thick air, exactly the way how it is in my dreams.

How do you go about achieving the digital facial animation we often see in your work?

I've been working with head replacements for as long as I can remember, but it always returns in my films slightly differently to how it's been done before. In “Splintertime” we worked with projection techniques where the actors were wearing these prosthetic masks that were tracked and traced and flattened again, digitally, then given to animators who would put facial expressions onto them.

So you keep all the real, live qualities of the masks — reflections, specular light, shadows — but at the same time the shape in a 3D space is being animated. For “Reruns” we had silicone heads made of the characters, scale models that were again tracked and replaced with digital, animated faces. This was a little easier to do because the silicone heads were cast from 3D prints of the digital models, so the match was perfect. In the past that was always a bit of a problem.

Your subject matter in general has always been hypnagogic, sort of between being awake and being asleep. For me “Reruns” particularly resonated because of my own recurring dreams of being back in school.

In a way “Reruns” is my most autobiographical film because all these dreams are true. I had to make a selection of dreams — especially ones that are connected to memory, because most of our dreams are, but some in such an oblique way that they aren't recognisable. The interesting thing is that as I get older they become more mundane and based on anxiety — exam anxiety, performance anxiety.

It's strange, because I don't consider myself an anxious person — apparently I have some deeper angst going on!

35 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

D

utch artist Rosto has spent the past twenty years spinning his music and art into the elaborate online mixed-media graphic novel project Mind My Gap, culminating in the Thee Wreckers Tetralogy (“No Place Like Home”, “Lonely Bones”, “Splintertime” and this year's “Reruns”, which won the VFX Prize at Clermont-Ferrand), four films centred around a supernatural band that occupy a dreamlike, limbo space.

Essay

Broken screws and dusty puppet eyes Mise-en-scène in the Quay Brothers Text by Timothy David Orme

W

hen one sees a Wes Anderson composition or a sweeping Goddard sequence of jump cuts, they are expecting a certain style. This feeling goes beyond directorship and into authorship when we experience something from the Quay Brothers. This largely happens because the Quay Brothers are able to grow the mise-enscène of the film into something that simultaneously is itself and something larger than itself. They are able to expand the frame beyond its edges, and expand its sensations beyond that of sight and sound. To put it simply, when one sees and hears a Quay Brothers film, they know it because they feel as though they can taste, touch, and even smell it.

36 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

The Quay Brothers are, perhaps to an extreme few other animators parallel, austere auteurs. The images in their films aren’t traditionally beautiful. They are desaturated and drenched in dust. They stink of mothballs. And let’s be honest, even if we can taste the images in these frames, they’re not delicious.

Beauty here lies in imperfection, and everything in the films points the viewers towards that understanding of beauty.

The clean and colourful stop-motion set is replaced with a precise barrenness: aged metallic tools are covered in dust to such a degree that while animating “Streets of Crocodiles” (1986), the animators had to animate the movement and then pause for the dust to settle before capturing the image.

A Quay Brothers image is not only seen but also inhaled.

Characters in these films are often unfinished and move with imperfect, jerky movements, which is all their bodies are capable of. These asymmetrical bodies remind viewers of their own aching knees and sloping shoulders. A character moving across the screen is a dusty, visceral pain for the viewer. A grinding of textures like a grinding of bone.

Some of the characters themselves are not human, but instead the detritus of the film’s environment. It seems any object on the screen might be a discarded portion of a deceased character, might at any point either move as a character itself, or might morph into a portion of another character.

Existence in these films is precarious and ever-evolving.

Watching the film, we come to realize anything could shift below us or around us at any point.

We see space, but feel time.

Camera movements themselves are almost too fast — re-enacting the struggle to comprehend space and the objects in the space as living or not. Sometimes the movement is so fast a viewer may realize they’ve moved, but not what land they traveled over in the moving.

As in “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, or “This Unnamable Little Broom” (1985), some sets themselves aren’t finished. The horizon line is the abyss itself. Perhaps the characters are stranded. Perhaps this is their entire world. Either way, the unknown is hidden, but its view is in plain sight. A viewer could touch it if they could just find its edge. This unsettled sense of feeling that one cannot feel (or touch) is what exhilarates the viewer of these short, enigmatic films.

Essay

37 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Street of Crocodiles ©1986 Brothers Quay

Street of Crocodiles ©1986 Brothers Quay

Interview

Robert Morgan

An unceasing series of nightmare visions Interview by Ben Mitchell

S

top-motion nightmare-weaver Robert Morgan's macabre filmography includes the animated shorts “The Cat With Hands”, the BAFTA Cymru-winning “The Separation” and the BAFTA-nominated “Bobby Yeah”.

More recently, he has been bringing his distinct style to feature films, animating segments for horror movies, and crafting the commissioned short “Belial's Dream”, an animated homage for the recently re-released cult classic Basket Case.

38 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

How did you get involved with The ABCs of Death 2?

I was approached by [co-producer] Mitch Davis, who programs for Fantasia [International Film Festival in Montréal] where they show my stuff a lot. Each director is assigned a separate letter of the alphabet for their title, originally they gave me “L” and I came up with “L is for Louse”. After they compiled the films together alphabetically the running order didn't work, so they reshuffled it. They wanted my short to come nearer [to] the beginning, so I changed it to “D is for Deloused”. Although people associate me with horror, that film is probably the first film I've made so far where I explicitly set out to make a horror film.

Now that you mention it, “Deloused” is more explicitly a kind of nightmare from beginning to end than your other work.

I don't even start with any particular genre when I'm thinking of an idea, I just go with it — usually for me I'm laughing at them rather than feeling creeped out by them! To be honest, “Deloused” ended up being very funny to me as well.

Do you know why your film is banned from the German release?

I think there were three “letters” that were removed from the alphabet, which meant they couldn't call the film The ABCs of Death, because it didn't even have a letter “C“ in it! I think they ended up changing the title to 23 Ways to Die. It's always baffling to me when something gets banned,

I didn't think it was that bad. Because it's animation, it has a complete absurdity to it, a dream logic that is so removed from reality.

I assume you were familiar with Basket Case before you made “Belial's Dream”?

Oh yeah, I mean it happened because I was a fan of Basket Case. I had proclaimed my love of Belial many times and Ewan [Cant] from Arrow Films sent me a message asking if I wanted to do an animated homage that they could include with the re-release. It's probably the fastest film I've ever made, but that sort of spontaneity kind of goes with the grotty, low-budget aesthetic of Basket Case, to make something quick and be opportunistic about it.

I didn't want to make a spoof or parody, I wanted to do something that felt like a proper Basket Case film, so the idea I had was to set the film inside of Belial's head — then animation sort of works for that purpose.

Do you have stuff that's on the boil at the moment that is able to be talked about?

I did some sequences for an American feature film called To Dust, where the main character is having a series of waking nightmares, visions. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, it's a live-action drama and is very original. Now I'm in post-production for a little five-minute “pilot” for my own feature which I'm getting funding for.

39 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Interview

D is for Deloused ŠRobert Morgan

Studio

Text by David Hury

40 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

At LAIKA Studios, visuals are at the service of the story.

LAIKA’s technicians and artists have mastered stop-motion and CGI integration, the sole mantra remaining: “The look is the rule.”

41 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

ParaNorman ©2012 Courtesy, LAIKA

Studio

Kubo And The Two Strings ©2016 Courtesy, LAIKA

A

42 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

s black as the night sky. As dark as the bottom of the ocean. As thunderous as the rumbling of a Hells Angels horde. The wave in the opening scene of Kubo and the Two Strings is insuperable and unsparing. As he drifts in the middle of the night in a canoe, with his mother as his sole guardian angel, Kubo has a brush with death and drowning. The viewer is then directed from the danger of this tidal wave that is ready to swallow up these two characters to another danger – one even more terrible. The story takes a turn in a split second to Kubo's face. We meet Kubo as a baby with a missing eye and the narrator tell us that his own grandfather, the Moon King, has already stolen one eye and would like to snatch the other.

It’s right there in the chilling category.

The spectacular scene is short and impactful. One that called for a treasure trove of imagination from several technical teams working in parallel to introduce Kubo, a character conceived by Shannon Tindle.

Travis Knight, LAIKA's CEO, asked Shannon to develop the protagonist in the genre of “epic fantasy drawing on Japanese culture”. For each of their films, LAIKA Studios commit to use, or even invent, new processes and to respect the story’s culture of origin. In this case, these are medieval Japan, the samurai Bushido, and the indispensable ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblocks, for the scenery.

The opening scene of Kubo finds its visual roots in one of the most famous Japanese works: the famous The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by the painter Katsushika Hokusai (1830). LAIKA’s technicians transposed it to night-time using glass debris, paper, and fabrics to create the glistening water effect. The animators, led by Ollie Jones, worked long to find the right formula for the water’s movement, shape, and texture. Artistic director Alice Bird explains the process, which consists

of a mix of different animation techniques, both traditional and digital.

“Ollie made a machine with ripped paper pieces that moved in a wave formation and showed off the shifting pattern of the torn edges, mimicking how water behaves but with real tactile material. That was an early inspiration. The final product, spearheaded by production designer Nelson Lowry, was created by embedding some of the woodblock textures that had come from the concept art into a digital model, with a huge amount of back and forth between the design team and CG water team to get it tuned to perfection. It’s definitely an example of how successful the blend of practical and digital art can be.” It is precisely this “blend” that LAIKA obsessively pursues.

When leaving the screening, journalists made the common mistake of noting that Kubo was made entirely using CGI. This was not the case.

Every second of the film in fact consists of 24 actual photographs. In an article in The Verge, Dan Pascall, Kubo's production manager, wondered why go through all this trouble, while expressing amusement at his own masochism: “God knows, there are easier ways to make movies, but we challenge ourselves to take ultra-detailed, time-intensive routes instead.” And oh, how long the route traveled since Coraline, LAIKA’s first feature film in 2009.

MASTERS OF HYBRID IMAGERY COMBINING STOP-MOTION AND CGI The impetus comes from the top. LAIKA’s chief insists on freedom for his artists so that they express themselves as much as possible. The CEO, Travis Knight, always repeats this in his interviews, as he did in 2016 in his interview with The Verge at the time of Kubo’s release.

"The ethos of this whole place is that we are artists first and foremost.

Studio

˜ With the rapid prototyping, people are so interested in the technology, and sure, it’s really is.

But, what is also really interesting is how we have adapted it to make it work for us creatively.˝

This passion for novelty and freedom begins, of course, with 3D printing, as ParaNorman director Chris Butler explains: “I think technical innovations (like 3D printing) have enabled the quality of what we put on screen to increase exponentially from movie to movie. I’m of the opinion that the final frame I see in the movie should be the best version of that frame, and I’ll use everything at my disposal to make it that way.” Whereas Coraline was the first feature film to industrialize the use of 3D printers, ParaNorman pushed it further. For the latter, LAIKA’s technical team conducted many tests, sometimes crossing their fingers not knowing what their programming results would look like for sure. But the results lived up to expectations.

It was “like we were building the plane as we are flying it”, recalls the co-producer Arianne Sutner, quoted in an article in Animation World Network. “Part of stop-motion is the perfection in its beauty as well as the imperfections too”, Arianne explains, “so not everything in this movie is absolutely perfect in terms of the use of technology. But, that’s what I love about it.” Critics note that there is really a pre- and a post-ParaNorman when it comes to the use of technology. Alongside the 3D printer running at full capacity, more than 300 artists worked on details that are barely perceptible on the screen, but that are at the heart of the richness of ParaNorman. Yet, production costs did not

exceed the planned budget (60 million USD, just like Coraline three years earlier and The Boxtrolls two years later). Arianne remembers ParaNorman's creation process, and the team learning to use the new machines. “With the rapid prototyping, people are so interested in the technology, and sure, it’s really interesting. But, what is also really interesting is how we have adapted it to make it work for us creatively.” This need for technical skill in all departments and at each production stage rises to the challenges of animations “Made in LAIKA”.

The impossible never stopped LAIKA. That said, there is no point in claiming victory too early. Each film brings new challenges. Kubo and the Two Strings, which was in production between 2013 and 2016, seemed particularly complicated to make into a film, especially for the transition from 2D to 3D. “The biggest challenge is translating the look of two-dimensional artwork into three-dimensional reality”, says Alice Bird, Kubo’s artistic director.

“Because there’s so much interpretation involved, the art director has to get inside the designer and director’s heads, really develop an instinct for what they are imagining when they discuss a given set or scene. Sometimes the vision can be ambiguous even to the director, which can be a fun opportunity for the art director to input their own interpretation and show the way forward.”

This “three-dimensional reality”, which is visually impressive in Kubo, marks the convergence of traditional stop-motion, frame-by-frame techniques, and computer-generated imagery. An often-tortuous convergence, as Alice explains. “We’ve actually developed a really good system for sharing the look across practical and digital assets. The art department will often build physical samples for the VFX team to keep and reference when they are texturing an asset. Even things like water

43 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

When we started LAIKA ten years ago, we could see the writing on the wall. Stop-motion animation was basically taking its last, dying breath.

We had to come up with a way, if we wanted to continue to make a living in this medium that we loved, to bring it into a new era, to invigorate it." In the 13 years since its creation, LAIKA has always tried to push the boundaries of its own mode of expression, stop-motion, without ever renouncing it.

Studio

44 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Kubo and the Two Strings ©2016 Courtesy, LAIKA

Coraline ©2009 Courtesy, LAIKA

Studio

˜ ˜ w what hat is is out out of of the the frame frame is is as as important important as as what what we we see see on on the the screen: screen: the the viewer viewer must must be be part part of of the the show show and and feel feel that that he he could could go go anywhere anywhere in in the the picture.˝ picture.˝

KUBO: USING DÉCOR TO CREATE THE ATMOSPHERE In order to bring their stories and characters to life, LAIKA’s creative teams set for themselves the goal of creating never before seen sets.

And this part of the process is thrilling and is also how LAIKA stands out from the competition. Whether it is in the thousand details of the city in The Boxtrolls, or in ParaNorman, the tones and the atmosphere are always painstakingly researched. For example, while Kubo was not the studio’s biggest box office success, it is nevertheless remarkable in its finish and in its wide-angle sets. The team relied on the Japanese identity of the story, for both small details and wider shots, while employing the woodblock effect of the renowned Japanese prints as the visual basis for the entire film design.

In her book The Art of Kubo and the Two Strings (LAIKA Ed., 2016), Emily Haynes tells us about the influence of Japanese painter and printmaker Saito Kiyoshi’s work on the film’s mood and feel, light and translucence. Travis Knight, director of Kubo and the Two Strings and co-producer of ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo, captures it best: “Saito’s work is really bold. He uses simple colors and shapes. But within those shapes, he uses the texture of the wood to give dimension and nuance. This use of texture became a focal point for the film. There is something really interesting about him that is relevant to what we do here, beyond his artistic inspiration. At LAIKA, we have a fusion of old

and new, a sense of tradition and history mixed with innovation and modernity. We work on a medium that’s over one hundred years old, but we also bring a passion for cutting-edge technology and modern creative approaches. Saito did much the same thing. He was part of the ancient practice of Japanese woodblock printing, but he was very progressive. He synthesized and infused these divergent ideas into his own work. On every film we try to push beyond the edges of the form.”

Production designer Nelson Lowry agrees and remembers the magical moment when the visual identity of the film was born: “We did a model of one of our sets and we painted a Saito texture on the top of it. It looked just like you would expect a traditional Japanese woodblock print. Everyone totally freaked out, and from that day on it’s been the look of the film.” At LAIKA, there’s a commitment to the look of films.

THE LOOK IS THE RULE During a tour of the studios reported by the site io9, Anthony Stacchi, co-director of The Boxtrolls, asserted this versatility that is so characteristic of LAIKA, halfway between different techniques, stop-motion, 3D printing, and CGI. “We are not purists”, Anthony Stacchi said, “the medium was less important that whatever delivers the look. The look is the rule.” LAIKA only relies on CGI to enhance scenes shot in stop-motion, and never the other way around. So much so that even an effect or an element is sometimes first made with physical materials to be later created digitally. For example, in The Boxtrolls, the mist and the clouds were initially designed in fabric to be later realized in VFX in post-production.

LAIKA wanted to raise the bar even higher by staging complex group movements, like the ballroom scene. Stacchi explains the created effect that serves the viewer’s experience like in the open world of video games: “Some stop-motion movies, you feel like you’re trapped on the set. You can feel the edge of the set all the way through.” For Stacchi and his co-director Graham Annable’s camera, the hors-champs is as important as what we see on the screen: the viewer must be part of the show and feel that he could go anywhere in the picture. This was also the case for Kubo, for which LAIKA keenly worked on textures and elements with infinite patterns so that the viewer feels comfortable.

“You don’t want the audience to really notice it”, art director Alice Bird explains. “You want it to be something that they sense. The same patterns that we used on the road surface in the village might appear

45 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

or smoke will usually go through a physical material exploration so that the VFX team have a starting point that isn’t just mimicking reality.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy! One of the hardest things is probably dealing with really big landscapes – when we design a set and make a small-scale model, we will try to show the contours of the surrounding landscape for VFX, but it always needs more refining when we see it in shots. So there’s a whole stage of working with the digital team to dial in the shapes and textures, with the director of photography and production designer helping guide lighting to get the set extension to feel as real as the physical set.” The teams’ sole objective is for the images to dazzle, for the look to be perfect and for the animation of the characters to be up to the mark. As Alice put it, “to be sure that animation is supporting the story.” It’s always the story that dictates the rhythm, with the visual elements only there in a supporting role. At the little factory of the great thrill, the sets too are particularly important to the visual identity of the projects and to the success of the final shots.

Studio

The Boxtrolls ©2014 Courtesy, LAIKA

embedded on the surface of the water in the Long Lake. This design is not something that folks will look at, and say ‘Aha! I’ve seen that before!’ But hopefully it will unify the film in a subliminal way, give it all the same voice.”

46 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

But everything might not be so easy once the graphic identity is coherent and correct. “We spend months working on look development – experimenting with materials, surfaces, color, texture and shapes to capture the feel of the concept art”, Alice continues. “Then it was my job to figure out how to incorporate that in to each of the sets we produce, and guide all the artists in understanding it so well that they forget how to work any other way. At LAIKA, the art department is responsible designing and building all the sets, props, and graphics based on concept art from the production designer and their team. The production designer works with the director and director of photography to figure out ambience and lighting, then when a set lands on the shooting floor we continue to collaborate with lighting to achieve the look and feel, tweaking paint and lighting as needed until we get it just right.”

What worked for the first four films will probably apply to the next feature, Missing Link, due to be released in the spring of 2019.

Chris Butler, screenwriter and director of this fifth LAIKA production, insists on the unique and central nature of the stop-motion technique. “All mediums have their own challenges. No animation is easy”, Chris affirms. “Having said that, I think one of the unique aspects of stop-motion is also one of its biggest challenges. A shot is essentially a one-of-a-kind performance. It’s much harder to tweak or change stop-motion animation after the fact, because it is a person manipulating a real object under real light on a real set. It’s almost performance art. Of course, you can go back and augment, or doctor the animation digitally, but for the most part it’s a singular performance. You have to know exactly what you want when you launch a shot, because a lot of the time, you get one chance.” It’s

out of the question to mess up during shooting, as corrections in post-productions are only minimal.

GIVING A SCARE Fright is constructed like a firework; you need powder, a wick, and a spark. The powder is the story. The better it is, the more spectacular the explosion will be. But for that, you need a spark and the wick. The spark is the created world, the first shudder that gets the viewer into a story. “It can be sound, lighting, or animation”, says Alice Bird, assistant art director for ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, and art director for Kubo and the Two Strings. “When you add in lighting, animation and sound design you have all these other tools which can bring the audience in to our world without even noticing that the characters have crazy proportions or the trees are made of popcorn. So I think each department strives to balance fantasy with realism in different ways, and the magic of seeing it all come together in the final product tells you if we succeeded in striking that balance.”

What do LAIKA Studios have in store for us now with Missing Link? At the time of going to print, LAIKA had only released one sibylline image of Mr. Link looking out from behind a tree and appearing to say “shhh” with his finger on his lips. Basically, we know nothing. And don’t count on Chris Butler to spill the beans.

“As director, I wanted to make a different movie than my first (ParaNorman). I had played out my horror/zombie/John Hughes phase… now I wanted to touch on some of my other early influences… like Indiana Jones and Sherlock Holmes, and classic adventure movies, and big hairy stop-motion monsters, obviously. To that end I tried to do something aesthetically different. This is a bright, colorful, bold movie. A vibrant, kaleidoscopic travelogue. It’s more ambitious in its scope and scale than anything we’ve attempted before!” So we have to wait till next April to find out if the new production – an Indiana-Jones-style adventure – is a winning recipe.

Studio

4 questions to

Alice Bird

What fears affect you?

I was always fascinated by traditional fairy tales and the darkness that is at the heart of them. They contain so much horror: being eaten, being abandoned, physical transformations, ghoulish apparitions, magic, the cruelties of fate, ideas of justice and retribution. The way that, as a culture, we have historically used these kinds of stories to teach children about life and being human is equally awful and attractive to me. Even as an adult I have had visceral nightmares about the supernatural that seem to spring from childhood memories of these types of stories. So while I was definitely fearful of them, I also love how you can subvert the ideas in them to challenge conventions of say gender roles or what a happy ending means. That stuff has real power for me.

What graphic influence were there for Kubo and the Two Strings?

Woodblock printing techniques were probably the key theme in terms of what the Kubo look was. Where on other movies we had a heavy focus on the line quality as a way to inform our style, on Kubo, line was pretty much absent. It was all about texture. We wound up isolating a handful of textures from the concept art that we used as templates for paint and texture on both practical sets and digital assets, rescaled and repeated across everything from skies to tea cups. It meant every surface of every frame contained a tactile sense of the textured patterns you find in woodblock prints, and really gave a strong cohesive look across the show.

How do you see LAIKA's future?

I would say there are no companies such as LAIKA! Each animation studio is unique – LAIKA maybe especially so because we work in the niche world of stop-frame and because we are completely independent. As for the future, I hope we’re able to continue making unique films. Ultimately a movie is only as impactful as the story it tells, so I think our future success depends on finding exciting scripts that can speak to a range of audiences.

I also harbor a secret wish for LAIKA to create short films, perhaps to screen ahead of our features. I think it would be a great way to start teasing out interesting concepts, as well as help develop studio talent.

And that of animation cinema?

I’m going to leave out the glaring answer of video games and VR because those aren’t of interest to me, although I realize that makes up the bulk of work going on in the field! As for other formats, I’m encouraged by a crop of bold and beautiful animated series that I’ve seen in recent years. Gorgeous, inventive kids TV-shows like Puffin Rock, Sarah & Duck, and Tumble Leaf are so refreshing in avoiding the usual goodies & baddies stuff that kids have been inundated with for years (and in my opinion are vaguely damaging in how they portray humanity and the world). And there are weird, hilarious shows like Big Mouth and BoJack Horseman that do things no other medium could. My hope for animated films is that we throw away the boring old Hollywood rule book about three act stories and predictable character arcs, and really embrace the weird and wonderful things you can do in animation.

47 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

©Courtesy, LAIKA

• Art Director for Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) • Assistant Art Director for ParaNorman (2012) and The Boxtrolls (2014) • Started her career as Assistant Art Director for Corpse Bride (2005)

(SOME)

AMAZING FACTS Studio

? a ik a L u o y e r a o h W

394 Employees (2015)

1.5

O t and CE Presiden t h ig n K is Trav creation place of Date and n, USA go 2005, Ore

million possible combinations, just for Norman's face

48 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

4.88m

high

+180kg For Kubo's skeleton model LAIKA's team had first bought an animated machine on eBay before building its own mechanism animated by a software worthy of the best flight simulators.

Coraline's shooting was done in a warehouse of 140,000m2 divided into

50 sets

The character of Hanzo's protégé (the beetle) is inspired by the actor Mifune Toshiroōwho often lent his features to Kurosawa Akira's films.

BUDGET / BOX OFFICE (USD) Studio

60 million

60 million

60 million

60 million

124.6 million

107.1 million

109.3 million

77.5 million

Coraline (2009)

ParaNorman (2012) Co-directed by Sam Fell, Chris Butler

The Boxtrolls (2014) Co-directed by Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

Directed by Henry Selick

For The Boxtrolls

Directed by Travis Knight

ANNIE AWARDS CORALINE - 2009 Bruno Coulais Music in an Animated Feature Production cameras (Canon 5D Mark II) were permanently mobilized for ParaNorman's production.

3D printing

is Used for the first time on a feature film for Coraline. On ParaNorman the use of the Polyjet 3D printer is Generalized and coupled with another printer, ZPrinter 650 (3D Systems), for colors.

4 sec.

of film is what 30 animators, on a team of 300 people, were each responsible per week for The Boxtrolls.

Shane Prigmore & Shannon Tindle Character Design in a Feature Production Christopher Appelhans & Uesugi Tadahiro Production Design in a Feature Production

PARANORMAN - 2012 Travis Knight Character Animation in a Feature Production Heidi Smith Character Design in an Animated Feature Production

THE BOXTROLLS - 2014 Ben Kingsley Voice Acting in a Feature Production

KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS -　2016 Jan Maas Character Animation in a Feature Production Nelson Lowry, Trevor Dalmer, August Hall & Ean McNamara Production Design in an Animated Feature Production

49 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

were introduced in all the plans, for the characters or for the textures like the mist, the sparks.

Christopher Murrie Editorial in an Animated Feature Production

Studio

3 Things You Need For A

Good Feature: A Good Script A Good Script A Good Script 50 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Text by David Hury

Before creating beautiful imagery, you need, first and foremost, a good story. And a scary one at that. At LAIKA, storytelling is the cornerstone of each film. It dictates the technique used and often pushes it to its limits. LAIKA’s brainpower is its gold mine.

Studio

“How could you do this to us" cried out my eldest daughter, describing Coraline's alternative mother the way she appeared first on screen in her kitchen when she briskly turns around. “She has buttons where her eyes should be! You’re out of your mind, it's too horrifying!” The damage was done. I switched off the TV. I did not watch the movie.

They both had nightmares that night. That's how I was introduced to LAIKA. Through vicarious fright.

A GOOD STORY: BETWEEN SCARY FAIRY AND SCOOBY-DOO For several years, Chris Butler has been the strongman of scary stories. It’s in his blood. He came into the world of animation by creating storyboards for Tarzan 2 (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), The Tale of Despereaux (2008), and Coraline (2009). His work in Burton's Corpse Bride was the spark. That’s when he decided he would do this for the rest of his life. Chris was 31.

He then went on to write ParaNorman (2012), Kubo and the Two Strings (2012), and now Missing Link (2019). Chris knows how to build a story and dip into the fears of children, as he did in ParaNorman, where the characters of all the horror films from our childhoods (the glorious eighties) are gathered under green and pink lighting worthy of a good giallo movie. Butler talks

you still have to remember you’re making a film that will be primarily seen by kids. You’re not just trying to scare them. You’re trying to entertain them, and make them think and feel, and scares are just part of the mix.”

In ParaNorman, Chris Butler wore two hats, that of screenwriter and co-director.

Throughout the film, he worked with several co-producers, including Arianne Sutner. From the start, Arianne was certain that she had in her hands a solid story. In an interview with AWN.com, Arianne recalled: “I think it had a great script. The pacing was all there.

We had a third act that worked, almost from the beginning, which is fairly unusual. We had a great hook, a really fun contemporary film, a nice fit to follow Coraline. I think also it just jived with Travis’ taste, kind of a contemporary Scooby-Doo movie. It could push the animation boundaries a little bit more.

˜ You’re trying to entertain kids, and make them think and feel, and scares are just part of the mix.˝

It’s July 2018. Nine years have passed. I live in Paris now. My youngest daughter, who’s now 15, brings up Coraline out of the blue. "Let's watch it!" I said. And right there and then, nine years after that November evening on my terrace and the scare of my two blondies, I realized what a bad father I had been then. How could I have done that? From the opening credits, Coraline was horror, pure and simple. Forsaken children, adults who are out-there, or, at best, lost in their own world. And then there is this parallel world, where everything is out of control. Where the great villain is much darker and terrifying than initially feared.

But it's Coraline's story that strikes me.

about his predilection for scary stories: “I have always gravitated towards spooky, creepy stuff. I think, historically, stop-motion animation has always danced in the shadows. There’s something grotesque and magical – necromantic, even – about the bringing to life of an inanimate object. Ladislav Starewicz, Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, they all contributed to an allure that was both enchanting but perhaps a little bit forbidden.

Tim Burton utilized this mystique in both The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.” The first sketches of Coraline clearly draw inspiration from the works of Burton.

What follows is the story of LAIKA and how they write the best stories they can.

It's through the lens of Chris Butler who is, Mr. Storytelling at LAIKA, screenwriter of ParaNorman and the upcoming Missing Link, among others. Coraline, like ParaNorman, appeals to the primal fear of being alone.

Her parents are distracted by their work; they don’t listen to her. She prefers to explore the house and what’s around it, straddling our reality and a parallel world, where you have to strike a deal with a frighful lady and exchange our eyes for stitched buttons on our faces to live "happily".

Chris wants to scare and to entertain. He wants spectators – or children – to get their money's worth. So you need a cornerstone to this wonderful construction: a good script. And this was the case for the first cathedral erected

by LAIKA, Coraline, adapted from British author Neil Gaiman’s novel. “Henry Sellick [director] and Neil Gaiman [novelist, screenwriter] were brave enough to tell a story that did not shy away from the weightier themes of classic fairy tales”, says Chris about Coraline. “When you make an animated movie like that, you’re following the same ‘rules’ that you’d follow if you were making a live action movie. But I think

We could make a bigger stop-motion movie.

That was something on our list that we really wanted to do. Pushing those boundaries, creating a feeling of real chase scenes.” Chase scenes, adrenaline rush, empathy for the characters, and bingo! ParaNorman’s smalltown folks are the characters that give the story its full weight. Butler took the opportunity to criticize the American society of 2010, like Joe Dante did in the past with Gremlins (1984), Gremlins 2 (1990) and particularly with Small Soldiers (1998). The real danger is not always what meets the eye. And for a good scare, let’s have double-edged characters.

CHARACTERS WHO ARE LIKE US What is more terrifying than ourselves being the true villains? A father wrapped up in his work, a child who’s used to getting their way, an authoritarian mother. LAIKA's films feature many characters everyone can identify with. The writers and character designers have free rein.

In ParaNorman, for example, some characters didn’t look anything like what their creators originally had in mind. Heidi Smith, the film’s character/conceptual designer was the movie’s lucky charm. ParaNorman was her first job after graduating from the CalArts where LAIKA

51 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

N

ovember 2009. I am on my terrace in Beirut on an autumn evening. The city is buzzing. Suddenly, I hear voices coming from the living room. I rush there to find my two daughters, aged six and nine, barricaded behind the sofa. The eldest is holding the TV remote as if it were an RPG, and through her bloodcurdling screaming I hear: “Will you to turn it off or what! Turn it off!"

Twenty minutes earlier, they had both settled in the living room, not feeling reassured by the movie I had put on for them that I’d bought earlier that day. I usually watch them first so they don’t have nightmares. I don’t know why I didn’t stay with them that day. I should have.

I had picked up Coraline.

Studio noticed her for her "crappy and unhinged" drawing style. That was 2008. The film would be released four years later.

In an interview published in Cartoon Brew, Heidi recalled the genesis of Norman's greatuncle, who entrusts him with the mission of putting an end to the curse of the witch: “When I read the script, I would just go with what I felt the story needed. Chris Butler didn’t give me any kind of guidelines or art; he just told me to read the script and have a go at drawing the characters. So what I went with was my gut reaction. I would do a bunch of drawings, and then Chris and the others would tell me which ones they gravitated towards and we’d go from there. I found out later that Mr. Prenderghast was originally drawn to be a skinny person, but my rendition they went with was as a fat, hairy guy.” Total freedom in the development of the characters, total freedom of tone in narration, total freedom to scare to death spectators, people ages 5 to 95.

52 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

LAIKA knows that nothing is perfect and reflecting that in its worlds are perfectly deliberate. “ParaNorman has a lot of asymmetry”, Heidi points out. “That’s one of the things they told me they liked about my portfolio coming into this project. They liked the asymmetry and ‘nervous line’ of my work. It had a scratchy looseness they were looking for. One of the things they pointed out that they liked was that, for instance, in a character’s eyes one pupil might be bigger than the other.” Asymmetry throws you off, disorientates and unsettles. Heidi readily recognizes the influence of some great masters: Stanley Kubrick, Canadian animator and director Richard Williams, and Russian

animator Yuri Norstein. The color tonality of ParaNorman borrows a lot from Norstein, as well from American photographer William Eggleston whose colorful America is on display in ParaNorman.

A SPECIAL MENTION TO THE BAD GUYS For a good story, you need good characters with their rough edges, and you especially need some spooky villains: the witch who spies on children through the eyes of their dolls in Coraline, the villain snatcher in Boxtrolls who is only motivated by his ambition, the two sisters with the impassive masks in Kubo and the Two Strings. The art director of the latter, Alice Bird, started her career as the assistant of Nelson Lowry, art director of Corpse Bride (2005). She joined LAIKA at the same time as Lowry, as assistant art director for ParaNorman (2012) before moving on to The Boxtrolls (2014). She explains how characters like the two wicked sisters or that of the giant skeleton are great tools to instill fear. Whether through textures and materials (for the costumes of the two evil sisters) or through the size of the models constructed for the shoot. “For the skeleton, we knew it had to interact with our hero puppets and with the set. We see Kubo, Monkey, and Beetle at various points climbing up the arms, on the skull, being stepped on by the feet which also crush bone and crack the floor.

Doing all this in a comp would have been really challenging, and likely wouldn’t have looked so convincing, especially with our desire to keep a strong sense of the physical qualities of the skeleton, the layered, brittle material that made up his body. So while it might seem a crazy excess, it actually meant we could achieve so much in camera without

leaning on post production. Plus, we got an awesome giant puppet to keep forever!” Once everything is in place, the characters will be able to embark on their adventures and follow the story’s paths.

At LAIKA, the story reigns supreme, whether it's an original scenario or a free adaptation, as with Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline or with The Boxtrolls adapted from Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters! But the choice to develop original scenarios is certainly the most complicated option, according to Arianne Sutner, co-producer of ParaNorman and producer of Kubo and the Two Strings producer.

“Companies are always looking for a franchise, something that has come before, or something that is based on a book, something that is known already”, she says. “So for us to take a chance, for LAIKA to take a chance on a story artist, working from original material, I think is a huge risk. Original material is risky these days, in this kind of culture. Yet original content is the kind of thing I want to see.”

BUT WHAT'S NEXT? This last sentence that is also true for the studio’s upcoming feature, Missing Link. But Chris Butler won’t reveal anything, no matter how you phrase the questions. The secret is well guarded. “There’s plenty of cool and surprising ideas bubbling away in the background, but I’m afraid my lips are sealed!” But for Missing Link, LAIKA seems to have had a change of heart: exit the zombies and enter the nice monsters with an environmentalist message. The state of the planet is surely something to be scared about...

Coraline ©2009 Courtesy, LAIKA

Studio

4 questions to

chris butler ParaNorman is an ode to your childhood. As you grew up in Liverpool, why did you choose to set the film in an American suburb?

The setting for ParaNorman is a vital part of its DNA. Quite literally, that story couldn’t happen anywhere else. The history of New England, and specifically the witch trials of Salem, is pretty extraordinary. I built the story around that history. Plus, if you’re making a movie that’s an ode to '80s cinema, like The Goonies, or The Breakfast Club, or Stand By Me, you really have to place it in the USA. You played an active role on ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and now Missing Link. What does LAIKA offers as a studio creativity for you above others?

I like the feeling that LAIKA could make any kind of movie. Any genre. We’re not trying to fit into a box. Creatively that means we can be quite daring, and nothing is off the table.

What it comes down to for me is this: I love animation, in all its iterations. I love seeing other studios’ movies. Disney, Pixar, Cartoon Saloon, Ghibli. I eagerly drink it all in. I think what’s great for me right now is that I’m not being asked to copy them. I’ve been given my own voice.

A remarkable memory?

I recall, watching ParaNorman with a Q&A audience, a number of people were asking how we realized “Angry Aggie” (the little electric girl at the end). These were studious moviegoers – experts of the medium! – and they weren’t quite sure what they were looking at.

Was it a puppet? Was it all digital? Partly printed? I loved that this character on screen in front of us was surprising people, and this is at a time when audiences see amazing cinematic miracles play out in front of their faces on a daily basis. I think there are still a lot of stories to tell in stop-motion. It has an aesthetic appeal all its own, and that’s not going to be superseded any time soon. I’m by no means a stop-motion purist. I’m all for digital animation, but it shouldn’t be the only option out there. Personally, I’d love to see a broader application of the stop-motion art form, in the way that modern movie-makers have embraced old-school practical FX, almost as a reaction to an over proliferation of by-the-numbers digital FX. Why not have Star Wars creatures or spaceships realized in stop-motion, just like the good old days?

As this is the actual addition of Marimo is called Phanstasmagoria, and as we are re looking at fears, we would love to know what was your biggest childhood fear?

I guess it isn’t surprising to say, given the movies that I’ve worked on, that my biggest fear when I was younger was being alone. And by that I mean, never meeting anyone who was like me. Never meeting someone who could really see me for who I was. Every kid wants to know how they fit into the world. I think that really troubled me when I was growing up.

That, and zombies.

53 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

©Courtesy, LAIKA

• Director of ParaNorman (2012), The Missing Link (2019) • Co-screenwriter for ParaNorman (2012), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), The Missing Link (2019) • Storyboarder for Disney’s Tarzan 2 (2005), Coraline (2009) • Started his career as director and designer for The Tigger Movie (2000)

54 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Essay

Essay

Harryhausen and his dinosaurs Text by Alessia Cecchet

F

ebruary 8, 1914: at the Palace Theater in Chicago, a man named Winsor McCay steps onto the stage and begins to interact with what appears to be a moving, thinking reincarnation of a long-extinct dinosaur. He instructs, and Gertie, his pet brontosaurus, obeys his command. The Palace audience is spellbound by this seemingly impossible display of anachronistic sorcery.

From 1955 to 1981, Harryhausen created the special effects for 12 Schneer-produced films, including The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Harryhausen was involved in the creation process from its conception through production — and sometimes even post-production; for example, he edited the sequence that features the death of Medusa in Clash of the Titans (1981).

The witchcraft in question, however, was merely an early example of cinematic magic; Gertie was the first fully animated dinosaur in the history of cinema, projected onto a screen for the amusement of McCay’s audience. McCay, an illustrator best known for the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, enchanted hundreds of spectators who reacted with wonder and awe to the dinosaur trainer and his beast.

The core of Harryhausen’s practice was building puppets that he would then animate in stop-motion. Each puppet was made first by assembling an armature (a ball-and-socket or hinge armature) that would allow the animator to move but also hold the pose between one frame and the next.

Harryhausen’s father, Fred, machined and built all of his son’s armatures up until his death. After the armature, the next step was covering the creature with sponge rubber and liquid latex, either through a build-up procedure or a casting method. Lastly came the glass eyes, the teeth, and the fur or paint. During shooting, Harryhausen worked alone, spending several hours on a few seconds of footage; focus was all that mattered. The sequences that involved the compositing of live-action scenes and animation were the most labourintensive; for these, Ray used a rear projector and a glass panel to create a matte between the camera and his set. This technique was patented under the name “Dynamation”, a name invented by Schneer after he came across the Dynaflow — a type of automatic transmission patented by Buick and that had nothing to do with animation or filmmaking — and found its name appealing.

Eleven years after the first performance of “Gertie the Dinosaur”, stop-motion animator Willis H. O’Brien brought three-dimensional dinosaurs and live actors together on the big screen in Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World — and captured the heart of a young Ray Harryhausen, who was fascinated with prehistoric creatures. As a child growing up in Los Angeles, Harryhausen’s father fostered his passion with visits to the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, where he could get a close look at prehistoric skeletons and dioramas. Fascinated with the work of O’Brien, Harryhausen soon started to make his own version of these creatures and animate them in his garage. At first using rudimentary materials that he found — a flexible table lamp served as the neck and tail of his first dinosaur — the animator practiced stop-motion techniques with passion and dedication.

After eventually getting the chance to work with O’Brien on Mighty Joe Young (1949), for which O’Brien won an Academy Award, Harryhausen joined forces with Charles H. Schneer, producer of genre and B-movies, and continued his constant quest for perfection in the creation of fantastic creatures.

In the early 1980s, after shooting Clash of the Titans, Harryhausen decided it was time to retire. His influence goes beyond the field of special effects; today, he represents a key figure in the history of filmmaking and provides an important reference for many filmmakers and animators. Much like his predecessor McCay, Harryhausen granted his audiences the dream of inter-species contact between humans and dinosaurs.

55 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Illustration by Ben Lewis Giles

Portfolio

PORTFOLIO

RED NOSE STUDIO Bringing life to illustrations with stop-motion animation

ABOUT THE ARTIST Chris Sickels is a three-dimensional illustrator, the owner and solo creative artist behind Red Nose Studio. Chris grew up on a small farm, solving the problems of daily life with whatever was at hand. He now brings that creative ingenuity to his illustrations and animations, often using indiscriminate items within arms reach inside his barnhouse studio to bring his creations to life. www.rednosestudio.com rednosestudio @rednosestudio

Chris’s extensive background in illustration led to self taught stop-motion animation projects; movement and art working seamlessly together. His animation credits include early development for The Little Prince (2015) and the creation of his own animated short film “Creosote” (2015). He has illustrated many children’s books, as well as authoring and illustrating his own story, The Look Book.

56 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Inside Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Indiana, Chris draws inspiration from childhood shows like Wallace and Gromit and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, while the inspiration of rural life can be easily recognized in his organically textured work. His unique style of animation is crafted with relatively simple technology to create an emotionally accessible, beautiful, and somehow nostalgic end result.

Green Law ▴

Fear Of Vocal Minority ▸

57 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

58 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

Creosote ▴

Library Of Lost Things ▸

59 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

60 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

â—‚ Time Pieces

61 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

62 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

Adviser Survey â–´

Chase â–¸

63 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Portfolio

Phantasmagoria

Smoke & mirrors Something that intends to deceive by making you believe that events are happening or are true, when they are actually not.

Text by Lorenzo Cervantes

64 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Illustration by Tom Deason

We are the wizards of the 21st century only instead of a broom, a spellbook, or a wand, we use electricity and computers.

In our human nature, the stories we tell are the ones that define us. These stories emerged out of nothing but a vague collection of thoughts, yet they remain oddly familiar and appeal to us in a profound, uncanny way. Now more than ever, we own the power to construct the fables, myths, and visions of our time, by bringing them to life through the prism of technology. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult to tell a truth apart from a lie, to recognize what’s real and what’s not, to know an illusion when it’s staring at you in the eye. We are living in a confusing, hostile, and flabbergasting world of “virtual insanity”.

65 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

I

n 1973, British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was already aware of the mystical powers that come with scientific progress. Clarke stated in his third and last law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In earlier times, magic lantern shows had already given humanity its first audiovisual frights. By using mechanical slides and projecting them onto a surface along with music and dialog, spectators were introduced to odd animated tales that had somehow managed to step into the light. Back then, you would surely have been surprised, amazed, and terrified like everybody else in the room, as if the devil had suddenly appeared before your eyes.

66 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

We have been coexisting with this impossible truth for so long that we have learned to love it. To fit the needs of a new and increasingly demanding audience, the format had to become bigger and stronger with time, and it did. We kept on experiencing this new spectrum of reality and explored its potential, as everything turned into a game of flickering shadows, mind-bending projections, ectoplasms from another world, and never ending hallucinations. To us gullible observers, these illusions show the truth, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.

ENTANGLED The industries of cinema and video games might have originated in different times, with different means and goals, but they have been inevitably drawn to each other with the years.

Thanks to the development of modern artistic techniques, a great variety of styles and identities has diversified both sectors in unprecedented ways. Video games are far from what they used to be like when Pong or Tetris were made known to the public. Today’s games feature cinematic single-sequence shots (ie God of War 4), and human performers that have been accurately transformed into virtual characters (ie Call of Duty franchise), just like in big screen pictures.

Much like in our beloved games, recent movies feature artificial objects and landscapes in 3D, dazzling special effects that can bend the laws of physics, motion capture technology, and CGI (computer-generated imagery). These elements now play an undisputable role in western cinematic culture, especially among blockbusters: the Marvel Cinematic Universe is just one out of many examples, along with visually groundbreaking movies such as Interstellar (2014) or Inception (2010).

It seems that immersive storytelling is the key to arising empathy and wonder in the eyes of the viewer. Therefore, movies and games often display an idea of reality, be it truthful and plausible or entirely fabricated. As viewers, we assume and assimilate these illusions without regrets. Each screen is an open window to a boundless parallel universe where, much like in a magic lantern show, we don’t bother looking for the hidden details: we simply sit back and observe in tremendous awe, for the sake of entertainment and discovery.

FANCY PIXELS A magician never reveals his secrets, but artists aren’t generally that opaque. VFX (visual effects) breakdown videos and original concept illustrations allow us to get a view behind the scenes, and try figure out how a fictional truth was brought to life.

There’s a long way to go from the artists’ sketchbooks to our widescreens: actors need to imagine what will be added in post-production and work with it on set. Then, visual effects artists work their magic. In several high-budget movies, CGI was used for an impressively high percentage of the final output, such as in James Cameron’s Avatar (60%) or Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (80%).

What drives these artists is passion for their work, and the results of their tireless efforts are simply from another world.

The day I saw Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and its astonishing visual effects in 2014, it became clear to me that visual

Phantasmagoria

“ Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.”

coherence and cinematic storytelling in movies had become ridiculously new – in a good way. What I saw was true as life itself, thanks to the motion capture elements provided by people on the set, such as Andy Serkis and Karin Konoval.

used for Bioshock (2k Games), Fortnite (Epic Games). In 10, 20, or 30 years, playing a game could feel just like watching a movie, only this time you will own the script as well as the power to decide what will come out of it.

As the pace of technological development moves forward uncontrollably, nothing can ever stop us from making our wildest dreams come true. There will always be a next milestone, another advancement, another way of making movies that reveal the truth – or a truth. We can work on the surrounding elements, the ones that may not be as striking, but eventually change everything: fog, rain, lighting, camera, makeup, costumes, and so on. We can work on every single detail, every sound and every pixel, and this is why we will keep on striving to achieve complete realism, with audiovisual experiences that can deceive even the sharpest minds.

In terms of narrative structure, video games tend to show more flexibility and often provide the player with an illusion of choice.

By placing decision-making at the core of their storyline, they invite the player to become both an actor and a spectator, inside and outside the story. Just like the operator of a lantern, we can move, shift, and change the perspective of a story as we see fit, making every experience unique in its own way. These virtual choices may hold little to no consequences in our boring, physical world, but they are never easy: they will necessarily lead to joy or sorrow, pride, or guilt, harmonious resolutions or endless mayhem.

REALITY CHECK A lie is a lie, no matter how well you disguise it. Without lies, there would be no fiction, and there would definitely be no science-fiction. But what is it about books, movies, and video games that makes them so special? Why should art be exempt from the tacit rules of honesty and trust? Some might see art as a means of escape, a beacon of hope, a self-contained delirium, or even a menacing addiction. In the case of video games, I like to consider these lines of endless ones and zeroes for what they are: a victimless lie, where there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The progress that has been made in recent years is hardly unnoticeable. In 2017, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice showed that the ultimate goal of photorealism can be achieved in video games, and chances are that it will become a “real thing” for most creations in the years to come. The high level of intricate details was achieved with the help of motion capture running through Unreal Engine 4, a famous game design platform also

As it is always the case with art, appreciating video games and movies is a healthy ritual, and it is truly magnificent. What restrains us in our daily life is what makes art and technology thrive: together they allow us to forget about our limitations and discover a new sense of truth. When art meets technology, there is no such thing as a limit: the magic lanterns of the future will make us laugh, love, scream, and cry in ways we can’t begin to comprehend, but we will eventually get used to it.

We cannot hide, nor can we run away from the trickeries of the digital sphere, as screens and devices progressively become an extension of our bodies and minds. Wherever we go, we live our virtual life, but what we experience digitally is nothing but a sophisticated magic trick. With time, the wonders of technology might reveal how puny and fragile our reality actually is; but it doesn’t matter. At some point, we shall embrace the idea that everything we see on the screen is as real as it gets, because we are a part of it as much as it is a part of us.

67 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

– Lord Byron (Don Juan, Molière)

Experience

VFX: the ultimate illusion

Matte painter Yvonne Muinde on making the unreal, real Text by Ian Failes

of futuristic cities or alien worlds). But in the early days of filmmaking, such effects were often realised directly on glass and then combined in-camera, ie directly onto the film without any kind of augmentation.

©Yvonne Muinde

I 68 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

n 1898, George Méliès used multiple exposures and black “mattes” in Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads) to make it appear as if he had removed his own head from his body. It was the dawn of filmmaking, and also the beginnings of special effects. Some 120 years later, a wave of effects artists are continuing that legacy of crafting illusions for the screen.

Yvonne Muinde is one of them. A fine artist and oil painter by trade, Muinde concurrently carved out a career as a matte painter, a job she describes as “a digital illusionist, whose role is to create believable realistic worlds that characters and stories exist in.”

Muinde has helped make many believable realistic worlds for some of the biggest films ever released, including Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, Avatar, and Black Panther.

The paintings for those films were of the digital variety (Photoshop is the matte painter’s workhorse in creating, say, views

Still, decades of advancements in technology have not changed what matte paintings need to be: invisible. The point is to look as if there had been no visual effects intervention at all. “I am very proud when my work is invisible”, says Muinde, “because it is then that I know I have created a realistic, believable matte painting. A beautiful matte painting to me is subtle. Reality does not want to be over-complicated.” Muinde notes, accordingly, that one of her most invisible matte paintings was for a view out a window on a train for the film Knight and Day, completed at Weta Digital. “It was the most simple shot, but very satisfying for me as a matte painter.”

Meanwhile, matte paintings that Muinde completed at Scanline VFX for Black Panther of the mythical Wakandian waterfalls were much more grandiose. Real locations such as the Victoria and Iguazú Falls provided a starting point for concepts. The final shots were a combination of, says Muinde, “digital matte painting, 3D, effects, and compositing to achieve a believable and beautiful world.”

Perhaps no one in the audience really thought that the Wakandian Falls were an actual place, but the role of Muinde and her colleagues was to use their artistic skills

and modern tools to “sell” the illusion of the location with photorealism. With visual effects, you can make almost anything seem legitimate.

Which may be a problem in today’s fake news world. Muinde is all too aware of the ethical dilemmas that photoreal effects can now present, especially in the case of fake news or even the resurrection of deceased actors via digital means.

“VFX is a powerful medium”, she warns.

Its ability to change minds and influence has to be treated with respect and basic moral values.

Those are issues Muinde will continue to consider as both a fine artist and a seasoned VFX professional. Having travelled between the US, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada to pursue an effects career, she has returned to her native Kenya to help foster the development of a filmmaking and visual effects industry there and to spread the knowledge of illusion-making.

George Méliès is often considered the father of special effects. His many “children” continue to prosper around the world.

Experience

The final shots included extensive digital geometry and water simulations.

Matte painting was also used for skies and distant backgrounds.

The falls were based on real waterfalls referenced from various areas around the world.

Black Panther ©2018 Marvel Studios

Black Panther ©2018 Marvel Studios

69 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

A still from Scanline VFX's waterfall sequence in Black Panther.

Muinde's concepts helped inform the integration of the live action actors into synthetic environments.

Black Panther ©2018 Marvel Studios

Experience

How did they do that?

VFX PROS LOVE BEING FOOLED BY ILLUSIONS, TOO Text by Ian Failes

The best visual effects shots should leave an audience wondering, “How did they do that?” But what about the artists who make those same kinds of effects for a living? What shots have blown them away?

Five VFX professionals share their most illusion-invoking effects scenes.

70 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Gong Myung Lee - Visual effects supervisor, Method Studios I remember watching Fight Club’s opening sequence where the camera takes you to a building, into a garage, to a van, and to the bombs inside, all in one shot. I was astonished that it was done entirely using CG. I felt the same way when I saw Panic Room’s establishing shot that goes all through the house, through walls and everything, into a keyhole, again all in one shot. The whole sequence kept the viewer in suspense by establishing where the intruders were in relation to the protagonist.

Rob Coleman - Animation supervisor, Animal Logic When I first saw Jurassic Park, the sequence where the T-Rex attacked the Ford Explorer was truly astonishing. The interaction between the animated dinosaur and the overturned vehicle was remarkable – the weight and movement. I had been working professionally as an animator in Toronto from 1987, and I knew they used Alias and Softimage, but how did they do that? I left the theater, cut my demo reel and applied to Industrial Light & Magic.

They hired me a few months later.

Experience

Brendan Seals - Visual effects supervisor, Luma Pictures To this day, I am still blown away by the Terminator 2 deleted scene where a CPU is removed from inside Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head opposite a mirror in a single take. Linda Hamilton operates on a prosthetic version of Schwarzenegger, whilst the real actor is seen through a hollowed frame (the mirror) on the opposite side, with Linda’s twin sister mimicking all her actions in real-time! It’s pure genius and so inspiring to watch.

Such ingenuity really deserved an audience at the theatres.

Zoe Cranley - Head of build, DNEG Vancouver I still can’t believe the opening titles shot from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, with Baby Groot dancing. It’s over three minutes long! Thousands of frames, blending from one effects simulation into another. There are so many different layers of action and visual complexity happening all at once. Just the sheer complexity of producing that work, with multiple disciplines, all to appear as one seamless shot, just blew me away. When I first saw it, I thought, “Seriously, is that one shot?”

That scene of the pseudopod in The Abyss, its interaction with the environment and actors, and how it mimics the expressions of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, was an effect I will always remember.

I suspected it was CG, but the blend of filmed images, CG water, and human-like expressions was a real moment of movie magic for me.

As soon as I came out of the theatre, I had no other goal in my life but to figure out how it was achieved.

71 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Stephane Ceretti - Visual effects supervisor, Marvel Studios

Essay

Deep in the uncanny valley Text by Laura-Beth Cowley

72 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Illustrations by Ian Moore

Essay

Growing up long before I realised being an animator or studying animation to PhD level was a possible pursuit, I loved anything creepy. Horror movies, ghost stories, vampires, witches, and werewolves were my favourite things.

In fact the only thing I was “afraid of” in a goosebumps, scared-of-the-dark kind of way, was dolls – china dolls to be exact. There was something about the way in which they were seemingly lifelike but not alive. The fact they could move, due to either posable parts or a satanic curse, really freaked me out. It wasn't until years later when I was working on my last stop-motion film that I started to connect the dots: stop-motion had become some kind of therapy to exorcise the fear of things that move but shouldn't. I had in a very real way made myself embrace my fear, whether subconsciously or due perhaps more to my love of horror films and the macabre. The way in which something scares us will often also beguile us.

T

he “uncanny valley” as a term was first coined by robotics professor Mori Masahiro, in which he discussed the links between human-like robots, affinity, and the human interface, suggesting that rather than seeking perfect human resemblance in a robot, we should instead seek better affinity with machines. Due in part to human expectation, the concept of something possessing a lifelike quality would also need to move or feel like a living thing, and as such, robots that fell short of this expectation would prove inherently disturbing. Mori went as far as comparing the effect to that of a zombie or a corpse.

The notion was later – and perhaps most notably – picked up by psychoanalyst Freud, who studied the feeling of the uncanny, drawing further connections between the senses of unease and fear that human-like dolls or automaton instill in us. As Dr. Angela Tinwell summarises in her book The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation “Uncannies occurs when objects or situations evoke a sinister revelation of what is normally concealed from human experience. In other words we experience the uncanny when we identify something hideous or unsettling that we or others may have been attempting to hide.”

On this basis, when something moves when it really shouldn’t, the uncanny sensation is heightened. It is natural then that this theory applies to animation, video games, and other industries that predicate themselves on the art of bringing the unreal to life. With advancements in technology and animators’ abilities, as seen in films like The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011) and The Polar Express (2004), it was almost inevitable that we would slip deep into the valley creating an unwanted sense of uncanny.

73 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

In order to truly discuss the uncanny valley we must first look at the feeling of the uncanny, which has it origins in psychology. Noted psychologist Ernst Jentsch discussed the feeling related to the uncanny as creepy and simultaneously real and unreal. The feeling is heightened in things that are seen as human-like. One of the earliest examples given by Jentsch is the work of author Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, in particularly his characterisation of The Sandman (1817), a character who steals the eyes of children who don’t sleep when they’re told. This story was subsequently adapted using stop-motion by master animator Paul Berry in 1992, and is a film that still terrifies young audiences to this day.

Essay

“ Characterised, appealing characters are often more warm more likeable.

Realism takes an incredible talent but is rarely needed and often unpleasant.”

Within games and animation, we seem to be seeking an endless pursuit for perfection, to create an exact representation of the real world. This can be a worthwhile pursuit, as in the Visual Effects industry we are patching together the real and the fantastical in an increasingly seamless fashion. In games, we are attempting to create a departure from reality but with the hope of eliciting as much human emotion and tangibility as possible. This is also the case with films such as Anomalisa (2015) where a play on realism is used to carry across the central plot of the film. However, in fiction and fantasy films we seem to have forgotten one of the oldest and most withheld rules of animation, the idea behind one of animation’s twelve key principles: “appeal”. There is a long legacy of being able to fully emote with characters who have appeal and are able to both elicit and portray empathy without necessarily being a perfectly realistic depiction of a human or animal. Characterised, appealing characters are often more warm more likeable.

Realism takes an incredible talent but is rarely needed and often unpleasant.

74 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

A feeling of uncanny isn't always bad and to be avoided, as playing with this effect has amazing scope within the horror trope of animation. In a lot of ways, stop-motion seems to be a natural fit. With masters such as Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay at the forefront, there is a long history of utilizing the uncanny in films that also makes use of the tactility and unique movement of stop-motion.

The uncanny can be brought into the storytelling cannon as a way of evoking repulsion and fear on a primal level in its audience.

When it comes to animation, a medium still most closely linked with children's entertainment, it is important to use our skills, storytelling ability, and animation’s natural attributes, to create films in other genres and for all age ranges. After all, some of our favourite films as children had a dark edge or tone.

All in all, more sci-fi and horror animation should be made to challenge the perception of what animation and film as a whole can and should be. The uncanny valley should be respected, used when needed, and avoided when not. To seek for perfection in human-like resemblance is a possibility we are getting closer to every day, however just how necessary and desired it is by audiences remains to be seen.

The human eye is the most sophisticated thing on this earth and it takes a lot to fool it, but to scare it or please it is perhaps an easier and more enjoyable pursuit.

75 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Essay

Phantasmagoria: an animated watchlist Text and selection by Laura-Beth Cowley

76 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

The dreamlike state that the word “phantasmagoria� describes was the inspiration behind this issue. By its very nature, animation is brilliant at representing dreams, visions, things that aren't quite there. Like smoke, the look and feel of an animated film can be both beguiling and fleeting.

Here is a representation of animation at its most ethereal and enigmatic, wonderful and horrific.

Watchlist

CHILDREN

The Black Cauldron, dir. Ted Berman & Richard Rich (1985); 80 min.

One of Disney’s lesser-known features is a dark fantasy tale that follows a young boy and soothsaying pig in pursuit of a demonic villain. The film, which is set in a fantasy world inspired by medieval England and set to an '80s theremin-infused soundtrack, will bring a shadowy excitement to a drizzly afternoon with the kids.

“The Sandman”, dir. Paul Berry (1991); 10 min.

“The Sandman” is the late Paul Berry’s classic retelling of the E.T.A. Hoffmann story and a pinnacle of stop-motion short filmmaking.

Despite the design and lighting in this film being reminiscent of childhood nightmares, the film is a joy to watch and share with children old enough to be entertained by a little fright.

“Vincent”, dir. Tim Burton (1982); 6 min.

This short, one of Burton's first films, was created during his time as an animator at Disney. In this early example of Burton’s now iconic visual style, Vincent, who is named after Burton’s hero and the narrator of the short, Vincent Price, envisions macabre scenes involving his own family. This one is for all the creepy kids out there who feel more at home watching The Nightmare Before Christmas than Moana.

TEENS Watership Down, dir. Martin Rosen (1978); 91 min.

Who wouldn’t shudder at the carnage and violence of this seemingly twee tale of rabbits living in an English countryside?

Fiver, a seer, is visited by spirits and has visions of destruction and a new beginning. He urges his fellow rabbits to abandon their warren, but is met with a series of increasingly tragic events as a result. These elements of prophecy and brutality give the film a horrifically magical quality, and removes the audience from the harsh reality of the actual animal kingdom’s fight for survival.

Spirited Away, dir. Miyazaki Hayao (2001); 125 min.

Arguably Miyazaki’s most well known feature, this dark and dreamy film showcases Studio Ghibli’s animation chops as it weaves a tale and crafts a world so mesmerising and bizarre

it leaves an imprint on all who watch it. From Boh the giant baby, to twins Yubaba and Zeniba, to the creepy but beguiling No-Face, the unusual characters and scenarios of this film have inspired an entire generation of storytellers.

“There’s a Man in the Woods”, dir. Jacob Streilein (2014); 4 min.

This chilling, poetic film takes the viewer on a cyclical journey.

Its narrative is woven together in rhyming couplets with an acidic animation style that is brought together by the use of metamorphic scene transitions.

“I Live in the Woods”, dir. Max Winston (2008); 4 min.

This is a manic film, full of punchy energy and ridiculous violence.

It's also an extremely funny and memorable story in which a purple-haired, yellow-eyed woodsman comes face to face with his maker. This action-packed film takes traditional puppet animation on a wild ride through the wilderness.

ADULT Perfect Blue, dir. Kon Satoshi (1997); 81 min.

The film, which follows a young teen pop idol as she is pushed into an acting career, plays with the audience’s perception of mania, fandom, visions and reality. Kon’s use of various anime styles adds another sinister dimension to this dark psychological thriller.

Fear(s) of the Dark, dir. Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, & Richard McGuire (2007); 83 min.

This French anthology of animated horror films created by well known comic artists brings together films that use a variety of monochrome styles to tell tales of human nature, fear and nightmarish transformations. The strong visual storytelling of this remarkable collection conjures memories of telling scary stories around the campfire, albeit with a distinctly twisted group of campers.

“The Cat with Hands”, dir. Robert Morgan (2001); 4 min.

Robert Morgan is one of those directors who can tap into subconscious fears. This beautifully eerie film uses a mix of puppets and pixilation to create a dreamlike haze state for the audience. Draw the curtains and let the rhythmic flow of the narrator's voice draw you in.

“The Backwater Gospel”, dir. Bo Mathorne (2011); 9 min.

In this simultaneously stunning and grungy film, the townsfolk of a dilapidated town choose between the words of their preacher and their fear of the undertaker. This dark short plays with the constructs of social justice and survival instincts.

77 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

James and the Giant Peach, dir. Henry Selick (1996); 79 min.

This feature film adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic children book is beautifully crafted in an art nouveau style, using a combination of live action and stop-motion animation.

The arches and angles of the bugs’ symmetrical designs mirror that of the Empire State Building, their destination. While the whole movie has a phantasmagorical feel, a dream sequence in which James (as a caterpillar) struggles to escape his aunts is especially haunting.

Phantasmagoria: an animated playlist Text and selection by Brice Fallon

78 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Because video games are an excellent story-telling device, creatives can easily reflect fear and horror straight to the player. All video game fans have sat in the dark playing that one game that scares them, to set the scene and truly experience the fear. Much like how the magic lantern was used, games can promote the unsettling and create an illusion that the player is actually in peril. But don’t worry. It’s just a game.

Playlist

RETRO

BASED ON...

American McGee’s Alice (2000), dev. by Rogue Entertainment and published by EA Lewis Carroll’s classic tale of “was it all a dream?” is given the unofficial horror sequel. Everything and every character is there, from the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit, but everything is twisted and broken. Not relying on implications anymore, this game dives deep into the dreamlike state of the original, with the titular Alice using Wonderland as an escape from her now-horrible life. A sequel, Alice: Madness Returns was released in 2014 repeated the same themes, showing that while Alice’s journey is timeless, it’s also the perfect representation of the inner workings of a confused mind.

SERIES Castlevania (1984 - present), created and dev. by Konami A video game staple since 1984, the Castlevania series takes on the vampire-hunting trope and explodes with platforming vigour. Supernatural powers and classic horror creatures from every corner of the horror genre permeate every pixel and polygon of each game. The Castlevania games have deep roots in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it shows. Continuing the themes of psychological horror prevalent in Dracula, the Castlevania games easily take their place in the phantasmagoria, especially in the later games once the limitations of earlier technology were outgrown.

Luigi’s Mansion (2001- present), dev. and published by Nintendo Though with only two in the series, and a third on the way, the Luigi’s Mansion games are the perfect spooky game for kids.

Ghosts torment the forever-scared Luigi as he searches for his missing brother, Mario. With cues from Ghostbusters, Luigi uses the Poltergust and other technological wonders to capture ghosts and clean out the mansion. The series uses horror motifs like floating furniture and creaking doors to immerse the player in a spooky, yet still Nintendo-family friendly, way.

Silent Hill (1999 - present), dev. and published by Konami Another horror video game staple, the first Silent Hill game features the main character flitting in and out of consciousness, with him, and the player, not sure what is a dream and what isn’t – something that continues for the rest of the series. With themes of darkness and confusion very prevalent throughout the series, the Silent Hill games use monsters and nightmares as a way to manifest the true psyche of the games’ characters, creating a full, but dream-like and terrifying, world.

NEW CLASSICS Bloodborne (2015), dev. by FromSoftware and published by Sony At the start of Bloodborne, The Hunter is told that “whatever happens, you may think it all a mere bad dream.” Playing Bloodborne, you would think it a full-blown nightmare. Stuck in a horrific town as its inhabitants turn into monsters and come after you with massive cleavers and echoing rifles, Bloodborne has a reputation for being very difficult. Storeys-high bosses and Gothic architecture are all around you. Fight your way through the city and stay alive.

Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017), dev. by Team Salvato Seemingly a lighthearted visual novel about a group of high school poetry lovers, Doki Doki Literature Club quickly turns to something else. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it’s full of lots of high-impact scenes, but the psychological horror is there for the player to question what is real and what isn’t. In the end, you’ll never look at your computer again.

Limbo (2010), dev. by Playdead A two-dimensional platformer, Limbo was praised for its use of light and colour (or lack of both) to great effect. The player controls a boy through a series of unsettling environments and uses death as a teaching moment so that you can try again – hopefully with the right answers to the puzzles this time.

Limbo features jump scares and brutal deaths, but all in the effort to find out what the title means and how the player can understand the world they just spent time in.

A Mortician’s Tale (2017), dev. by Laundry Bear Part point-and-click adventure, part study of the science of death, part window into grief, part scathing look at the funeral industry, A Mortician’s Tale lets you play a year in the life of Charlie, a fresh-faced mortician in her first real job. You read emails, prepare bodies, and attend funerals, never saying anything, but listening to the conversations of the loved ones of the deceased. It’s more than a visual novel. There’s not a lot of horror, unless you’re scared of animated dead bodies, but there’s a sense of loss and macabre permeating through every second of the game.

79 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Dragon’s Lair (1983), dev. by RDI Video Systems and published by Cinematronics More a maze needing quick reflexes to solve, Dragon’s Lair comprises of nothing but animated cutscenes. The player moves Dirk the Daring through the animated world using only their hands to react on the joystick and sword button, and their eyes to take in the glory of the animation. That’s right, instead of pixelation, the staple at the time, Dragon's Lair was more like an animated feature – and one animated by the legendary Don Bluth! Almost a confused dream with scenes cutting from one to the next, the game sends Dirk the Daring all around Mordroc’s Castle, where nothing is what it should be and every door could lead you to anywhere.

80 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Essay

81 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Essay

Beyond

Work In Progress

The Glassworker Text by Ko Ricker

82 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Usman Riaz, founder of the Karachi-based Mano Animation Studios, is currently in the process of producing Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animated feature, the highly anticipated The Glassworker.

83 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Work In Progress

The Glassworker ŠMano Animation Studio

84 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Work In Progress

Work In Progress Riaz will be the first to tell you that his primary inspiration for the project is the work of Japanese animation greats. As a child, Riaz stumbled across his first-ever anime series, Yamazaki Koji and Kanda Takeyuki’s 1978 adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, by complete accident. “When I was four or five years old, I rented this old video tape. It was a Disney film, but then when the video ended, this animation started playing, and it was the Japanese animated series [The Adventures of] the Little Prince”, Riaz explains. “For some reason, the storytelling and the way it was drawn just clicked with me. I just remember being like, ‘I want to watch more things that are animated like this.’”

As Riaz got older, he began to familiarise himself with more masters — Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata Isao, Otomo Katsuhiro. He fell in love with the works of Studio Ghibli in particular, and films like Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Only Yesterday inspired him to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. In 2010, Riaz enrolled at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, where he studied illustration for two years. But it wasn’t until he saw Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises that Riaz seriously thought he might be able to follow in the footsteps of his heroes. “[The Wind Rises] is what made me realize, ‘We can do this in Pakistan.’ I could see Jiro Horikoshi’s journey, how he would take English magazines about aeronautical engineering and he would sit with a dictionary and translate it into Japanese and just look at the pictures”, says Riaz.

“I remember seeing myself in that. I have all of the Ghibli storyboard books and they’re all in Japanese. I’m just looking at all the pictures and looking at how [Miyazaki] is making everything.”

“ And to see how intimate the space was, to see

In 2013, Riaz was selected to become a TED Senior Fellow — the youngest ever at 22 — because of his exceptional musical skill. As a result, he then studied for a few years at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Riaz characterizes this time as a slightly ridiculous, if happy, detour from his true goal of becoming an animator. Still, he’s grateful; after all, if it weren’t for his experiences with TED, Riaz says he never would have been able to start Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animation studio. It was because of a TED connection, in fact, that Riaz was able to visit Studio Ghibli and the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo in 2015.

“It was a dream come true, that whole trip”, says Riaz. “And to see how intimate the space was, to see Ghibli and just see the craftsman mentality there, that was the inspiring part. We’re so used to seeing the Pixar and Disney documentaries where they have these gigantic, stadium-sized studios with thousands of computers and people working.”

85 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Ghibli and just see the craftsman mentality there, that was the inspiring part. We’re so used to seeing the Pixar and Disney documentaries where they have these gigantic, stadium-sized studios with thousands of computers and people working.”

Work In Progress

86 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

The Glassworker ©Mano Animation Studio

The Glassworker ©Mano Animation Studio

The Glassworker ©Mano Animation Studio

Work In Progress Riaz returned to Karachi and was determined to get started on his own vision, The Glassworker, a feature film that follows the lives of Vincent, the son of a glassblower, and Alliz, a prodigious violinist. Not knowing how else to amass the necessary production funds, Riaz set up a Kickstarter to fundraise 50,000 USD for a short prelude for the film — and ended up with 116,000 USD to produce Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animated short.

In order to produce The Glassworker, Riaz had to establish Mano Animation Studios, his model of course being the close-knit, auteur-centric Studio Ghibli. Up until recently, animation of any kind had barely existed within Pakistan. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s 3 Bahadur, the country’s first computer-animated full-length film, was released in 2015, and Allahyar and the Legend of Markhor, from 3rd World Studios, came out earlier this year. Before Mano, there was not a single Pakistani animation studio dedicated to traditional hand-drawn animation. With the help of co-founder (and now wife) Mariam Paracha and animation director Aamir Riffat, Riaz began to build Mano from the ground up. Today, the studio consists of a Karachi-based staff of 25, along with another eight in Malaysia, and the group is slowly expanding.

The full prelude, now completed, is just short of seven minutes, and is only available to those who backed the project on Kickstarter, while an abbreviated version with a runtime of about three and a half minutes is available to the public on YouTube. Riaz, who is directing, expects production on the feature film to be completed in 2020.

The Glassworker will depict a war-torn environment not dissimilar to Riaz’s own childhood; though Pakistan’s political climate has calmed significantly in recent years, Riaz’s youth was marked by corruption, social unrest, and a heightened level of danger that became normalized out of necessity. “The political instability really affected my childhood and my early teenage years, because we got so numb and used to it. ‘Oh, there’s a riot happening today, so just come home from school early.’ We were like, ‘Oh, there’s a bombing that happened in so-and-so area, so we’ll just avoid that route coming home.’”

“I’m hoping what happens is that people are drawn into the visual style, and then they discover a whole other side to the story and themes that could only be found in Pakistan”, says Riaz. “Even though life is so fragile, you still find reasons to keep moving forward — and a glass shop is a nice visual metaphor for that sort of environment.”

87 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Though The Glassworker takes place in a westernized landscape, Riaz insisted that his characters speak in Urdu and behave like Pakistanis. After all, the characters in Mulan and Aladdin act like American teenagers, while those in Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky speak Japanese and sometimes bow to one another. Why should Pakistan’s first traditionally animated feature stray from this tried-and-true approach?

Experience

BRINGING YOUR IDEAS TO LIGHT

A LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES OF THE ANIMATION BUSINESS AND TEAM BUILDING

Good sorts: the ethos behind the creative success of a small London studio Kiri Haggart, Executive Producer / Managing Director at Feed Me Light on the studio's recruiting philosophy: Feed Me Light (FML) is a creative studio based in London. We provide a range of services and creative solutions for our clients that span from creative briefs, to storyboarding, illustrations, 2D & 3D animation, filming, post-production, print, video games, and VR. Opening its doors in late 2015, the studio went through unprecedented growth in its first three years. Growing a studio came with the new challenges of general business management and managing clients and feedback. We ensure that our creative talent is supported by a solid team of producers, who find creative solutions to support the project and help find a compromise between our budget and creativity.

Everyone that comes on board embodies the ethos of being “good sorts”; they come in with big hearts, lots of talent, and no ego. In our line of work, people are generally quite excited to come in and create, so you don’t really have to do much more than give them a healthy work environment and be flexible around what they need to flourish. Our love of collaboration, and our respect for our colleagues’ creative visions is what we feel leads to the dynamic and bold range of styles in our studio portfolio.

When a project comes together under the FML roof, it has been the result of a multitude of talents from across the board, not just the creative workforce. Everyone has something to bring to the table; each person comes from their respective culture and has their own experiences to share. These experiences provide humour and insight into our daily lives that we otherwise never would have had, and helps push our ability to understand, craft, and tell the stories of our clients. Usually when a brief comes in, we sit and chat, get the juices going, and it is readily apparent whose stamp the project fits and whose hands it will best be placed in. It's always been a very organic process. Jobs will also come in with clients requesting a specific visual style from a particular director, who they know will deliver their vision.

88 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Cross-collaboration between different directors is something we’re proud to foster in the studio as well when we know a project will be strengthened by the combined minds of a number of our creative leads. It’s our own special FML House Blend.

What sticks out the most for us, and has the biggest impact on our day to day life, is the people. Our team. They have been the single most exciting part of the FML story so far. And I don’t just mean the studio staff, it is also every single freelancer we’ve had in to work with us on our projects. We’ve grown in size, we’ve gotten stronger, and we’re delivering projects which keep us motivated. There have been many opportunities for our team to crumble and lose interest, but they never have. It almost feels too good to be true.

But hands on hearts, we know that we are who we are, and deliver what we do, because of our people and our team. The underlying fact is, we come in every day to have fun, and we enjoy what we do. It sounds almost like a prepared answer, that perhaps we feel is the “right” answer to make us sound good. But it’s not, we truly love our team and the environment they help create.

Experience

Lessons Learned Along the Way Zainab Balami shares her experience on producing her own TV series: It has been a year since I resigned from a 9-5 job to pursue my dream of creating a children’s animated series. Though I am still in the early stages of this project, I have learned more in this short period than I ever thought possible.

African folktales have been the vehicle for transmitting culture, preserving memories, and making sense of the world. These stories and their lessons were passed down from one generation to the next, but the storytelling culture is gradually fading away.

Inspired by the storytelling from my childhood and West African folktales, I wanted to make an impact by preserving the African storytelling culture through animation. And so, Kaka & Zaza is born!

©Feed Me Light

The British/Nigerian children’s animated series is inspired by folktales of the trickster tortoise. The production is split between the UK and Nigeria. The biggest challenge so far is funding; I am working on a strategy for crowdfunding the pilot episode.

Throughout this journey I’ve learned a lot about entrepreneurship and planning for success. These are some of the most important lessons I’ve learned so far:

Building a trustworthy team that shares your vision and passion is extremely crucial.

I had worked with some team members previously and had the opportunity to establish friendship and mutual respect. That mutual respect enables the production of quality content that will have a positive lasting effect.

Being authentic and staying true to your purpose was what got me through some challenging periods of the production.

TrueView ©Feed Me Light

Be a creative entrepreneur. It is not enough to have a great idea, you need to be able to translate how that idea will add value and attract prospective investors as well as viewers.

89 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Being open-minded is necessary to allow for constant change for the project to evolve in a positive way. I was fortunate to have a meeting with a three times Oscar nominated animation producer through B3 Media TalentLab (London). Being receptive to new ideas enabled me to take his advice on board and reshape the animated series in a way that is unique and culturally appealing.

90 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Sisters

Sisters

Women Who Perceptions prejudice and the fight for change Text by Ruth Richards Illustrations by Marta Zubieta

91 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Animate

Sisters

It has been over a year since the #MeToo hashtag, born of a concept introduced by social activist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral, following the sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The resulting movement, designed to raise awareness of and eradicate sexual assault and harassment in all workplaces across all industries, continues to resonate today. Problematic practices and figures within the animation industry, as well as the film industry at large, have been exposed and criticized. In order for real and meaningful cultural change to take place, it’s imperative that the conversation surrounding these issues continue.

Today, more than ever, it is vital not only to contextualise, but also to celebrate, the history and continuing impact of women in animation.

92 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

O

ne of the most readily visible factors indicative of the gender politics at play within the animation industry, much like the film industry at large, is that it is a “boys’ club”. In 2018, the Animation Guild (IATSE Local 839) found that of its approximately 4,230 members at studios in the Los Angeles area (including writers, artists, and technicians) only “slightly more than 25% were women”.1 Throughout animation history, many women have risen in prominence, and yet the lack of gender parity and prejudice against women in animation persists. Although the reasons women continue to face such prejudice are multifaceted, one of the possible contributing factors is that animation has traditionally been the considered domain of “great men”; Walt Disney and the Nine Old Men, Chuck Jones, Miyazaki Hayao — when someone is asked who the great masters of animation are, these are the names that invariably first come to mind.

However, even a brief examination of animation history reveals that women have always been present, with many having a great impact on the development of the industry as well as the artistic development of the medium since its earliest days. Part of the necessary task of documenting and teaching their history is to reappraise how women in animation have been written about, if they have been written about at all. As Bella Roe writes in an article for blog animation studies 2.0, “the way the history of women in animation has been written has provided a foundation to the current prejudice women experience in the animation industry.” It is necessary to re-examine and revise this history, in order to properly contextualise the contribution of the women from our past, and better understand the problems that women are facing right now.

“FEMININE COMPETITION”, “DOMESTIC CRAFTS”, AND EARLY AMBITION M.J. Winkler is one of the most important figures of the early Western cartoon industry; she not only distributed the Fleischer Studios Out of the Inkwell series and Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat, but was also responsible for the distribution of Walt Disney’s first shorts from the Alice Comedies series. Without M.J. Winkler, the histories of the early US cartoon industry may have unfolded very differently. And yet, a newspaper article from the early 1920s, as quoted in Maureen Furniss’ Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, writes of Winkler, “Few of the motion picture men who have done business with M.J. Winkler Productions know that M.J. is Margaret Winkler, and that she is young and nice looking.” To look back now and read her described as “young and nice looking” is laughable, but sadly, it isn’t particularly surprising. The clipping, Furniss points out, also describes Winkler as “invading” one of the few fields where men had yet to face any “feminine competition”; the work Winkler was doing was certainly not the type of work that many women of that time would be expected to do.

Despite barriers, Winkler developed an impressive reputation not only with regards to her business acumen, but for recognising new talent and pushing the artists she worked with for further creative development. Winkler got her start working as secretary for co-founder of Warner Brothers, Harry M. Warner. She quit to become an independent distributor in 1921, and ran her business successfully for

1. A detailed breakdown can be found on the TAG blog http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2018/03/employment-and-gender-diversity.html

Sisters

Whilst women have succeeded in the industry, they have also had to fight the perception that their work is somehow less valuable, or less worthy of recognition, than the work undertaken by men. Inking and painting, for instance, was a role that demanded speed, precision, and consistency. Repetitive though it may have felt at times, the women of the ink and paint departments underwent their own training, many of them having graduated from art schools. The under-appreciated and under-valued work performed by the women of the ink and paint department is now being acknowledged, thanks to the work of journalists, historians and researchers such as Mindy Johnson, with her book Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation, as well as Christine Guest, the filmmaker behind the docu-series Beyond Ink & Paint: The Women of Animation.2 For Vanity Fair, Patricia Zohn has detailed the experiences of her aunt, Rae Medby McSpadden, who worked at the Disney studios during production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Through interviews, letters and personal documents, Zohn paints a vivid picture of life during the “Golden Age” at the Disney studios.

The relatively new significance placed on the women of the ink and paint departments goes some of the way towards redressing the sometimes paternalistic and gendered ways in which they have previously been represented. Kirsten Thompson, director of the film program at Seattle University, examines some of these representations in

2. https://www.beyondinkandpaint.com

The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a comedic promotional film for the Disney studios. She finds that the representation of the ink and paint department “domesticates the female labor of ink and paint, connecting it to other traditional tasks of femininity”. The film presents a theatrical and sensual image of the ink and paint “girls” (as they were and still so often are referred to), where colour production and the artistry of the department are equated with narrow images femininity and domesticity.

Banter in the film equates the task preparing the paint to cooking, as the women use their “secret formulas” to create a perfectly vibrant mixture.

This image of domesticity not only applies to the women of ink and paint, but to independent artists and animators as well. It is not uncommon to find works animated by a woman equated to embroidery, tapestry or knitting. Tashi Petter, a doctoral candidate at the Queen Mary University of London whose research focuses on German director and animator Lotte Reiniger, notes that Reiniger’s animation technique, which is rooted in traditional paper cut and silhouette art that was mostly practiced by women, has been used to link Reiniger’s work to the home and domestic craft. Whilst this can be seen as a patronising or gendered dismissal of her work as “craft” rather than “art”, Petter points out that through her fusion of the traditional craft with the then emerging medium of animation, “Reiniger’s work transforms a handmade form — traditionally practiced by women with no access to formal training — into a distinctly modern and aesthetically radical medium.” Personally, Reiniger, whose contemporaries included Walter Ruttman and Berthold Bartosch, couldn’t have been less interested in a domestic lifestyle; Petter notes Reiniger’s “wonderfully subversive” instructions to those wishing to animate at home, which were to cut a hole in the dining room table and put a glass plate over it to create an animation table — a reclamation of the domestic space.

“ IT TAKES MORE THAN INSPIRATION TO ACHIEVE GENDER PARITY IN THE INDUSTRY.” There are many more figures that deserve their fair share of recognition and appreciation, but it will suffice, as a cursory introduction to a history of women in animation, to say that women like M.J. Winkler, Lotte Reiniger, Helena Smith Dayton, Laverne Harding, Retta Scott, Mary Ellen Bute, Mary Blair, Okuyama Reiko, Evelyn Lambart, Faith Hubley, and Caroline Leaf are just some of the names of women who have pushed the medium forward, and they continue to inspire constituents of the animation industry today. However, it takes more than inspiration to achieve gender parity in the industry, and making sure women are given equal place in the history books, whilst a necessary step, only addresses one aspect of a much larger problem.

93 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

the next five years. However, her husband Charles Mintz (well-known for hiring away Disney’s staff and securing the rights to the Disney character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit) would take over her business in 1926 after their marriage and the birth of their children. Mintz had also begun his career working for Warner Brothers; working with Winkler’s brother George, the business was still known as Winkler Pictures. After Mintz also lost control of Oswald to Universal Pictures, he would continue to operate as an independent producer working with Columbia, producing Krazy Kat cartoons, Scrappy cartoons, and the Color Rhapsody series. Although Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic devotes nearly an entire chapter to Mintz, the book makes only a small mention of Winkler. Donald Crafton pays her more attention in his book Before Mickey, acknowledging her as a “straightforward businessperson”, while referring to Mintz as a “wheeler-dealer in the grand style”. Despite being one of the most important pioneers in the distributors of animated cartoons, Winkler’s work and talent were eclipsed by the dealings of her husband, and for too many years her contribution to the industry went unacknowledged. There is something eminently satisfying in knowing that one of the key figures of the early animation industry was a woman, particularly as, for a long time, women in animation have been subject to the ahistorical perception that in the early years they were relegated to ink and paint departments only. It is true that many women did find themselves inkers and painters, but they have also had a great impact in all areas of the medium from animation’s earliest days, all over the world. Lotte Reiniger, for instance, perhaps the most well known woman in animation history, is particularly celebrated for the creation of the earliest surviving feature length animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which first screened for an audience that included Fritz Lang.

Sisters

REPRESENTATION, ACTION, AND INDUSTRY TRANSFORMATIONS Andi Spark, head of the animation program at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, recalls a senior lecturer once saying to her, “You haven’t got what it takes to be an animator.” Sparks writes that in her subsequent 30-year career in animation, she has spent some of that time trying to figure out “what it takes”. Spark uses the term “Animatrix” to describe a female-centred approach — animation made for and by women that aims for nuanced representations in terms of theme, design and narrative. Spark notes that it can be difficult for women to feel like they belong in animation when they can’t see themselves.

“Considering a large variety of successful female-initiated projects is essential for women to combat the ‘imposter syndrome’ of feeling that they don’t belong and that even when they are in a senior creative or executive position, that they’re there by accident”, Spark wrote in a 2016 article for Animation Studies Online Journal.

94 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Perhaps the most obvious reason for needing women in animation is just that — seeing themselves represented on screen and behind the scenes can have an incredibly positive impact on young girls and women, inspiring them, and opening their minds to the possibility of a career in animation. And yet, representation alone is not enough. The barriers to women joining the animation industry are not that different to women looking to enter any traditionally male dominated industry; Professors Deb Verhoeven and Stuart Palmer of Deakin University, for example, have found using data from the Australian screen industry that male-only or male-dominated creative teams are more likely to “thrive”, and are far more likely to work only with other men. Female producers, on the other hand, are far more likely to approach gender parity on their creative teams. Unhelpfully, the onus is often placed on women themselves to counteract this problem, assuming that 50/50 gender parity will be inevitably achieved once women are simply motivated to work hard, and believe in their own merits and abilities. Achieving gender parity, however, cannot happen unless those who already hold power in the industry take action. As Verhoeven and Palmer suggest, beyond offering mentoring or financial support for project and career development, the distribution of resources in the film and animation industries needs to be predicated on equity, which means hiring more women whilst at the same time reducing the number of men. Men (and women) already in positions of power need to fully understand the dynamics of the problem of male domination of these industries, and be held accountable when they fail to meet these goals.

The lack of gender parity and egalitarianism in the animation industry is concerning enough on its own, but worries for women in the workplace don’t end there. Whether it’s through unwanted sexual advances and comments, threats of blacklisting and retaliation, harassment and assault, or predatory behaviour, it is both heartbreaking and infuriating to think of the women who have have been forced away from a career they loved and wanted because

of long-entrenched behaviours. The insidiousness of this “boys’ club” atmosphere has been brought into sharp relief in the wake of the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, when John Lasseter, co-founder of Pixar and then chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, announced he was taking a six-month “sabbatical” as a result of “missteps”. It was soon revealed that these missteps included unwanted physical advances, including kissing and hugging, of female employees. Perhaps more upsetting still were the revelations that studio executives were aware of Lasseter's conduct for many years, yet Lasseter continued to hold a position of huge power and influence within the organisation.3

“ SLOWLY WE ARE BEGINNING TO SEE POSITIVE CHANGE, AND THAT IS WORTH CELEBRATING.” This no doubt led to an environment in which others felt they could engage in this type of behaviour consequence-free. As a household name, the public face of Disney and Pixar, and a man responsible for directing and producing many animated features beloved by children worldwide, this news was particularly cutting and distressing. It has now been confirmed4 that Lasseter will no longer continue at Pixar after 2018, but for a number of months speculation that he might return to the company in some capacity proved utterly galling for the staff who had been forced to endure his actions and behaviour.

Cassandra Smolcic, who was a graphic designer at Pixar, describes a number of uncomfortable encounters at the company during her internship. She was warned early of Lasseter’s behaviour and was forced to endure unwanted and objectifying comments from a number of male superiors during her five year employment. She writes, “It was clear the institution was working hard to protect him, at the expense of women like me.” 5 Rashida Jones, who was hired as a screenwriter for Toy Story 4 before departing due to creative differences, stated of the culture at Pixar that “it is a culture where women and people of color do not have an equal creative voice.” 6 Further disturbing revelations around the animation industry came to light when Ariane Lange reported the predatory behaviour of The Ren & Stimpy Show creator of John Kricfalusi, who has admitted to carrying on “relationships” with underage girls whom he invited to his studio under the pretext of an internship.7 The reporting around these issues has been brave and necessary; women have come forward, sometimes anonymously and sometimes openly, to share their stories and experiences, in the hopes of that calling out such conduct publicly will force those in the industry with the power to take action to do so.

3. Deadline https://deadline.com/2017/11/john-lasseter-behavior-pixar-disney-1202213821 4. https://variety.com/2018/film/news/disney-john-lasseter-harassment-bob-iger-1202734060 5. Variety https://variety.com/2018/film/news/pixar-boys-club-john-lasseter-cassandra-smolcic-1202858982 6. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/pixar-john-lasseter-boys-club

Sisters It shouldn’t be left up to women to fix a problem that they didn’t create, but women have been the ones to take action. In October 2017, women and gender non-conforming people of the animation community, including Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Anne Walker Farrell (BoJack Horseman), and Julia Pott (Summer Camp Island), signed an open letter demanding an end to sexual harassment within the animation industry. Written to highlight the pervasive sexism and misogyny in the industry, the letter is a call to action that outlines clear steps for changing the culture within the industry.

These demands include that animation studios instate clear and enforceable sexual harassment policies; that the Animation Guild update the language of its constitution in order to censure members who engage in inappropriate or prejudicial behaviour; that the Guild establish an Anti-Harassment and Discrimination committee, in order to uphold the new language, educate, and prevent future offenses; and importantly, that male colleagues begin speaking up and calling out inappropriate and anti-social behaviours. Since the publication of the letter, steps have already been taken, and the Anti-Harassment and Discrimination committee has been established.8 What was once dealt with through “whisper networks” is now open to direct public scrutiny; the letter ends on a note of unity and defiance: “We are united in our mission to wipe out sexual harassment in the animation industry, and we will no longer be silent.”

More than a request, this letter is just one part of a larger, sweeping fight for structural change, from constitutional policy reform to holding employees accountable from leadership down.

Slowly we are beginning to see positive change within the industry, and that is worth celebrating. As more and more women continue to come to prominence, women in animation will see more and more firsts: Retta Scott was the first woman to be credited as an animator at Disney; Brenda Chapman was the first woman to officially win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature9; Jennifer Yuh Nelson became the first woman to solo-direct a Hollywood animated feature with Kung Fu Panda 2; Domee Shi is the first woman to write and direct a short film at Pixar in its thirty year history; and in 2018, Jennifer Lee was named the new chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios. Change is coming, slowly but inexorably, and the animation community will be all the better for it.

REFERENCES: Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey.

The University of Chicago Press, 1993 Furniss, Maureen. Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics Revised edition. John Libbey Publishing Ltd. 2007.

Furniss, Maureen. A New History of Animation, Thames & Hudson, 2016 Johnson, Mindy. Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation. Disney Editions, 2017 Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Revised and Updated Edition, Plume, 1987 “An Open Letter to the Animation Community” Los Angeles Times http://documents.latimes.com/ animation-open-letter Accessed April 16th 2018 Petter, Tashi. “‘In a Tiny Realm of Her Own’: Lotte Reiniger, Domesticity and Creativity” animation studies 2.0 www.blog.animationstudies. org/?p=2166 Accessed 23rd April 2018 Roe, Bella Honess. “The Gendered Past of Animation.

Exploring the Historiography of Women in Animation” animation studies 2.0 www.blog.animationstudies. org/?p=2225 Accessed 16th April 2018 Spark, Andi. “Pursuing the Animatrix: Musings on Defining a Term to Describe Woman-Centered Animation” Animation Studies Online Journal, Volume 11, 2016. https://journal.animationstudies.org/ andi-spark-pursuing-the-animatrix-musings-on-defining-a-term-to-describe-woman-centered-animation Thompson, Kirsten. ““Quick - Like a Bunny!” The Ink and Paint Machine, Female Labor, and Color Production.” Animation Studies Online Journal, Volume 9, 2014. https://journal.animationstudies.org/ category/volume-9/kirsten-thompson-quick-like-a-bunny Accessed 16th April 2018 Verhoeven, Deb and Palmer, Stuart. “Women aren’t the problem in the film industry, men are” The Conversation www.theconversation.com/ women-arent-the-problem-in-the-film-industry-menare-68740 Accessed 16th April 2018

7. https://animationguild.org/about-the-guild/committees 8. Amid Amidi points out that although Shrek won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, co-directed by Vicky Jenson, she did not receive an Oscar because the award went to the films producer that year. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/brenda-chapman-becomes-first-woman-to-win-feature-animation-oscar-78416.html

95 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Zohn, Patricia. “Coloring the Kingdom” Vanity Fair. www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/03/disney-animation-girls-201003 Accessed 23rd April 2018

Sisters

DOMEE SHI joined Pixar in 2011, working as a story artist on Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur and Incredibles 2 (2018). Shi’s critically acclaimed short animation "Bao" is the first short film at Pixar by a female director, and centres on a Chinese mother going through “empty nest” syndrome, when one of her bao (dumplings) comes to life.

96 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

DEL KATHRYN BARTON is an Australian artist and filmmaker. She is perhaps best known for her paintings, which are surrealistic and make use of vivid colour and patterns.

In 2015, Barton (along with Brendan Fletcher) directed "The Nightingale and the Rose", based on the story by Oscar Wilde and Barton’s original artwork. The film is a combination of Barton’s paintings, stop-motion and digital animation, and won the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Award for Best Short Animation.

REBECCA SUGAR has worked as a storyboard artist on Hotel Transylvania (2012) and Adventure Time (2010–2013), but is probably best known as the writer and creator of Steven Universe (2013–) for Cartoon Network. Sugar, who is non-binary, started in independent comics before moving into animation, and Steven Universe has been lauded for its treatment of such topics as gender and sexuality, family, and LGBTQ representation.

NORA TWOMEY is co-founder of Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, and is an Oscar nominated animator, producer and director. She was co-director with Cartoon Saloon co-founder Tomm Moore of The Secret of Kells (2009), and her first solo feature, The Breadwinner (2017), was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

JENNIFER YUH NELSON has worked as a character designer, story artist and storyboard artist, and was an episode director and character designer on HBO’s Emmywinning series Spawn (1997). She holds the distinction of being the first woman to solo direct a major Hollywood animated feature, Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She went on to co-direct the sequel, Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) with Alessandro Carloni, and recently directed her first live-action feature film, The Darkest Minds (2018).

NOELLE STEVENSON is a cartoonist, writer, and the showrunner of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–) at Dreamworks TV. Her comic book series Lumberjanes (along with Shannon Waters, Grace Ellis, and Brooke A. Allen) won the Eisner awards for Best New Series and Best Publication for Teens in 2015. Her graphic novel and popular webcomic, Nimona, is currently being developed into an animated feature at Blue Sky Studios. She has also written stories for various animated series, including Wander of Yonder (2013–2016) and DuckTales (2017–).

Sisters

ANNE WALKER FARRELL is an illustrator, writer, comic artist, animator and director, whose career in the animation industry has already spanned thirteen years. She has most recently worked as a director on the fourth season of BoJack Horseman (2017), on which she has also served as lead animator. Her comic work includes the series Starseeking (2018–), Hand of the Scribe with Daniel Persinger (2016), and Counted (2015).

JENNIFER LEE is a writer, director and producer who is best known for directing Disney’s Frozen (2013), for which she won an Oscar (along with co-director Chris Buck). Her story and screenplay credits include Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Zootopia (2016) and A Wrinkle in Time (2018). In 2018, Lee was named the new Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

NATASHA ALLEGRI a graduate of CalArts, got her start in the animation industry working on Adventure Time (2010–2014) as a storyboard revisionist and character designer, before creating and successfully pitching her own web series, Bee and PuppyCat (2013–) for Frederator and Cartoon Hangover. The series follows the frequently unemployed Bee and her companion Puppycat as they work at an intergalactic temp agency in order to pay the rent. Originally intended to be only two shorts, the series was so popular that it was turned into a full web series, and currently stands as the most backed animation project in Kickstarter history.

TAYLOR K. SHAW studied journalism and creative writing, and works as a producer, writer and on-camera personality. She is also the founder and CEO of Black Women Animate, an organisation created to both highlight the work of women of colour in the animation industry, as well as to advocate for them by providing resources, access, and various other opportunities. Black Women Animate operates as both talent management and a site for original content production. Their animation team includes Carrie Hawks, Monique Henry-Hudson, Jaleeca Yancy, Mia Lee, Jasia Hilson and Mia Coleman.

NILAH MAGRUDER is a writer, animator and illustrator who studied at the Ringling College of Art and Design. She has worked as a storyboard artist for a number of projects, including Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventures (2017–), and is also known for her work as an author. Her published works include the children’s book, How To Find a Fox (2016), and M.F.K., a published collection of Magruder’s ongoing webcomic (2017–).

97 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

YAMADA NAOKO is a prolific animator and director. Although best known for her work as a key animator, then director, of K-On! (2009–2011), her extensive list of credits include the series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006), Clannad (2007), and Lucky Star (2007). Most recently, she has garnered international critical acclaim for her feature animation, A Silent Voice (2016), which won the Best Film Award at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival in 2017.

98 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

99 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

ŠRobbie Cathro

100 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

101 Marimo issue 002 - Phantasmagoria

Studio

To animation and beyond!

www.marimomag.com

3 770009 758000