I just found out that indie Japanese animator Mirai Mizue has his own web site and you can see all of his films on there. That's one of the great things about indie animation today - it's quite easy for artists to share their work on their own home page if they want. Many years ago I wrote a bit about Mirai Mizue's debut film, Fantastic Cell (2003), which was shown on Digista, and wanted to see more from him in this style. But I never got around to looking to see if he'd continued to do anything in the intervening years.

I was reminded just now by a post by Amid on Cartoon Brew about his latest film, Jam (2009). Looking at his site, where Jam can be viewed online, I was delighted to discover that he'd not only continued to build on that style over the last few years, but that the films were all viewable on his home page. (Fantastic Cell is here) He's one of my favorite animators in today's indie Japanese animation scene, with a truly unique voice and sensibility.

The Carmen ~In Fantastic Cell~ (2002) is another one of the films in the patented 'cell' style that he's developed. It was actually a study for his debut film, but is quite fun and gets across what makes his films so much fun. He does a great job of bringing alive these organic yet abstract shapes of various cells and strange cellular creatures, and syncs the animation with the music in a way that makes the movement very funny and makes the film really fun and interesting from moment to moment. This particular film reminds me of Oskar Fischinger in the way the semi-abstract forms are zooming around on the screen - an abstract animated ballet set to a famous classical music piece.

Trip!-Trap! (2005) is perhaps the most impressive and broad-ranging of his films. It's a good showcase of the artist's broad range of styles and techniques, all jam-packed into a tremendously dense and fun 5 minutes and set to some great music by his constant collaborator Alice Nakamura. Devour Dinner (2008) does away with the music and goes with only funny sound effects, showcasing his ability to come up with an infinite array of those strange cellular creatures. It feels like Fantastic Planet in the way it consists of a simple sequence of shots depicting this fantastical, bizarre microscopic world in a sort of deadpan way. It's a darkly funny film where these imaginary creatures spend their entire lives eating and being eaten. Some of my favorite animation of the last few years has been work like this that treads the line between figurative and abstract in its depiction of familiar yet fantastic microscopic life, such as Robert Seidel's _grau and Erick Oh's Symphony.

His illustrations are also really cool, full of densely packed but whimsical detail. I love his sensibility and unique style. He thinks fractally, creating macroscopic forms that emerge out of seemingly repeating yet actually infinitely varied microscopic forms. He's carved out a very interesting place for himself as an artist. It's great to know there are a lot of animators in Japan working in such personal and inventive styles.

I just saw a video entitled edicisuM by a 23-year-old Turkish artist named Candas Sisman on nofatclips, and it immediately made me want to see more from the artist. It was a non-narrative abstract piece, but it stood out from all the other non-narrative abstract pieces out there perhaps due to its distinctive mesmerizing, dazzling visuals and smooth audiovisual rhythm. You can find ten of his videos on his Vimeo page, and he is also a prolific artist of compelling digital imagery. After you watch the video, read Candas's comments on how it came about.

His video works all boast the same perfect integration of alternately noisy and ambient soundscapes that, amazingly, seem to emanate directly from the images. He is an expert manipulator of digital means, creating a dense cascade of forms, colors and movement that doesn't grow tiring, but seems to evolve organically by some hidden inner logic. He has an instinct for beautiful images that extends into the third dimension - he creates beautiful evolving images. Sometimes the images seem purely digital, evolving subtly, moving in and out of focus, like bacteria under a microscope, while at other times the images are clearly photographs of the real world, but blended, shaken and stirred in a way that turns the shapes into abstract forms, only to actually segue into digitally-created abstract forms. He blends the real and the created in a seamless whole that is always delightful. And like Oskar Fischinger did, he has the good sense to keep each of his films short, just two or three minutes. This is among the best digital animation work I've seen in quite a while - a superb example of engaging, exciting, flawlessly executed abstract animation.

Oh, and merry xmas everyone.

I discovered the music of the Fleet Foxes recently, and found that they've got a stop-motion video set to one of their songs, White Winter Hymnal, directed by Sean Pecknold. Gorgeous music accompanied by a nice slow and simple concept for the visuals that winds out and then winds back in. Very pleasing. The calm, complentative puppet animation kind of reminds me of Tomoyasu Murata. There seem to be many people using animation for music videos these days... from Sarah Fimm to Chad VanGaalen to Omodaka to The Blue Seeds to Quantic... to say nothing of ones I've mentioned in the past like Cornelius. The rhythmic chiptune wickedness of Kokiriko Bushi in particular slays me, and the animation is rich and imaginative. The animation in a lot of other videos is honestly pretty crude and not interesting in itself, but when it matches the style of a song, the images come alive and the video works, as a number of the other vids attest, which is perhaps what makes music videos such a rich form. There's plenty of leeway for a more individual, analog, handmade approach that might not work elsewhere. I'm sure this is nothing and there are lots of other great animated music videos. Please feel free to share your own favorites.

Animated music videos almost seem to be enjoying a creative renaissance these days. A lot of bands seem to find the expressive playfulness and freedom of animation appealing, if the bounty of videos and things like the Radiohead competition are anything to go by. It's like they find the handcrafted, lo-fi appeal of indie animation a fit for their songs. Not to mention that it must be a lot cheaper, easier and quicker to just get an animator to make the visuals. Even not in animation, it's possible to create videos with visuals that make us see things in a new way with very little means and just an interesting approach, like Tone Twilight Zone, which has an Eames-like childlike wonder at the little things around us. Cornelius' videos are all pretty amazing in this sense, such as Point of View Point, which is very simple in execution and concept but creates a fantastic visual experience, and even is quite interesting conceptually, as an exploration of light, motion, perspective, how points becomes lines in motion, etc, and ties in to the very rich (but catchy and pulsing) sonic exploration of the music. There seems to be a music video for almost every song on Cornelius' masterpiece of an album Point, so they're all worth exploring. Smoke is interesting to note among these, as it's an obvious homage to two of the fathers (and as of yet unsurpassed masters) of all this music video business: Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren.

The video for Venetian Snares' Szamar Madar was a favorite of mine for a long time until a few years later I discovered it to be the work of a brilliant animator, David O'Reilly, whose Please Say Something was a shock to the system when I first ran across it a year or so ago - easily one of the most thrilling recent discoveries for me in animation. Szamar was the first time I'd seen visuals do justice to IDM (putting aside Rubber Johnny). I thought it was one of the crowning achievements in representing this kind of music in animation. O'Reilly's devious playfulness comes through in the film, too. Watch it in full screen to get the intended effect. There's nothing that quite matches the thrill and ecstasy when a piece of animation and a piece of music sync into a pure and unseparable unit of perfection like they do here.

Not really a music video per se, but more like an animated short in the form of a music video that really bowled me over and remains one of my favorite animated shorts of the last few years is Massive Swerve by Robert Valley, set to Massive Attack's Mezzanine. Robert is a brilliant illustrator in his own right, but as proven by the animation he did for Peter Chung's Riddick, he's also capable of putting those drawings together in the dimension of time to create some superb movement. The film's combination of smart and edgy design appeal with loose linework and spare but craftily applied animation creates a texture and tone unlike anything else out there. The dance scene is one of my favorite of its kind, using the strobe effect to depict the girl's wild gyrations with the rhythmic flashing of just a few stylishly exaggerated drawings. The pulsing, hypnotic downtempo anthem helps transform a film about a wild night at a rave party in Ibiza into something that feels like an epic descent into the bowels of a mythological netherworld.

I saw Animation Show 4 the other day. My first question was: Where's Don Hertzfeldt?? I'm sure it's been explained somewhere, but I didn't realize he wouldn't be there this time around. I wanted to see his new film. Without him, honestly, the selection was pretty thin and gimmicky, supported by almost no animation of any intrinsic worth as animation and falling dangerously close to a Spike & Mike's style fest of audience condescension with lowest-common-denominator outrage-appeal. I love Usavitch an all, and so did the audience, and I think it's great to get it seen by people. But some of the pieces on there... yeesh. Schwizgebel's Jeu was the only genuinely inventive and awe-inspiring piece there, which is ironically why it felt out of place. It's great to get audiences interested in animation. I know of a few people who saw the show who aren't into animation and who loved it. But it would also be nice to be able to do so by showing them a little more of the genuinely good work being done out there. This was a fun show for laughs, which is obviously all that Mike Judge was aiming for, so it seems kind of anal to pick on it for not trying to be something it's not. I was happy to see another piece by Luis Nieto, and again, that Schwizgebel piece reminded me why it is I love animation. Pure genius. Pes is also a really inventive animator. I like how he creates these really simple one-note punchline pieces but uses an odd new substrate to do the telling of the piece each time. What I really like about him is that he's doing inventive things with actual things, the way animators used to. I don't doubt that this selection represents US humor pretty well, but I refuse to believe that all US animators today think the only thing animation should do is gags, despite what some people seem to assert. I think audiences would have been far more satisfied with a little injection of depth and beauty here and there.

What makes animation interesting is that there can be as many answers to that question as there are people. What it is about an animated short, TV series or movie that enthralls us and makes us fall in love with the medium can range from anything as precise and specific as piece of animation in a particular shot, to any number of the many other elements without which animation could not be made - be it a story that enthralls with its epic scale and imaginative twists and turns, a character you can relate to, a powerful performance by a voice-actor, or a scene directed with hair-raising intensity. Animation can range from a massive team effort taking years to complete to a one-man project completed in a matter of weeks. Not only are the possibilities of the media that can be used to create animation limited only by your imagination, but different individuals may find inspiration in different aspects of a work of animation. In both creation and interpretation, animation offers considerable possibilities.

I can pinpoint the moment of magic that pulled me into the vortex of animation fandom to any number of very specific moments (and aspects) of animated filmmaking. When at a young age I happened across Heidi on TV in France knowing nothing about filmmaking or animation, I didn't appreciate the revolutionary nature of what Isao Takahata was doing by going to such extreme lengths to depict - not the dramatic exclamation points of conventional drama - but the little moments in our everyday lives that make up real life, in animation of all things. Nor did I catch on to Yoichi Kotabe's delicate and magnificently sensitive animation, or the authentic soundtrack leavened with Austrian folk melodies and instruments by Takeo Watanabe. But I sensed something was different. Everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about animation, at some point has a similar gut reaction to animation that draws them in. And in my case, once I got back into animation many years later and re-discovered these memorable aspects of Heidi, that process has pretty much never stopped. I've never known everything, and never will, so I'm always discovering something new in animation, some new spark that keeps me watching and wanting to experience that spark again.

When I stumbled across anime many years later, the first spark was the eye-opening experience of seeing with Akira that it was possible to make dark, serious, complex stories that went beyond kids programming to both depict brutality as well as address complex themes. Another spark of a very different nature but that was equally significant to me came later with my discovery of the sumptuous beauty and deep-felt humanism of Frederic Back's flowing, painterly animation, which I related to on a deep level, and which showed me that it was possible to go in different directions with regards to aspects like the style, the texture of the screen, and the approach to storytelling. Again, in another case, it was seeing in Yasuji Mori's Hilda in Horus, Prince of the Sun a three-dimensional character who went beyond cartoon platitudes, who was torn apart by conflict, who was morally ambivalent - a complex character I could relate to, struggling to figure out her place in the world. In yet another case, it was the sumptuous, dreamy atmosphere and gorgeously rich, baroque visuals of Jiri Trnka's Midsummer Night's Dream, which showed me that it was possible to create not only beautiful animation but great animated filmmaking in contexts other than hand-drawn animation. In yet another case, it was Shinji Otsuka's animation of Hana berating Gin in Tokyo Godfathers, with its pliable and constantly changing expressions combining with brilliant lines and voice acting, which was one of the funniest single shots of character acting I've ever seen and showed me how much richer characters became when the animators were imaginative and got into the mind of the character. In a similar spirit, it was a shot of Milo spouting in a static shot for 30 seconds by John Pomeroy at the end of Disney's Atlantis, and any number of other shots of its ilk elsewhere.

The examples could go on and on. It was also the creatively empowering example of Tadanari Okamoto, who worked solo year after year, with a skeleton crew, to create his own small, handmade, personal films - each time forcing himself to take a creative new approach to the medium, using yarn for one film, then papier mache for the next, then engravings for the next, and so on right up until the moment of his premature death - a life lived for animation. It was the brilliantly humorous, ironic and satirical writing of scriptwriter Takeshi Shudo on shows like Minky Momo that refused to be bound by the context of children's shows and probed questions of identity and purpose in life. It was the poetic fire and sophistication of Yuri Norstein's films. The visionary genius of Oskar Fischinger, who revealed to me the pure physical pleasure of imaginatively conceived movement, with the way he eliminating backgrounds, narration and other extraneous elements to focus on the core element of animated movement in its purest form - in the process showing that animation could range beyond the classical, Victorian obsession with anthropomorphism, into unknown realms yet to be explored but only accessible via animation. It was the climax of Mind Game, where through intense, hair-raising animation of individuals engaging in an act of superhuman exertion, Masaaki Yuasa created a scene that was both powerful as animation and spoke on a meaningful level about both the nature of life and the struggle it always involves if we're to try to achieve anything, and by extension, of the act of animation, which in its highest form is an empowering struggle against a blank slate.

What unites many of these is the primacy of the animated element in accounting for what makes them appealing. Heidi would not have been as convincing were it not for Yoichi Kotabe's dedication to packing it with pared down but realistically influenced animation, achieving a watershed stable level of quality for such a tight schedule and such a small team. Hilda would not have moved with the stately grace and sensitivity of expression she does had any animator other than Yasuji Mori supervised her animation, bringing to his work as he did a somewhat more old-fashioned craftsman's delicacy and attention to detail befitting this veteran animator from the 1950s. The animation of Hana berating Gin in Tokyo Godfathers, with its more choppy motion and exaggerated poses, benefited from a different approach to timing than that of other scenes even in the same film, such as the scene of the bickering in the trash heap at the beginning by Hideki Hamasu, with its more fluid and heavy style, by dint of Otsuka's hand in its creation, as he tends to adopt a more 'limited' style (meaning using less animated drawings) in order partly to exert more control over the movement from moment to moment. As the animator of the climax of Mind Game, Nobutake Ito was no doubt in large part responsible for its impact by creating animation of the characters running that was full of dynamic exaggeration and in constant motion, conveying the urgency of their life-on-the-line exertion by making that exertion seem simultaneously mortally frail and superhumanly powerful. Films like those of Fischinger exist in a more rarefied place where the animation is in itself the appeal of the film.

There are likewise cases were it's not possible to narrow down the appeal of a film or TV show to any one element, animation or otherwise. In a case like Omohide Poroporo, the film would be equally inconceivable without its closely observed animation of gestures and expressions by Yoshifumi Kondo as it would be without its measured pacing, meticulous layout, beautiful paintings of the Japanese countryside, realistic script sensitively exploring a woman's experience growing up in modern Japan, unforced performances by the voice actors, intriguing soundtrack, and deft directing that melds all of these elements together into a seamless whole. The same could be said about Tokyo Godfathers and Mind Game. In the best situations in commercial animated productions, the animated element acts like a fully-functioning sub-unit that achieves a powerful effect on its own while making an indispensable contribution to the production that, like an actor in a film, isn't the entire production, but acts as the mouth through which the film communicates. With good animation, a film communicates more effectively.

Five or six years ago, I discovered something that kind of renewed the waning spark of my enthusiasm for anime: a set of Japanese animators creating flamboyantly stylish animation that was exciting like no animation I'd ever seen. It was the discovery of the existence within the anime industry of a coterie of animators with a deeply creative spark like Masaaki Yuasa, Shinya Ohira, Satoru Utsunomiya, Atsuko Fukushima, Yoshinori Kanada and Takeshi Koike - each working within the industry, yet managing to carve out a stylistic niche of the kind that elsewhere might only be attainable in the capacity of an independent animator - that renewed my faith in the power of animation, and showed me that some of the most exciting animation being made today was being made by these people in Japan. These animators heightened my awareness of the animated element in animation, and expanded my appreciation of the importance of movement in animation. But more than that, the sheer audacity and brashness of their individuality opened my eyes to a rich vein of creativity in the Japanese animation industry. There have been many great animators over the decades in Japan, and these animators continuing that tradition opened my eyes to a hidden narrative of anime history that broadened my appreciation of anime and renewed my faith in its potential.

In an interview with me posted on Anime News Network a few days ago, I felt there were some lingering questions about what exactly it is that sets animators apart from each other in anime that I hadn't addressed well enough, so I wanted to try to do that here.

It's not a judgment or a matter of taste to state that different animators exhibit different styles in Japan. It's a fact of life. Whether or not the viewer sees it, animators are unable to all draw and animate the same way, and stylistic disparity is an inescapable aspect of production that must either be fought against or embraced - both of which the industry does to varying degrees, depending on the context. The main tool the industry has devised to address this issue is the animation director system that has been used in nearly every anime since 1963, in which someone corrects keys to maintain at least some semblance of uniformity over a production. But this tool is overwhelmed by its placement of the onus on a single individual, and inevitably, idiosyncrasy creeps through, if not in the drawings, then in the movement. Animation industries elsewhere undoubtedly pride themselves on lacking such undesirable human idiosyncrasy in their product, because such disparity is often viewed as a fly in the ointment, sometimes rightly so. Yet in Japan, that disparity often not only works despite itself, but often achieves greatness in its own right.

Naturally, many of the greatest animators in Japan are the animators who are able to adapt stylistically while still doing great work. But the fact is, their work remains identifiable by its intrinsic qualities in terms of its technique, or its creativity of movement or acting. A production such as Jin-Roh might be said to fall at one end of the scale, where ample scheduling permits thorough polishing of all aspects that renders it more difficult to differentiate between animators merely on the basis of obvious idiosyncratic style, which would be a distraction in the context. At the opposite end of the sale, a film such as Dead Leaves benefits from a more spontaneous and playful approach to the animation that not only permits animator idiosyncrasy but deliberately foregrounds it, and makes an asset of it.

To some extent, all anime could be said to fall somewhere along a continuum between these two extremes. Even when it's not intentional, there is usually some variation between animators present, even if barely noticeable. Although on occasion such variation is a deliberate stylistic decision, it is more often than not simply an inevitable part of the production process, with all of its rushed deadlines and geographically scattered freelance staff. However, whether intentional or unintentional, the strength of anime is that this stylistic variety often gives its animation a richness and unpredictability that is in itself unique and appealing. They've wrested what could have been a systemic weakness into a major appeal point.

This approach in which different animators are permitted to bring different styles to the table, without first being passed through a process of stylistic homogenization, may be part of the reason that Japan now boasts such a wide range of animation styles within its industry. A number of animators who grew out of that system to develop pronounced individual styles, such as Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masaaki Yuasa, received commensurate recognition and went on to head some of the most compelling Japanese productions of the last few years - precisely because they were given the opportunity to pursue their predilections and allow their talent to flower within their industry. This larger format in turn attracts similar talent of the next generation drawn to the work of these interesting animators, providing them with an opportunity to pool their talent to the benefit of the production and at the same time learn from one another, in a self-perpetuating loop of creative influencing and development that strikes me as one of the industry's creative wellsprings.

What sets animators apart from one another?

Although the issue of whether animator idiosyncrasy is desirable in a production is probably a contentious one, and whether it works will often depend on the viewer, the fact is that different approaches to animation are on display, and it can heighten enjoyment of anime to be able to appreciate different animators' contributions, so I wanted to get down a few simple pointers that I thought might point people in the right direction who are having a hard time 'seeing' the difference.

First a quick overview of the process. Based on the storyboard, the key animator creates a layout that acts as the frame within which the action takes place and defines the relationship of the animation to the background. The key animator then designs the motion by drawing 'key' poses at various points across the arc of a movement, and specifies where the other drawings should come to fill out the movement (on what's called a time sheet). The inbetweener then fills in the missing drawings to make the movement smooth. There are a number of other roles that can be involved in the animation before or after, and of course it's more complicated than this, but this is essentially how a movement is made.

There are a number of concrete ways (key) animators can differ.

Drawing
Tell two people to draw a drawing of the same person, and it will come out more or less different in how the volumes and lines of the figure are expressed. It's the same in animation, since animation is just a series of drawings in sequence. Inevitably, whether they will it or not, each animator has his or her own style of line and way of drawing forms. This is why a sakuga kantoku or "animation director" (more like a key animation supervisor) is needed to correct the drawings by the key animators 'to model'.

Timing
Animation is made by stringing drawings together, and the timing is how much of a space is placed between the drawings. Different animators might favor different timing styles. One might keep the drawings spaced smoothly, while another might place drawings more erratically. The timing dramatically alters the impact of the drawings.

Acting
The actual meat of animation. How the animator makes a character act out an instruction on the storyboard, be it by body language or facial expression. The drawings might be corrected, obscuring that aspect of the animator's style, but it's the plan of the acting that is the core of the piece of animation. Inevitably, each animator will come up with their own interpretation reflecting their skill level, predilections and imaginative capacity.

Some combination of these will account for most differences between animators.

Needless to say, it is by no means necessary to always be on the lookout for animators or to be struggling to identify the animator of each different scene. That is counterproductive and putting the cart before the horse. The whole point is that, just as we might follow a director or actor whose work we know we tend to like, sometimes while watching a TV show or movie there will be moments when the animation catches your eye or is particularly pleasing to you, and you wish you could see more like it; it's in situations like this that it can be nice to be able to articulate what you like, and to know who was behind that work, so that you can find more like it if you want.

Animation by Yoshinori Kanada (like this) and his followers like Masahito Yamashita and Hiroyuki Imaishi, for example, will usually contain some amount of uneven timing, with things kind of jumping around at odd moments, and liberal sprays of lines, geometric flashes and other assorted effects and playful insertions (like UFOs) appearing for a single frame at a time. The characters move not smoothly like in Jin-Roh but jumping almost randomly been assorted crazy poses. The drawings tend to be very loose and not highly worked. Their animation is more about having fun and creating animation that is exciting to watch than creating nuanced character animation. So these guys are identifiable through drawing, timing and acting.

The last shot of the kitten bumping into the cat in this clip by Shinya Ohira from FLCL is a good example of the opposite approach to timing - each drawing coming at the same interval, like ticks of a metronome. The drawings here are also very free and characteristic of Ohira. This is a rare case when drawings this idiosyncratic are left through into the final product without being corrected (hence the subtitles of the characters names for identification purposes). The acting is very different from the preceding Kanada-school animators. Rather than jumping around between extreme crazy poses and zooming around the screen wildly, Ohira tends to keep a shot fixed and use lots of drawings closely spaced to follow a movement through more closely from one pose to the next. So this animator is also identifiable, in his own very different way, through drawing, timing and acting.

The swimming animation here by Mitsuo Iso (of Denno Coil fame) is a similar example of animation that isn't about crazy timing and extreme jumps between drawings, but about following a movement through from moment to moment. The style here is not so much identifiable by the drawings and timing as simply by the unusual richness of the acting, with some new pose or reaction occurring in virtually every second over the thirty second span of the shot, as opposed to, say, a several-second loop of a set of the same drawings showing Kintaro swimming the freestyle stroke. In both this and the former case, the animation is unusual because it was probably drawn entirely by the key animator, without inbetweens. Inbetweens are a time-saving measure, but they also reduce the animator's control over a movement, relegating the little details to another person. Some animators don't like that, and have a very precise sense of what they want to achieve, so they draw everything themselves. So another identifying factor is this 'density', or the amount of control exerted by the key animator. An animator like Yoshiaki Kawajiri might rely a lot more on inbetweens, for example, to achieve his very smooth movements.

The differences are sometimes quite obvious, and other times rather difficult to put your finger on and articulate in words, although you sense that something is different. And there are obviously many other approaches to animation that I haven't covered here. But I hope this begins to give a sense of how it is that animators can differ from one another.

Abstract animation has changed a lot since the days of Oskar Fischinger. The biggest change in recent years has been the shift to digital means of production, which seems to have had the effect of not just making it easier to produce, but also expanding the forms of expression. The internet has in turn made it easier and easier to see this work, so that the combined effect is that it feels like there has been a quantum leap in the evolutionary pace of new forms of expression in abstract animation (and other forms of animation for that matter).

The digital means available now are resulting in a lot of truly interesting new approaches to abstract animation. Much of the work that I've sampled on the internet recently straddles a philosophical line between experimental and animation, so that I often find myself wondering whether what I'm watching should be referred to as animation or experimental video. The line is much clearer when it comes to conventional forms of figurative animation, but seems to become fuzzy when dealing with pure abstraction, especially now that, with digital, the question is not as clear-cut as whether the material is hand-drawn or not. All I care about, in the end, is whether the piece provides an engaging audiovisual experience to the viewer, as opposed to functioning purely on a conceptual level.

In that sense, Michael Theodore's 2007 short film entitled Color Dream No. 246 (which can be seen in full in a nice big version on his website) is yet another great example of this recent burgeoning in abstract digital animation. It's as pure a piece of abstract animation as you'll find, consisting entirely of one long shot of undulating, scintillating, shifting washes of color, but for some mysterious reason it remains engaging at all moments, and so to me functions nicely as a piece of animation and not merely as an abstruse concept piece. The constantly changing clouds of color are imaginative and beautifully executed, and seem like something that would have been hard to achieve before digital, when forms would have to be solidly delineated. The film feels like a worthy continuation of the work of early masters of visual music like Fischinger.

Animation can be any number of things. It all depends on the viewer. Movement, directing, story, color, form - any single element or combination of these elements can create sparks in a viewer's mind. There's no one right answer. This particular viewer happens to see greatness when someone displays a mastery of their own interpretation of what animation should be, regardless of how much it might diverge from the answer of another artist. How do you know it's the right answer? You know it when you see it.

I recently had the pleasure of discovering an animator who displays the calm confidence and mastery of her approach that I associate with a great artist. Her name: Florence Miailhe. I'd never heard of her until seeing her films, which were released on DVD in Japan in the New Animation Animation series, but they immediately rank among my favorite bodies of work by any artist in recent years. Florence Miailhe has created a series of films that at any given moment are immediately identifiable as hers, and only hers, and that immediately capture you with not just their consistent and unflaggingly lush beauty, but by her fundamentally personal approach. She strikes me as someone who approaches the form from a mindset that is somewhat at odds with that of most animators. She doesn't strike me as an animator, so much as a painter who animates. It seems like a subtle nuance, but it's quite important. It's a difference that goes to the core of what makes viewing her work such a pleasure, and what makes her work so great.

Miailhe's first major work, and the work that to me seems to represent her painterly approach in its purest form to some extent, is Hammam (1991). This film was my first exposure to Miailhe, so I came to it knowing little what to expect, and as a result, viewing it was a genuinely surprising and enthralling experience. With no perceptible narrative, the film appears to be what one might describe as a painter's stroll through a women's bathhouse, showing nude women alternately bathing, being massaged, reclining, talking, walking, and so on. But the women are drawn not realistically but in a style that vaguely recalls the great painters of the early 20th century, with a few quick, bold strokes describing the figures arrayed before the painter concisely and elegantly in simple, exaggerated forms.

Watching the film becomes a multileveled experience - Miailhe capturing a moment in the life of the bathhouse with her animator's easel, before standing up and walking to another room to paint another scene. Us following along, wondering where we are and what we're doing here. She's as surprised as we are, but taken also by the incredible beauty of the sight, which she is determined to capture. We share those feelings, following her along with a voyeuristic blush. The gaze is playful by moments, as when she observes with humor the massive hips of the elder women being massaged flat into the form of a young woman. When she gets home, she feels something is missing - life. Movement. Thus the film is born, as she invests the painting with little touches of life and interesting transformations.

The style of animation in Miailhe's films is itself quite interesting. It shares something with the style of Tsuji Naoyuki in the sense that each shot comprises a single sheet upon which she paints with pastels, one frame at a time, in a continuous line until only the last frame of the shot is left on the sheet. Each shot is a painting unfolding in time, a time-lapse photography of the painter in the progress of painting. The previous set of strokes is modified by the current, so that you can see the previous strokes on the screen, and movement creates a trail of itself.

In that sense the film also reminds me of the last and one of the greatest of Oskar Fischinger's films, Motion Painting No. 1 (1947). The subject matter is different, with Fischinger's being pure abstraction, but Miailhe's films are just that - motion painting. In later films Miailhe comes up with a technique of creating beautiful patterns in the wake of the movement of characters to both mask and enhance the characteristic feature of this style of animation. As with any great painting, appreciating the strokes of the painter is important, and here you can see those strokes in the process of their being made. I'm a fan of rougher styled animation for its greater spontaneity, and the rough bold strokes she uses here have a very tactile, visceral, spontaneous beauty.

Hammam is, first and foremost, a magnificently beautiful film to watch. Miailhe is a painter, and this is a film in which each image can be appreciated like a good painting. The forms, the colors, the strokes of the brush and the framing of the image are always unfailingly fresh, impeccably handled, delightful to behold. The animation acts first and foremost to enhance the beauty of the images, rather than to attempt to create the illusion that they are alive in the way that Alexander Petrov's work does. In her two next films, on the other hand, the animation by necessity becomes a bit more more naturalistic and active.

The simplicity of the film is one of its assets. Hammam has the formal purity and strength of a musical exploration of variations on a theme. An old artistic staple that has gone by the wayside of living art - the nude - is revived in a very appealing way by bringing it into the dimension of time and movement. While Miailhe's later films are all fully the equal of Hammam on a painterly level, they have a narrative framework that is lacking here and gives Hammam the appeal of being perhaps the most rigorous and simple expression of her approach.

If it wasn't obvious enough from her first film, there's a very strong erotic element in all of Miailhe's work. In retrospect, Hammam even comes across as a sort of unashamed declaration of her preoccupations as an artist - namely, with femininity, the human body, and desire. Miailhe doesn't strike me as a beginning animator in her first film. She strikes me as an artist with a clear grasp of her goals, whose vision remains firm and consistent over the next few years of her production.

The two films that followed Hammam are adaptations of stories from the 1001 Nights - both being her longest films to date, clocking in at 16 minutes each, and both featuring an overriding element of sexuality. The first is Scheherazade (1995), which tells the framing story of the woman who through her cunning and ingenuity curbed the murderous fury of a cuckolded prince by telling him a new story every night for 1001 nights. A year later followed one of the stories told, legend has it, by Scheherazade to the prince - the story of The Prince who Lost an Eye and Became a Beggar (1996).

The films first of all bring a new element to Miailhe's work - that of narrative. The setting in ancient Arabia seems the perfect element in which for Miailhe to revel in the sort of baroque, lushly colored scenery that makes her painting such a delight to behold. At the most basic level, both 1001 Nights films are beautiful and entertaining works that make you wish there were more in the series. While obviously functioning on the surface as lush, beautiful tales of the exotic and fantastic for Miailhe to regale us with her gorgeous images, they also serve to provide modern insight into the relationship between sexuality, behavior and violence. This aspect makes these films much stronger than conventional retellings of these already famous stories.

The way the films examine the relationship between sexual drive and violence reminds me of a similar preoccupation in the films of Walerian Borowczyk. His early masterpiece Blanche (1971) is an excellent historical drama whose outcome hinges on this dynamic. An aged feudal lord is driven mad for vengeance when a paige of the king makes overtures at his wife, leading to a downward spiral of escalating violence that leads to the death of most involved. The film acts as an examination of the ways in which desires underlies and drives every aspect of human behavior, in extremis turning love into its opposite and driving people to irrationally commit heinous acts of violence.

In Scheherazade, a prince discovers that he has been deceived by his wife, who holds wild orgies every night with her entourage. After murdering everyone involved, he seeks revenge upon womanhood as a whole by taking a new virgin to his bed every night, and killing her that very night to ensure that he will never again be cheated upon by a woman. A young woman named Scheherazade seeks to curb his reign of terror in an odd way - by marrying him. To save her own life, she tells him a new story every night, withholding the conclusion until the next evening. She does this for 1001 nights, until he finally falls in love with her and vows to stop his murderous spree.

The fantastical The Prince who Lost an Eye and Became a Beggar is a version of a story from the anthology proper, and provides a great example of the timeless fascination of the stories from the 1001 Nights. A prince leaves his country on a boat in search of adventure, only to find himself plunged into a series of unlikely adventures involving everything from a magical bronze horse that transports our hero to a faraway land, to a gigantic monster holding a beautiful princess captive. The forces of lust and death are forever intertwined, leading the prince to his inevitable downfall.

Miailhe's next film dates from several years later - White Bird, Black Bird (2002). It is very different from her previous films in many ways, and seems to mark a different stage in her artistic life. It's a short film, clocking in at only four minutes, and also concise and simple. A narrator recites what appears to be a traditional proverb from some African nation about black birds and white birds. Every person has a series of nests in their soul - a black nest and a white nest. The black nest roosts black birds, evil thoughts sent by an enemy, while the white nest roosts white birds, good thoughts sent by a friend. The solution when an enemy sends you a black bird? Don't let it in, and send a white bird back in return.

It's a simple metaphor with a strong message about human aggression that seems particularly apt in light of the year it was released. The film appears to be animated using a different technique from her previous films, which were animated using pastels. It appears to be sand animation. I don't know what Miailhe was up to in the intervening years, but she undoubtedly continued to be active in other areas as an artist, presumably painting. I get the impression that she felt the world needed to hear this proverb at that moment in time. The theme of the passions leading humans to engage in irrational violence against one another is one that runs throughout her work, and is here expressed in a new and more direct way.

Miailhe's next film shows her continuing to explore new facets of her art. With the quite recent Neighborhood Stories (2006) she is back to the longer length of the 1001 Nights films, but now she is telling a story firmly set in the contemporary western world, not in some faraway fantasy land. Despite this, the film retains something of the atmosphere of her previous films by telling a strange and fantastic story that doesn't seem of this world, despite having all of the appearances of taking place in the everyday world we know.

A lone acrobat in purple checkered tights practices on a trapeze. A lion escapes its cage and prowls the streets with a doll in its maw. A little boy searches for his lost doll. All of these strange things are happening right there, outside your window, in the old neighborhood you know so well. The world is a place where we are all seeking something, prowling on the streets like animals in a jungle. The world is full of menace and danger. But life goes on. Pedestrians saunter by, pianos are unloaded from moving trucks, and homeless bums sleep in metal cannisters outside of the apartment construction site on the corner of the street. The story swirls around and gradually all of the players become intertwined in this world where we all live together.

The film comes off brilliantly considering how much of a divergence it represents in style from Miailhe's earlier films. The images are still lush and painterly, but without that Matisse-like richness. The world here is all shades of gray and straight lines and angles, with only the billboards shouting colorful pornographic advertising at us from every wall. The film is also different in that it was the product of a larger team, from what I can gather from the credits. Several people other than Miailhe are credited with animation. The film was clearly created in a digital environment, with some incongruous movements every once in a while, and loses some of the stylistic uniformity and elegance that her earlier films had because they were all painted in the same analog way. Nonetheless it is one of the most thematically challenging and compelling of her films, and is certainly one of the best short animated films of the last few years. I hope that we can continue to see more of Florence Miailhe's animation in the future.

I learned through Koji Yamamura's blog that it's possible to see four of the extraordinary films of Igor Kovalyov right here. If you want to see them in the international order in which they were made over the span of the 90s, it would be Hen and his Wife (1989) and Andrei Svislotski (1991) in Russia and then Bird in the Window (1996) and Flying Nansen (2000) in the US after his emigration to Hollywood. There's a discernible difference in the style of the animation, which seems to have a little less of the wonderful improbable deformational Parnishness of the early stuff in Russia. But it's still great. I just had the pleasure myself. He's a guy who can tell incredible stories that mean a lot without saying a word or making any sense. He just finished Milch which is thankfully available on DVD. I'm going to hen hop for it.

Koji Yamamura's blog has in fact turned into a set of DVDs collecting the eponymous Unknown Animations that he's been hilighting there over the last year since the founding of the blog. The two volumes cover ten films including Christopher Hinton's Flux and Janno Poldma's On the Possibility of Love.

I'd been wanting to see Flux for some time, and it's currently available for viewing on the NFB site along with a number of other classics from the vaults. (via Progressive Animation Review)

I'm glad to see that a DVD of Oskar Fischinger's films has finally been released. (via antville) Although I wish they would have put more than ten films on there. Maybe they don't qualify as visual music, but it would have been nice to be able to see his amazing marching cigarettes & other commercials in pristine quality. Basically, I want to see it ALL. Presumably there must be more. But I'm very happy indeed to see that the results of his revolutionary deli-slicer wax-ball animation technique have been included on the disk, as I was very curious to see those after reading about them in the late William Moritz's great biography Optical Poetry.

It's been brought to my attention that Walter Ruttmann's four Lichtspiel films are available for download from Ubuweb. I'd never seen the films, and never expected to see them, so it was a surprise and a delight to be able to see them.

Who is Walter Ruttmann? Even if you've never heard of him, watching the films should at least remind you of someone: Oskar Fischinger, who saw the first film at its premiere in 1921 in Frankfurt and went on carry on the flame of these pioneering films with his own Studien and other abstract films. I first learned about the interaction between these two seminal figures of abstract animation when reading the late William Moritz's Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, which appeared last year.

Lichtspiel Opus I was "the first abstract film to receive public performances". Ruttmann was trained in painting and music, both of which show up clearly in the Lichtspiel films. A piece of music was written for the films, and Ruttmann played the cello at screenings, but watched even completely silent the films pulse with a hypnotic, almost techno rhythm that's gripping, making music seem almost unnecessary, and making these films the earliest instances of bona-fide "visual music" that I've seen.

My first question when watching the films was: How were they made? It would seem that there was uncertainty about this until Moritz's book appeared, with one source citing Lotte Reininger saying she had seen him painting on small glass plates, which Moritz confirms. Ruttmann was already an abstract painter, so all he had to do was move his painting into the dimension of time. He painted on glass and photographed each drawing one frame at a time before modifying or adding to each drawing and photographing the new drawing, finally hand-coloring the film using various methods.

This is why, when Fischinger wanted to get started making films around the time Lichtspiel Opus II came out in 1922, he didn't go directly to painted/drawn animation, but instead invented a novel method of animation: wax. He chop-shopped a deli slicer into a machine that would cut through a ball of wax containing a molded shape. As the machine sliced through the wax, a photograph was taken one slice at a time, revealing the slowly changing outline of the shapes in the wax. Ruttmann attempted to use the machine, but he wasn't able to because the wax melted on him. Fischinger apparently made several minutes of successful tests with the curious invention.

After putting out the last two of the ever more impressive and technically accomplished Lichtspiel films in 1924 and 1925, Ruttmann went on to create some of the the landmark live-action films of the period, including his great masterpiece Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (1927), which alone would be enough to grant him a secure place in film history. He also worked on Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, notably the opening scene. His early abstract animated films add a dimension to the picture of this impressive artist of the early period of cinema who truly tested the possibilities of the new medium.

What baffles, then, is to hear about the subsequent turn to the extreme right of this artist who up until just prior to that had epitomized the avant-garde of his country. In contrast, Fischinger continued to do everything he could to make his films and get them shown. In his book Moritz describes in delightful detail the wonderful schemes Oskar came up with to get his films shown in theaters in the increasingly difficult atmosphere of Germany before he finally left for the US in 1936. I recommend the book highly.

Note that Lichtspiel Opus I is cited as being 13 minutes long everywhere I've seen, so the thirty seconds in the above clip must be just a small excerpt. The other films appear to be complete.

Related reading:

A short biography of Walter Ruttmann

A short biography of Oskar Fischinger by William Moritz

The William Moritz archive

After seeing the recent crop from Digital Stadium, it felt like the most interesting animation being made in Japan at the moment was coming from students - a feeling that is reinforced by watching the winners in the animation division of the 10th annual Student CG Contest hosted by the Bunkacho, the same government body that hosts the Japan Media Arts Festival.

The quality of the films is amazing. There's no feeling of being infected by preconceived notions of what animation should be, which is what makes films by students these days so exciting. You feel they're really using these new methods to explore new forms of animation. Not knowing the methods used to produce the films surely adds some to the mysterious effect achieved in several of the more abstract of the films, like Kashikoki Mono (The Wise Ones) by Takahiro Hayakawa, a dazzlingly beautiful explosion of color and movement that's an exploration of the concept of Japan's animist spirits. With traditional animation, for example, you know how it's done, so you can break it down and explain it, but it can be so much more interesting and liberating to be thrown into the ocean without those floaters, for once permitting the images to speak for themselves. That's the power of animation that Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren opened our eyes to. Maybe because of technical difficulties, but more likely because of the culture of anime, there hasn't been much animation of that sort in Japan until recent years as far as I know. Changing technology seems to be changing attitudes. Most impressive is that Hayakawa's film is not merely abstract - it communicates. It connects with the viewer and has an emotional resonance and narrative flow, which is an impressive achievement for an entirely abstract piece. Colors, shapes, pacing, music and theme all come together as a unified whole to create an exceptional little film.

The rest of the films in the small selection show a variety of approaches, each successful in its own right. The uncanny optical illusions of 2.5 Camouflage by Sayaka Maruyama were a delight to watch. The film achieves a great effect with the most rudimentary means. Kojiro Shishido's Kagami no Genon (Mirror's Fundamental Tone) shows great sensitivity towards the delicate gradations of light and shadow in the natural world, with a matching delicate soundtrack by Shishido himself. The tour-de-force of the selection is the laboriously animated spiral rhythm by Mayu Inose. The designs were all very carefully researched and differentiated, with movement and colors well matched to the music.

Probably my favorite discovery from Imagination Practice was Nobuhiro Aihara, who was represented by the solo short Memory of Red and an animation battle with Keiichi Tanaami, 10 Nights' Dreams. Kentaro Onitsuka's Blooming Ink Tale was the surprise of the selection for me - imaginative concept executed with sophistication and flair. It was the only film there that went outside of the boundaries of animation-as-drawings. I felt distant echoes of Norman McLaren's stop motion films. I like that no CG was used here; they used good old-fashioned paint. Kentaro Onitsuka was present and said a few words before the screening, as was current Kyoto U animation student Suwami Nogami, whose amusing loop film opened the screening.

Aihara's film struck me the most because watching it I was reminded why I fell in love with animation in the first place: the joy of seeing fantastic movement. Aihara and Tanaami have extremely different styles. Aihara creates abstract shapes moving through intricate metamorphoses (I was reminded simultaneously of Oskar Fischinger and Gisaburo Sugii), while Tanaami comes up with a succession of bewildering oneiric images. Both are extremely appealing, and I look forward to seeing the rest of their animation battles after seeing this one, which got the most enthusiastic applause of the whole show, and for good reason. It was not only exquisitely imaginative and consistently interesting but also fun. Adding to the pleasure was a brilliant soundtrack that was every bit the equal of the mad images created by these veteran animators. It didn't take me long to be able to pick out when Tanaami was animating and when Aihara was animating. That even added to the fun of watching the film: grasping when one was taking his turn at the canvas, responding to the rival's salvo. Aihara's constant-motion-in-stasis filigrees, seen undiluted in his solo film Memory of Red, made for a compelling contrast with Tanaami's menagerie of mad dream figures.

The head organizer of the animation selection at the VIFF stated before the Lee Sung-Gang shorts screening that he had wanted to program anime originally, but had been given the red light by the distributors. Frankly I'm glad it turned out this way. It would have been ludicrous to screen some big anime blockbuster at an international film festival like this, thus shutting off independents like those featured here, when the film was going to be released soon nationwide anyway. As for audiences, the theater was nearly full for both the Lee Sung-Gang shorts and Imagination Practice (though moreso for the latter). There were a few loudmouthed louts of the sort that make me avoid cons, but otherwise the audience seemed fairly diverse and appreciative.