I often do workshops about storytelling, with the emphasis on the freedom of imagination that animation allows; these sometimes involve throwing various ideas and images into a hat, and pulling out a random selection. We throw in a brief description of a character, then a location or context follows, and fi nally we throw in some sort of dilemma or weakness, or at least a complication. These are all standard elements for any story. The details on the bits of paper are hugely imaginative, and sometimes it is a tough task to pull out three bits of paper and link them all into a cohesive story with a point.
Occasionally, a story comes out that is just perfect for a short animated fi lm, and one such was from a group of young animators in Portland. The fi rst character we pulled out was a three- legged dog. He immediately seemed appealing because of his vulnerability and uniqueness. The location was a futuristic urban landscape, where all grass and trees and vegetation had been replaced by artifi cial equivalents and masses of concrete. It is a city run by robots. We didn’t immediately think of an obvious story, as the robots seem to be the main and immediate image, but the dog as an outsider here was an interesting idea. The next piece of paper to be pulled out was the complication ‘the character needs to go to the toilet immediately’. This caused many guff aws, but at once I started to link the three random images. Some story elements went off on embarrassing tangents, but there seemed to be something worthwhile here. The robots seemed to be a red herring initially, but I thought that robots don’t need to go to the toilet and would not necessarily have considered the needs of others, let alone a little dog, and the idea of a three-legged dog seemed to make the idea of going to the loo even more of a drama. All the elements started to fall into place, making a story about a cold hostile environment, where robots had no need of natural things like trees, or of biological functions. This lone dog was some sort of survivor, and still with biological urges, and needed to go to the loo, but there was an interesting twist. Being male, he could only do so against a tree. The fi lm could be developed into the quest for the perfect tree: I know my cat would have made all manner of informed and fussy decisions before he was content. The soil is either too wet or too exposed. The scope for gags about the unsuitably of the right spot is endless, and add to this the ticking-clock element of how long his bladder will last, and there is the basis of a self-contained short fi lm. The escalation of all the compounded frustrations, such as running gags about sights and sounds that make his toilet needs greater and more desperate, would need some pay-off , such as fi nding the perfect tree only to have it uprooted and the whole thing start again. Losers can never reach their quest, Tom will never get Jerry, nor will Coyote ever outsmart the Roadrunner. I should sit down and write the script for this dog and the perfect pee fi lm. Even as I write my mind is stumbling over itself with a million gags and a million pay-off s for a story that seems to have gelled from three random ideas. And what’s the story of the missing leg?
What strikes me as suitable for stop motion are the textures, with a suitably hairy and textured dog puppet contrasting with the smooth textures of the mechanised world. The lushness of a single green tree makes an interesting visual, and there is good scope for sound. Also, the movement of the dog, with his frustration and release, would be a gift for any animator. It would be a hard audience not to have empathy with this dog; a simple fl aw makes him endearing. Underneath is a substantial theme of natural urges being unsquashable. All in all, this could be a pretty eff ective ten-minute fi lm. All it needs now is a budget and a good title.
Emotions
The two scenes in animation history that have reduced most of us to tears both involve mothers: the death of Bambi’s mother and Dumbo’s mother locked in a cage for being mad, nestling Dumbo in her trunk. Producers know that the death of a mother is probably the most traumatic event in one’s life, understandably, and the live-action fi lm that most reduced me to tears was Finding Neverland with the slow fading of Kate Winslet. This and the death of Smike in any version of Nicholas Nickleby will see me in honest tears. I have cried in operas, ballets, plays and even with books, but only a few puppet fi lms, such as Kong and
The Periwig Maker, have truly moved me. Perhaps I am too close to the technique. I have felt other emotions. I remember the real dread at seeing The Sandman, but the sort of fi lms that I connect with emotionally are not being made with puppets. Michael Dudok de Wit’s two great short fi lms, Father and Daughter and The Monk and the Fish, leave me dewy eyed, as
much through the music and beauty of the artwork as through the story, and the end of Chris Wedge’s computer graphics short fi lm Bunny had me choking back something … but
no puppet fi lms as such. I know we can do it, and I’m hoping it’s not the all too solid nature of a puppet that prevents us being moved or shocked. The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride play with the conventions of horror, with darkly gruesome humour and exquisitely eccentric characters, but there are many more genres still to be tackled and other emotional buttons to be pressed. I hope that we can see the visceral and the downright tragic one day. Rumour has it they may be on the way.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick (Kerry Drumm).