I’m awake most nights with my head pounding with ideas for fi lms, even though there is little chance of getting them made. Stories suggest themselves from a conversation at work, or something ironic in the paper, or someone’s behaviour in a shop, or wondering what lay behind an expression I glimpsed. Could that expression be the start of a fi lm, or is it the end of the fi lm? A lot of animation is about fi nding a diff erent perspective; for example, seeing complex human situations through the distancing of using animals or cars or ants, or by turning a given situation on its head, or by creating interesting dramatic confl icts by bringing unlikely worlds or themes together. Many fi lms and plays depend on this change of perspective for characters to learn the truth about themselves. Shakespeare sends his characters into the woods (as does Sondheim) to see clearly, or he blinds them, or he makes them swap gender briefl y; Ibsen sends them up mountains; others travel in twisters to seek fake wizards, some have to be visited by spirits from Christmas Past, some turn into swans, some lose their minds, some are exiled, some fall down rabbit holes, some see themselves from afar, some face big natural disasters, some have to lose everything they have, and some are told the truth by jesters. There are many narrative tricks to send a character on this journey to fi nd them. With animation, this journey, this change of perspective is often the animation itself. Animation and puppets are good at showing us what we cannot see for ourselves. Truth is so often revealed through deception.
King Lear loses everything to see what he has (Richard Haynes).
The trick is shaping this change of perspective to make it interesting and
exploiting the potential of what animation can bring to it. Of course, this is the real world and a fi lm-maker has to take into account the reality of available resources; happily, I’ve found the tighter the budget, the more creative I become.
I love playing with structure and watching how it works in great pieces. Watching the dullest of fi lms or plays is never a waste of time, as the mechanics of how things happen often gives me more pleasure. I marvel at how clever twists are introduced or how back-stories are revealed, or how a sentence is structured to give away so much information but still sound like natural dialogue. I’m not sure that my fi lms are great examples of any classic ideas about structure, but they do fl ow and not a frame is wasted. I like to throw in unexpected narrative twists, but I am not consciously following any recognised formats or genre tricks.
Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George imagines the painting of Seurat’s, Sunday afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte, giving every detail a new perspective (Saemi Takahashi).
My favourite structure is an obvious change of perspective to make the usual unusual, or the familiar look fresh. In J.B. Priestley’s play Time and the Conways, he shows us a family innocently celebrating, with all their hopes and ambitions. Without warning the play jumps to after the war, to see how these ambitions have been crushed. Act three takes us back to where we were, and how hollow these celebrations seem, now we, the audience, know something the characters do not. The audience having secret knowledge is a prime device for tension. For twenty centuries audiences have screamed at Oedipus not to seduce Jocasta, alone knowing
that she is his mother. Another favourite structure is Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, where the audience watches the painting of Seurat’s masterpiece, seeing every little detail echoing the artist’s life. Every hitherto innocent detail is now teaming with imagined signifi cance. In a daring moment, Sondheim twists the perspective and we see the artist’s life from the character’s perspective. In animation, the fi lms of Paul Driessen often show the same event from diff erent perspectives at the same time, and see their subsequent diff erent meanings.
The most basic structure is to set up a situation of normality, then complicate it with change; perhaps the arrival of a stranger, a quest or a threat, then resolve it with some sort of confrontation, either real or internal, with a new order restored after what amounts to a journey of enlightenment. The three-act structure works even in short fi lms, but what is more important than endless theory is to make the telling of the tale interesting, by drawing in an audience and teasing them into wanting to know more about the characters and their situation, being just that one step ahead of them, tantalising them but not confusing them, leading them one way then outwitting them, getting them to care. To keep them watching there is little point in giving things away from the beginning. I was disappointed that the recent remake of The Wicker Man chose to feature the wicker man itself on the posters. The butler might as well have done it, and told the audience as they came in. Information, both plot and visual, needs to be teased out and pieced together over the length of the fi lm. In the popular stage and fi lm versions of The Phantom of the Opera the big eff ect, the crashing chandelier, is given away in the fi rst few minutes by seeing it rise into position. There is little surprise when it falls, although there is the rather clinical tension of waiting for it. I love structures where everything only falls into place in the last few frames, leaving you going back over the fi lm, piecing it together in your head. I am bored, though, by fi lms that put it all on a plate, usually linear fi lms, with nothing left after the credits.
There are the classic themes on which all plots are supposedly based (with such stories as The Quest, The Journey, The Rise and sometimes Fall, the Battle against the Monster, A Second Chance, and Comedy and Tragedy, and all manner of variation) and following these guidelines leads to fi lms that resonate, but I would encourage a bit of innovative lateral thinking. Animation of all art forms has licence to break rules and experiment. It can do anything, as there are no rules about making animated fi lms, but the one thing it cannot do is be dull. Many an exciting fi lm has been made of a dull book, thanks to an imaginative director and writer. True, many a dull fi lm has been made out of an exciting book, thanks to an unimaginative director.
M.C. Escher and other artists
With his knack of challenging with a fresh perspective, it is not surprising that I love the etchings of Escher, and like many model makers and set designers I am fascinated by seeing these glorious optical illusions realised in three dimensions. That they cannot exist, except cheated to one specifi c viewpoint, adds to their appeal. Walking round such a model there would be signifi cant gaps and unparallel parallel lines. It’s his never-ending staircases in drawings such as Relativity (1953) that appeal to me and I will animate that illusion one day, but it would be a cheat. Stop motion is a cheat. It looks as if it could happen but it cannot. I push this element in all my fi lms. Next looks as if it could happen on stage, but even with clever editing it could not. I like that delicious twilight area between total naturalism and complete abstraction.
The paintings of Magritte also interest me, and although perhaps they look a little obvious today (because there have been so many imitators who have taken his ideas even further),
when fi rst seen these paintings must have been astonishing. To juxtapose two diff erent images, or reverse a perspective, is what animators do every day, and I am surprised that Magritte’s infl uence on animation isn’t greater. I wrote an animated feature fi lm script with the bowler-hatted, apple-faced character from The Great War
(1964) as a main protagonist, but was told that paintings were hardly a commercial subject. Shame. Magritte does turn everything upside down, with a great ‘what if …?’
logic to the thinking behind the paintings. This ‘what if …?’ is so often the starting point of a good fi lm, play or work of art. What if toys had their own private life away from humans, as in Toy Story? What if the characters in a painting had a life, as in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George? What if there were monsters lurking in the cupboards, as in Monsters Inc.? What if we saw Hamlet
from the perspective of a couple of minor characters, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? What if the Wicked Witch of the West hadn’t always been wicked, as in Wicked? Asking this ‘what if …?’ about the most familiar day-to-day subject or cultural icon is to be part way towards a good story. For Next, the ‘what if …?’ was: what if instead of so many people doing Shakespearean auditions, it was Shakespeare himself who was auditioning? Juxtaposing ideas this way has great potential. Magritte asks what if the night sky was actually light and the ground dark, as in The Empire of Lights (1954); or the lightest of objects, a fl ying dove, was made of the heaviest, stone; what if a window blocked our view rather than making our view? I went to a fancy dress party as The Great War; among the vicars and tarts and nurses, I should have gone as a lead balloon. There’s an oxymoron Magritte might have enjoyed. Actually, animation is a creative oxymoron, where things don’t behave as we thought they might, or what we think is solid is soft, or what looks heavy is light, or what is inanimate is animated. I was interested to see that a production of Billy, the musical of Billy Liar, had a Magritte-inspired poster, as shorthand for a skewed reality.
There is a subtle reference to Escher in the feature fi lm of The Wind in the Willows.
One shot has a rather clunky fi sh swimming underwater, while a leaf fl oats on the surface and a refl ection shows the trees above. This consciously echoes Escher’s
Three Worlds (1955). My only Magritte moment, other than the script waiting to
One of Escher’s impossible architectures (Richard Haynes).
be fi lmed and a stage set, was an animated snippet of his raining men (Golconda, 1953) in the Aardman Manchester Evening News commercial. I am glad that Magritte was chosen to represent art.
A Magritte-inspired poster and animating Magritte for a commercial with Aardman.