It's January and ASIFA Hollywood has has released their listing of films nominated for the 51st annual Annie Awards.
With the second season of Arcane still months away and not having seen many of the features or television series, I'm a little out of sorts on who to cheer for.
At this point, I've seen Suzume but only have a couple of the nominees on my list of films to watch--those being: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Boy and the Heron, Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia, Robot Dreams,The Inventor, and White Plastic Sky. I also need to watch Invincible: Atom Eve before the second half of Invincible, season two is released, but that's neither here-nor-there. The rest of the nominated films really don't seem to be capturing my interest. They may be good films for all I know, but when I look at the trailers, I'm just not feeling them.
I have the same problem every season when the new anime is released. I start out with a sizable list of shows that look good from the trailers, but when I get two or three episodes in, the luster fades. Out of the eight shows I've started this season, so far, only Delicious in Dungeon, The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, and Solo Leveling are holding my attention (I'm still on the fence with A Sign of Affection). And last season, I started with four and only season two of Goblin Slayer made the cut. On the bright side, it does give me enough time to go back and finish watching Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Skeleton Knight in Another World. I discovered those a little late in the season, so fortunately all those episodes are out right now. Though I really do need to finish those two series before the Spring as Kaiju No. 8 is due out in April and Loner Life in Another World is due out "sometime" in 2024.
Then, in February/March, the DIA is showing the Academy Award Nominated animated films so I'll be driving down to Detroit to watch those... and my copy of the late Paul Bush's film Babeldom arrived from England... want to rewatch that film sooner rather than later... and the last two Arpeggio of Blue Steel animated features arrived from Japan earlier this month... ah, so much animation, so little time to fit it all in. A good problem to have now that I think about it.
The year has come to an end and once again I find myself looking both backward and
forward. What projects have I completed? What would I like to accomplish in
the coming year? Well, in addition to updating my history class for it's new format,
there were two main projects I worked on this year that I'm particularly proud
of.
The first was a cookbook for my nephews. One graduated from high school and the
other from college. So I spent over six months talking to my mother and other
relatives in order to gather recipes that have been in the family for
generations--a number of which my nephews would have tried out when they came to
visit. Each recipe had a story (or just an anecdote) on why it was in the
cookbook as well as snippets of our shared history. I also included as many stories
of our family history as I could find--even going so far as to trace our
family tree back seven generations, which included the geneology work performed by relatives who had done much of this research in the years leading up to my project.
Sadly, due
to the Bolshevek Revolution and the Vietnam War, I couldn't go back very far
through the Shemko and Nguyen/Pham lineage since most of those records have been
destroyed. But, we do have some very detailed records of the Wilson, Crotty, and
Shults lines. One big surprise was the work that my cousin's family did in
discovering who my Grandpa Wilson really was and where he came from. I never knew that
six generations back, we have an ancestor who immigrated from Italy to
Ireland.
Well, I honestly doubt that the cookbook will mean much to my nephews right now, at
their current ages and where they are in life. But in about fifteen to twenty
years, when they have kids of their own and they start fielding questions of
what it was like when they were kids and 'where do we come from', I think the
Family Heritage Cookbook will mean something really special to them.
The second project was no less of an achievement, one years in the making and
that has been on my mind since being furloughed during the economic crash of
2008.
On more than one occasion, I've stated that I want to make more films that are
fun and uplifting. A lot of this comes from my work as a forensic animator.
The rest comes from my trips to Ottawa. The Ottawa International Animation Festival is a very inspiring
experience and yet at the same time it's a very humbling experience. I see
the works of filmmakers like Michèle Cournoyer and Andreas Hykades. They are
entertaining on one level, thought provoking on another, but overall they make
me confront the fact that I don't yet have the ability to handle serious
topics with the skill and delicacy that they do. I know that we shouldn't
compare ourselves to other people, but I often find myself listening to
podcasts and audiobooks about serious subjects (like the Rape of Nanking or the
history of Russia) and wonder how I would portray such events in animated
form--an attempt to convey the tragedy and the horror of the event without it
devolving into a spectacle that robs the event of its meaning.
This all leads into the other thing I'm proud of this year: convincing my boss
to let me do a little internet advertising towards our existing client base.
Yeah, yeah, I know, how does this relate to the above, bear with me. I've
worked for Investigative Mechanics for over twenty years now. During that
time, I've been filming car wrecks (and animating a few) in order to document
evidence for court cases. Sometimes, I even get to make these 'mini documentaries' that explain
technical issues to non-technical judges and juries.
And for at least the past fifteen years, through the good and bad economic times, I've
been trying to convince my boss to advertise the company. As he's somewhat
old-school, he's always balked at my ideas, preferring to gain new business by
word-of-mouth advertising through satisfied clients. However, we've got a
rather sizable library of cases that we've worked on and some are pretty
interesting. So, when I pitched the website update and redesign this year, I took a
little time to write-up some cases and animated the following video about one
of our more interesting cases -- complete with some new animations to explain
the issue we discovered.
Now it's one thing to produce a short like this one: dry, technical, but
interesting to its target audience. It's another thing entirely to produce a
film that can tackle a more difficult subject and make it appeal to a much
broader audience. This is where I really admire filmmakers like Cournoyer and
Hykades. I've watched Hykades' film "The Runt" many times over the years and
discussed it with a fair number of people. I keep coming back to the 'rite of passage' theme of
guiding a boy into manhood by teaching him the lesson that 'for him to live,
something must die'. Most people I've spoken to are stuck on being horrified by
the death of bunnies. They stop there and don't seem to consider the deeper
lessons that Hykades may have been trying to reveal to his audience--some that he
may have learned as a boy himself. Cournoyer's film for the NFB "A Feather Tale" with its themes of sexual fetishism and objectification is a little easier to find common ground with people who've watched it. We tend to see the same themes in the metaphorical imagery of a man who objectifies his wife told through the visuals of a farmer and a chicken.
I'm honestly not sure if producing films like the aforementioned is a goal I should be working towards or if I should stay in
my lane. Though films like "A Feather Tale" may not have the
immediate payoff as a comedic animated short film does, I suspect that the serious
animated film may have a longer term payoff as it's meant to affect us at a deeper level. Bears further thought.
I remember sitting in a Toronto theater in 2014, watching the annual TAIS Summer Screening. They had put out the call to their members for the yearly anijam. That particular year's topic was "robots". So I banged out something quick over an evening and submitted it. That night, knowing that I couldn't match the artistic skills of my fellow animators, I went for a simple one gag story with a 'subversion of expectations' event thrown in for good measure.
And it worked.
The crowd got a good chuckle out of the ten second animation and I heard someone in the audience say that it was clever. I had taken my roll of the dice and it paid off.
There are a lot of funny stories in my past that I'd like to share to a wider audience. But there are also some serious and poignant ones as well. The first step to take is to write them down--which I've been doing for several years now, if for no other reason than to get them out of my head. As I close the book on the 2023 projects and look at my free time for 2024, I'm left wondering which stories I should invest my limited time and energy into: those that will make people laugh in the moment or those that will make people think over the long term?
Well, enough rambling. Happy New Year, everyone. Time for me to get back to learning the latest upgrade to Moho Pro.
By day, I'm a mild-mannered forensic animator, but during evenings and weekends, I work on my own animated films and various artistic endeavors for clients. I'm a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology's M.F.A. Computer Animation program and a current member of ASIFA, the Toronto Animated Image Society, and Women in Animation.
Building upon the 2008-2009 project for the NY MET and Bard Graduate Center, I am currently animating gold-and-silk needlework stitches and managing lesson webpages for an online course presented by Dr. Wilson-Nguyen for her Thistle-Threads Historical needlework website.