on 29 October 2004
Still from A Dog Cartoon, © Wild Brain 2004
It’s got a matt-varnished flexicover with big capital letters and two exclamation marks! Everything in it is a different colour! It’s cheaper than a cockroach and bigger than a cow! Yes, it could only be another Taschen graphics round-up.
Laid out in a way that doesn’t so much shout at you as get right up and invade your personal space, this is a rollercoaster ride through the work of 80-odd animators and animation studios. Alphabetical arrangement (by first name, a typical idiosyncrasy) makes no distinction between obscure individuals and Pixars, and there’s something similarly democratic about the text: repeated in three languages, it delivers all the key facts you need to know without any danger of slipping into knowingness or hero-worship.
Having the selection compiled by the organisers of the Brazilian festival Anima Mundi also means there’s no home bias. Brazil has more than its share of decent studios, including Trattoria di Frame and Vetor Zero, but nothing like enough to dominate the book, which instead is fairly shared between the UK, every corner of Europe, Australasia, Japan and the Americas. British entries range from Aardman (always first in any compilation) through the likes of Studio AKA, Nexus and The Character Shop to festival fodder such as Phil Mulloy, Barry Purves, and – for everyone who’s winced at those winsome Charmin adverts while noting how well they’re drawn – Joanna Quinn.
Once upon a time, you judged an art book by the number of illustrations listed in the blurb, some of which, if you were lucky, might be ‘in colour’. Nowadays the quantity of images is hardly limited by repro costs, only by copyright fees, and in a showcase volume like this the pics are free. So you should expect wall-to-wall visuals, and here that’s exactly what you get. Numerous as the pictures are, however, they don’t move much, which is limiting in a book on animation. Hence the attached DVD – attached, to be precise, by gluing its plastic wallet to the inside back cover, leaving the disc somewhat vulnerable when you grab hold of the cover and thumb it back.
If it gets as far as your DVD drive unsnapped, you’ll find on it, despite the interface, an impressive collection of extracts, trailers and promos. There are two making-ofs and no less than ten complete shorts, including Wild Brain’s A Dog Cartoon – proof that you can do classic Warner Bros slapstick in 2D animation software – and Jonathan Hodgson’s The Man With The Beautiful Eyes, which features, among other treats, some of the best typography you’ll see in a moving picture. It’s like one of those nights when you switch on Channel 4 at two in the morning and get lucky.
Despite the Shrek mugshot on the cover, this is not a compilation that favours digital work. Plenty is represented, but it’s outnumbered by hand-drawn and clay-based methods. If you’re a 3D or Flash animator looking for inspiration, that’s probably an advantage: better to crib from as many genres as possible, especially those untrammelled by technical considerations. Painting frames or tweaking armatures is probably no more or less laborious than modelling and skinning, but it does evolve a different sensibility.
If the book has one failing, it’s that it focuses almost exclusively on the kind of work that can only be produced by geniuses with huge amounts of time and, in some cases, technology on their hands. The great thing about the Mac, for animation as for so many other creative disciplines, is that it provides the tools for anyone to have a go. Sadly, few of the pieces here will make you think, ‘Hey – I could do that!’
adambanksdotcom @gbarl Bah, missed your Watchdog. Do they do it on iPlayer?