Animating in Present Tense
Plus: the words of a composer, newsbits.
Happy Sunday! Thanks for joining us. This is the slate for the latest edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:
1) The intuitive animation of Sasha Svirsky.
2) A look into the music of Kensuke’s Kingdom.
3) Newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Sasha Svirsky, an original
Animation has many, many rules. In fact, there are enough to fill books: The Illusion of Life, The Animator’s Survival Kit, Preston Blair’s Animation. Not to mention YouTube tutorials. Not to mention college courses.
All of those rules are breakable, and the results can be bad — or brilliantly bad-on-purpose. Certain animators find a third way, though. They replace the rules with a personal style and create animation totally unique to them. Animation that’s engaging on its own terms.
One animator like this is Sasha Svirsky. He’s self-taught. He animates his films by himself, and they don’t look like other people’s. Usually, he just draws and invents until ideas and scenes slowly come into view. “I don’t have any plans. I like to improvise,” he’s said.
Each of his projects transforms as he goes, based on his thoughts and feelings while he works — and on whether he’s staying interested. A film’s whole look can switch in an instant. “I don’t want to make animation in a consistent style because ... I make everything myself, [and] at some point I become bored,” he explained.1
Every once in a while, Svirsky brings up his early attempt at a normal film — planned in the “proper” way. He wrote a script, structured the project. Yet he never finished it. As he came to believe:
... this workflow, dividing the production process into different parts, is good when you work with different people. You need storyboards. You need a script. You need to tell other people somehow what they should do. But, if you do everything yourself, you become kind of an employee on your own project [by working this way], but no one is going to pay you. … I really lost motivation.
The standard method wasn’t fun for him, which led Svirsky to a discovery about himself. “I realized that I’m more interested in the process itself than in the final result,” he said a couple of years ago, “and I want to enjoy the process as much as possible.”
Svirsky animation is a flow of chaotic change. It’s bright, angular, visceral and often very fast — a lot of it shouldn’t be seen by viewers sensitive to flashing images. And some of it leans transgressive, not unlike Keith Haring’s work. A few months ago, YouTube sadly and unceremoniously deleted Svirsky’s channel of 16 years for that reason.
But, to be clear, the point of these films isn’t to attack the audience. Their appeal is right on the surface: they grab your eye, keep you hooked. They’re frequently really funny. The color, shape and composition choices hit on a gut level. Like the Russian animator Vlad Eskov has noted, “[Y]ou could pause any frame and it looks great.”
Svirsky is from Russia himself. A handful of years back, he was “the leading avant-gardist and experimentalist of Russian animation.”2 Today, he’s an expat in Berlin. When his home country invaded Ukraine in 2022, he was one of the animators quick to sign that protest letter. Soon, staying became unbearable for him.
“In the first months of the full-scale military invasion, I was emotionally and creatively paralyzed,” he said this year. “I lived in Russia, unable to work or to do anything, and I could only scroll through the news.”
Svirsky may follow his own creative path, but he isn’t disengaged from the world. His work has something to say about people, art and politics — in its surreal, fragmented way. The masterfully weird Vadim on a Walk is all glitch, naive doodles and lo-fi 3D graphics. Yet it’s also about oppression, and the violence that power inflicts upon the powerless. It doesn’t have the look of a Basquiat painting, but there are similarities in ethos.
And, like Basquiat did, Svirsky knows what he’s doing. Although his drawings tend to be willfully childlike, he’s an art-school graduate trained in the classical approach: “it was a very old-fashioned art education inherited from the Soviet system,” he said. That blended with his own studies. He’s inspired by Paul Klee, Dada, the early Soviet avant-garde and the underground art group Mitki. It’s all in there.
Svirsky flips those reference points into a form of communication that can resonate now. His animation hasn’t just succeeded at festivals, but with the public.
He’s done branding work for TV channels. He’s reached hundreds of thousands with 9 Ways to Draw a Person (2016) — a mad rush of collage and line and color, embedded below. His gripping music video for the song Engine of Progress has more than six million views. One of its top comments reads, “It was like watching a fast slideshow of a contemporary art exhibition.”
In a way, it makes sense that Svirsky’s stuff can spread virally. He went to art school, but he’s just as much a product of the internet — and some of his films (see again Vadim on a Walk) are visibly the work of a very online mind.
Svirsky started to animate around 2008. He’d graduated college years before, and was living at the time with his parents in the small village of Sovetskoye Runo, home today to fewer than 2,000. He spent a lot of hours indoors, drawing at a feverish pace and making illustrated books. It was all primarily for himself.3
Then he discovered Flash.
Svirsky joined Russia’s online Flash scene, sharing funny, ambitious projects like Mirs Pirs in the late 2000s.4 He learned as he went, and he was good — but he would get better, more original. Flash and the later Adobe Animate stayed his main tools even after he moved into the festival scene in the early 2010s. (Today, he uses Blender.)
As the years passed and Svirsky gained notoriety, a career in animation became thinkable. His wife, Nadya Svirskaia, met him at a festival in 2011. She’s been his collaborator for more than a decade now, usually credited as a producer. “I’m not great with animation. It’s Sasha’s work,” she’s said. “I work mostly on some of the communications and other things.”
They often appear together in interviews, and she does a lot of the talking. Svirsky is visually oriented — he’s the first to admit that he has trouble expressing himself in words.5 Mostly, his life is drawing, an obsession he’s had since childhood. “Sasha works a lot. He wakes up in the morning and sits late into the night, doesn’t get up, doesn’t want to go anywhere,” said Svirskaia.
The films tend to emerge quickly from this frenzy of animating. One of Svirsky’s best, My Galactic Twin Galaction (2020), is a six-minute piece animated in around two months. His idea was “not to make a film, but to make a making-of a film” — for a film that doesn’t exist. It’s an odd, hilarious statement on the creative process, and purely Svirsky.6
Since the move to Berlin, Svirsky and Svirskaia have kept busy. The work, like The Master of the Swamps (2023), is as good as ever — and it’s kept its absurdity.
It’s darker now, though. Svirsky’s animation has always had an edge: he’s addressed heavy feelings, death, war. But it’s never been like this. Something has changed in the world, and his work reflects it.
A few days ago, Svirsky and Svirskaia won the German Short Film Award in the animation category — one of the country’s biggest animation prizes — for Dull Spots of Greenish Color. It’s incredible, harrowing stuff, streaming for free in Germany at the moment. It’s about the invasion of Ukraine, and its origins in Russia’s media culture.
At certain points of the film, Putin’s face shows up in front of us — distorted, smeared. Svirsky narrates in his own voice:
I don’t remember when the face appeared. ... It popped up all of a sudden, as an image on the flat surface of the screen. Where did it come from and what was it made of? It was small like a spore, but grew bigger and bigger, sprouting from our fears, hopes, frustration and confusion. Using them as fertile soil. It was so colorless and featureless that it seemed to reflect any colors and features.
Toward the end, after footage of explosions and bombed-out buildings, we see a malformed creature that floats in front of static and TVs. Its nerve endings extend out from its body in all directions. Then Svirsky’s voice comes again, deafeningly loud and echoing this time. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”
Like all of Svirsky’s work, Dull Spots cuts through the formalities of animation to reach the viewer directly. You get the sense that there isn’t time for formality, for rules. The ideas and feelings he wants to convey are too pressing to wait — and that’s long been true for him. He’s an artist of the immediate. His subject is the present.
Svirsky’s voice is one the world needs right now. And we’re very lucky to have him.
2 – Animation news worldwide
Composing Kensuke’s Kingdom
Every year, quietly, Europe’s co-production system turns out animated features. These are award-winners, although not necessarily money-makers. They aren’t trying to rival Hollywood — and they don’t. People plugged into animation, though, know that there’s unmissable work being done in Europe.
Lately, one of the most celebrated of these features has been Kensuke’s Kingdom, which had its wide release this year. It adapts a children’s novel from the ‘90s about a boy who washes up on an island — only to find a Japanese medic from World War II living there. This is Kensuke; the island is his home.
Britain’s ever-interesting Lupus Films (The Tiger Who Came to Tea) oversaw this one. And what’s been made here is, oddly enough, a bit of a throwback: a ‘90s-style adventure movie for families, of the kind that used to be done in live action. The music is a bit of a throwback, too. It jumps out in the way that ‘90s film scores often do, with recognizable themes and a full orchestra.
Composer Stuart Hancock was happy to have the chance. It’s the approach he favors — and he had room to explore it. “I wonder whether I’m going to get it this good again,” he tells us.7
Hancock’s involvement began in 2016, when Kensuke’s Kingdom was just a pitch. He composed its pilot, and returned to score the feature in late 2020, when the animatic was ready and things were finally underway. He notes that, like many movies today, this one was “very well temp-scored” by the time he arrived. “There’s a lot of John Williams and Joel Goldsmith and Silvestri, Desplat,” he says.
He built his original score from there. As he explains, the temp music was:
… wonderful for giving me the steer on the moods that they’re after, but also, as I’m sure you’ve heard from composers in the past, it can be a challenge when the pieces they’ve chosen are so good that it’s hard to match them — and hard to beat them. But, initially, it was a good steer for me to know where they wanted to be musically and stylistically. And that suited me down to the ground. That old-school symphonic style of John Williams, in particular, really played to my strengths. Because I’m far more in the sort of thematic writing of John Williams than the broader writing of someone like Hans Zimmer. I think it’s more a Williams than a Zimmer score.
There’s little dialogue in Kensuke’s Kingdom. Hancock’s music fills the empty space. “The directors, Neil and Kirk, basically viewed the bulk of the film as a silent film,” he says. His job was “telling the story musically,” through developing themes “that attach themselves to the different characters and the different moods.” He viewed the music as a whole composition — not a series of discrete tracks.
As he says:
It’s very not “right now,” this sort of style. But I’m happy with that. … It’s a style that suits what I like to do and the way I like to write my music. It’s theme-led; it’s melody-led. It’s a very good medium for telling story.
I use the word symphonic very deliberately when I describe it, because, to me, it is a complete piece of music. And it’s a complete listening experience from start to finish, where you establish themes for your characters and for your moods and your scenes, and you develop them in a symphonic way … And you work it right through to the final scene, where you draw everything together. All those themes have a final outing, and it’s sort of a final letting go. You resolve them in a way that ties the story together and allows you to finish the film in a satisfying way.
Hancock spent around two years composing — it was a piecemeal, back-and-forth process. “I would work on maybe a 10-minute stretch and do my demos, and feed them in to Richard, the editor, and to Neil and Kirk for their feedback,” he says. A section could go through quite a few revisions before all involved were happy.
“Everybody’s giving their opinion, and then you’ve got to take all these opinions on board and understand they’re completely valid, because they’re having an emotional response to what you’re doing,” says Hancock. “That’s kind of the job of the composer, to add that emotional, abstract layer to a piece of filmmaking. If it’s not pushing the right buttons, you’ve got to go again.”
Because this wasn’t an expensive film, and the crew was small, Hancock found himself in charge of the whole score — “right from managing the budget.” He orchestrated the music himself. But that, again, fit his process. “I always feel like maybe half the composition is in the orchestration,” he says.
His highlight of Kensuke is the ending sequence — the “bringing together of all the little themes.” In his words:
I think a testament to getting that final scene right in terms of the filmmaking as a whole, including the music, is when we premiered it at Annecy last summer. All of us in the team that made it were there in the … thousand-seat cinema, and the final scene played out. Cut to black. And the roar of applause and cheering — so spontaneous. It was incredible, and I sort of get goosebumps even talking about it. Just the roar of satisfied cheering from that crowd, seeing it for the first time and responding to it so viscerally. It was a real sign that we’d done a good job. … I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before. I’ve been in other screenings since where there’s been a sort of [laughs] more polite ripple of applause. But that first Annecy reaction in that thousand-seat cinema was amazing, absolutely amazing.
Hancock continues to tour around theaters with Kensuke’s Kingdom. At the end of our conversation, he says:
I’ve seen it so many times now, in so many screenings. It still gets me. The power of it and the emotion of it. I still get misty-eyed at all the same scenes, and I still notice things in the animation that the guys have done, and little details in the backgrounds, and just the tiniest little eyebrow movement or twitch of an eye looking a certain way in the animation.
I love being in rooms with people who haven’t seen it before, and you can hear the little sniffles of emotion happening in all the right places. It’s very satisfying. I was introducing a screening at one of my local cinemas over the weekend — it was a beautiful, Art Deco, restored cinema. Did a little spiel on the stage beforehand. Everybody cheered, me being local. And then took my seat and enjoyed the response of this new crowd as recently as Saturday [November 9].
I’ve got another screening tomorrow with 150 school kids who are going to be seeing it for the first time, where I’m introducing the movie and doing Q&A, and it’ll be the same again. I’ll notice new things in the movie. I’ll hear the same reactions, perhaps in slightly different ways — given it’s a pack of 11-year-olds [laughs], which is absolutely terrifying. But it’s a joy to be still on this ride with this movie, and I kind of don’t want it to end.
Newsbits
We lost actor Shohei Hino (75), who voiced the grand uncle in The Boy and the Heron; and poet Shuntaro Tanigawa (92), who wrote the lyrics to the theme song of Howl’s Moving Castle.
The Chinese feature I Am What I Am is officially free on YouTube with English subtitles. It’s a major one, but it’s been hard to see in the West until now.
From Croatia: still more restored Zagreb Film shorts from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Check out Happy End and The Man and His Shadow.
Esther is one of the most-hyped animated projects ever from Argentina. On the heels of its successful showing at Cartoon Forum this past September, Animation Magazine has spoken to its team about where the series is headed.
You may know about the artist shortage in Japan, where animators have thinned out and there’s little training for newcomers. A new textbook seeks to address this, and to push back against the blasé attitude toward animation quality that has, reportedly, spread among many involved in lower-profile productions.
Return to Hairy Hill is a Canadian short that impressed us this year. Now, it’s online for free.
Russia is putting even more government funding into the movie business.
In Cuba, a biography of the late animator Juan Padrón (Vampires in Havana) is coming out next month. An important piece of history.
In America, the WGA has reached a deal with PBS that includes “first-ever union protections for animation writers.”
The Japanese film In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World is on Crunchyroll. It’s a much-expanded version of Sunao Katabuchi’s In This Corner of the World (2016).
Lastly, we compared the past and present of stop motion.
Until next time!
From Svirsky’s talk Chaos as a Method, one of our big sources today.
See this interview in Stengazeta, an essential source of quotes and other details.
Russia’s Flash scene was profiled in more depth by The New Tab a couple of years ago.
See the virtual roundtable from LIAF 2020, for example — another source today.
Svirsky’s quote comes from a Q&A session at the 2020 Berlinale.
Our conversation with Stuart Hancock took place on November 12. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
I was not aware of Svirsky until today - awesome writeup, and it's interesting how his comments on the traditional pipeline parallel those of Felix Colgrave. I need to try animating in this stream of consciousness approach, see what happens.
And ooh ooh I was at that Kensuke's Kingdom premiere in Annecy! I still remember the incredibly striking 'Sakura, Sakura' sequence about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, with the lone voice building to a full choir over an abstractrd painterly depiction of the war and bombing. The strongest moment in the film I think, in large part due to the music - you could argue it's a too-obvious pick, but it's haunting in the delivery and the film is honestly a big part of the reason that Sakura, Sakura was one of the first pieces I learned to sing and play on erhu.
So, very cool to see a writeup of the film's music! The connection between music and animation is so rich, going back to the earliest days of the medium (Fleischer rotoscoping Cab Calloway's dances, Disney's infamous 'Mickey Mousing') and I def think it deserves as much discussion and investigation as any other part of the picture.
“You become an employee of your own film..”…totally !…:)