Rejecting the Slop Economy

The latest Jonni Peppers film, plus news.

A still from Take Off the Blindfold Adjust Your Eyes Look in the Mirror See the Face of Your Mother

Welcome! We’re back with another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s our agenda:

• 1) Speaking with Jonni Peppers about her deeply human new film.

• 2) The week’s animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1 – Our favorite movie of the year so far

To some degree, we’re all in it. We find slop everywhere, unavoidably — every day.

The word is popular right now. Slop is the empty, amorphous, contextless stuff that fills social media feeds and the internet in general. Its point is to waste people’s time — to take attention and offer nothing good in exchange. Machines create a lot of it, but the managers of the slop economy are human beings.

It’s content, essentially. And it fuels this present moment in which art, meaning and experience are reduced and exploited for likes. The artist Nishant Jain calls the whole thing “Context Collapse.” As he wrote in his newsletter, this is:

… the stripping away of reason, and circumstances, and motivations, and process. It is the phenomenon by which you see everything in the same way as everything else — just another post on your infinite-scrolling feed. Whether it is the art of someone you deeply admire, or the rant of a frustrated artist, or videos of a devastating earthquake, or bombs dropped over innocent children, everything is reduced to content. …

Context Collapse makes Hayao Miyazaki just another “cute” aesthetic for people to usurp. … There is no worth to the painstaking hours, years and decades it took to create the art style, [to] the human values it espouses, to its rich, timeless stories, or [to] the labor of love involved in doing it this particular way. Context Collapse leaves the value only in how the work can be exploited, all profits going to Silicon Valley.

Work-in-progress animation from Take Off the Blindfold

In this moment, it isn’t easy to make intensely personal, human art. Yet it’s still possible in animation — and Jonni Peppers just proved it.

Peppers could’ve been the new voice of the California industry. She’s a CalArts graduate who did a viral short for Frederator in 2017, and the buzz around her was real. Yet the industry didn’t fit her. Instead, she went indie, and eventually moved to Chicago for grad school. She’s a member of the online animation scene that includes Felix Colgrave (Double King), Victoria Vincent (Snooze Quest) and Ian Worthington.

All three of them voice in her new movie — whose title is Take Off the Blindfold, for short. It’s feature length, and Peppers drew most of it by herself, as she tends to do.

This is the latest in her Blindfold series, following Wasteland, Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners and Barber Westchester. Very longtime readers might recall our interview with her about that last one — it’s a cult movie we love. But Take Off the Blindfold goes even further out, into the distant reaches of what’s happening in animation now. It’s hard to describe in terms of its story, but the viewing experience is similar to holding a live wire for 90 minutes.

Peppers creates in a freeform way and refuses to put a shiny finish on her work — we’ve called it “no-fi” before, and that still holds. If you’ve seen her amazing music video for Macbook Orchestra, you know the score. “[A] lot of people get super bogged down with perfectionism, or shooting for some standard that I personally find to be irritating and missing the point of making art,” she told us a few years ago.

But she’s never just riffing, and that’s especially true of Take Off the Blindfold. Everything is here for a reason, and it feels meaningful, even if the viewer can’t fully understand it from the outside. (“Every character is an extension of myself in some way,” Peppers said recently.)

She didn’t make this movie for social media clout — and it’s not sitting on YouTube. These days, none of her films are. She’s chosen to stand outside the content mill, and to create art for people on the wavelength to receive it. Peppers told us about that decision, and about the making of Take Off the Blindfold, in a recent conversation.

You’ll find it (edited for clarity, flow and length) below.

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Animation Obsessive: What do you hope people’s experience is, watching Take Off the Blindfold?

Jonni Peppers: I really want people to watch it with an open mind and heart and try to engage with it not as a “piece of media” or as “content,” but as an artwork made by a real, living person, and as more of a poetic experience than a traditional film-watching one.

Could you describe what the film is and how it came to be?

Jonni: Take Off the Blindfold Adjust Your Eyes Look in the Mirror See the Face of Your Mother is a multilayered reflection on my previous films. It bridges Barber to the finale of the Blindfold series, The Cone Layer.

It’s a form-breaking poetic meditation on my real life, using the characters and locations from my past work as symbols and archetypes. One of the biggest goals I had with the film was to move The Blindfold [away] from the form of a literal story, with literal characters, into something poetic and sprawling. The next film is going to be pretty much entirely genre-defying, sprawling poetry.

Work-in-progress animation from Take Off the Blindfold

One of the main influences on Take Off the Blindfold and the future film is William Blake’s body of work, specifically The Book of Los, as well as his illustrations. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to do a “Jonni version” of a William Blake poem that was autobiographical but also highly symbolic and prophetic.

Take Off the Blindfold actually became the most intense and personal work I’ve made so far, despite being the most abstract and dense.

In recent years, you’ve taken most of your work off YouTube and stopped using social media as much. Could you talk about the reasons for those moves?

Jonni: I’d been planning it for a while and was hesitant, but I was inspired to make the leap after taking a video installation class with Tirtza Even.

In one of the first classes, she talked about the importance of context, ephemeral work, moving work from one space to another, dignity, respect and the relationship between the viewer, environment and content of a work.

I decided I preferred an audience that was respectful of the time and effort I put into my work, rather than internet virality. I felt that strangers having immediate, 24/7 access to raw art pieces about my feelings and life didn’t feel right — and actually had been making me feel bad for a long time. The way I’d been displaying my work was detrimental to my mental health, was financially irresponsible and was putting out the wrong message about how I’d like people to engage with it.

Barber Westchester eating a cube. Work-in-progress animation from Take Off the Blindfold.

I’m getting older and am dealing with the realities of living in America as a working artist (health problems, money problems, grad school, et cetera). My work is personal to me — it’s a bunch of deeply personal art pieces that I poured all of myself into making. These are not neutral products with no value: I spend most of my time and money on them. It’s mainly by myself, with some help from my friends.

I did a bunch of experiments before [taking my films off YouTube] to see what worked for me, and, unfortunately, nothing that was totally free did.

Since taking your work down, you’ve livestreamed it on YouTube here and there. How does that viewing experience differ from immediate, 24/7 access?

Jonni: I felt doing free livestreams of my work every month was a way for people to see and discover it, and show it to their friends — but it’s more intentional. I have to run the streams and watch the films while everyone else does, and it feels more like something I’m “sharing” with people and giving them permission to watch with me.

One of the big things I’ve loved doing is showing other peoples’ work during the streams, as sort of a small-scale version of my film festival, Transfiguration. I did this a lot in the first six months, but grad school made it hard to keep curating stuff. My goal is to keep it up after I graduate.

Stills from Take Off the Blindfold

Take Off the Blindfold is the third feature film you’ve animated almost solo, right? How has your process been refined across all this time?

Jonni: I think I still use the same basic process I talked about in our Barber interview — but it’s become second nature to me, and now I don’t have a way to streamline explaining how I put the work together. I’m sort of doing everything at once, working on everything until it’s finished.

I don’t really do storyboards or layouts anymore. I go straight to animation without really planning. The main obstacle now is mostly the emotional and physical pain; otherwise, everything moves pretty smoothly.

Could you break down a scene of Take Off the Blindfold and what you were thinking with your approach, in terms of animation? And do you have a favorite sequence — or one you feel exemplifies the movie?

Jonni: My favorite scene is when Barber finds a way out of their head and ascends to the top of the universe. They meet a giant eyeball that tells them how the universe started, which reflects how my life started, but it’s hard to explain that to Barber. The story doesn’t make sense to Barber [when communicated] with language, so the eyeball uses a bunch of scenes from all the other films I’ve done, laid over each other, to create a color-and-light show that illustrates the story they’re telling.

The ending of the film features a sequence where I show the whole universe in which the Blindfold series takes place, in one shot — starting from the bottom and then escaping through the top. I did it all with symbols in Adobe Animate, and it’s all in one file. It was actually super hard to pull off and is maybe the longest I’ve ever worked on one shot in my career.

A snippet from Take Off the Blindfold

For the film’s soundscape, what tones and moods were you looking to create?

Jonni: I worked with my friends Vania Junco and Ravinda Wibowo for music and sound design, respectively — they both did really incredible work.

With Vania, we were trying to approach the music in a way similar to the film’s structure. So, using a lot of what came before to create new stuff. You can see this happen in the section with the inchworms and Roy Icebreaker, where Vania combines the sound that Dylan Kanner established for Roy in Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners with the Scrumbos’ theme by Melody Scallion in Goodbye Forever Party.

We looked at everything from the past films like building blocks to jump off of and go crazy with. We also worked with covers of pre-existing songs, which I think turned out great. Vania’s going to do the music for The Cone Layer, too.

With Ravinda, I let her do basically whatever — but, because she’s a genius, it worked out really awesome. She’s an amazing animator in her own right and worked in the Indonesian animation industry before pivoting to sound and technology art at SAIC.

Near-final animation from Take Off the Blindfold

How were you able to finance Take Off the Blindfold — and how do you intend to finance the next one?

Jonni: I funded Take Off the Blindfold with Patreon and my freelance projects, as usual. Being in grad school also helped buy me time and space to finish it. Cone Layer is funded similarly, but this time I’m seeking larger external funding — I’ve already received a bit of help from Cartuna’s micro-investment in the project, and I’m applying to a lot of grants and other funding opportunities.

What direction do you want to see the animation world move in? Do you have any words for independent artists trying to make a go of it with very personal work?

Jonni: My strategy was always to start small and build out to larger pieces — the more work I make, the easier it gets, and I’m able to tackle larger and larger projects by leveraging my past experience. But also I probably have undiagnosed arthritis...

Concept drawings for Take Off the Blindfold

I’ve decided to mostly divorce myself from the American animation industry, to the point that I don’t care what it’s making or doing. I really want to see more nonwhite LGBT+ and women artists creating personal animation without the intention of joining the industry — the main goal of my festival Transfiguration is to showcase work made by those artists. That’s the only thing I really care about right now with regards to animation.

I read Animation Obsessive every week and program for film festivals, so that’s how I keep some tabs on things. But, other than that, I’m really deep into independent, live-action world cinema, and I’ve decided to spend most of my time looking at that from now on, as far as watching things goes.

Lastly, what’s it been like working on a solo feature alongside grad school and life in general?

Jonni: Pretty awesome. Having a lot of different outputs, projects and things I’m learning has made me appreciate animation more, because I have more going on.

Work-in-progress animation from Take Off the Blindfold

Since 2023, while making Take Off the Blindfold, I’ve started a documentary series called Talent Show and begun researching a larger documentary about animation studios in Asia. I’ve also finished a live-action mumblecore feature (Smelling the Dirt and the Coming Rain) and started another one called White Person — with my friends Janet Lee, Chris Bumaa, Emiko Akiyama Tahara, Yaelin Kim and Veronica Timble, who all contributed to Take Off the Blindfold.

In addition, I’ve been running Transfiguration International Film Festival and doing my performance piece The Brittle Brine of the Ocean and the Fish Are Crying, which is about working through childhood trauma. I’m trying more performance work as well.

I’m pretty excited about this era of my life because I feel a lot of things are opening up for me. Life feels a lot more colorful and beautiful in comparison to when I only did animation.

Our thanks to Peppers for talking to us. Take Off the Blindfold next streams via her YouTube channel on June 1, and it will screen this month at California’s Mammoth Lakes Film Fest (which starts May 21). Meanwhile, it’s available through her Patreon and Gumroad pages.

2 – Newsbits

• In Spain, the Quirino Awards announced their winners. On the list: Capybaras, Black Butterflies and José Prats’ Adiós — another big honor for that excellent film.

• Following the American government’s destruction of the Ready to Learn grant (key to funding PBS Kids), the animation ecosystem it supported has begun to collapse. Molly of Denali is done and staffers for Skillsville are out of work — and the full scope of the damage is still coming into view.

• In Japan, E-SAKUGA released a book dedicated to the animation of Mary and the Witch’s Flower. If you know the company’s work, you know that’s good news. The book is also available stateside.

• Coyote vs. Acme, one of the sadder stories in recent American animation, continues to fight for a happy ending. Ketchup Entertainment (now its distributor) will soon look for buyers for the movie at the Cannes Film Market.

• In America, on LinkedIn, animator Jazno Francoeur is sharing vintage Disney pencil tests and concept work — stuff from Fantasia 2000, Mulan and beyond.

• In Russia, Soyuzmultfilm continues to post restored versions of classic cartoons. The translator Niffiwan is maintaining a list of them and sharing subtitles.

• Also in Russia: conflicting reports circle Animaccord (Masha and the Bear). There’s good evidence that the studio is gutting its Moscow office and shifting the entire Masha operation to Cyprus, despite official denials.

• Aardman in England is making a third Shaun the Sheep movie.

• A documentary on Chinese animation, Pathfinder: The Chinese Animators, recently premiered in Japan. It profiles artists in China’s current animation wave — from Deep Sea, I Am What I Am, Jiang Ziya and more.

• Last of all: we looked at the cel artworks of Frédéric Back, drawing from the artist’s own words about his technique.

Until next time!