The Process Is the Art

Plus: news.

A still from Porco Rosso (1992)

Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the agenda:

• 1. Notes on process.

• 2. Newsbits from the animation world.

With that, let’s go!

1. Figuring it out

If there was a way to make art perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort, would you use it?

That question was put to Coleen Baik this year, in slightly different words. Baik is an animator, and her work takes time and effort. Right now, she’s animating on paper. “[I]n the era of ‘let the machine do everything,’ I’m increasingly drawn to do more of the labor myself,” she wrote in her newsletter, The Line Between.

When she got that question about the no-effort, no-time alternative, she replied, “What would be the fun in that?”¹

In the 2020s, there’s a lot of discussion around closing the gap between first thought and completed project. Tech companies are making it possible to render a spitballed outline very quickly. Using their tools, the process of creating an image (or a song or a script or a film) shrinks. It doesn’t take much thinking; the machine does the heavy lifting.

But art isn’t really about jumping from an idea to a finished piece. Art emerges from process — the middle part, which some companies hope to erase.

There’s a famous Ed Catmull line about Pixar’s method. Years ago, he called it “going from suck to nonsuck.” His studio’s best movies didn’t start as its best. “Every time we show a film for the first time,” Catmull admitted, “it sucks.”²

Early ideas for the likes of Toy Story and WALL-E were often startlingly bad. Made “perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort,” the films wouldn’t have been worth watching. The team knew it.

What saved these projects was the long, slow, painful, confusing process of their creation, as endless decisions were made and problems solved. The films grew out of the time and effort itself. “In fact,” wrote author Peter Sims in 2011, “directors say that Pixar’s films will suck virtually until the last stage of production — problems are constantly identified and fixed.”

Not everyone pushes it that far. Even so, there’s no escaping process. It’s where art happens.

Pixar story artists at work on Toy Story circa 1992 or 1993. Courtesy of The San Francisco Chronicle.

Hayao Miyazaki circa the mid-1980s, courtesy of the documentary Never-Ending Man

Watching a Hayao Miyazaki film, there’s a sense that everything’s in its place. His mastery shows in each shot, musical cue and frame of animation. Yet none of it simply pops into being.

Miyazaki doesn’t imagine a movie and execute. All of his productions were made up in large part along the way — down to their storyboards. A Miyazaki film radically evolves as it’s produced, as he and his teams answer creative and technical questions in the moment. His friend Isao Takahata once put it like this:

Hayao Miyazaki stopped writing screenplays some time ago. He doesn’t even bother to first finalize the storyboards. As long as he has a revelatory idea for a world structure, and as long as he has a clear image of the appealing protagonists who will be crossing swords with each other in that world, he can plunge into building that world, relying solely on the images and plots he has in mind. After diving into the process, he begins creating the storyboards while doing all his other work, from key animation on down. Using his powers of continuous concentration, the production starts to take on the elements of an endlessly improvised performance. … [H]e throws himself into the one-time, multilayered form of combustion that production itself represents.³

Something like Princess Mononoke (1997) couldn’t be created otherwise. Miyazaki had starting ideas and followed them — but the project grew in an organic way. Notoriously, he realized that another 15 minutes of film were needed toward the end, with the deadline nearing. Mononoke had become a different, richer story in the making of it, and the earlier plans had to change.⁴

Even when Miyazaki draws a single picture, he’s considering the individual lines and their interrelation, figuring the piece out as he goes. Miyazaki’s drawings are defined by the thoughts and feelings and solutions that arise during the process of drawing. His art’s power comes from those things. There’s no shortcut around them.

Yuri Norstein at work on The Overcoat, possibly circa the ‘80s. Courtesy of Literární Noviny.

A snippet of animation from Tale of Tales (1979), as seen in The Short Films of Yuri Norstein

This stuff isn’t unique to Miyazaki or Pixar. Many of the greatest in animation have made similar points. Take Yuri Norstein, one of Miyazaki’s influences.

Norstein is an animator-director, and his films from the Soviet era (especially the ones made with Francheska Yarbusova, his wife) remain magical. You might be familiar with Hedgehog in the Fog or Tale of Tales from the 1970s, for example.

As with Miyazaki’s work, it’s hard to imagine what could be different about Norstein’s films. What they are, they are perfectly. Yet he’s a deep believer in an organic creative process. Filmmaking, for him, is far more than taking an outline and putting it on the screen. Like he said in the ‘80s:

I think a film should be constantly changing, developing. … The film grows of itself while it’s being shot. And during this time I never look at either the treatment or at the shooting script. … But the storyboard, on the other hand, isn’t something you just do at the beginning. You do it every day. It’s alive. And sometimes, out of some little detail, out of some action not foreseen in even the most detailed, strict storyboard, sometimes when you’re already shooting, a whole scene grows, a whole sequence.⁵

The poetic, spiritual energy in Norstein’s films wasn’t simply planned. It involved planning — but, again, it was grown. Norstein’s false starts, agonizing, experiments, mistakes, breakthroughs, on-days and off-days led to these creations.

“[A]lmost everything that you see on the screen,” noted author Clare Kitson, “is gleaned from either painstaking research to solve a particular problem, or from one of Norstein’s childhood experiences, lodged since then in his memory, or … from a completely fortuitous chance.”

In Tale of Tales, for example, the little wolf’s eyes arrived randomly. A friend’s son found a “crumpled ball of paper on the ground,” and it contained a haunting photo of a cat. When Norstein saw its eyes, that was it. They weren’t part of his first idea, but they became an emotional center of the film.

Tissa David at work on Raggedy Ann & Andy (1977), courtesy of The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ‘70s, the American legend Tissa David touched people with this same type of approach. (“Although her name is not familiar to the general public,” wrote historian John Canemaker, “several generations of audiences grew up seeing and responding emotionally to Tissa David’s work.”)⁶

David’s animation for the Hubleys and on Raggedy Ann (not to mention in films like Abel’s Island) is still beautiful and original. And that animation was something she discovered in the process of drawing it. David imagined a movement and worked it out frame by frame, detail by detail, with a great deal of improvisation and without reference footage.

Over time, scenes grew. Like she said:

I never know what will happen in a scene ahead of time. I know what should happen, and what the story calls for. It will happen as I am going on, but how it will happen is just as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. I find out the personalities of the characters in a few scenes and then I let them go the way they feel like.⁷

A snippet of Tissa David’s animation for Raggedy Ann

As with Pixar, not everyone takes it as far as Tissa David did. That goes for Miyazaki and Norstein as well.

Every artist grapples with process, though. Even limitations play in — navigating time, money, skill level. David often worked within small budgets, which helped to make her one of the finest users of limited animation. Miyazaki’s first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), was only allotted four or five months of production, and solving that impossible problem led to a classic.

To put it simply: more goes into making a film, or even a single sketch, than a raw first idea. A project built “perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort” wouldn’t contain much — because not much would go into it. The middle part, even if it’s short, is where the real interest blooms.

Plus, there’s the other question — the one about who’d want to work that way, even if such tools existed. As Coleen Baik said, “What would be the fun in that?”

2. Newsbits

• The Pied Piper (1986), a Czech classic, is streaming for free on YouTube.

• Australia’s Studio Spud made a very interesting animation test with Moho, bringing a detailed illustration from the ‘40s convincingly to life.

• Meanwhile, Australia’s Glitch Productions is having a great deal of success with ticket presales for the theatrical release of the Amazing Digital Circus finale.

• In America, new images from Beyond the Spider-Verse dropped — and they take the style of Across even further. Producer Phil Lord posted one with the note, “This is a frame from a movie.”

• On the topic of Yuri Norstein: the Russian government revoked his trademark to the bear in Hedgehog in the Fog. It comes as part of his and Yarbusova’s ongoing rights dispute with Soyuzmultfilm.

• Japanese animator Honami Yano (A Bite of Bone) has returned with a film called Eri — selected for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. See the trailer here.

• The Indian feature Baahubali: The Eternal War was picked for an Annecy work-in-progress showcase. Hype for this one is rising. The full list of WIPs is here.

• The BFI Film Classics book series is getting a rare entry from the animation world: My Neighbor Totoro. British journalist Andrew Osmond is the author.

• Japan has seen a rise in full-time employment for animators in recent years. It comes as “anime studios try to secure reliable talent during the anime industry’s persistent labor crunch,” reports Animenomics.

• Last of all: we looked into Jiří Trnka’s classic film The Cybernetic Grandmother.

1. Today’s story grew out of a conversation we had under Baik’s post last month.

2. See Fast Company.

3. Takahata’s quote comes from Starting Point 1979–1996 (“The Fireworks of Eros”).

4. The addition of those final 15 minutes is explored in the documentary How Princess Mononoke Was Born.

5. Clare Kitson’s book Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales was our source for this section of the article.

6. See this post from Canemaker.

7. From David’s interview in Sporn-o-Graphics (October 1991).