Catalogue essay for ‘continuum: Independent animation from Japan and Australia’ exhibition at The Japan Foundation, Sydney. February to July, 2022.
There is something in the irregularity of the handmade object that speaks to our deeper selves; reviving for a moment a prehistoric human urge to manufacture things with our hands. These imperfections awaken within us an empathy of the hand, an acknowledgement of the tactile sense we all share. In our world of smooth mass-produced surfaces, perfect shapes and digital refinement, there is still room for the wonder of imperfect objects because they remind us of the person behind the hand that made them. They reveal the tacit knowledge acquired through years of practice, experimentation and craft that is expressed through the maker’s fingers. This feeling is evoked in continuum, where we experience the visceral presence of the handmade in the filmmakers’ work.
In The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968), David Pye breaks down workmanship (or craft) into two streams. The first is a ‘workmanship of certainty’, the repetitive manufacture of the countless mass produced objects that fill our world and the ‘workmanship of risk’, those handmade objects where, at any moment in their creation, there is a great risk of failure; objects that are saved only by the maker’s tacit knowledge and exercise of skill.
Stop motion films involve Pye’s ‘workmanship of risk’, because they are produced in an analogue space governed by the laws of physics, where successful outcomes are not predetermined. In the digital space, animators are cradled by software and free to craft and refine impossibly perfect and repeatable moments — a ‘workmanship of certainty’. Most animated films today are a hybrid of these two states of creation, however, stop motion exists in a high risk space where the animated object is made material to enable a tangible interaction between the filmmaker and their subject. These films create a space where the materiality of the world is bent and cajoled into the shape of their story; an alchemy over matter.
While digital and analogue states of filmmaking are both open to the full spectrum of human creative expression, there is another fundamental difference between them –the way that time is experienced during the crafting of a film. In the digital space, time can run forward and backwards because the animator can undo steps in software and revert to an earlier moment in the production process effortlessly. In doing so, digital films erase one timestream and create another, obscuring the manifold decisions made to reach that creative moment by forking time and creating a new clean path. A multiverse of possible perfect outcomes collapsing into one.
In the real world of the stop motion animator, the arrow of time only flows forward. There is no digital undo to protect stop motion animation, no cocoon of software that shields from reality. Such a filmmaker can only redo or repair. In the manufacture of models, sets, puppets and the actual stop motion animation process, the physical redo follows a long tradition in hand crafting, where resourcefulness, ingenuity and skill are called upon to hide or fix an error, or even remake a defect into a feature. This often leaves visible marks or arrangements in the materials and textures, revealing the echoes of earlier creative decisions. Whereas the digital can erase time and start afresh, the analogue is like a layering of translucent time, a palimpsest, where the overlaying of process reveals a wildness of untamed matter that we recognise as the implicit mark of the filmmaker’s individuality and humanity.
One of the delightful things about creating animation from physical objects is the sense of visual tactility that emerges from a direct memory of surfaces and textures from our own lives. We carry within us a catalogue of remembered textures that we can recall under certain conditions: the sharp twist of dried grass; the hairiness of string; the roughness of sand. The materiality of stop motion animation provides a key to unlock this internal catalogue in ways that most other forms of animation can’t access. And although all the stop motion films shown in continuum have passed through a digital path during their post-production and completion processes, their initial grounding in the tangible allows for a coarser human experience which is less mediated by the perfection inherent in software.
In Kardiyarlu Kangurnu, two stories of Indigenous contact with rabbits and bullocks are animated in a bas-relief format involving plasticine pressed onto sand-textured surfaces. This modelling clay has been shaped and moulded by hand, in some cases catching the fingerprints of the animators and leaving them visible on the skin of the characters. The roughness of the desert landscape and the smoothness of the plasticine hunters speaks to the textural contrast between land and people, a condition we as an audience understand implicitly, even if we have never visited the Australian desert.
Ngayuku Papa, another Indigenous narrative, spins a tangled world from hand-dyed desert grasses using the handiwork of the Tjanpi Desert weavers to tell the story of a beloved dog. Again, there is an ever-present red sand-textured background, but this time, it is contrasted with woven grass puppets that seem to contain a vibrational coiled energy: a life force gifted from the weaver’s hands that is like a crisp three-dimensional paint stroke that circumscribes the form of the characters in a living material.
In Grace Under Water, we are presented with a startling version of stop motion realism. This sun bleached Australian experience captures hot summer days with water play and swimming pools. Textured with nostalgia, this near photorealistic tale draws on a collective Australian memory of suburban grass and municipal concrete to anchor it in the summers of all our youth. Here too, the animators have captured the surface and subsurface textural qualities of water interacting with light; an optical texture playing across the silicone casting seams visible on the characters’ bodies. The burnt sausages on the barbecue, so common in typical Australian backyards, speak to the textural taste of food with their greasy burnt spots and overcooked hopes.
In House Rattler, a mischievous Japanese house spirit, similar in intent to a western poltergeist, is ignored and eventually forgotten. Discomforting, yet familiar, the coarse fraying fabrics of the spirit’s clothes and wild unkempt hair all speak to a textural sense of time that spans centuries; of a tangible loneliness now folded into the worn wooden corners of an old lady’s life.
In The Lost Sound, Steffie Yee uses hand rolled plasticine loafs, sliced like bread, to create a series of animated moments using a process called strata cut animation. This high risk technique draws attention to the unplanned edges and artefacts that dance around the mouths and faces in this film about voices and sound. The effect is X-ray-like and mesmerising, rhythmically recalling medical scans of the human body and abstruse linguistic processes, as we slide through the ‘meaty’ textured slices of sonic representation.
In all these films, we are reminded of the filmmaker’s hand in ways that enhance our viewing pleasure. The films become more personal, more charged; whispered stories told intimately, reminding us of a shared human experience. The films’ textural irregularities and beautiful imperfections speak to an unbroken physical tradition — a continuum — of hand skills and making, balancing the individuality and universal connection inherent in each artist’s vision.
