Motion, Animation, My Love

26th of july, 2024

Movement is a fascinating thing and it becomes even more mesmerizing when you get into animation I feel. Or just sequential art in general, comic artists may also relate.

I find it very interesting how you can see the way something works through its movement. For example I love watching my cat move, the way his fat and muscle scrunches up before a jump and stretches into a beautiful slim arch. That’s squash and stretch for you! I love watching videos of martial arts championships, as you can see each form the person deliberately takes and executes perfectly. Drawing out each frame of a punch really makes you understand where the force is coming from and you can use this knowledge in so many ways. Observation is really important in animation. Sure you can learn the principles and leave it at that, but you need to anchor it to how real things and creatures move.

Another thing that is very interesting to me is weight and texture, which are often related. This goes back to the problem solving element of art that I have mentioned in my little post on art in general. Say, for example, you want to animate hair in the wind. There are so many things to consider to make the movement feel real! What is the hair’s length? What is its texture? What kind of haircut is it? How strong is the wind? What direction is it coming from and is it consistent or changes its strength? All of this is incredibly important and I LOVE thinking about it. I am tearing up a little bit as I write this just from how much joy animation brings to me.

I often think about the character of Mizusaki Tsubame from the manga and anime series Eizouken, which focuses on three friends making animated shorts as a school club. Eizouken as a whole resonates with me deeply as a love letter to the medium of animation. I can write a whole other post about this anime, but right now I want to mention Mizusaki’s outlook on sequential art. She is a character animator, as well as an sfx artist, and I love how she compares animating to acting. She swings a machete in the studio to understand the movements herself, just like professionals in the industry do; she watches movement she likes again and again and again to really get it right. The scene where Mizusaki’s parents recognize the way their daughter holds chopsticks and her grandmother splashes tea in her animation never fails to bring tears to my eyes. Making an illusion of movement so real people can recognize it on such a deep level. Truly beautiful.

Speaking of animation I love, I would like to mention a work that is very important to me on many levels. Puparia is an animated short film released on the 20th of November 2020 by Shingo Tamagawa. It is a truly breathtaking and haunting piece of animation that deserves a lot more to be said about it, but for the sake of this entry I will keep it short. I might be misremembering but Tamagawa emphasized the importance of making the character movements very grounded with no exaggeration so that they would contrast and in return make the surrealistic creatures and scenes feel more real. I think that is a wonderful way of approaching something like this. Puparia is a short film with very few scenes and no spoken word and yet it has managed to leave a lasting impression on me. Even years later I can recall every shot in perfect clarity. Such a deeply personal work created by one man about his feelings on an ever-changing world. My Mom finds the ending to be ominous and foreboding, but I always saw it as inspiring and comforting. I see the smile of the white-haired person in my mind so clearly. What a wonderful piece of animation.

I haven’t been doing animation for long (you could argue I haven’t really done much to even count it). I started when I was finishing high school. I was attending classes in a college I didn’t end up perusing. We had a graphic design class which had us do some light motion graphics. I think that’s when it first clicked. What really cemented it for me was watching Pokémon Art Academy videos with Ross O’Donovan and Barry Kramer. Ross would talk a lot about animation and how he started out and that really inspired me to pick up the craft. It has been difficult to find the time to animate with college and work, but as of recently (unemployed cough cough) I’ve been falling in love with it again! I guess you can see that by the amount of alien gifs I’ve made for the website haha.

Anyways, thank you for reading as always. I probably have even more to say but this is it for now. Have a good day.

I want to draw something for this page actually...