Animation is Fairytale

   

   I mean, think about it. Fairytale, we have decided, is what you get when you transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. It's when what's wooden holds a forest, the rabbit hole a croquet game. Fantastic happens when you realize it's bigger on the inside. Impossible is reality the moment Elfland comes into view. Now, none of these are concrete reality, so none of them can be recorded by conventional means. We rely on the animators to drill down and tell us these stories.

   









   Photographs and live action can only document what is there. They are the experts at showing the inevitable and the surprise, the tragic and comedic. What they cannot do justice is the abstract. (Anybody who is in DM155 may understand what I mean.) We look to the animators for that.

    If you ask a painter, a videographer, an animator and a photographer to give you an image of a leaf or a rock or another concrete noun, who do you think will give you the more clear image? What about joy or grief or the Holy Spirit?

    It is in the abstract the animator is most treasured. They possess the uncanny ability to take from their mind and translate it into something we can all see and understand without really knowing what it is we are seeing. By "knowing" I mean how we are able to know a rock. It's pretty obvious and you can study it. With the fantastic, brilliant realm of all things unfathomable before you, there are a lot of options and few limits.

   This ability in itself is like a fairytale. Your mind is an object known to science. The magic it makes will never be. You rock, dudes!



(This post began as a comment on Isaac's blog; go check it out if you haven't read it yet. Lo and behold I felt loquacious and wanted to add pictures, so here we are.)