William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
Animator William Kentridge animates with charcoal on paper, leaving traces of each drawing behind as the movement progresses. These traces lend a depth to the image as well as the time of the animation. They also serve a narrative purpose. Kentridge’s early animations were copied from early Soviet films, placed in the Apartheid, South African context. Apartheid was a system predicated on the exploitation of black South African labour in the interests of white South African society. Kentridge uses his animation to express his feelings of guilt for being a white male with inherited wealth and status as well as his personal fantasies of acceptance and forgiveness. The layered shadows of previous drawings that haunt his animations are ghostly reminders of the time that each drawing took to make. Animation here serves as a kind of penance.
Working process
Examples of charcoal animation
Evocative charcoal drawings of Johannesburg. Has detailed historical overview, but the images could speak for themselves.
Jonathan Hodgson is an internationally renowned animation director based in London, he has twice won BAFTAs for Best Short British Animation in 2000 and 2019. He studied animation at Liverpool Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. After spending 25 years directing commercials he moved to academia, setting up and leading the Animation degree at Middlesex University where he combines teaching with making personal films. He is the animation director of Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex, the first full length animated documentary on British TV.
“I am interested in how the materiality of an image can support its meaning, the tearing or disintegration of paper and marks alluding to the criminal and emotional disruption of public space. The police violence in America is happening almost too fast to comprehend and almost certainly too fast to document. In a series that started with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, I have been documenting the last image in the victims of police shootings lives. In this film the drawn footage is worked and reworked until the figures merge with the landscape and the paper is destroyed. There is a sense of burning, referencing lynching and also foreshadowing the subsequent riots.”
Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Live, Moments Ago (The Death of Mike Brown) (n.d) catherine-anyango.com.
Rough collection of animations from You Tube and recommendations I found interesting for my work on wordless animation. Unfortunately some are no longer at their 2020 URL.
Oona Grimes, murd : pagina quattro, 2020, Courtesy of the artist and Danielle Arnaud gallery, London. 2.28 mins Fellini’s La Strada [1954] mis-remembered and re-invented… Rapid fire images and action notations create unplanned collisions… Flashes of accidental animation. Gelsomina is a naif from the margins who has fallen through the cracks. She retains her innocence despite being sold to the brutal travelling performer, Zampano. Her drum playing gives her a job and a voice, a starring role loved by children and therefore a means of survival in the ruins of post-war Italy. https://www.tintypegallery.com/exhibitions/unstilled-life-artist-animations-1980-2020/
Edwina Ashton, Mr Panz at Lake Leman, 2010, Courtesy the artist and Tintype, London, and with thanks to Animate Projects and to Drawing Room, London. 6 mins Edwina Ashton’s hand-drawn, animated films hinge on the mismatch between our intentions and reality, offering narratives that draw on painful observations of everyday behaviour and individual foibles. The film follows the daily habits and explores the memories of Mr Panz, a removed, particular gentleman elephant living in a hotel on Lake Geneva. His diffidence is matched by the sensitive, almost hesitant style of Ashton’s animated drawings, which include a remarkably economical differentiation of an elephant and a mole. https://www.tintypegallery.com/exhibitions/unstilled-life-artist-animations-1980-2020/
https://vimeo.com/444063101
Markus Vater, Worlds Don’t Come Easy, 2020, Courtesy of the artist. 10 minutes A tear finds happiness in the first of these short film vignettes packed into ten minutes: a mountain top rescue has an unexpected outcome; a chameleon gets confused matching its own reflection; God loses an eye; dandelion fairies commit mass suicide; a gun barrel proves a sub-optimal choice of home… There’s a dark twist to many of these tales, belied by the jaunty and diverse range of accompanying music, candy colour combinations and absurd humour. Markus Vater recently gave a talk entitled ‘Things that are there because they are not there, like a shadow, or death…’
Commentary on life and narratives about mental illness, sexuality, cruelty and politics. Some of the animations are driven by voice-over narrative. But his very simple evocative style is carefully adapted to subject matter and uses drawing styles and animation techniques that I could experiment with in my own work.
Dogs (1981) A man takes his dog for a walk in the park where they encounter other dogs and their owners. The film explores the relationship between a man and his dog highlighting their contrasting approaches to life. Worldess animation, originally 6mm film.
Menagerie (1984) is a wordless animation about the experience of the animals in living in captivity in London Zoo. The film was used by the charity Zoocheck zoocheck.com/ to help promote their campaign for the protection of wild animals. The film was animated with pencil on paper and frosted cel and shot on 16mm film.
An example of his psychological narratives. The animation is driven by the voice narrative. But the evocative painterly style is something I could experiment with. A gang of kids find a strange house with an overgrown garden where they play. Only once do they meet the man who lives there, a dead-beat alcoholic with a free and easy spirit who welcomes them. The children see him as a romantic character in stark contrast to their neurotically house proud parents.
End of the Death Penalty 2012 spearheading Amnesty International’s campaign. Simple monochrome style with voiceover narrative about one Iranian lawyer’s fight to save juveniles from execution. Uses a combination of still backgrounds and moving figures, ending in photographs of actual people and events.
Produces short surreal animations in a child-like style with simple line and crayon/wash. Many of his animations depend on use of sound effects and have no words.
British illustrator who has some of his comic narratives converted into animation. Although he relies a lot on voice narrative, his very direct and simplified cartoon style could be replicated in iPad animation.
Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (22 June 1900 – 31 January 1967) was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. He created special effects for Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon, one of the first sci-fi rocket movies, and influenced Disney’s Fantasia. He made over 50 short films and painted around 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries, and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947).
Ian Gouldstone
Experimental conceptual animations using a range of techniques.
Two forms, a red ball and a yellow stick, rest in the silent darkness, then hover and morph with sound effects. Can I replicate this through a blended foreground in procreate to give atmosphere? Certainly later in Adobe Animate.
Use of front mask to contain and emphasise the motion. This could be done as a foreground in Procreate or added later in Adobe Animate.
A very evocative Polish black and white film animation about Harvest.
Uses variations in abstract framing, focus and timing to evoke memories and reflections.
Film grain, light and shadow plays evokes the time that has passed. Subtle monochrome colour shifts and selective colouring eg shirts of harvesters as the main things remembered.
Dreamlike reflections are produced through eg drawn/overlaid animation of birds.
Music and sound effects re-inforce the feelings of dreamy nostalgia, noise or threat.
Animated cartoon of Diet Coke bottles filled up with milk. Shot on video in Detroit Michigan, the characters walk through the desolate streets in real video sometimes in groups and sometimes alone. The image wobbles, flips and turns inside of the video frame.
A commercial voice over actress speaks from texts collected from the internet referencing identity, technology, memory and mortality most of which are personal accounts spoken in first person. Every few minutes Jordan Wolfson interrupts her giving basic formal instructions and adjustments distorting her tone, volume, and “sex”.
You Tube and Google searches on ‘women’s empowerment animations’ and ‘gender equality animations. Some of the You Tube viewer comments are also quite revealing – and shocking.
Amusing short textless animation for Social Europe about the inequalities in recognition of skills between women and men.
An overview for Trocaire of meanings and patterns of women’s participation and empowerment in DRC, Nicaragua and India. Shows variety between cultures. Argues we must address underlying inequalities between all women and all men, and between citizens and states.Voiceover and text are both in English, and seems to be aimed more at promotion to donor publics, rather than women in communities on the ground.
A comparison of the lives of two girls: Maritas who is the daughter of a teacher and gets secondary education and sex education and trains as a doctor. She is able to plan family and contribute to family and community. Cristina is from a poor family, her mother dies in childbirth, her father remarries and she is married off at 13 to a man three times her age. She contracts HIV and has a series of unplanned children. Argues Cristina should have had the chance to decide. Voiceover and text with supporting statistics and arguments in English.
Video for Pacific Community on causes of domestic violence in sex differences and stereotypes that are internalised by girls and boys from being very young, then translated into low pay and work opportunities reinforcing men’s feeling of power, leading then to violence. This is reinforced by the attitudes of church and police. Voiceover and simple text in English.
A Sketchnote cartoon by USAID. Apart from You Tube and USAID, it is not clear who the audience is.
Thinking Beyond Borders: India and US published May 2012 Through questions and stories from around the world, Thinking Beyond Borders gap year students examine the meaning of empowerment and it’s potential to create social impact.
Animation in Hindi about the behefits of womem gettingva loan to buy a cow. Hanna Barbara productions.nwholecseries of Meena stories. Meena’s oarehts are un debt and her father says she will havevto be taken outbif school. They gobtobthe jarket to get a loan from a shopkeeper. Meena notices thaf thecshopkeeoer has put the loan for 18 years and not 8 years – cheating her father outbif a lot of money. Hecsays he wants her to carrybon a5 school. Her teachers suggesr they get a loan and buy a cow. And everything ends happily. Meena gets a bike.
About UN commitment to increasing women’s agency to control her life. Argues that the way to address global poverty is to empowerment women. All in English with lots of text. Promotion of a Christian training programme called ‘Imagine’, Empowerment Workshop.
An8mation witg English text about eatly marriage,
Cartoon with animated English text, about global gender stereotypes in education and professions. By PowToons.
More artistic treatments for video competitions etc.
Artistic Sand Art on women’s empowerment.
Artistic cartoon about gender discrimination. Lots of simple animated English text and English voice over but interesting art style. For an Indian movie competition.
This has nice very simple white on black drawing. More arty than detailed concept. By Arcsoft Animation, India?
Artistic cartoon about gender and caste discrimination, with critique of Mahatma Gandhi’s attitudes to caste at the end. Driven by lots of paragraphs of animated English text and English voice over, symbols just illustrating this text. Created with PowToon for an Indian movie competition.
Cartoon of apparently random drawings of different aspects of women’s position as a card for International Women’s Day.
Animation in English about benefits of women getting loans and training for handicrafts.
