Saad Chowdhury, Director, Big Blue Communications
As a 10-year-old preparing for school while living in New Jersey in America, my brother and I would set the TV to play morning cartoons while we got ready, and we would dart into the living room to catch a brief glimpse of shows between eating breakfast and packing our lunches. Any moment we had to just grab a few more fleeting seconds of these bright, noisy programmes before we started the grind of the day was worth it. If the intro from Conan the Barbarian started, then you knew you were late for the bus.
For some of us, that love as an audience member for animation is life-long, starting in childhood. We owe a lot to the people who made these shows. In our adult years, animation didn’t get left behind as many children’s activities did, but developed into a legitimate artform for adults to enjoy, too.
As we have grown and matured, so has what the creators are capable of showing us, and the complexity of the subjects they can approach successfully. A show as nuanced and ridiculous as Bojack Horseman, with its razor-sharp scriptwriting exploring mental health, relationships, and the blackest of black humour against a visually and sonically absurd universe with anthropomorphised animals, would not have been possible 20 years ago. The creators are getting better with animation, and the audiences are being given more faith in their intelligence to follow along, too.
I think this is why animation has become a powerful tool in communications, and in the international development sector. Animation and visuals help us to grasp the significance of organisations’ research and to understand in a visceral way the challenges, the urgency, and the solutions needed to combat big challenges for people in the world today.
I am excited that animation has become one of our major vehicles at Big Blue for sharing stories, and connecting our partners with audiences around the world. In the past four years, we have created animations that cover technology and education for children in Malawi, workplace safeguarding practices, health and safety at ports in the Arab world, and road transport issues in developing countries.
This coming week, Big Blue will help to launch a new online platform for Gender Focus, a new research-sharing initiative from the International Development Group of the University of Portsmouth.
Gender Focus highlights new research and research practices relating to topics such as gender-based violence and cultural practices that harm women and girls in the global south, particularly Africa and Asia. It is really exciting for us to be part of this launch, which will be accompanied by a short intro animation to be published on the new Gender Focus site.
Animation is an exciting, vibrant, and impactful tool for storytelling. As a creator, there is a very real satisfaction in seeing ideas which started in your head, sometimes as something as basic as a crude sketch in a notepad, become a moving, noisy thing with a personality that can affect people.
Animation lets you create larger-than-life characters who could never exist. It lets you visualise entirely unique perspectives and play around with physics and other rules that you could never otherwise break. Animation lets you explore worlds that don’t even exist.
It helps people reach audiences and share findings and opinions, sometimes on topics too sensitive to film, or too difficult to reach.
For many, this past year adjusting to Covid has meant restriction on basic things like movement and travel and socialising. It has been a big disruption for our children, their parents, teachers and schools. It has been an acid test for the world’s social healthcare systems and contingencies, and it has stirred up a hornet’s nest around personal mental health, and the concept of ‘freedom’. It continues to be a source of grief for many who have lost loved ones. At a time when we are all being told to stay home, keep to a routine, don’t think too hard, and don’t try to leave, animation is one way we all have to let our minds wander free, to keep our spirits high, and to ensure our imaginations and the possibilities for the future never dim.
Animation, visual art and impact
Animation, in its recognisable form today, has been around for about 100 years. It has occupied a unique place between illustration and film and is often associated with iconic studios such as Walt Disney, Fleischer Studios and UPA, to name a few. It is an art form that has always led a double life.
On the one hand, it has a highly visible, highly commercial face in children/family film and television. On the other hand, it has had a wildly dynamic life in the hands of independent filmmakers, experimental artists and important idiosyncratic cultural movements such as the notable and influential explosions of animation productivity in post-war Eastern Europe, Japan, Canada, and in pockets of activity around the world. Animation is a slow and deliberate artform and passions for it are high among producers and consumers.
The function of animation shares much with how we understand the visual, non-photographic, image. Animation utilises the symbolic language of drawing and creative media and enables an aesthetic lens from which we can understand this world or other worlds of the imagination. As much as the medium makes all imaginative ventures a possibility, it is particularly well suited to addressing the ‘real’ world through lived experience and issues, both complex, simple, and poignant that affect us.
Animation and research
While there is a field of ‘practice-as-research’ in animation which explores the medium as generative of insights and contributions within and across disciplines, animation for research is largely part of a communications strategy, utilising academic findings and presenting them in novel ways. Animation and non-fiction subjects have a truncated history but are now highly visible, tackling a variety of subject matter.
What is important to take from this history, however, is that, early on, animation was seen to have a unique representational function for the non-fictional moving image, one that could not be fulfilled by the conventional live-action, photographic based alternative.
Dobson, Roe, Ratelle & Ruddell, 2019, pg. 115
The shape and form of these outputs are widely diverse and depend on the discipline, genre, aesthetic culture and sensitivities of the findings. Formal and aesthetic decisions by the artist are consequential and shape the representation of people and ideas but more importantly, and perhaps problematically, animation emotionalises information through eliciting participation.
Like viewing a painting or a drawing, the conceit of the artist, through his or her means, is to render a bridge from the representational to the represented. From the symbol to the source. Irrespective of how this is accomplished and taking into consideration the sensitive approach of most well-meaning artists, this results in a ‘reading’ of the academic findings which is immersive, memorable and concretised in the forms of animation. As Herbert Read notes:
When we contemplate a work of art, we project ourselves into the form of the work of art, and our feelings are determined by what we find there, by the dimensions we occupy.
Read, 1956, p.30
Gender and Art in South Sudan
This animation took findings from Professor Tamsin Bradley’s contribution to the AHRSS (Arts, Heritage and Resilience in South Sudan) project and specifically aimed to highlight the complex positive and negative aspects of artistic practices in South Sudan.
The mixed animation method was intentional to explore the different textures of the artistic outputs and to address difficult subjects in a more abstracted, symbolic way, utilising tools that enabled that. The use of stop-frame animation was in part to explore the potential of the medium in connecting to the experience of others and to create a unique space of sculpted, moveable forms as avatars for the wider experience of men and women in South Sudan.
I also realised quickly that the models had a kind of in-built personhood that made them appealing and empathetic. Something apart even from two-dimensional drawings. Equally, it made sense to have the Zande sculptor a moving sculpture himself; a way to connect the craft to the artist in a concrete way but also to open a dialogue through the medium of animation.
The mix of styles and approaches reinforces the light and dark/positive and negative themes that pervade the narration and offer, through different aesthetic choices, new readings of often re-occurring themes and ideas.
The shift from stop-frame animation to 2D animation which occurs most intentionally when the model woman looks up at the home with the blowing curtain and transitions to a drawn man pushing open a curtain manages to keep the narrative open and not fixed which somewhat unintentionally, enables the content to be seen as more universal and not specific to that context. This is an unforeseen strength of the mixed media approach and something which I plan to exploit in future projects.