“What I Like About Animation” Daniel Poeira
Skwigly
Skwigly’s latest columnist Daniel Poeira tells us what he likes about animation and who he has been inspired by over the years.
There are certainly dozens of answers for the question in the title, but today I’ll major on one of them: wordless communication.
All around this old world of ours we see people talking about the power of information, that we are in the information age, and that information is strategical in this globalized world… But hey, who asked for information? If information is so important, why are newspapers so cheap? Can you eat them?
Information is solid and lifeless, and has no true meaning at all. It is like a brick: you can build beautiful things with it, but alone, it’s worthless. There are two other words that can tell us a lot more about what the world really needs these days: “communication” and “knowledge”.
You can keep a stack of hard drives with several terabytes of information on it, but what does it mean? What’s the value of this raw data without someone messing around with it and creating something useful out of it? Today you can read all the main newspapers in the world, for free, in the internet… but who really does this? Pure information is useless! Have you ever tried to read the phone list? It has plenty of information in it, but so what!
When you browse around the internet, read a newspaper, or even when you call your mom on the telephone, you’re not looking for information: you want communication and knowledge. That’s the real power, that’s the real “new thing” journalists talk so much about.
And animation has everything to do with this. Have you ever seen those TV shows where they present TV advertisings from all over the world? Have you noticed that some of them are dubbed in English? That’s because advertising agencies submit their products to international festivals and TV shows. After watching about a hundred of these shows I found out something: the advertisings that really strike you in the head are usually wordless. They need to dub the others to help more people understand them, but when you create everything based on images only, or even with images followed by a single phrase… that’s so much more powerful!
It sounds like a shot in the foot, writing a column saying that wordless communication is more powerful than text… but that would be a misinterpretation of what I’m trying to say. Now think of this: In a globalized world, where people from all kinds of countries and cultures can talk to each other in a very fast and cheap way, the multitude of written and spoken languages is a huge barrier. Websites, cell phone companies, video games… everyone is struggling to be understood by everyone.
When I went to film school for the first time I didn’t know anything about silent movies. I thought they were quite boring and naive. But after I got in touch with the likes of Eisenstein, Griffith and Buster Keaton, they blew my mind. How could they say so much by using only images and music? In some cases, the words are even useless! Try watching a movie called “Sunrise” (1927, F. W. Murnau) and you’ll see what I mean.
Why am I saying all this? Oh, I almost forgot… animation is the most powerful communication tool I know!!!! If people ever made live-action movies which could communicate without using any words at all, that was way back in the early past century. After the advent of “talkies”, most movie directors forgot how it was done before, and regular movies became huge dialogues with images that barely justified them being called “movies”.
On the other hand, animation has always been closely connected to this original form of storytelling used by early moviemakers. Not only because it’s hard and expensive to do lip-synch, but also because animation is so expressive. Since you can use any kind of art form to create animation, the limits are your imagination. The things that live action cinema are doing today with all this incredible equipment is basically a photorealistic version of what animation has been doing since forever.
And in times like this, when the world seems to be collapsing again and brother is killing brother once again in the name of greed and misunderstanding, animation can be a strikingly powerful tool, not merely to exchange information, but to create actual communication – and understanding. And also to spread knowledge – the fastest medicine for a disease called “ignorance”.
And if you didn’t understand what I meant by all this, don’t blame me. Blame my words!