I keep on saying that there’s something in the air in Adelaide. Over the years, the city has become a cultural hotbed for creative folks of all kinds: film, digital media, street art, sports. It’s even become a surrogate home for a group of global elephants without a herd to call home. There’s a cultural foundation that is pushed for and cultivated by the people who call the city home. It’s a push that comes with the understanding that without engagement in the cultural scene, it will stagnate and dissipate out of view.
One of the key active community groups within Adelaide is moviejuice, the film collective which is dedicated to screening alternative and experimental cinema. The run of films they’ve screened across unceded Kaurna Land has included everything from the microbudget work of Adam C. Briggs with Boogie Bobby (replete with a live score), to the hyper-indie disruption film Ships That Bear from Gabriel Bath, and now to the realm of animation with their first retrospective screening series: Idris Kellermann Williams’ ANIMATION IN TRANSFORMATION.
Screening over four Wednesdays in April, commencing on 9 April and finishing on 30 April, ANIMATION IN TRANSFORMATION brings the work of four distinct animation creatives to The Mercury, with Marcell Jankovics 1981 film Son of the White Mare (9 April), Isao Takahata’s 1994 film Pom Poko (16 April), Sébastien Laudenbach’s 2016 film The Girl Without Hands (23 April), and Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s 2018 film The Wolf House (30 April).
Conversing via digital means, Andrew caught up with Idris ahead of the screenings to talk about how animation and transformation relate to one another, the diverse selection of films chosen, and what it means to be able to bring these films to The Mercury.
To purchase tickets, visit the ANIMATION IN TRANSFORMATION ticketing page here and follow moviejuice on socials (facebook/instagram).
The series of screenings are held under the title Animation in Transformation. Can you talk about how transformation and animation relate to one another?
Idris Kellermann Williams: The core of the idea is really that what distinguishes animation from live-action is that it is created frame-by-frame, rather than by recording continuous motion. That is to say, any continuity between frames in an animated film is purely the product of convention, rather than being necessitated by the innately stable nature of real objects placed before camera. Consider drawn frames in 2D animation, for instance. But even in stop motion there’s no reason why you can’t just swap out a puppet or part of one from one frame to the next, and that’s even the whole idea of the replacement animation technique that you see in the facial animation of Laika’s films. Of course, live-action has an element of this, in editing – one of the fascinating things about live-action cinema is how you can stitch together disparate times and places through editing. Continuity between shots is a matter of convention as well! But animation is like live-action with 24 cuts a second, and is so much freer as a result.
Of course, despite this, for reasons of coherence and the imitation of live action, most animation maintains some level of continuity between frames! Unless you’re doing something completely abstract, like Norm McLaren or Len Lye’s direct films, you have to introduce an element of continuity just so that the audience’s eyes have something to hang onto – and even those abstract films invite the viewer to create continuities between their frames in their mind. So I guess I’d say that a core characteristic of animation is the need to maintain a balance between continuity and change. Does a character or setting look the same in consecutive frames? If they do, why? If they don’t, why not? I hope these films can show ways of exploring that a little, and in doing so explore the unique possibilities of animation.
The four films you have chosen present a diverse and underrepresented slice of animated cinema. Can you talk about the decision process behind the four films you have selected?
IKW: Thank you! I will say that they could certainly be a lot more diverse and underrepresented than they are, and I hope that there’ll be programmes in the future, by moviejuice or by others, showcasing even more under-represented animation. I’m sure there’s great stuff being done all over the world and especially by complete independents with no industrial backing that I simply haven’t heard of yet, but for this I’ve more or less stuck to what I know, so I personally feel that I’m not doing anything very radical by highlighting animation the former Eastern Bloc, Japan, and France, as they all have pretty established reputations. Chile is a different matter, I think – I haven’t really heard of much Chilean animation other than Leon and Cociña’s work.
As for the choices of films – well, I have three rationales. The more high-minded one is that all the films showcase a different way that animation can use transformation, while at the same sharing an interest in folklore. Not to give too much away, but I’d say in Son of the White Mare it’s about capturing the worldview of the ancient Hungarian peoples whose mythology it’s based on, in Pom Poko it’s a Brechtian distancing effect to help the film’s political critiques, in The Girl Without Hands it’s more about creating a dreamlike, fairytale mood, and in The Wolf House – well, it’s hard to describe, but it’s very much about depicting a character’s worldview as spilling over and shaping the space they inhabit. And I think all of those are really interesting for how they interact with the idea of folklore – by my limited understanding, one characteristic that unites mythology and folk tales across cultures is that they often seem to have a pretty fluid approach to forms and reality compared to modern storytelling, and of course all of the films have some connection to folklore. Probably the most tenuous is The Wolf House, and even there it’s pretty clearly referencing Grimm fairytales even if they’re not as core to the narrative as Japanese Yōkai are to Pom Poko, for instance.
The somewhat more practical rationale was that I believed that, to sell tickets, I needed to pick films where just a few seconds of footage would simply be so visually striking that anyone who saw it would be compelled to seek them out. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that the films were all completely different and from different times and cultures. Given what I’ve said earlier about transformation being inherent to animation, it was kind of inevitable that it’d be a formal element in films that I thought were visually striking, because I think it’s one of the things animation does best!
Finally, I think the fundamental reason is that they’re all films where, when I first saw them, I thought “I need to share this with as many people as possible! Why has hardly anyone seen it!?” Or in the case of Pom Poko “why is all anyone talks about that the characters have large and prominent testicles when there’s so much other amazing stuff in the film?” I have a particular connection to Son of the White Mare on that front: I first heard about the film long before it was restored and easily available, and I’ve pretty much been longing to show it to a crowd ever since I pre-ordered the blu-ray of the new restoration, about four years ago. When my friends started moviejuice, they basically demonstrated that it was possible to actually do that. So I did.
To me, animation is a vessel of creative expression that allows the artists showcase slices of their cultural history in a way that live action is unable to do so. How do you feel these films present each of their cultural roots on screen?
IKW: It’s interesting that you point to culture here. To be honest that’s not really my area – I won’t claim to know much about the cultures any of the films are representing. But they’re certainly very specifically the products of their cultures. I think Pom Poko and Son of the White Mare are the most specific. Marcell Jankovics, the director of Son of the White Mare, wrote books about the folklore he based the film on, and directed a TV series that was also based on those stories. And of course, Pom Poko is very specifically derived from Japanese folklore to an extent that western viewers often seem to have trouble with it. There’s a lot of very specific references to stories and artworks that are probably missed outside of Japan. As for The Girl Without Hands – I suppose it’s certainly somewhat more explicit than I imagine it would have been if it’d been made in the Anglosphere as opposed to France. But I don’t know if I can really speak to cultural specificities. And I suspect the reference points of The Wolf House that are specifically Chilean are much more about post WWII history and the influence of fascism and Nazis in South America than about Chilean culture as such, as it is designed to comment on the insular worldview of a particular cult, founded by a German, that set itself apart from Chilean society around it. There are certainly German cultural references in it as a result, but I don’t know enough about Chile to speak to Chilean ones.
Additionally, these four different films each present different styles of animated filmmaking. In an age where many dominant animated films are computer generated/assisted experiences, how important is it to showcase painterly, hand drawn, and stop motion films in this way?
IKW: Well, if I was going to get on a soapbox, I’d say that there’s something fundamentally a little unsatisfying to animation that limits its imagination to creating the illusion of coherent, three-dimensional space and a stylised simulation of live-action photography, as has been fashionable in mainstream feature-length animation for a while now. I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s always a bad thing! But it’s my firm belief that there’s an ideology of “realism” that really afflicts all kinds of films these days. Basically, films – live action or animated – are made to fit an idea of realism because that’s the dominant style, rather than because it’s interesting or contributes to their ideas or emotions at all (which it certainly can; I’m not opposed to realism per se). But I think that films using more painterly, hand drawn and stop-motion styles are simply doing something different. You can feel creative choices being made that aren’t just about imitating the way live-action films look, and as such it feels, to me, like they’re more honestly engaging with the fact that they’re animated, rather than just being animated because that’s the medium they happen to be made in.
I’m not opposed to computer animation at all – I think it has fascinating possibilities and I’d like to show a programme of films that use computers in unconventional ways someday. But I think it’s rare to see a computer animated film which makes you think about the fact that it is computer animated, rather than immersing you in the story. And I think the films I’ve picked all make you think about the way they are made, and that just interests me a lot more right now. I also think that probably the computer animated films that do the most interesting things with the medium would often simply be a harder sell to audiences because, broadly speaking, computer-generated images that acknowledge their digital origins are perceived as ugly in a way that hand-made images are not. I do think things are looking more interesting for computer animation since Spider-verse, though.
You’re presenting one of the finest horror experiences in recent years, Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Wolf House. It is, quite simply, one of the most transformative, animated experiences around. Can you talk about your experience watching The Wolf House for the first time, and why people should see this in a cinema?
IKW: Thank you! I’m glad you like it so much. I absolutely agree. I actually first watched it alongside The Girl Without Hands, with Daniel from moviejuice, several years ago. I’d been keen for it as I’d been aware of the trailer for some time. To be honest I don’t recall my specific reaction to it at that moment, other than I suppose finding it both a very overwhelming sensory experience and just remarkably complex in how it approaches its themes. I had known it would be amazing to look at, of course, because I’d seen the trailer, but I guess I wasn’t prepared for the complexity of the framing – it’s basically a fake propaganda film, like Starship Troopers, and if you know a bit about the historical context of Colonia Dignidad, the cult it’s based on, and its relationship to naziism and Chile’s fascist government under Pinochet, it becomes clear that it is commenting on the kind of brainwashing that cults, and more broadly fascism and white supremacy, require.
So I’d say it’s an incredibly rich text, and it’s so visually astonishing in how every part of the setting is animated that I’d say it absolutely justifies the big screen. And, while I hate to bring up the state of the world right now, the fact is that the exact kind of ideologies the film is dedicated to demolishing are getting more and more powerful right now, and although I’d never claim that watching a movie is a meaningful form of activism, I do think we’re living at a point in time where figuring out how to confront them and understand the ways that they function is becoming more and more important, so it’s worth a watch. Especially when there’s people to talk about it with in the foyer afterwards!
Additionally, you’re presenting narratives from Hungary, Japan, and France, can you talk about the importance of showcasing non-English language films?
IKW: To be honest, I didn’t really think about this at all. It’s just how it worked out. But it was, I think, inevitable because there’s just so much great animation from outside the Anglosphere and one of my main goals was to show people things they would probably not have seen before. There’s so many languages and countries that it would have been absurd and limiting if they’d all been from English-speaking countries. And I suppose while there are English-language films that would have fit the programme perfectly – like Wolfwalkers, for instance – I just wouldn’t have felt I was showing anything that would be really new to the audience. Although I do love that film and I’d probably have shown it if I was showing five films instead of four.
Finally, Animation in Transformation is yet another example of why Adelaide is becoming the central, hotbed place for film culture and engagement. Can you talk about your experience of being part of the moviejuice experience, and why you feel that Adelaide is becoming a creatively rich place for film culture?
IKW: Well, I’ve been friends with Daniel and Shea since long before they founded moviejuice, and I’m incredibly grateful to them for doing so. I think there’s really two things that they’ve done that are really wonderful. Firstly, they’ve shown that you can just organise film screenings. Now this might seem obvious, but it’s so easy to end up believing that film screenings have to go happen thanks to established cinemas or other institutions like art galleries or repertory cinemas like the Mercury. But in fact if you have access to a space and a projector, you can become a cinema! Not that everyone does have access to those things, but it’s a much lower barrier of entry than one might think.
Of course, there are practicalities around paying for rights, and paying to use the space, which mean that you do have to sell tickets for money and so on. These practicalities are basically resolvable, though, if enough people come together. That’s where the second thing they’ve proved comes in: they showed that there is a community of people who will show up to interesting screenings because they’re interesting. And that’s amazing! Because all these people you’ve never met before just come out of the woodwork and all show up in one place, for one purpose – to watch a film that wouldn’t be shown by anyone else. And that’s really what moviejuice is all about – it’s about community. Showing that the community can provide an alternative to mainstream cinemas, basically, where all kinds of films can be shown that you’d never see otherwise. And I think the real magic of moviejuice is in the conversations after the films. There’s not much that’s better than hanging out in a foyer or some nearby establishment with people you hardly knew a few hours earlier passionately discussing a film that you knew hardly anything about a few hours earlier.
It’s also worth noting that they’ve been really brilliant at getting a crossover between crowds who might not mix otherwise – most of their screenings have been paired with live music, which helps attract people who might not have gone otherwise, resulting in a healthy cross-pollination between the music and movie scenes.
And the other great thing about that community they’ve created is that it shows that there’s people who will buy tickets. And so once you’ve broken the mental barrier and realised that it’s actually entirely possible to organise completely independent screenings, and there’s enough of a community that you can do so in a financially sustainable way– well, the possibilities are endless.
Now, I will say that for these films the stars aligned and we were incredibly lucky to be able to organise with the Mercury to show them there. Which is wonderful because the films will look and sound good and it’s a place where I’ve seen a lot of great movies. But, great as it is to show them there, we don’t need any institution’s support to organise a screening.
I can’t really speak to why Adelaide is becoming a creatively rich place for film culture because I don’t have a point of comparison. But I think in the end it’s about community. My experience with moviejuice has been that there’s just a lot of people out there who are passionate about their creative pursuits, and that’s only amplified if you bring them together.