Run Wrake's short film "Rabbit" is one of those rare gems that takes on a life of itself when it's screened theatrically. This film kicked off our third touring festival and left audiences not knowing what to say afterwards. Taylor Jessen caught up with Run back in October before our release. If you missed this on the big screen avoid seeing it online. It deserves the largest screen you can secure when watching on DVD.. with the volume cranked on high.
THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 3
Run Wrake
Animator, “Rabbit” (2005)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 10/27/2006
Transcribed by: Taylor Jessen
Animation Show: Before we get to your filmography, congratulations on your brilliant biography, which is the only bio I’ve ever seen in map form. It looks like you emerged from The Sticks in 1955, but when did you enter Chelsea School of Art?
Run Wrake: I started studying very much in the punk / New Wave era, where you sort of tried a bit of everything in the arts. You did a bit of printmaking, graphic design, and so on. And we had a visiting lecturer who showed us a video called “Close to the Edit” by the Art of Noise. I saw that and thought that was something I wanted to do. It was collage visuals, tightly synched to beats, very rhythmic music. And there was something about that synchronicity that really appealed to me… It’s almost fully-animated, and there’s some beautiful collage sections. There’s some pretty racy 3D plasticine animation. Some is not so good – they were trying things out – but some of it I think works really well. I was certainly caught out when I saw it for the first time. So that was my starting point for getting into animation.
AS: Were you looking at the work of Jonathan Bairstow at all?
RW: Yes. When I was at the Royal College, I think he was a year above me. He was a fantastic designer. He did a beautiful black and white thing which featured a lot of loops. I was actually trying to find out what it was called the other day by looking online, but I couldn’t track it down.
AS: It’s the strangest thing, but I was watching MTV way the hell back in 1988, and I happened to tape a British show they’d bought for rebroadcast called First Bite that included Bairstow’s short Jah Hoover.
RW: That could be it.
AS: It’s all loops and these wonderful line drawings on a white background. It really stayed with me. And then later I saw his “Prophet and Lo$$” in the British Animation Invasion program.
RW: Yes. Definitely an influence.
AS: What was your first degree project that came out of your first animation training?
RW: At Chelsea, where I did my degree, I did graphics, and animation wasn’t a key part of the course. So I guess the film I made at the Royal College, which is called Anyway, would be the first proper film. When I was at Chelsea, on the graphics course, I didn’t have any equipment, so it was very much making it up as you go along. That was a big step for me. Going to the Royal College, I was learning about how to break down sounds, and peg bars, and the proper way of doing animation. So I guess I’ll say that Anyway, my graduation film from the Royal College, would be the first accomplished piece.
AS: There are certain visuals I can see recurring from short to short – were you already amassing a lot of found objects?
RW: Yeah. All the way through college, through three years at Chelsea and then two years at Royal College, I went to Portobello Market regularly every week and picked up bits and bobs here and there, and going to car boot sales. So yeah, (laughs) I’m constantly accumulating printed ephemera and various other things.
AS: I love the idea that Rabbit is completely detourned from these 1950s educational stickers you picked up in a junk shop twenty years ago, but I also love the fact that you sat on these stickers for twenty years before you ever used them as raw material for a short. That’s how appropriational art works – you gather as much as you can, and some of it you can’t use right away because you don’t know how to use it. And then you discover it years and years later, and suddenly you’ve got a way in.
RW: Yes. You have to mature. The time has to come. (laughs)
AS: Did you research the original illustrator of the stickers before or after you did the piece?
RW: We tried to track him down. The company that made them, Philip & Tasey, they’re still producing stuff for schools, so I contacted them, because I had to clear the copyright. They didn’t actually have records going back to 1954-1955, so they couldn’t guarantee who the artist was. But their best guess was that it was this guy they used a lot of the time, Geoffrey Higham. So we put his credit on front of the film, but we’re not absolutely sure whether he was the illustrator or not. The stickers are in two distinct, slightly different styles. The drawings of the boy and girl in particular are slightly different to the bulk of the other drawings. So maybe there’s more than one artist. It’s a bit of a mystery, really. There’s just no records from the time when they were produced…I’m expecting to get an irate call from some 85-year-old man saying “What are you doing using my pictures?”
AS: Your early work is very analogue and funky, full of hand-drawn pictures and photocopied collage, whereas Rabbit and your MTV “Musicman” idents are digital. When did you make the move to the digital realm?
RW: Around about 1998, I think, I started using After Effects, after a few years of resisting and resisting. Because I was very much from the old school. I like having artwork. I mean, all the flying energy blobs in Rabbit are hand-drawn on paper and then scanned in, because there’s something about that boil that you get with hand-drawn animation that still really appeals to me. But with me it’s all been put together on computers since about ’98.
AS: That wonderful skull in Jukebox shape-shifts into a heart and cutout heads and lots of different things, and it’s all done very amorphously using just thick outlines in a style you can only get in traditional animation. Do you miss that?
RW: I just miss having the painted, finished artwork. In Jukebox, for example, most of the frames in that four-and-a-half minute film exist as a piece of artwork. It’s really nice to have that. In computer work, in nowhereland, it doesn’t exist, which is a shame. But the opportunities that it gives you just far outweigh the disadvantages. I’m not breathing in SprayMount all the time, for example. I’m not risking cutting my thumb off with a scalpel. So I think what computers give you far outweigh what they don’t give you, compared to the old methods.
AS: Wow, I never considered the safety angle – every animator talks to you about the speed advantage, but I’ve never considered the advantage of putting away the cutting tools.
RW: Yeah, definitely. There’s more danger of electrocution, I suppose, but…
AS: When did you first break into commercial work, and how did you connect with U2?
RW: The first commercial contract actually came when I was at Royal College. There’s a TV personality over here called Jonathan Ross – I don’t know if you’re aware of him in the states – he was doing a series of four documentaries on film directors, including David Lynch, kind of left-field film directors, and he wanted a title sequence, so he got me into his office and briefed me on that. That was the first thing I did. Then I had a big gap after that of about two or three years with very little paid work. But I carried on doing visuals for nightclubs and struggling. I kept busy all the time. I would say that the first piece that really started things properly for me was Music for Babies, which was a film to accompany the release of an album by Howie B.
AS: That’s a stunning piece of animation – hopping from cube to cube, and each cube has a smaller cube on top, and you’re constantly zooming in and zooming in and then you suddenly turn it around and zoom back out. It’s almost vertiginous.
RW: Yeah. (laughs) I’d say that was the piece where everything came together. And that led to a hell of a lot more work, including in a roundabout way the first U2 connection. I think they went to the Royal College and selected stuff, but then – I can’t really remember – I think subsequently I then sent them Music for Babies. And at the time, the album that they were working on, Pop, Howie B. was actually working as a producer on, so there was a connection there. That may have helped.
AS: There are animators who go into shorts specifically to tell a story, and although Rabbit does that too, the bulk of your filmography has been non-narrative collage work. What were your graphic design influences? Were you heavy into the Dadaists?
RW: Dada, big time, yeah. Pop art. Punk rock as well. The whole British punk rock aesthetic, Jamie Reid and a lot of the record sleeves in the late seventies were an influence. And the non-narrative thing, it was really music – the reason I got into animation was to be able to put pictures to music. And I like that music doesn’t really need a narrative. You start listening at the beginning, and it leads you through – a good piece of jazz or instrumental music will lead you along. You don’t have to be told specifically what’s going on. And that’s what I was trying to do in animation. But as you say, Rabbit is a real sea change for me, and it’s a definite move towards narrative, because obviously then it opens up longer-format storytelling, which is where I want to go, really.
AS: It’s wonderful how the music can do half the work for you. It can drive you through visuals that don’t necessarily lead logically from one to the next. Working together they make something that has a lot of emotional drive even if it doesn’t have narrative drive.
RW: Absolutely. There’s something about the combination of the two – it’s magical.
AS: I read that when you found the sticker of the Idol, that was lightning bolt that told you there was a story waiting there.
RW: Yeah, it was the starting point.
AS: How long did you spend boarding Rabbit before you started animation proper?
RW: It was probably about four months. I started messing around with the stickers, and the starting point of the story with the idol being found in the rabbit came very quickly. And then I spent a long time, maybe two months, trying to get the whole story sorted out. There were all sorts of sub-plots originally – the Idol was going to zap bees as well, so then the bees wouldn’t fertilize all the trees, and they’d starve to death – and it all got very complicated. There was a lot of going around with the storyline. So I think it was about four months from the first day I got the stickers out until I actually started animating.
AS: So most of the sampled artwork is just straight scans with a little manipulation – I guess you had to do more manipulation with the Idol, because in the original sticker, he’s sitting down.
RW: Yeah – I had to create a complete torso so I could then move his arms and legs around. It wasn’t a massive amount, but that was the one that needed the most, for sure.
AS: The music is by your long-time collaborator Howie B. In terms of the sound design, is this the most sound work that you’ve ever done for a short?
RW: It’s actually the first time that I’ve handed over the sound to a third party, which turned out to be a fantastically good move, because he did an amazing job, Craig Butters. He literally took the visual and just created all that. Obviously I was viewing it as he was doing it, and saying yea or nay to stuff. I just think he’s done an absolutely incredible job, certainly much, much better than I could ever have done myself.
AS: So you delivered something to him that was completely mit out sound and he created the effects soundtrack from whole cloth?
RW: Pretty much, yeah. I said to him that I wanted to use real sounds where possible, so obviously a lot of that was just creating countryside atmospheres. The freestyle stuff, particularly the idol’s voice, was probably the biggest challenge. Originally he made him a bit more jokey, cartooney, which I didn’t really want. He needed to be cheeky, but slightly threatening. It was quite difficult to get the balance between being comical but scary at the same time, which I think he pulled off in the end.
AS: Is the idol’s voice human, or is there another animal mixed in there?
RW: I’m not entirely sure. I think it is mostly Craig sampling his own voice, and then putting it through all sorts of filters. But he may well have mixed in some donkeys or something. (laughs) Who knows.
AS: Where have you gone with the short around the world to show it?
RW: It’s been all over the world. I haven’t personally been with it that much, because I had a little daughter earlier this year, so traveling around has been difficult. However we went to Japan and Taiwan in August, which was amazing, and I’m going to Holland and Germany next week, and then to Singapore the week after that. So I’m starting to do a bit of traveling now, now that Florence is a bit older. But I would say it’s certainly played in every continent. And it’s been fairly well received. It’s fantastic.
AS: It’s dialogue-free but it’s not text-free, so it can travel overseas and still tell a story to a non-English-speaking audience – but at the same time, with those words hovering over all their respective icons, it’s almost an avant-garde teaching tool. I’ll bet the Japanese loved it – they have a major infatuation with English words detached from context, just as something with a pleasant shape or sound.
RW: I think so, yeah. That is interesting the way they use English. I love it.
AS: How are shorts distributed where you live? Can you run across them by accident while channel-surfing, or do you really have to seek them out? They’re very difficult to find here in the U.S.
RW: Good question…well, I think obviously a film festival is the easiest place to see them on a big screen, but what’s happened now with the internet has really opened things up. Over here we’ve got BBC Film Network, which is really championing shorts at the moment, and that’s really taking off. Obviously YouTube, which has just gone stratospheric, is a good place, although the quality is not great, and quite often they put stuff up without your permission – which is slightly annoying, but it’s good exposure. There’s MySpace.com. And obviously Atom Films as well. There are places to look, and I think it’s getting increasingly easy.
AS: But in terms of spending a night out in the cinema, you don’t normally see shorts in front of films in the U.K.?
RW: No, sadly not. I can remember that when I was a lot younger. It’s a real shame. Now and again it’ll happen in a one-off – Rabbit showed in Hyde Park in the summer with Performance, which was great, but that was an independent event organized by the Serpentine Gallery. Seeing a short film distributed with a feature in cinemas all around the country at the same time is very, very rare. I presume there’s just no financial gain in it for the distributors, so they don’t bother.
AS: It’s too bad, because when I was growing up, HBO used to show shorts between movies, and that’s how I first ran into a lot of stuff from National Film Board of Canada. Whereas now on TV it’s very difficult to see those kind of things accidentally.
RW: Channel Four Television in the U.K. do a bit of that. Every now and again, there’ll be a little five-minute film that comes out of nowhere. But it’s very rare.
AS: What are you working on now? Have you got a new short in the works?
RW: At the moment I’m starting to work on ideas for the next film, which is going to feature a character called Meathead, who has cropped up through the years…
AS: Oh, yes, I completely forgot to ask you about the gentleman with a cutlet for a head. He’s appeared in many of your works, and frankly I was wondering why he didn’t have his own series by this point.
RW: Well, that’s the plan! (laughs) I’ve been so swamped with dealing with Rabbit, which has done so well, it’s constantly going to festivals – I’ve just been producing a Rabbit DVD, which arrived today, and it’s available through the Website now – now that that’s been sorted, I’m going to start writing. That’s what I shall be doing on various trips – when I go to festivals, on the plane I’ll have my sketchbook with me, and be scribbling down ideas, so I’ll be ready to come back and start with that.
AS: We’ve only seen short glimpses of Meathead’s personality, but he looks like a gentle soul, someone who runs from dogs but who will tolerate a meat tenderizer banging him repeatedly. I guess we’ll find out more about his personality as time goes on.
RW: Indeed. I think he’s slightly bewildered by the state of the world.
AS: He’s Everyman. Everymeat.
RW: Absolutely.
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