Explanimation: Animation as a tool of explaining what cannot be said with words

Galeria e Arteve Pejë 16 July, 17.00 – 18:30 Three passionate animators, moderated by Nancy Phelps, the animation journalist who carries the title Grandmother of Anibar with pride, spoke to the young audience at the municipal art gallery.

The title of the session confronted them with a paradox. To tell us how animation can explain what cannot be said with words, they had only words. No images where shown. The Anibar panels are hardcore verbal events in the midst of all the images that swirl throughout the festival. Which is good: even people who excel in the visual often find themselves in situations where they have to define their practice in words – and no better place to exercise this than in the company of young Kosovars eager to find out more about the magic and hard work of animation.

Much of the panelists’ work is available online. Highlights will be shown during the festival. And here, we got to see them in real life.
Anna Eijsbouts is a highly respected Dutch animator. Once a claypuppet stopmotion addict, she liberated her imagination once she discovered paper animation. Case in point: Hate for Sale, from 2017, a dangerously seductive meditation on how the peddling of hatred can poison our minds. ‘Through working with paper, I got to add more textures, creating a dreamlike environment where emotions can travel from one body to the next. It’s all about deciding on the spot. Very intricate – and very pretty.’ Anna, with her sharp wit and breathless eloquence, spends most of her time in animation studio’s and dance classes – both essentially worldless environments. But language was certainly not a problem to her here.

Hana Arapi was good at science in high school, back in Prizren. But her mother noticed her eye for the visual and encouraged her to study graphic design. Today, she is the proud co-founder of Amam Studio in Prishtina, one of the first independent animation studio’s in Kosova. Next to commercial jobs, she devotes herself to teaching children and teenagers the first steps in animating. And with Videosinteza, she and her team produces educational shorts of great clarity. The first one: Air Pollution for Kids, a 5 minute video laying out how power plants and old cars produce mind-boggling amounts of carbon-dioxide in Kosova – and why the future should be in public transport, bicycles and skateboards.

Jeremiah Dickey had trouble raising funds for the animation film he dreamed of, in 2012, when he was asked to join TED-Ed, the online educational initiative of the TED conferences. Ever since, he has animated and produced a torrent of 3-to-5 minute shorts that work as a tool for teachers, who can customize them to good use in their classrooms. Highlight: Two ways to animate slam poetry, using rotoscoping to express the external life and traditional hand-drawn animation to express the internal life of the troubled protagonist of a powerful spoken poem. The magic happens when the interior bursts out into the exterior, as good poetry and animation always do.

Phelps pushed them on the subject of animated documentaries, a genre she highly appreciates for its power in telling stories that cannot be told in any other way. When people are speaking about sensitive subjects such as growing up gay when all your friends are football hooligans or their first sexual experience, the only decent way is to animate their faces to protect their privacy.
The panelists had different views on this. Eijsbouts prefers the liberty of improvization, the magic she learned as a dancer. Dickey loves the meticulous phase of storyboarding, but cannot resist the structured spontaneity he learned from jazz. Arapi, finally, just sighed. She agreed with Phelps that Kosova has so many stories that are still untold and she would love to move into animated documentaries, but where to find the money, where to find the skilled people who would join her in countless voluntary hours working to create the work? For now, she is content to educate gifted youngsters, just like the Anibar Animation Academies do, who will be able to join forces with her in the future.