Sean Solomon is an artist working across animation, music, and comics, whose practice is rooted in a DIY, punk ethos. His work moves between mediums, building a visual language that exists both on and off the screen. He just returned from Europe touring with Unknown Mortal Orchestra as their opener, performing alongside his animations on CRT monitors, VHS tapes, and large scale projections.

As an animator and director, his films have screened internationally, including at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and span independent shorts as well as commercial work, including projects developed during his time with FOX’s ADHD Animation programming block. In Los Angeles, his imagery extends into public space, appearing on posters and walls across town. Videos of him singing and playing guitar alongside his hazy TV monitor animations have been going viral on TikTok and Instagram the past year or so.

@foreverseanMusic and Animation by me 🥰 #indiemusic #animation #vhs #analog #emo #folk

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He has performed in bands such as Moaning and Moses Campbell, and now releases solo work. His latest album, The World Is Not Good Enough, released on Anti- Records, is accompanied by his own comics, extending his visual storytelling directly into sound. You might “recognize his whimsical artwork from visuals collabs with Run the Jewels… and Odd Future. Now, as a fully-fledged solo artist, Sean has tied the disparate threads of his creativity together.”

His recent work engages more directly with themes of mental health, family, and an uncertain but hopeful future, while maintaining the looseness and unpredictability central to his style.

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“These songs are almost coming from a place of childlike expectations,” Sean says of the album, which features his own hand-drawn cover art in the vein of children’s author/illustrator Richard Scarry. “So many of my resentments towards the world and the people around me are because of these expectations I have of them. I tend to be sensitive. I want everything to be perfect and for people to be empathetic and thoughtful, and they just aren’t. Every song has that overall theme that things aren’t the way that they necessarily should be.”

Accompanying the album is the cartoon short, The Sean Solomon Show.

This short, all made by Solomon, with its smooth lines and soft mix is in contrast to his other more recent animated work. Largely working with VHS and CRTs, he extends the visual language seen in his music video Black Hole, pushing further into texture, distortion, and physical playback. The same sense of instability and emotional weight carries through, but now filtered through analog decay with flicker, scan lines, and signal noise.

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Black Hole becomes a recurring point of reference throughout this episode, I’d recommend watching it before listening. It captures the intersection of his animation and music practices in a distilled form. The piece reflects his instinct for blending raw, hand-drawn imagery with emotional undercurrents, creating something immediate and ruminative and hand crafted. As discussed on the podcast, it serves as a window into how he builds atmosphere and narrative across mediums, and why that synthesis has become such a defining part of his work. Short mini-doc about the making of the video.

Really excited about this episode! Bit longer than usual, hope you dig it.

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Is it happening, guys?

Is it finally happening?

The great romancen-ing of analog?

A them can dream but it does feel that way.

In a world now inundated with AI girlie pops talking through their anxiety, AI sexy MAGA nurses owning the libs, AI political slop, and AI, ya know, being a rancorous menace overall, it feels like we are primed for a slowdown. Two things are bubbling up that I think well illustrate the antithesis of AI and our collective desire for subjective, flawed beauty and absurdity: Puppets and Digital Video. Giddy up!

Click the images and stills throughout for videos and other media. Substack does not allow certain types of videos to be embedded via link.

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This past month saw the inevitable return of Coachella, the behemoth music festival that occurs in the SoCal desert each Spring. The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, the storied and esteemed puppet group, appeared at Coachella performing alongside the likes of Pink Pantheress and Justin Bieber. I love their fake-out of introducing “Geese” to a confused but excited crowd. It’s a goose puppet, not your Dad’s favorite modern band of the last decade. The BBMT feels ever-relevant, especially now. Puppets are the antithesis of AI in many ways. They are tangible, oddly shaped, require a human to be brought to life, and have a fun, impressionistic essence. Here they are now, lip syncing to Dear Evan Hanson’s Ben Platt live rendition of Addison Rae’s Diet Pepsi. Why am I getting emotional?

@coachellaYour parents could never understand… @Bob Baker Marionette Theater Watch the Coachella livestream on @YouTube all weekend long. #BobBakerMarionetteTheater #AddisonRae #BenPlatt#benplattla

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The BBMT is one of many puppet groups exciting audiences now. They are currently in the process of buying their building to have a more permanent home for the over 3000 puppets that comprise the collection. Less family friendly and more late night weird, Poncili Creación is an experimental art collective known for its wildly imaginative performances, handmade sculptures, and immersive visual worlds. Founded by siblings Pablo and Efrén Del Hierro in Puerto Rico, the group blends elements of theater, puppetry, and installation art to create chaotic yet deeply expressive works that explore themes of identity, mythology, and transformation.

Similarly, Freak Nature Puppets is a Los Angeles–based performance group known for their expressive, handmade puppet creations and immersive live shows. Drawing from DIY traditions, their work features large-scale, often abstract characters made from found materials, foam, and fabric, emphasizing texture, movement, and physical presence. Their performances blur the line between theater, installation, and improvisation, inviting audiences into playful, unconventional environments. Get weird, get freaky, get your whole body into this whole puppet, and let’s have a good time. FNP acted as “security detail” for the BBMT, their occasional collaborator, at Coachella, with their large-scale puppets providing a barrier between the audience and the performer.

Puppets are in theaters, at Coachella, they're moshing, they're reciting poetry. Sophie Truax, an artist and social media puppet influencer, initially thought her creations would serve to help promote her music. Her audience, of almost 1 million across platforms, was more excited about the puppets. Using her puppets as avatars, she creates short comic works about her own life and the lives of others. Also, they smoke.

One of the hottest tickets in town is for Ronnie’s Big Idea, an experimental theater show at the New Hollywood Theater, which uses a deceptively simple puppet premise to explore ambition, logic, and absurdity. Created by Sophie Becker, whose practice is rooted in experimental theater and a fascination with vintage figures like Jerry Mahoney. Ronnie’s Big Idea has recently extended its run, reflecting a growing audience for intimate, character-driven performances with PUPPETS. Give us the silly immediacy we can only experience in person.

I’m a stop-motion animator, so I’m a natural collector. Give me the seashells, the torn photos, the huddled electronics yearning to breathe free. Whenever I find a cheap, brick cell phone from the 2000s, I buy it. This beautiful detritus cocoons the spaces in my home, ebbing with toys, ephemera, and other people’s memories. A few years ago, I brought several of these into school to give away to my students, as I occasionally do with art supplies. Nobody wanted them. “What do you use this for?” asked one student. Um, for fun, obviously! They didn’t want my magpie treasures, and that’s fine. This past semester, I tossed a few into my free art supply bin for students. They were gone within minutes. Something’s changed.

Olivia Rodrigo is at the precipice of her new album rollout. Her latest music video is directed by Petra Collins, her longtime collaborator and tactile image fetishist. The video for the song drop dead, on a variety of 1990s & 2000s-era camcorders and DVcams, creating a rich patina of aberrance and beautiful digital miasma. The single-serve Instagram account Lens_Addiction broke down the hardware for the shoot, which includes modern favorites like the SONY DXC D30 Betacam and the hefty PANASONIC 2 Ms4 S-VHS.

Analog media is making a big comeback online and on social media. The rise of the still point-and-shoot camera among Gen-Z has been well documented, and this interest in the commensurate moving-image technology just makes sense. In a New York Times article about the phenomenon, a trend strategist summed up the appeal of digital cameras as having “a layer of personality that most iPhone content doesn’t.” Certified cool kid 2000s camera, the Nikon Coolpix, is fetching a decent price on resale markets. Companies like Camp Snap seek to recreate the feel of analog through a digital product, with varying results. For some, it’s the aesthetic and slowdown. For others, it’s the physicality of something tangible in your hand.

@amaliebladtthe over exposure look >

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Fans of Rodrigo and Collins have taken to playing the video on their CRT monitors, or, as they are sometimes called, “big butt TVs”. The lived-in, hardwired TV monitors are as delightfully aberrant as the means by which the image is created. Online, they can be, and are often, personalized with stickers, objects littering the edges, and stacks of other media providing insight into the world of the author. Tale as old as time, a generation is romanticizing the media & media hardware of the ones before it. These tools access something that feels new and exciting, just out of reach for today’s technology. A flipped upside-down Juergen Teller.

Gamers, as is not always the case, were on this CRT craze before everyone else. Long before “2000s” became an aesthetic trend, competitive players kept CRT monitors around because they simply performed better for gaming in key ways. Unlike modern flat panels, CRTs don’t suffer from image processing delays or frame buffering, which means input feels almost instantaneous. This is something especially critical in fast-twitch genres like fighting games, rhythm games, and shooters where timing windows are razor thin. The monitors also excel in motion clarity thanks to how the electron beam refreshes the image line by line (the “refresh rate”), effectively eliminating the motion blur common on LCDs and even many modern OLEDs in fast movement

A different type of nerdy, T.A.P.E. is a Los Angeles–based analog film group dedicated to preserving and celebrating the art of shooting on film in a digital age. Bringing together artists and makers of all experience levels, T.A.P.E. (which stands for Teach Archive Preserve Exhibit) fosters a community centered on experimentation, collaboration, and hands-on learning. Through talks, workshops, and shared exploration, the group creates a space where members can slow down, engage deeply with the photographic process, and build meaningful connections. Recent meetups have included Video Tape Repair, a Data Moshing Delight, Cameraless animation workshops, and a conversation with Haneen Sidahmed, creator of Sudan Tapes Archive. They also rent out equipment and have various digitization resources. Spaces like this, and others around the world, are speaking to that direct interest and need that people have to express, capture, and explore the world around them through the analog image.

Taken together, puppets and digital video point toward a broader cultural drift away from the frictionless, optimized output of AI systems and toward forms that are slower, more tactile, and open-ended. Puppetry foregrounds the visible hand of the maker. We see the seams, the hesitation, the imperfection that invites interpretation and even disgust. Digital video, especially in its lo-fi, looped, and independently produced forms, similarly resists the polish of algorithmic media by preserving noise, delay, and subjectivity as part of its aesthetic value. Both mediums create space for ambiguity, where the viewer is not just consuming but actively completing the experience.

In that sense, the appeal of these forms isn’t nostalgia so much as a preference for media that doesn’t fully resolve itself. Against the accelerating certainty of AI-generated content, puppets and digital video offer something slower, more interpretive, and ultimately more human: a space where meaning is unstable, authorship is visible, and imperfection becomes the point rather than a flaw.

Just remember, everybody loves Puppets.

Click the images for links to the trailers & films.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)
Robert Zemeckis, Richard Williams (Animation Director)

This image blends the squash and stretch and transforming quality of cartoon animation and uncannily anchors it to the real world in a haunting way- stripping the wholesomeness of the binary fantasy that cartoons are good and bad things only happen in the real world- toons can be evil too man, and when they are their helium inflated balloon eyeballs don’t float away they cut like daggers. I’m still scared out there somewhere there is an evil toon holding the dip.
— Nirgends

JOY STREET (1995)
Suzan Pitt

There is something here that points to a kind of martyrdom imagery, the kind where lady saints hold their plucked eyeballs or their severed breasts serenely on a platter as if to say I know what pain is. Or this is what it looks like to feel that way. This shot is visceral and relatable its not about the actual pain but the spiritual pain that the image refers to that is so powerfull as a moment of montage in a film that deals with the melding of internal and external worlds that this image so succinctly captures, it is not about the real experience of being stabbed but of the feeling of discomfort that the image elicits and how that mirrors the feeling of despair experience by the protagonist.
— Nirgends

*Second appearenace on Five Frames for Joy Street. Also a source for our last guest, James Thacher.

GUMBY THE MOVIE (1995)
Art Clokey

Forever burned into my mind, before that one stop motion short where the girl cries plastic pearl tears Lowbelly was crying real pearls watching Gumby transform (me too). Animation is magic! It is alchemy and transformation and transmutation- I saw and believed as a kid that this was possible true and real, and now I know that through animation a dog can cry pearls.
— Nirgends

LES ESCARGOTS (1966)
René Laloux

The painterly textures, the purple hues, ambiguity of the imagery, if a window is always a portal how are you using it? Is that an alien? is it a plant? what is happening? Les Escargots to me is a criminally underrated film, this frame is trapped between two worlds the one of humans and snails about to collide in an absurd surreal intersection.
— Nirgends

THE GAMES OF ANGELS (1964)
Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica

This frame encapsulates the whole feeling of the film, it is tragic and alien but also beautiful. impenetrable by logic or visual recognition but there is a feeling that something is utterly wrong, that something wrong has been done that we cannot see or truly understand but only vaguely feel we know.
— Nirgends

Thank you, Jenny! Until next time.

Things Going On:

• The Hollywood Reporter found the cure for brain rot: Experimental Film <3. “The scientists settled on challenging animated shorts” to show their subjects as a potential antidote for YouTube “empty-calorie content”. We need the list!!!

• This upcoming weekend at the Philosophical Research Society, “OUT THERE: FAR-OUT INTERGALACTIC ANIMATION, 7th House's multi-month celebration of surreal and celestial animated cinema” kicks off with a René Laloux double feature.

• Another 7th House screening. Catch the cult 1983 glam rock sci-fi film, Rock & Rule, screening (with live performance + guest author of “Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam”) at Whammy this Friday.

• This Avatar leak drama has everything. Hackers, high budgets, and lowbrow cinephiles.

• Not actually news news but I’ve asked all my classes this week if any of them care about the Stranger Things animated series. Many students seem to me the demo; likes animation, nostalgia, feel good media. Not a single one interested. Who is this for?

• BBC interviewed the man behind the Iranian AI slop propaganda videos. When asked about his use of Lego, he said he uses it “because it is a world language”. Read more about animated propaganda and it’s seductive qualities there.

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Some of the films mentioned

We spoke about the uncanny animation in Piotr Kamler’s Chronopolis (1982), the only feature from the famed Polish director. Kamler’s post-humanity tale follows the “powerful immortals” of a megacity who are “jaded with eternal life”. The world around them has become a toy box for exploration with the muted faces of the beings creating, destroying, and filleting impassively. All are in wait for the “ultimate gift” but this film is not for those seeking clear narrative or science fiction exposition. The designs of the protagonists, a surrealistic Adam and Eve, suggest inspiration from Egyptian Hieroglyphics or Phoenician sculpture. The much esteemed composer, Luc Ferrari, grounds the film with his punctuated electronic music concrete score.

In the classic lineage of animators, Nirgend’s is a tinkerer. Many strange, beautiful analog processes are discovered through trial and error, through needs realized. When working for Cauleen Smith, the incredible interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Nirgends developed a printing technique in the service of Smith’s 2024 film, The Volcano Manifesto. Various media, including TikTok Videos, are transmitted from digital to analog. This process of printing video onto 35mm interrupts the immaterial smoothness of digital media, reintroducing grain, abrasion, and physical index as expressive elements. As Smith notes, the aim is to make digital images “tactile and material and visceral,” leveraging the “heavy metal materiality” of film to transform ephemeral footage into something durational and embodied.

”Ever wonder what a sound looks like?”

Drawing directly onto the optical sound strip of 35mm film, Bad boy animator Norman McLaren creates his own soundtracks filled with zips, zops, clicks, and abrasive sharp tones. In 1951’s Pen Point Percussion, McLaren shows how familiar sounds correspond to visual waveforms, then translates this principle into practice by inscribing shapes and patterns onto the film itself. He makes the soundtrack a graphic artifact that is inseparable from the film’s physical structure. You have a drawn element, a sonic element, an analog element, and moving image element. Back and forth, forever perhaps.

It recalls graphic scores, or graphic notation, where sound is composed through visual form rather than traditional musical notation. In John Cage’s Water Walk, for instance, the score becomes a set of instructions and gestures, mapping action to sound in a similarly expanded field. McLaren’s film operates in this same conceptual space, but collapses it even further. Instead of interpreting a score, the marks themselves are the sound, eliminating any gap between composition and execution, image and audio, notation and performance.

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Nirgends, alongside collaborator Max Winston, created Personal Demons for HellaVision / Hell’s Fables, a project born out of the collaboration between HellaVision Television and Kat Ball’s Loose Frames. The program brings together short, experimental works that are, often, deliberately low-fi with an artist-run sensibility. Positioned somewhere between an anthology series, talent showcase, and a screening platform, they emphasizes collaboration and circulation outside conventional venues, creating space for work that is informal, strange, and process-driven. Similarly, Nirgends has created work for LA Loft Movie Club, another venue for unpolished, immediate pieces of media. These spaces allow for low pressure creation with built in deadlines. They are all great places to find new weird and wonderful animation :)

Nirgends frequently points back to the people around her as integral to the work itself: Em Yue, Paris Baillie, and Max Winston as collaborators, and Mir Morales, whose donated chest X-ray becomes both material and gesture within her practice. There’s also a sense of release she describes after graduate school, a freedom from the pressure of a specific version of success, which opens the work outward, away from individual authorship and toward a more communal mode.

Jenny and I both live in LA, an animation industry center, which can feel contradictorily isolating as an artist. Here is where things, in theory, get made, but where, when, and how that happens can be obfuscating. Having spaces like this, even the Minneapolis-based ones like in the case of Hellavision, is encouraging. It’s a space to create not in a vacuum, but in commune with your peers. Process is visible, circulation is shared, and the work can exist outside the pressures of industry timelines and expectations. We need that.

Nirgends reached out to the company Sugru to propose a collaboration, and their enthusiastic response was to send pounds and pounds of the material to her studio. Sugru, most often used to repair electronics, is a silicone-based, moldable compound that can be shaped by hand and then cures into a flexible, durable form. Somewhere between glue and clay, its intended use leans toward maintenance. Its use lingers as a reminder of how industrial substances can be redirected toward unexpected, expressive ends. Also I kind of want to take a bite out of it. I mean, look at it.

Not animation related but definitely related to liminal, uncategorizable technology: McDonald’s shakes. As mentioned last episode, they hover at the edge of category. Cellulose aka Wood Pulp slips in quietly, holding it all together. Yum! Not legally enough milk to be called ice cream or a milkshake, these “shakes” are milk-adjacent, thickened into being.

That’s it for now!

More soon on Jenny Nirgends including her five frames later this week. The Nanny Lynn essay has turned into a bigger project, which I’m excited about, so expect that later in the year. See you in the Funny Papers!

Jenny Nirgends is a multidisciplinary artist and experimental animator originally born in Mexico whose work spans film, sculpture, collage, and installation. A collector of objects, materials, and stories, she builds intricate, handmade worlds using stop-motion, puppetry, and assemblage, blending personal mythologies and exploratory histories into hybrid tactile forms.

She holds a BA in Film Studies from Michigan State University and an MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts. Her films, including Siempre a las Doce and The Last Wild Bird in Heaven, explore themes of transformation and emotional memory.

Her recent exhibition Affect Cabinet at Automata in Los Angeles featured assemblage sculptures and the premiere of her film Chimeras Lullaby, continuing her investigation into fragmented bodies and ways of seeing.

Alongside her independent practice, she works on commissioned projects and teaches animation.

I recently screened a piece of Jenny’s, The Last Wild Bird in Heaven, at LA Filmforum as part of Femme Grotesquerie. It’s a striking stop motion film about growing up, acting out, and loss. The piece, her thesis film from CalArts, is ruminative with deft craft and consideration. Inspired by personal experience, loss and faith are explored from a young girl’s vantage.

The emotional core unfolds with a quiet intensity, balancing moments of tenderness with unsettling imagery that lingers. Jenny’s use of texture and movement gives the film a tactile immediacy. The handmade quality of the stop motion mirrors the fragility of the subject matter, reinforcing the instability of childhood perception when confronted with grief.

Rather than offering resolution, the film dwells in ambiguity, allowing its symbols and gestures to accumulate meaning gradually. It’s a work that feels both intimate and expansive, grounded in specificity yet open to broader reflections on belief, absence, and the ways we construct understanding from what we cannot fully grasp.

While she has made character based work, Jenny’s practice is expansive. In the episode, we talk about her more explicitly experimental work like Chimera’s Lullaby and Beautiful Summer. Both pieces use non-traditional means to create rich tapestries of texture on film, X-Rays and 35mm photos respectively.

Chimera’s Lullaby is crafted from a mixture of sourced X-Rays, from thrift stores, friends, and Ebay. The X-Rays were cut and spliced together on 16mm revealing images in ways they were never meant to be seen.

Similarly, Beautiful Summer moves between 16mm, 35mm, and digital all in one swipe. Working with midcentury 35mm stills from composer Jill Fraser’s family archive, the piece revisits and reworks these images through reenactment and re-photography, letting past fragments slip into the present. “The analogue-digital re-output to 35mm and 16mm creates an expanded motion, interpreted in pixels, these microscopic undulations exist like a memory- fleeting between frames.”

In tandem with our discussion about Nirgend’s personal work we discuss animation labor and its fetishization both inside and outside of our community. How many frames?? How many dang frames??? We may never know.

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Things Going On:

• Harry Smith Alert! There is a series of multi-day multi-venue screenings and events for the acclaimed filmmaker happening in LA at the end of the month. Rani Singh, Harry Smith Historian, is conducting an “immersive presentation” at the Philosophical Research Society for the kickoff on April 24th.

• Musician and Animator, John Andrews, is currently on tour and is doing a number of “solo animation shows” across the country. John regularly performs alongside his creations. Dates are in late April & May across the Eastern seaboard, South, and Midwest.

• Shadow Kitchen, an artist run screening series, is having their “Animation Spring Mix” next week. Delighted to have my 2021 film, Up Close, playing in the program alongside some absolute bangers. Coaxial, April 16th.

• Internet darling, The Amazing Digital Circus, comes to theaters in the US this Summer. Vvvvvv curious to see how it is received.

• LA is really eating well this next week. Lightstruck, the curatorial project of Mark Toscano & Zena Gray, has their second Polish Animation screening April 16th at 2220 Arts & Archives. Chance & Transition (1975-89) is the follow up to their earlier screening, Flames in Dark Places (1962-74).

• Famed NBA star James Harden partnered with an AI company to make a new short. It looks bad. As the TikTok comments say, “Damn Unc, AI?” From foul baiting to rage baiting.

• My favorite piece of animation this week was this piece of Machinima. Youtuber Phil TM built a synchronized racetrack on Trackmania set to Debussy’s Claire De Lune.

• Prismatic Ground, the experimental documentary and film festival, is happening again later this month. Wish I could go! They always have great programming.

Los Angeles Filmforum presents Stacey Steers: Alchemical Collages, a program of handmade, process-driven animation that reanimates fragments of early cinema into uncanny, speculative forms. The screening takes place Tuesday, April 14, 2026 at 7:30 p.m. at 2220 Arts + Archives (2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles), with Stacey Steers in person. I’ll be introducing the program as well as hosting the Q&A!

Weaving together archetype, allegory, and wonder, Stacey Steers’ films create a mythos all their own. Her heroines, lifted from early 20th-century silent films, ebb toward eternity, inky waves alight in their swell. Their collaged effigies move through narratives of personal recollection, environmental anxiety, and science fiction convention.

Ruminative and unfixed, Steers’ worlds are steeped in implication, yet unclaimed by certainty. The material becomes mercurial as exploratory dreamscapes reimagine these appropriated images, loosening them from their original contexts and allowing new meanings to surface.

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Working through an intuitive, labor-intensive process, Steers prints, hand-processes, and photographs each frame on 35mm film, imbuing the work with a tactile, almost alchemical presence that bridges cinema’s past with an unsettled, speculative present.

If animation is often framed as a medium of intuitive creation, Steers treats it as a practice of excavation, mining the archive. Eadweard Muybridge studies, silent-era actresses, nineteenth-century engravings, are all subject to a slow, recursive process of reconfiguration where meaning accumulates through repetition, variation, and drift.

Animation here is not seamless illusion but the visible labor of making and remaking; each frame bears its construction, foregrounding a medium that can hold contradiction. While the collage itself becomes a way of thinking through cinema itself, its histories, its ghosts, and its unrealized possibilities.

Featured films include:

• Stacey Steers, Phantom Canyon (2006), 10 min.

• Stacey Steers, Night Hunter (2012), 16 min.

• Stacey Steers, Tbilisi Silk (2024), 4 min. 43 sec.

• Stacey Steers, Edge of Alchemy (2017), 19 min.

• Stacey Steers, The Stars Watch from Long Ago (2026), 22 min.

Watch Online

Several of her films can be found in part or total on her Website & Vimeo. Enjoy :)

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I was suddenly aware of how sticky my makeup felt on my face. The red on my nose had been repeatedly applied because I kept sweating it off. I had changed my mind a few times in the past week about the required costume. I wanted to be in the experience, have fun, but not be too ridiculous. Eventually, I settled on something just from shopping my closet and busting out a little Ben Nye.

You could call it sidequesttmaxxxing. I love a novelty, a new experience. I’ve lived in LA for about a decade and have never satisfied my goal of being on a game show. A single-serving television experience is what I wanted, to be on in the background in waiting rooms across America. A brief application and a drive to the Valley later, I was under the sparkling lights of a well-oiled Game Show machine.

“So, Sam, what do you do?”

The Game Show Host’s megawatt smile beamed at me. He was smaller than I expected; actors always are.

“I’m an artist, and I teach Animation History at CalState LA, go Golden Eagles, and at USC.”

There was a brief throng of applause at CalState LA and a sharp eruption at the mention of the University of Southern California (USC).

“Wow,” said the Host, smiling, “Good for you!”

I grinned my painted grin back at him, the pink circles on my cheeks rising with the tide. What I said was true, and would remain true, for about 24 hours. Then, the program I was a part of would be shut down forever.

I should not have dressed up as a clown.

USC’s Expanded Animation (XA) MFA was one of the few programs that treated Animation as a living medium rather than a pipeline. Fairly new; it launched in 2022 within the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA), USC’s storied film department. It was built around the idea that Animation isn’t just feature films or TV - it’s installation, performance, games, fine art, coding, projection, whatever form the work needs to take. Sweet, beautiful, weird, and expansive Animation.

XA was deliberately interdisciplinary, pulling from across the SCA and beyond, and it attracted people who weren’t interested in fitting into industry boxes. It was small, experimental, and, by most accounts, working. The barely 3 year old program was seeing a progressive artistic distillation each Spring. Students were producing ambitious work, and the program was already earning recognition, including several grants and a Student Academy Award.

I joined XA the year it launched, teaching their Survey of World Animation course with a focus on experimental Animation. I’ve taught Animation History in various capacities for the last several years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to teach a class quite like this to students like the ones I had at XA. At New York University, my classes have focused on American studio history, so we watch Scooby Doo, ¡Mucha Lucha!, and all my favorite Silly Symphonies. When I teach at CalState LA, it’s worldwide-inclusive but more geared toward traditional canonical Animation, so we watch Norman McLaren, Marcos Magalhães, and Pritt Parn (if they need to wake up). XA was a space to showcase more challenging, robust, and obscure works, like the type of films I write about here. Even more conventional works, like Disney’s Bambi, can be viewed through a different lens and recontextualized. All in pursuit of ruminating on the question - What is Experimental Animation?

In February 2026, the University of Southern California announced that the Expanded Animation program would be discontinued effective June 30, citing a “routine review” and “declining enrollment.” That’s the official explanation, anyway. What’s clear even at a glance is that the decision landed fast and hard, with students and faculty scrambling to understand what had just happened to a program that barely had time to exist. Everyone is still reeling.

This comes on the heels of several recent, sudden school closures in the Arts. California College of the Arts is in the process of being absorbed by Vanderbilt University and will cease to exist; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia collapsed almost overnight (my alma mater!); the San Francisco Art Institute shut down after years of instability; and PAFA eliminated its degree programs entirely. This isn’t to mention the myriad of small cuts, rumblings, and rumors from a multitude of other higher ed institutions, public and private.

Different timelines, different financial specifics, but the same pattern. It’s institutions framing these moves as inevitable, while students, faculty, and staff are left to deal with the fallout of decisions they had no real part in shaping.

For a program like XA, which was designed to be forward-thinking and expansive, the institution’s lack of foresight seems especially damning. The industry is rapidly changing in ways that feel both obvious and completely unaccounted for by the people making these decisions. Traditional structures of media and viewership have already fractured; nobody really watches TV the way they used to, everything is streaming, and even that model is unstable. Many students involved in the program were making work that didn’t exist in these traditional art and media audience paradigms.

Animation studios are still trying to recalibrate in real time, cutting costs, consolidating, chasing platforms or pipelines that may not exist in five years. Skydance’s David Ellison is setting himself up to become the Standard Oil of media with the looming Warner Brothers-Paramount-Skydance merger. Mix that with the actual, present use of AI tools and the much louder executive fantasy about what AI might someday replace, and you get a broader cultural sense that the ground is shifting under everything at once.

Five days after my clown escapade, I was getting ready to attend the Annie Awards for the first time. “Animation Prom”, as it’s lovingly referred to, is an awards ceremony honoring achievements across film, television, shorts, VFX animation, and individual crafts like character animation, directing, and production design. I was able to attend through some of my work with ASIFA-Hollywood, the international animated film society that organizes the Awards and serves as one of the central professional bodies advocating for Animation. My tuxedo was back from the dry cleaners, and the stain of my red nose had finally dissipated (after a lot of Dr. Bronner’s). It was time to see K-Pop Demon Hunters win.

Throughout the night, I saw a lot of people, some I expected and some I didn’t. Friends, acquaintances, luminaries. Many of my colleagues from XA attended. The mood, despite our formal wear and despite the beautiful environment, was muted. Having all talked about it for the past several days, what else was there to say? We were here, in the belly of the studio beast, surrounded by Animation. The people who made it, breathed it, loved it, and lived it. Most of them started somewhere like we did, in classrooms and programs that gave them time and space to figure out what their work even was. We’re part of that ecosystem, or at least we were.

As animation programs and schools condense and change, what does that mean for this ecosystem? What happens when the spaces designed for experimentation, risk, and failure start disappearing? What happens to the artists who don’t fit neatly into industry roles, or who need time to develop something that isn’t immediately legible as content? If the entry points narrow, the work narrows with it.

I eventually found my seat in the orchestra and settled in for an over three-hour award show. Many clips were shown, many hands were shaken, and many men thanked their wives for their support in their acceptance speeches. I lasted about an hour and a half then started getting sad. Just long enough to see producer Ralph Farquhar, presenting alongside Bruce W. Smith, castigate AI and say Fuck Donald Trump while on the live stream. We love to see it, chat.

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After a few more awards, I slipped out and walked outside. Autograph hounds were posted at every entrance. All men holding neat piles of clipboards, papers, and cardboard sleeves cradling numerous photos, ready to be plucked out at a moment’s notice. I didn’t expect autograph seekers, professionals who seek out celebrity hotspots to flip autographs for sale, to be here.

“Who are you waiting for?” I asked them.

“Whoever’s here,” replied one of the men.

They looked at me for a second, trying to decide whether I was worth investing any time in. It’s a common look in Los Angeles.

“But, like, specifically, who are you waiting for?”

“Anyone famous.” said another. “We heard Matt Groening was inside.”

They heard correctly. He was in there.

Matt Groening, best known as the creator of The Simpsons, attended The Evergreen State College, a school long defined by its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, narrative evaluations instead of grades, and a kind of scrappy, anti-institutional ethos that encouraged students to figure things out on their own terms. He’s one of several notable alumni, alongside artists like Craig Barlett and Lynda Barry. A school now undergoing its own slow erosion, with budget shortfalls translating into cuts to programs, facilities, and student life. Only a week after XA’s own announcement, Evergeen launched a new series of “reductions” and “operational changes” to address its current budget crisis.

Those autograph seekers are moving in a similar way to the Instituions. And that’s the disconnect that stuck with me more than anything else that night. Inside, people were celebrating Animation as an art form—lifetime achievements, craft, community, the idea that this work matters. Outside, it was flattened into proximity and extraction, reduced to signatures on glossy prints stuffed between cardboard slats. The people inside didn’t just appear in there. They came out of programs, out of spaces that gave them time to experiment, to fail, to make something that didn’t make sense yet.

It felt like two shades of the same ecosystem running in parallel: one built on years of study, experimentation, and collective investment, and another orbiting it, skimming off whatever value it could recognize. And somewhere in between those two worlds are the institutions that are supposed to sustain the first one - quietly cutting, restructuring, disappearing.

At a minimum, students, faculty, and staff need to be treated with respect. Give them clarity, options, and real support. Not this quiet administrative redirect and a shrug. Workers and students in the arts are already navigating a lot. Add to that the broader pressures - Department of Education instability, student loan policy swings buried in massive federal bills, the demographic drop tied to the post-1991 birthrate decline, and increasingly hostile immigration policies that deter international students - and it’s not hard to see why enrollment is down. But that context should be a reason to invest more thoughtfully, not to pull the rug out. Institutions need to be transparent early enough for people to make informed decisions. Otherwise, the cost of institutional instability is foisted directly onto people, especially the students, who have the least power to absorb it. If institutions want to claim they support the next generation of artists, this is the moment to prove it.

Starting off the week as an employed clown and ending the week underemployed in a tuxedo does feel like something out of a cartoon. I wonder if it’s the kind that could someday win an award.

Share Smear Frame Podcast

Here, James Thacher shares his five favorite frames from across animation history, reflecting on what makes each moment work and why these particular images continue to shape the way he sees, makes, and thinks about moving pictures.

Click the images for links to the trailers & films.

Joy Street by Suzan Pitt (1995)

“Carrying a feeling of this intensity and specificity through a production is awe inspiring. It’s difficult to pick a frame but the relief when she finally pries the window (frame) open is magic. If you live in a city, this head out the window trick works, if only for a little bit.

The mouse is your friend

The mouse is community

The mouse is your neighbor

The mouse is your cat

The mouse is yourself” - Thacher

The Ballad of Maria Lassnig by Maria Lassnig Kantate (1992)

“There’s something aspirational about this one and how ernest and open Maria is. It’s so outside of my register but I hope to one day make a film like this, maybe when I’m 73! There’s a biography of Lassnig that came out a few years ago that I’m eager to read.” - Thacher

Jessica by Amy Lockhart (2014)

“Riding an elevator, living it up when you’re going down!”

“I tell students to embrace the boil, hold and still frame (what a lifehack!) but I’ve never been this brave. I love Lockhart’s use of shadow here and the sound design is sublime.” - Thacher

Cosmic Clock by Al Jarnow (1979)

“To convey to children a deeply existential concept like the infinite dilation of time without scaring the shit out of them is no easy feat. Appreciate the subtle camera pan away from the aging man right before he skeletonizes. This aired on a Sesame Workshop produced PBS show called 3-2-1 Contact in 1979. That year they also aired a highly detailed making of a KISS concert segment.” - Thacher

The Wishes of Women in Gaza by Haneen Koraz & children of Palestine (2025)

“Go watch these films by the children of Gaza. This one captures the moments of community that exist even under the most oppressive violent conditions. Haneen [Koraz] is an inspiration to every teacher that joy and experimentation can be found in any place.” - Thacher

Thank you, James! Until next time.

It also feels like a way to keep building a small constellation around each conversation. Much like Clanky, we’re all made of star stuff. These posts are a place to gather a few of those thoughts and give them a little more room. Not a full explanation, just a few pieces of star stuff expanding outward from the epicenter.

If I link anything from Instagram or TikTok, these are links! Please click and check them out. Is this obvious? I don’t know.

“I’m interested in emerging technology”

Sometimes hearing my voice back I can’t even tell if I’m being sarcastic or not. I suppose I’m being genuine since I did attend the Augmented Worlds Expo in Long Beach last year on a media pass for this podcast. This podcast did not exist but I wanted to see some stuff in VR dammit. I saw a few panels but, as I was there on the last day, most of the heavy hitters had already presented. Far too many people were bringing up Grand Theft Hamlet for my taste. In the expo hall, I was able to test out some cool things like VR with an omnidirectional walking pad where I just walked around a field for a while. I love walking around fields!

There were a lot of different companies peddling their AI-assisted animation software, inviting attendees to try them out and see what they could do. Every single one failed my go-to AI animation thwarter; Animate a person putting on a sweater. This seemingly simple movement is incredibly complex to animate. Where do the hands go? The elbows? One arm, then the other? One particular instance, I forget the software company, created a person sort of exploding into a sweater. The attendent apologized for the software’s mistake and encouraged me to try again with a simpler prompt. It still sort of exploded.

Pencil XR, which I erroneously call Pencil VR, is a piece of drawing software made for a VR headset. The headset overlays step-by-step instructional drawing information atop a real time view. You can select from a sheet of preselected drawings and follow along on physical paper as Leo, their paintbrush wielding mascot, takes you through the process. I really enjoyed this actually! I asked the developers if there were any plans to allow users to upload their own materials to draw on paper. No plans as of yet but there were curious about my approach to it as an animation professional. I should have told them I was interested in emerging technologies. Fuck!

Community Notes

We briefly spoke about Helen Hill, the late American animator, activist, teacher, and writer. Hill is a personal animation hero of mine. She was a cool punk nerd mixing together animation, community, and DIY into one. Hill treated filmmaking as something communal and accessible, closer to folk art than industry product. Through screenings, workshops, and collaborations, she helped cultivate a small but devoted culture around experimental animation that valued warmth, curiosity, and the idea that anyone with patience and imagination could make moving images.

Her publication Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet captures that philosophy in printed form. The booklet mixes actual recipes with instructions, reflections, and diagrams for handmade filmmaking. Loads of contributions from other handcrafted filmmaking titans like Naomi Uman, Richard Reeves, and Christine Panushka. It’s scanned, it’s rough, it’s hard to read at some points. I love this thing so much. It’s playful and it’s generous, presenting filmmaking as a craft that can happen in kitchens, living rooms, and backyards, where creative experiments unfold with the same improvisational spirit as putting on a show in your basement with friends.

I’d love to write something longer all about Hill someday. In the meantime, you can learn more about her on the Harvard Film Archive. Her Cookbooklet can be purchased from Shapeshifters Gallery in Oakland. You can also download the whole thing from Film Labs.

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Outside, what a concept

What is it about a picnic that gets animators excited? The Ottawa International Animation Festival has been throwing picnics at their festival for over twenty years. There is something strangely wholesome about taking a break from the festival, leaving the theater, putting down your pass, and going to a picnic in the park. It makes me think of being in junior high school taken out for a school assembly. We were learning algebra but now for some reason we are watching an interpretive dance review. Once, a wannabe boy band of men in their 30s performed for a solid 45 minutes. To this day, I ask myself, “Was Ball in the House real”?

In tandem with the picnic, OIAF holds a pumpkin carving contest with wild results. One year, I saw someone make a pumpkin zoetrope, just begging for a flickering candle to be set beside it. It’s good to give animators an activity.

The Animator’s Friend did a series of interviews at this past year’s OIAF Picnic including with yours truly. I mostly talked my favorite store in the mall, Lids, and not animation. My bad. I also recently stumbled on this 2011 episode of a defunct animation podcast, the Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum, where they record a similar jaunt around the picnic interview series including with Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby. Regardless of year, everyone is probably leaving with a sun burn and/or day drinking headache.

Animator picnics have been springing up with more regularity post Covid. Seattle’s Sea Slug Animation Festival has one in Othello Park with Stefan Gruber’s Rock Paper Scissors Hand Crafted Animation Fest. I’ve co-hosted one alongside Jenny Nirgends and Kat Ball at the Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round. The picnics feel less like curated events and more like small, wandering gatherings of artists orbiting the same strange sun. Blankets, sketchbooks, half-finished ideas, and quiet conversations spread across the grass while animators pass snacks and little moving secrets.

James Thacher and Amanda Bonaiuto treat the whole thing less like a formal meetup and more like an open field for animation people to drift into, trade thoughts, and remember that animation doesn’t just live in studios or on screens. It also lives in the conversations, the experiments, and the small communities that keep the medium strange and alive!!

Animation Big, Animation Small

Talking about his most recent experience at the Yosemite adjacent Upstream residency, Thacher detailed his experience using a type of “Lazy Susan” to rotate his dollhouse set. It’s circular motion allowed for Thacher to easily move his set to best accomdate his cinematic needs. This type of rotation harkens back to the early days of filmmaking. Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, constructed in 1892, was the World’s First Film Studio and was constructed with a retractable roof. The base of it was on a circular track that enabled it to capture the light throughout the day as the sun set.

The early work being made by Edison and his employees, like W. K-L. Dickson amongst others, was shot with a Kinetograph, an early motion picture film camera, intended for release on a Kinetoscope. These devices predate traditional film exhibition as we understand it today. Instead of a large audience watching one film, these devices were meant for single users to peer inside, like a peep show. A Kinetoscope parlor would have several of these devices on the floor, each preloaded with a 50 foot film loop depicting anything from sneezing to dancing to boxing. We are over a hundred years away from this and, yet, we cannot resist the call of a looping dance video. At least a Kinetoscope can’t fall behind my bed frame and loop the same TikTok audio over and over again until I claw it back up.

Dickson, alongside Herman Casler, created a cheaper, simpler version of the Kinetoscope. Their Mutoscope was, essentially, a large sexy flipbook. After depositing payment, a user would peer into the viewer and progress the images themselves by turning a crank. The rolodex like roll of images would spin, progressively revealing each subsequent frame of motion.

Animation Big, Animation Smaller

Another place you can place your peepers is right into Peephole Cinema. Ruisdael Clouds was created for exhibition in this San Fransisco based micro microcinema. Noted website for Freaks & Weirdos, Atlas Obscura states that the single serve cinema is perfect for those who want to “crouch down and crane their necks to peer into the small hole” in order to be “rewarded with an endless loop of short films”. Started by Laurie O’Brien in 2013, Peephole Cinema was born from a desire to “find a way to bring animations to a wider audience”. O’Brien took inspiration other local immersive, ephemeral public art installations like The Wave Organ and the SF Camera Obscura. There are currently two operating Peephole Cinemas: 280 Orange Alley in San Francisco & 97 Wilson Ave in Brooklyn.

In a profile about the space in 2016, the San Francisco Chronicle quotes O’Brien as growing “tired of attending animation festivals where the only people in the audience were the animators”. She’s right, you know. With the cinema built right into her house, it places animation at the same level as everyone else on the street, about three feet up off the ground. If you can find the hole next to her recycling bins, you can take in a looping series of curated short films. At the time of the above profile’s release in 2016, the films on view were by Beth Krebs, Joanna Priestley, and Jill Taffet. According to the cinema’s website, the current artists on view at the SF location are Kelli Anderson & Tala Rae Schlossberg. Hit after hit.

Things Going On:

• Sweet featurette from the Wall Street Journal on Aardman Animation and their issues in getting their preferred brand of clay.

• Lightstruck has two programs of Polish Animation coming up in the next month. Both will probably sell out! Get tickets while you can.

• Loose Frames is freaking out on April 5th at Heavy Manners Library.

• Women in Animation put out a vague statement about the recent closing of several domestic schools and animation programs, including USC’s XA department where I taught an experimentally focused animation history course. Of course, you wouldn’t know that from reading it because it doesn’t mention any schools or programs by name. The cynic in me reads this like a plea to their own institution justifying the need for their department. God speed.

• Looking forward to reading OIAF director Chris Robinson’s “part memoir, part field guide” Watch Me Jumpstart: Strutting and Stumbling Through Animation when it gets released in June.

• New Children’s Youtube Channel, Wonkybot, had a big PR push announcing its debut. It doesn’t say it’s AI generated but look at this stuff. AI usage will continued to be obfuscated in animation and especially so for children’s media. Looks bad man.

• Great Jim Henson program coming up in LA at the Philosophical Research Society. They are playing his feature, The Cube.

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The joy in people talking about the new Gorillaz short, The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God, is almost vibrational.

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Los Angeles Filmforum presents Femme Grotesquerie, a curated program of contemporary experimental animation that challenges and expands conventional representations of femininity through bold visual language and material experimentation. The screening takes place Sunday, March 8, 2026 at 7:30 p.m. at 2220 Arts + Archives (2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles), and will feature a post-screening discussion with filmmaker Jenny Nirgends and curator Sam Gurry (That’s me).

The program brings together ten short animated works spanning direct animation, stop-motion and digital techniques. Across the selections, artists embrace the grotesque, the excessive and the unruly, depicting worlds “lived, imagined, subverted, or reclaimed.” The films juxtapose humor, discomfort, tenderness and volatility to foreground voices and visions often overlooked in mainstream animation.

From the glitter-bombed 16mm of Moon Cycle to the animated porcelain puppets of On Weary Wings Go By, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, and the visceral imagery of The Gnawer of Rocks (Mangittatuarjuk), recently screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the works in this program stage feminine aesthetics and narratives “to be wielded, distorted, reclaimed, and reimagined on the animators’ own terms”.

Discussion to follow with filmmaker Jenny Nirgends and myself.

This screening argues that the grotesque is not an import from live-action but is a foundational logic of animation itself. Long before contemporary discourse around body horror or “extreme cinema,” animation has operated as a space where bodies are inherently mutable. Anything is possible, everything is modular. From Victoria Vincent’s hyperpop existential dread to Sophie Koko Gate’s libidinal squelching, femininity in animation has always been constructed through distortion, exaggeration, and reassembly.

To be seen as acceptable, femininity has historically been forced into coherence, restraint, and control. Bodies must hold their shape. Desires must remain contained. Those who fail are marked as excessive, grotesque. Femme grotesquerie begins at that threshold, but refuses its terms. What happens when the feminine seizes the means of image making? Excess cultivated, reformed. The grotesque, no longer a stigma, becomes something to be celebrated, feared, or desired.

Animation makes this possible because it is already a medium of build up and breakdown. No image is made without specific intent and time. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue (1997), with it’s fractured narrative and recursive animation, is frequently cited as a touchstone for live-action psychological horror. It’s an obfuscated source of inspiration for Black Swan (2010). Darren Aronofsky took specific visual cues from Kon to be remixed with Natalie Portman in place of the cel animated protagonist, Mina.

What emerges from all this work is a shared commitment to mutable form. It’s an insistence that femininity is most legible at the point where it breaks down. Animation, with its frame-by-frame construction and material plasticity, becomes the medium where this instability is not only represented but produced at it’s most vivid. Live action could never.

Featured films include:

• Justine Lai Moon Cycle (2024) 3 min. (screening on 16mm!)

• Alice Bloomfield Larval (2025) 12 min.

• Amy Lockhart Jessica (2014) 5 min.

• Anu-Laura Tuttelberg On Weary Wings Go By (2024) 11 min.

• Jenny Nirgends The Last Wild Bird in Heaven (2024) 7 min.

• Victoria Vincent Twins in Paradise (2020) 10 min.

• Sofia Carillo Prita Noire (Black Doll) (2011) 8 min.

• Sophie Koko Gate Slug Life (2018) 7 min.

• Jenny Jokela Dollhouse Elephant (2025) 11 min.

• Louise Flaherty Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2024) 15 min.

Full notes here & Cartoon Brew shout out there

Lee Webster from T.A.P.E., a sick as hell local analog media organization, was kind enough to interview me a bit about the program for their March zine. You can check out part of it in Scenes in LA.

Really excited about this screening. Oddly enough, Amy Lockhart brought out Victoria Vincent for a talk tonight following a screening at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago. You can check out the program here, notes are adapted from my own from a previous Vincent screening last year.

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Can’t make it? Lucky for you some of these are online! Enjoy, you animation lovers, you.

James Thacher is a mixed media animator, filmmaker, and tenant’s right organizer currently based in Brooklyn. His work, often drawn on paper, has an effervescent yet grounded quality to it. Renderings dance across their forms but characters move with purpose. Aberration embraced and real life transformed into something more vivid, more subjective, and, perhaps, more real.

I first became aware of James’ work years ago when Prismatic Ground, an experimental documentary and avant-garde film festival, had some online interactions in the penumbra of Covid. I found his piece that played in 2022, Ruisdael Clouds, to be incredibly striking. Thacher describes the painted cloud inspiration for this piece, by the eponymous Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael, as “massively imposing and ephemerally vaporous”. The ebbing visuals create analogs to the digital cloud and “thirsty servers that can never be turned off”. Documentary Magazine, in a review of the festival, said “Thacher considers the billowy formations in Jacob von Ruisdael’s landscape paintings…the screen shimmers and writhes, isolating the clouds in this brief glimpse, contemplating their ominous, looming presence in the skies”.

In addition to Thacher’s personal practice, we also discuss his research and work with Nanny Lynn Ochberg. Thirty years ago, VHS tapes containing striking Commodore Amiga animations started showing up at parties, micro cinemas, and living rooms across the country. Each copy was made to satisfy the audience's thirst for more of these narratively diverse films showcasing fairy tales, dinosaurs, consumption, play, politics, and even the Bosnian War. Those holding their tapes were left hungry in their pursuit of figuring out the true identity of its creator, Nanny Lynn. In the late 2010s, renewed interest led to the discovery of Lynn Ochberg, an Octogenarian Grandmother living in Florida whose oeuvre of animated wonders was created for her grandchildren. Thacher was instrumental in discovering Nanny Lynn's true identity and works with Ochberg to preserve and distribute her work.

I’ll be following shortly with a long post all about Nanny Lynn Ochberg and Thacher’s work with her. In the meantime, you can watch many of her films online.

You can check out this episode right now! Posts to follow soon.

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PS. I know, I know, I KNOW that this episode is late. A program that I have been teaching in for the last few years, Expanded Animation at USC, was recently shut down and we’re all still reeling from it. I’m writing a piece about this to come on in the following week.

“What happens when an animator follows a line, a patch of color, or a shape into the unconscious? What wild images would emerge?”

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A transition that engulfs.

It’s a gesture that feels improbably alive.

A background licking the ebbing of the screen and transforming an entire world.

Here, Annapurna Kumar shares her five favorite frames from across animation history, reflecting on what makes each moment work and why these particular images continue to shape the way she sees, makes, and thinks about moving pictures.

The Scarlet Flower, Directed by Lev Atamanov, Soyuzmultfilm, USSR (1952)

“This is a transition shot that I think about a lot. A father picks up a flower, the background dissolves, and he’s transported to a stormy land inhabited by a monster. (The flower is glowing thanks to fluorescent paint!) The transformation happens quickly and caught me off guard on my first viewing - it’s one of those scenes that can give the viewer a jolt and get them excited to see what happens next in the story.” - Kumar

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Directed by Masami Hata & William Hurtz, TMS Entertainment, Japan (1989)

“I love the costume design in the Little Nemo comics, and this pilot preserves them perfectly. It also nails the visual stiffness of the drawing style, without the character movements themselves feeling too stiff. This frame is from one of the first scenes of a very complex adventure, and it gives one of the strongest nods to the original design out of anything we see. It’s almost like the filmmakers dreamed themselves farther and farther away from the original as time went on.” - Kumar

Ponyo, Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, Japan (2008)

“Maybe it’s basic to choose a Ghibli film, but I still think the use of duplication in Ponyo is so inspiring. The swarm of tiny Ponyo goldfish is such a lovely way to use an ensemble of simplified characters to illustrate an emotion - in this case joy and freedom. I really like films that can step back and treat a group of characters less like individuals for a moment, and more like a system or an environment. Plus the water and bubbles look delicious.” - Kumar

Aranymadár (The Golden Bird), Directed by Dóra Keresztes & István Orosz, Pannonia Filmstudio, Hungary (1987)

This is the opening sequence- a wide establishing shot, then the camera slowly zooms in. Still paintings crossfade a couple times into closer framings that have more detail, and eventually we see a character under a tree that seems to be sleeping, but isn’t. It’s very painterly, while the rest of the film is much more cartoony with thick lines and flat color.

Abductees, Directed by Paul Vester, Speedy Films, UK (1995) *Wolf sequence by Karen Kelly

I’ve worked on and off for Paul for several years, organizing and scanning his archive. Finding this sequence was one of the most exciting moments of that process. Opening the box felt like opening a treasure chest. Each frame of the wolf scene is so full of gestural marks, but somehow totally smooth when played in sequence, with not a single mark out of place.

Thank you, Annapurna, for sharing your favorite frames! I’m excited to ask this of each guest and share the results here. Until next time :)

This podcast was born out of 24memespersecond, the meme page and, now, curatorial project I run with a couple of friends on Instagram. We had talked about recording a podcast for a while and actually recorded a sample episode (about the rise and fall of the Vimeo era of Animation). It didn’t work out for a few reasons, all benign, so I proceed on my own. It’s weird to listen to yourself talk! I totally get it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve hosted some sort of film interview talk show. My high school back in New Jersey had the local television studio inside of it. If you took the applicable classes, you could do the morning or evening announcements over the closed circuit televisions across the campus. The studio would hire students for low level jobs after school and I somehow wormed my way into hosting a film discussion show. It was me and my 45 year old co-producer, Tom, discussing films with whoever we could wrangle up. It was usually a odd mix; my friends, stoned and giggley, with Tom’s, staunch and not at all comfortable talking with teenagers. We traded off film selections each episode. Tune in Tuesday evenings to hear us discuss Do The Right Thing and Bridge on the River Kwai. Older women would stop me in the local grocery store certain that had seen me discussing Billy Wilder in pigtails the night before. You did, Ma’am!

Something that IS new though is having this platform to talk about things after… we talk about things. In hearing from people after the first episode, Shayna Strype, interdisciplinary artist and animator, wrote down a list of references she wanted to look more into after the episode. This seemed like a great place to start so thank you Shayna for letting me break it down!

First, some of the films mentioned:

Annapurna Kumar and I both teach Animation History and are certainly what you could call an animation nerd. It’s cringe for everyone to be a Disney Adult except for us. We love films like Hen Hop by Norman McLaren, one of many made at the National Film Board Canada, that are scratched directly onto film emulsion in order to create an image. This technique has many names; scratch film, direct animation, camera less animation to name a few. Many of McLaren’s pieces of animation made in this technique, either solo or with his frequent collaborator Evelyn Lambart, are abstract. Hen Hop is a rare piece of representative animation that is irreverent and fun! Everyone loves chickens, except for my fiancé because she is afraid of the sound their wings make.

Duck Amuck was mentioned as a film often screened on the first day of an Animation History class. For me, I love to introduce the idea of self-reflexivity early into my classroom. Animation, despite largely being a screen based medium, has a call-and-response energy to it that is unmatched by other media. Every frame is a construct and “all the world’s a cel”. Duck Amuck showcases that classic trope of a creation speaking directly to its creator with aplomb and delight. Chuck Jones has many fabulous cartoons to choose from as a favorite and this is certainly one of mine.

Diluvio was mentioned by Annapurna when talking about "Line vs. Shape vs. Volume” (something I’ll get into further in a future post). The Chilean animation collective has a number of short films all incredibly engrossing and engaging. We were speaking specifically to La Casa Lobo (The Wolf House), a feature film of collective trauma retold as a shadowy fairy tale. Mixing together cues from The Three Little Pigs, The Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland, this surreal nightmare unfolds one frame at a time. In the hellish regime of Chilean dictator Auguste Pinochet, an isolated Nazi run commune flourished in which numerous children and political dissidents were tortured and abused. The style of animation, called simultaneously palimpsest, destructive, or draw & erase, is a constant stream of change. The characters warp and shift changing mediums as they change forms.

Muto by Blu went viral before we thought of things “going viral” back in the earlier days of Youtube. Using a similar technique to Diluvio, Blu is a graffiti artist using the outside world as his canvas. Characters are constantly painted over again and again and again creating a new image while, also, still showing the previous ones. The history of each shot cannot be erased fully, the ebbing remains. Lighting changes are embraced, the camera jockeys for focus, and every time I watch this I can taste cheap beer in my mouth and the wisp of a Marlboro Smooth on my tongue. I mean that positively.

Some other assorted items:

A couple of terms were brought up and not fully defined in the episode. In reference to K-Pop Demon Hunters, I mentioned “stepped animation”. Stepped animation could be best understood as a term to describe the contemporary, often 3D, style of “limited animation”. It’s UPA style for Zoomers. Less in-betweens, more vibes. It’s become really popular in the last decade following the success of films like Into the Spiderverse and a general interest in low poly, Playstation 1 & 2 style graphics. Oh, and of course, it can save time. A lot of 3D softwares used in animation can create the in-betweens which is often avoided to create that digital 2.5D look that we see in the above films.

I feel like I’ve been talking about The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin a lot these days. The seminal 1930s text speaks to the creation and role of art in an increasingly industrialized, politicized, and atomized society. He speaks about art’s “aura” and how this intangible quality is lost when mechanical reproduced. This concept is ever relevant these days as we continue to try and parse out art’s relationship to and with AI. We live in a world with “second screen content”, content meant to be watched in the penumbra of your phone. As we become even more robust “passive consumers” of art, what happens to the “aura” of the consumed? Do you think Netflix will bring back the 2000s reality TV show Bridalplasty if I start writing them daily emails?

A favorite resource of both mine and my guest’s was Archive.org and the Wayback Machine! Archive.org is a nonprofit digital library headquartered in San Francisco. They want to offer free access to texts, films, websites, media etc. It’s awesome! You can find a lot of cool, great, FREE animation resources here. You can find hard to track down media from some of your favorite filmmakers, like this Sally Cruikshank Sesame Street piece. I screened some clips from this “Imaginary House” series from a 1995 Public Access Television Station at Animation Brüt, my experimental animation screening series, a couple years ago. The furry community really has locked in on their archiving as you’ll find 1000s of pieces of animation like this about lesbian video game characters and tufted lions falling in love. A little something for everybody.

That’s it for now. I’ll be posting some more later this week about our guest this week, Annapurna Kumar, as well as a deep dive rumination into “Shape vs. Line vs. Volume”. See you in the funny papers!

Things Going On:

• Loose Frames has a new screening on 2/21 at Heavy Manners Library here in Los Angeles. Always a great show and a great crowd!

• To Gaza With Love: AC4PAL Fundraiser screening at Whammy Analog Media in LA on 2/15. All proceeds go to fund animation workshops by Haneen Koraz, an internally displaced person, lived at the refugee camp in Deir al-Balah.

• Slamdance Animation Screenings coming up this 2/21 and 2/22. This is the second year the festival is in Los Angeles. See you on the bus!

• Avidly following the Netflix-Warner Brother’s merger hearing. It’s a lot of Senators trying to grab quotes but however this results should have big impacts in the contemporary media landscape. Bring back the Paramount Decrees!

• Stephanie Delazeri, Animator and Animation Researcher, has been posting some incredible things on her Instagram re: her ongoing Animation Labor research. Caught both of her talks this past month and I can’t recommend enough. That clip is “A rare look at some of the Korean animation workers (Akom Production Company) behind the production of The Simpsons, from a clip from the American tv show Splitscreen (SE8-EP1), aired 1999”.

• I can’t stop seeing this AI Yogurt Ad everywhere. Unsurprisingly, it’s made by two agencies that love AI. Yogurt doesn’t move like that.

Hi, I’m Sam Gurry. I’m a filmmaker, curator, and educator. I’m also one of the minds behind 24memespersecond, where we post memes about sand, the animated canon, and things that aren’t technically animation but spiritually are (puppets, reflections, running past a fence really fast).

I like weird animation. I make it, teach it, screen it, and never shut up about it. I regularly program experimental animation screenings and host conversations with the filmmakers afterward. Doing that made something clear: there aren’t many spaces, online or IRL, where animation is treated as an art form and discussed with care.

Smear Frame is dedicated to independent animation and the people who obsess over it. The show moves between interviews, musings, and deep dives into artists, histories, disasters, and new favorites. Each episode centers on a guest working in or around animation, their practice, and a topic that’s specific to them. We also play some games.

As Father Stop Motion said, Animation is Cinema. Animation is not a genre.

Animation is growing more and more everyday. There’s too much of it, spread across festivals, platforms, archives, and niche social media accounts. Subscribing to Smear Frame Podcast means having a consistent guide: interviews with artists, recommendations worth your time, and context for work that’s independent, experimental, or easy to miss. It’s a way to follow animation with a fellow human instead of an algorithm.

You can check out the first episode of the podcast right now featuring independent animator & interdisciplinary artist, Annapurna Kumar! Posts to follow soon.

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