Roadside Motion
Animatronics, barbed wire, stereoscopes, and other things that came alive on a cross-country road trip.
I expected to spend two weeks driving between animation events. Instead, I spent two weeks realizing animation is, actually, all around.
No, not just in whipping past a field really fast, not just in the invisible parkour guy keeping up with my Honda, and not just the signs dancing for attention on the side of the road (though all are beautiful and special in their own ways) - It’s in animatronics, the puppets, the antique technology, the landscapes, and the odd handmade objects that seemed to appear in every corner I visited with Anna Firth.
Things that repeat
Animation is iterative. So, when I see repetition, I think, “You could animate this.”
Going through Kansas, a state I’d never visited before, made me feel like I was time-traveling. An experienced Midwesterner can tell you how long it’ll be before the storm on the horizon reaches their porch. An expanse of farmland laid out like unleavened green bread getting a wet kiss miles away can be measured in minutes. While driving, if I were to look leftward down a perpendicular road, it would appear to go on forever. I was sitting in the past, seeing the future at the same time, like a redshifted star.
Too much? Have I lost you?
Okay, then, please gaze upon Al Hardon’s Barb Wire Collection from the Thresher Museum in Bird City, Kansas. The Thresher museum would be a replacement animator’s dream. You could absolutely animate this, and I would love to see it. Ebbing cycles of barbed wire come to life. Ugh! I need a Five Minute Museum of just barbed wire.
While advertised as an outdoor farm machinery museum, the space had much more than we anticipated. There were several barns filled with organized and cataloged equipment, big and small, personal and professional. One held an old schoolhouse filled with books, and another was a sod house stinking of earth. The large barn, with the above collection, contained a faux photo studio filled with Kodak-branded everything and large, swiveling frames of unlabeled personal photos. Lots of beauty queens! In the most modern building on the property, there were random sorts of items collected by a local tour guide and electrician, Jim Leach. He also wrote poetry with framed iterations of his works all over the grounds.
Things that come alive
Wall Drug, the billboard empire, is a place I’ve been happy to visit, now, three times. It’s a huge tourist trap of a mall that has historically lured visitors with its advertising of “free ice cold water” and “5-cent coffee”. It also has dinosaurs.
Throughout its meandering hallways and shops, you can find a variety of animatronics. Bands are waiting for your quarter before they begin to croon. A doctor with snake oil at the top of a medicine show stands, frozen, with a bottle in hand. A dinosaur with long fangs emerges from the fog, actively scaring children every ten minutes. I always get twenty bucks in quarters before a road trip for things like this. I need to hear the band, I need to be sold snuff, and I desperately need to see these children scared. Shut up, take my quarter, and another, and another.
Back in Nevada for the return trip, we stopped in Boulder City for a night just outside of Las Vegas. The city, one of two in Nevada that prohibit gambling, was established to house Hoover Dam workers in the 20th century. The area in and around Las Vegas has lots of public art, meant to “dress up” the dry Mojave. Dotted throughout Boulder City were bronze statues dedicated to different figures from the town’s history, including the eight-foot-tall “toilet paper man”, Alabam. A local business, Characters Unlimited, creates bespoke animatronics, including the infamous Zoltar. They are responsible for this terrifying beauty who sits in a car and tells you about Hoover Dam history. It was inside a coffee shop and had a car horn button that I pressed way too much. I’m sorry. I am a child.
Things that sit still
We stayed in three, count ‘em, three Victorian hotels during our trip. The first, outside Omaha on the very edge of Iowa, was run by a local artist. The home was filled with her photographs and a lifetime of collected objects. Inside one of the living rooms was a “Goddess” lamp, a vintage oil rain lamp, that gives the impression of endless streams of water. You fill a reservoir with mineral oil, and it continually ebbs droplets along its taut lines. These are camp in an aesthete, Aubrey Beardsley, older gay kind of way, and I just love them.
There was a large, nine-foot-tall ramshackle tree thing in that same living room that I didn’t properly absorb. We later realized it was for the 7+ birds that lived with her. We woke up to the smell of her cooking bacon for them. I didn’t know birds ate that. Beardsley didn’t either. One walked on my pillow.
It’s a toss-up for favorite animated object of the trip between the above lamp and the below TJ Bearytales. Inside a packed vintage shop in Idaho, this dense bundle of fur really made himself known. I try to live life without regrets #noregrets, but damn, I regret not buying this little guy. Think of the circuit-bending potential! Anna was not a fan.
Every room at our second Victorian hotel, the Landmark, came equipped with a stereoscope and a stack of stereoscopic cards waiting on the bedside table. I sat there for a while in Oberlin, Kansas, feeding them through one by one, the nineteenth-century equivalent of an endless social media feed. Swap the algorithm for a wooden viewer, and you’ve got the same irresistible “just one more.” I needed a stereoscopic card equivalent of that video that comes up on TikTok when you’ve been on for over an hour.
Things that are not things, they are people
In Chicago, we stayed with fellow animators, Sarah Schmidt and Ian Ballantyne, for the weekend, who graciously let us into their world. Their studio was delightfully abuzz with people working on their own projects. We somehow came on a weekend with competing cultural festivals, including Maifest, a German festival filled with beers and brats and the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile. Never made it to the Bean™ but did meet up with other animators, including Amy Lockhart and Jesse Patience Black.
Once we hit Colorado, the first thing we wanted was a salad. The dearth of fresh vegetables in the Midwest is not understated. The second thing we wanted was a friendly face, which we found in Stacey Steers! I met Stacey earlier this year when I hosted her LA Filmforum screening of Alchemical Collages back in April. She kindly offered us a place to crash. We were able to get a tour of her creative space, where she creates her immersive worlds. I always love to see artists’ spaces; how they organize, how they focus, how they relax.
Things that are landscapes
This is mostly an excuse to show you some pretty landscapes. But also, if animation is the art of change over time, then these places have been animating themselves for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. I was just lucky enough to catch a few frames.
Cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. Kiss kiss.
Next stop: Academics, Pittsburgh, and expanding the canon.
Things Going On and Things I’m thinking about:
Siggraph, the computer graphics conference, just happened here in LA. I’ll be posting about it on the Smear Frame Instagram with a longer write up later this summer.
Lots of chatter about Ozzy Fox, Disney’s AI-assisted cartoon. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Disney’s Accelerator program has a couple AI companies included among them Animaj, used for Ozzy Fox. Creative Bloq has a good break down of the show and how AI was used.
Speaking of corporate overlords corporate overlording, the layoffs will continue until morale improves.
More studio shakeups - Ánima Estudios in Mexico, one of Mexico's longest running animation studios, is “restructuring”.
Angine de Poitrine, the costumed Quebecois rock band, has really exploded this year. The people have spoken and we want puppets.