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Reviewed by:
  • My Mind
  • Emily Edwards
My Mind Directed by Jason Harrington University Film and Video Association Conference, Champlain College, August 2010.

For me there is something really engaging about drawings that move, which is likely a significant bias on my part. My favorite childhood toys were a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons, a ream of unlined paper, and a number-two pencil. With these in hand, there was nothing I could not be or do. This is the central charm of Jason Harrington’s short animated poem My Mind, in which the protagonist celebrates the power of imagination or mind and Harrington truly celebrates the power of animation to make the invisible visible and the abstract concrete. What I especially like about this piece and what gives the film its folk charm is that viewers are allowed to see the hand of the artist in the work. The design of the film—the line drawings with crosshatch textures—fittingly accentuates the personal expression of the poem. Although much of the animation is fairly literal in its interpretation of the movie’s voice-over, the stylized method and what appears to be a blending of key-frame and straight-ahead approaches to movement give the work distinct appeal. In a letter to me, Harrington explained that he particularly likes the work of Frederick Back and Bill Plympton, and I can definitely see the inspiration here in the style Harrington uses. These are worthy inspirations too: in 1980 Back was nominated for an Academy Award for Tout Rien [All Nothing], and in 1982 he won the award for Crac, about the life of a rocking chair; Plympton’s work includes two Academy Award nominations, in 1987 for Your Face and in 2005 for Guard Dog.

I can appreciate the time-consuming nature of this production, having just finished my own hand-drawn animation. You have to be particularly driven or graphically consumed to draw twenty-four frames for one second of a movie—and in cases where there are multiple layers composited to create one image, twenty-four frames for each second of the movie’s background, mid-ground, and foreground. I also appreciate Harrington’s mixing of traditional pencil and paper with digital computer pen and tablet to develop the images, having also done this myself. There is something satisfying about putting pen to paper that is not quite the same as using a Wacom tablet. However, the less permanent digital images can be much simpler to manipulate, although no less time-consuming. [End Page 73]

Harrington’s My Mind opens with space, planet, and stars. An exploding planet becomes a line drawing of a woman, white against the dark universe. A woman’s voice tells us, “My mind frees me from the solitude of sighs,” and the figure cups her hands and blows out the image that will represent imagination, a woman with butterfly wings. We watch this butterfly travel across a busy cityscape, where she seems bewildered by the traffic. She appears joyful when she makes her escape to the sky, afterward crossing tundra to disappear in a white screen of snow. In the following scene a mumbling weatherman energetically forecasts sunshine. Imagination as butterfly then reappears to walk across the weatherman’s head, which transforms into a planet surface. One of the things I can appreciate about this animation is the thought that went into the transitions between scenes, as when the weatherman’s bald head transforms into a planet, and a moving solar system becomes a revolving record, which begins playing, presenting us with a plaintive song from the Be Good Tanyas, while our butterfly does a balancing act on the needle arm of the turntable.

The Be Good Tanyas song was also a fitting choice here. The music of the folk-roots movement, with its emphasis on vintage instruments such as the guitar, banjo, and mandolin and simple songs with straightforward lyrics, seems to fit well with this folk style of animation. I have seen another animated piece by Kate Brown set to the Be Good Tanyas song “Human Thing,” which has a comparable style and charm. Brown’s animation features a mixture of...

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