Pre-cinematic toys
08/09/2024
Mei's toy
Mei is a character in the movie "My neighbour Totoro" created by the Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The style in which the animation on the phenakistoscope is made is highly influenced by this movie which deals with flights of fancy as a coping mechanism to deal with the tragedies of life. The phenakistoscope is an interactive toy. One holds the handle in one hand, the animation facing away from the viewer. The toy is held up to a mirror and whilst looking through the little gaps, you spin it with your other hand. In the mirror the consecutive images drawn on the board appear to be in motion - creating a whimsical animation. I then made a digital rendition of the animation inform of a GIF through taking a photograph of each frame of the image and making a short clip with the consecutive images. Eric Dyer is another notable artist worth mentioning who inspired the mechanical and digital rendition of the phenakistoscope.
The Fall
The Fall is a hand-drawn animation which works with a hand-cranked toy known as a mutoscope. With this mechanism, individual frames of an animation is drawn and attached to rods which slot into two disc's on either side with little holes for the rods. There is a handle on the right hand side which you turn towards you, making the images appear like they are in motion (much like a flip book animation). The animation itself is once again inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's drawing style and is a reflection of the origins of cartoons as hand drawn, frame-by-frame animations. In The Fall, one sees a portal opening up in the sky and through it falls a humanoid cat creature. This is perhaps how I feel as an old soul artist in the digital age that we live in as I strive for simpler times where we are more intune with our surroundings on a physical level.
The Baron
Again an image inspired by Hayao Miyazaki and his work at Studio Ghibli. The character seen on this toy, known as a Jacob's ladder, is a talking, gentlemanly cat known as the Baron in the Ghibli movie, "The cat returns". I fell in love with this character as embodies a type of chivalry that is rare in modern society. In that sense, it ties in with the nostalgic ideal of a gentleman. The depiction of the baron on the front of the ladder is set in the daytime, and on the back the exact same image is depicted in the night time. The Jacob's ladder is a toy made of several wooden blocks attached together in a specific way which does not entirely fix them to one another. It works through holding the handle on the side (whatever your dominant hand is will determine whether you view the daytime or nighttime first) and twisting it 180 degrees (either towards you or away from you, again depending on your dominant hand). What happens then is the image switches from day to night, or night to day, through a cascading motion.
