Run Wrake

Run Wrake took some "Dick and Jane" illustrations by Geoffrey Higham and created an innovative and provocative animation titled Rabbit.

Watch Rabbit, then read our interview with Run Wrake.












Chief Magazine: Were you well-behaved as a kid?

Run Wrake: Of course! A model child. [Laughs] I was born in Aiden in Yemen; my father was a chaplain in the army. But I remember growing up in Leicester and Sussex in England.

You use a bunch of Dick and Jane-style stickers from the ‘50s as the characters for the animated short film Rabbit. Do you remember growing up with similar learning aids as a child?

Absolutely, that was part of the appeal of the images for me. I can remember those kinds of images when I was at school back in the late-‘60s. I don’t know whether that’s why I like those images because I remember them from when I was a kid, but certainly they were around when I was at school.

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Was this your first film based almost entirely out of found material?

Pretty much. I’ve always used found material in other work, but it’s usually combined with more drawn stuff. All the moths in Rabbit are actually hand-drawn, so there are some hand-drawn elements. That’s why I was excited about using those stickers: I could make an entire world just using those images, which is really cool.

What kind of formal artistic training have you had?

I did a foundation course in Eastbourne and then did graphic design at Chelsea School of Art in London for three years to get a degree and then did postgraduate animation at the Royal College of Art, also in London.

Your work reflects influences from surrealism, Dadaism, etc...

Dada was big. Dada – big influence.

And pop art seems to have had an impact on your work, too. Were these styles of art that interested you growing up?

Not really, no. Growing up I was more interested in going fishing and digging up old bottles.

[Laughs]

I wasn’t really paying much attention to art until I went to college, really. When I was doing graphics at Chelsea, Dada graphics was a massive influence, and all that punk rock cut-and-paste style, which I think you can see in the early stuff that I did.

The MoMA here in New York just had an expansive Dada exhibit over the summer.

Really? Wow.

It spanned all the different regions where the movement was really taking force.

There’s some amazing stuff. Kurt Schwitters, I love Kurt Schwitters. And John Heartfield collages, and Max Ernst – all those boys. Brilliant.

Were these the artists who made you want to pursue animation as a career yourself?

No, to be honest, it was more music because I was doing graphic design but buying and listening to a lot of music, and animation was a way of combining the two. And we had a talk when I was on foundation in Eastbourne by a guy who made the video for Art of Noise called “Close (to the Edit)” which came out in ’85, and it was seeing that. That was the real catalyst. It was very collagey – cut very tightly to the beat – and it just really appealed to me, that combination of sound and image tightly synchronized, so that was the real turning point.

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Rabbit took you something like 16 months to complete.  When working on a piece like that, is it hard decide to commit that amount of time without knowing what the response might be?

The response has been amazing, but while I was doing it, all I was thinking about was getting it finished, and then when it was finished, as far as I was concerned it sort of felt over, but of course that was really when it was being born. But I don’t think you can afford to worry too much about whether people are going to like it; you just have to please yourself while you’re doing it. Because how can you second-guess other people? All you got to do is try and make something, A) that you’re going to enjoy making, so you can actually go through the process of doing it, and B) that you’re happy with at the conclusion, and then hope that when you put it out there that other people agree with you.

And apparently it’s worked out.

It’s done really well. Amazing, amazing response.

How much footage are you able to film in a single day? Was the animating any easier with stickers because the characters have already been drawn for you?

That obviously saves a lot of time, but they all have to be scanned and cut out very accurately, but had I had to draw them, it would have taken a lot longer. And it really varies with the shots – some shots are obviously simpler than others and you could turn out maybe a ten or fifteen second shot in a day. It just varies with each shot. Like the shot at the end with the flies crawling over the bodies – that took forever. I thought that’d be a relatively simple thing to do, and it just turned into a complete nightmare.

Why is that?

Just because we had to cover their entire body area. An individual fly crawling doesn’t cover very much, so it’s just the amount of flies that you have to layer up. And they have to be reasonably random; otherwise, they sort of formed lines. Technically, it was absolutely a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be. So that would be the one shot that I hadn’t predicted was going to take as long as it did.

How big of a team was used throughout the project?

It was me mostly on my own for about eight months, and then for the last four months I had another animator working with me everyday, and then for the last month I had somebody else helping out. So three animators, but most of the time it was just me.

Wow, I had no idea the team would be that small.

Well, with that amount of time – with a year – you can actually do quite a lot. The budget just enabled me to not have to take on any other projects, so I could just focus on that.

This feels like the kind of project that could easily begin to develop a somewhat cult following. Have you had any encounters with devoted fans, or are you getting a sense as to how you might describe the typical fan base for the film?

[Laughs.] No, to be honest. I get a lot of emails from all over the place, and I keep an eye on the message boards on Afum, and it’s been posted up on YouTube, and that’s always interesting. Some people absolutely hate it, but generally the response has been good. I’m more interested in the people that hate it, funnily enough, because there’s fewer of them, and I’m just interested whether they think, because it’s got children in it, it’s meant to be a children’s film, and it’s meant to be all sweet and lovely, and as soon as they start slicing animals up, they don’t understand why that’s going on. I seem to get a reasonable cross-section of male, female, all ages that say they like it. I don’t think there’s a typical fan base.

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Was it an intention of the film to satirize the sanitized motives or forced naiveté of the kids in those stickers from the ‘50s, and by extension, of that time period in general?

Absolutely, that’s what I’m quite interested in – they do kind of represent innocence. You look at those images, and they seem to represent a time that everything was much simpler and wholesome values were more prevalent, but I question that. I think really nothing much has changed. We’ve just got media saturation now that tell us that things are worse all the time, so we assume it is, but I don’t think any people are any better or any worse. I think we’re pretty much the same as we’ve ever been. We’ve just got more access to more technology and we can communicate with each other easier, but I think we’re ultimately still the same. But it was interesting playing with that innocence – the fact that they’re children, and the fact that they’re children from an age which we see as being innocent, was kind of a nice thing to subvert.

Right. The film starts with the kids having somewhat arbitrarily chosen to use teamwork to kill a frolicking rabbit and then desecrate its carcass. Kids will be kids.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Is there a reason they want to chase the rabbit to begin with? I guess ostensibly it was just the means to creating a muff – and was there actually a sticker teaching kids about a muff?

The story came about because of the stickers. I had a lot of them, but it was a finite source, and I was trying to create a story out of them. I had already decided that the idol was going to be inside of the rabbit, but I needed a reason for them to kill the rabbit, and there was a sticker of a muff, which lent itself to her wanting a muff. Therefore, that was the reason that she wanted to kill the rabbit. So there’s a lot of that: the story was driven by the images that I had. Rather than me writing out the story and then finding the images for it, I was just sort of looking at the images and then putting them into the story.

So suddenly, the kids find a living, golden idol that pops out of the rabbit’s body and can transform insects into jewels, feathers, and bottles of ink. That idol can also really put back the jam. Was there a message about society behind his single-minded pursuit and overindulgence in such a simplistic and gratifying, yet nutritionally vacuous, commodity, or does he just really dig jam?

[Laughs] He just really likes jam.

He just really likes jam.

And it kind of worked because jam would attract insects. That was the reason I used it. But, again, I had a few stickers of jam, I had that nice dish with the spoon, and there was also a lovely image of a jar of jam. It could just as easily have been honey or sugar or anything, but it became jam because I had the images that lent themselves for it to be jam. That’s another example of, that why it’s jam. It’s greatly interesting, what you say. I hadn’t considered that as a reason.

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How did you decide to have the idol emerge from inside the rabbit, and are viewers supposed to ponder as to how he might have gotten in there? Maybe inside every rabbit is a jam-loving idol who turns insects into jewels, just waiting to get out?

Possibly, yeah. That’s the end shot really. That’s the question at the end: is there another rabbit out there, or are they in all rabbits? Who knows?

Do the stickers limit where the narrative can go, or is that kind of the fun of using the stickers?

For me, it actually made the process easier. I find that sometimes starting with a complete blank sheet is a lot harder than starting with something that has already got boundaries. I actually found it a really good way to work, having those limits. For me, it made writing the story easier in some ways.

It’s satisfyingly circular to have the film begin and end with a running rabbit, even after bad things have happened to the kids by the end of the film. Was this intended to provide symbolic significance or closure, with the blissfully ignorant rabbit having enacted a degree of comeuppance on the greed-addled children?

Yeah, this really represents nature. I think we mess with nature, and ultimately it will carry on. And we’re pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and that’s really the reason why we return to the beginning. And also I like a loop. A lot of my work in the past has been based on loops of various sorts, musical and visual, so it was partly that as well.

It’s intriguing to try to guess whether pieces of your own adolescence may have inspired various details in the film. For instance, did your family have an insect problem while you were growing up?

[Laughs]

Did you write with a quill? Does anything have an autobiographical basis?

Maybe subconsciously – I mean, not consciously. I love insects – always have been fascinated by insects.

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Really? Insects?

Yeah, I just think that, without insects, the whole life on the planet would collapse. But they’re kind of seen as being pests, which I think is crazy. The diversity of colors and shapes and sizes, I think, is just wonderful. That’s why he changes insects into diamonds rather than changes cows. That’s possibly something that’s quite a personal thing. But in terms of writing with quills, no. I mean, the ink and the feathers thing was to tie in at the end so that they would have something to exchange at the shop. I can’t really remember, but I quite possibly got to the end and needed something to resolve that so then went back and decided on those two elements because it would then help in the end.

There are a range of childhood stories that seem to have lent elements to the genetic makeup of Rabbit. The plot bears a loose resemblance to Cat in the Hat as mixed with themes from King Midas and Peter Rabbit. Did you see yourself as creating a work in this vein? Do you feel that other childhood cautionary tales served as milder precursors to what you were looking to accomplish?

Absolutely, I wanted to make a morality tale, like those old fairy tales that have a very simple moral message because I felt at the time that there just wasn’t many around. It is quite an old-fashioned idea to make something so obviously moralistic. We live in an age when somehow morality is something to be challenged, rather than accepted as actually something that might be quite a useful code. So that was a conscious decision to do a simple morality tale.

Speaking of Cat in the Hat, where are the parents in Rabbit? Isn’t there someone to teach these kids that turning bugs into jewels is one of those get-rich-quick schemes that never seems to work?

[Laughs] Good question. To be honest, part of the reason it’s kids is because the stickers that I had had quite a good selection of images of children, but there was one father and one mother. And obviously, it just enabled me to do more with the animation, having a few different body positions, so that was why I went with children. And also because it worked on the subverting innocence idea, so it was partly practical and partly because it worked. We’re all children – we’re all grown-up children – so you could say they’re just human beings.

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How has it been as a new father, having a young child in the house? What has been the biggest surprise for you about raising kids?

That’s a good question. I don’t know, really. So many surprises. It’s very tiring – I was kind of expecting that. Just hundreds of things. It’s a wonderful thing.

How soon until she gets a screening of Rabbit?

She’s seen bits of it, honestly. If she’s sitting up here and playing it on the computer, she’ll sit and watch it. She loves it. I don’t know if she’s got any idea of what’s going on, but the rabbit loop particularly gets a chuckle.

Have you heard any reactions from other parents about the film?

I don’t know. It’s difficult because it’s a bit gruesome. I don’t think it’s too gruesome for kids. I think they could quite easily cope with it, but I could understand those parents didn’t want to expose their children to kids cutting live rabbits up. It’s up to the individual parents, I guess. [Laughs]

Would you ever want to work on a full-length feature? Do you have any ideas that might be developed into full-length work?

That’s what I’m trying to sort out at the moment, but it’s proving a bit of a challenge. It’s a bit of a jump from eight-and-a-half minutes to 90, but that’s my ambition. I don’t know if it’ll be the next project or what, but that’s what I want to do. I’ve got a character, Meathead, who I’m working on. I’ve got a broad idea, and I’m having meetings with various people, but I need to team up with a writer, I think is the case. So that’s the plan, but it’s very early days.

Do you watch Hollywood animated films? Where are they going wrong? Out of all the ones you’ve seen, which one comes closest to passing your personal standards?

I really love The Incredibles, I have to say. The story is not really… for me, they tend to be a bit samey, a bit the same, and I can understand why, because they cost an absolute fortune, and they’ve got to recoup the money, and they have to appeal therefore to a child’s imagination which, as we all know, is limited in one sense – absolutely the opposite in another, I would argue, but I can understand that. But I think the quality of the animation in The Incredibles and the styling of it is absolutely beautiful, and I can’t knock it at all. But what I am hoping to do is take that kind of quality of production but apply it to a slightly less predictable story, perhaps. So that would be my take on it, but, obviously, when you get into that level of funding, it’s a whole different ballgame. So I’m trying to come up with something that’s got that broad appeal, but without having to check all the usual boxes.

What animators or artists are you a fan of? Are there people out there who haven’t been getting the kind of recognition they deserve?

To be honest with you, I don’t actually see massive amounts. I tend to just focus on what I’m doing. I’ve got a friend Andy Martin who’s about to make a film on the same scheme that I made Rabbit – a very different piece, but I think that’ll be worth checking out – called End of the Street.

How are your days being spent right now? Are you in the middle of another project, or are you staying busy by purchasing trophy polish for the bounty of awards that Rabbit has amassed? Purchasing trophy polish can be time-consuming.

[Laughs] Buffing up my laurels. No, I’m doing a bit of work for Genesis, would you believe, for their upcoming world tour. I’m just doing some visuals for them.

Really? That’s great.

Which is good – paying the bills.

How’s that going?

It’s good. I’m only doing one song, so it’s very simple, line-drawn. It’s very different than Rabbit – very different style. It’s always nice to do stuff like that. And in the background is the Meathead. I’ve got a meeting on Friday, which hopefully will get things moving. I’ve had some interest from the west coast, actually, so we’ll see. That’s really what I’m trying to concentrate on, but it’s such a big mountain to climb, and I’m used to working very much on my own, and obviously you cannot make a feature on your own, so I’m having to cross over into a different world. But I work from home, so it’s just slow. I was actually working on some visuals today for the idea that I’ve got.

Did you see any of this year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts?

I had a look online. I saw stills, and they all seemed to be made specifically for the Oscars. I had a look, but there was nothing that I saw that was terribly inspiring for me.

What does it take to get noticed by the Oscars? Have you considered entering Rabbit or a future work for contention?

I would have entered it, but they are so strict about, if it’s been screened for television anywhere in the world, it’s ineligible. The scheme that I made Rabbit on, part of the deal was, it gets screened on Channel Four television in the UK, so straightaway it was ineligible. And then it also has to be screened in front of an audience on celluloid in L.A., which, subsequently, that happened, but because it had been turned on TV, I couldn’t submit it. I think it’s a real shame that the Oscars are so tight like that. I think it’s one of the only awards that is that strict about rules like that. That’s why I was saying, it seems to me that a lot of the studios have actually made films specifically for the Oscars which they submit without any source of TV sales because they can afford not to, and I would loved to have entered Rabbit. I would have been really interested to see how it went down, but I couldn’t, unfortunately.

That’s really a shame.

It is; it’s quite a shame. Next time.

I wasn’t sure if you think that the Academy has certain subject matter in mind. I can’t remember if Wallace and Gromit have ever desecrated an animal’s carcass.

I don’t know, actually. I think it would have been interesting. It got nominated for a BAFTA, which is kind of the English equivalent. It didn’t win, but I thought that that was really exciting for me to get that. I would have loved to enter it for the Oscars, though.

Has Rabbit been screened at the MoMA in New York, or were there plans do so?

It’s coming up in June, which is great.

How did the ABC World News segment about Rabbit and that interview with you come about? It doesn’t seem easy to get on ABC World News.

I just got a call out of the blue from a guy called Zach Fannin who works for them, and I’m not sure where he saw the film, and it was entirely through him. I went over to their offices in Hammersmith in London and filmed a short interview, and then, the next thing I knew, there it was. [Laughs] It was great. Really, really pleased. I think it was Zach who saw the film, got really excited, and then made it happen, so big thanks to him.

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You’ve been involved also with a lot of music videos and have even created animation that was used as a backdrop for a U2 tour. It must have been crazy to have that many people absorbing your work at once in such a high-profile setting.

Yeah, that was amazing. That was back in ’97. It was the first time that I had been to New York; they flew me out to New York, and I went to meet Roy Lichtenstein in his studio down in the Meatpacking District to present storyboards. It was an extraordinary experience. And then went back to New York, went to their first show at Giants Stadium and Roy was there, and it was quite glamorous and amazing. Brilliant, brilliant experience.

I’m curious how you got involved with U2. Did they come to you? What was the collaborative process like?

Yeah, it was by the Royal College, actually. They worked with a woman called Catherine Owens who’s their art consultant, and she went to the Royal College to ask them for some show reels of past students, and she saw my stuff there, and then I went from meeting with her and Willie Williams, who’s the stage designer, and one thing led to another. And coincidentally, that was the tour that Howie B, who I’ve made five or six videos for, was DJing for them, so it all came together. It was good.

Do you have a regular composer or musician that you work with in your film work?

Not really. Howie is, I suppose, the closest thing I’ve got. As I say, I’ve done a few videos with him, and he did the music for Rabbit. I guess he’s probably that person.

Did you have input on the music in Rabbit?

I had a little intro from a bit of Mozart. I took the record round to a little studio, so that was the starting point, but then he sampled it and pressed a few knobs and a few keys on the keyboard and turned it into that little melody, which works so well. One thing I said to him is I wanted it to be minimal because I wanted just the sound effects to be the dominant part of the soundtrack. I wanted to try and make that world as real as possible, so the music was always going to be background, and I think he nailed it absolutely perfectly. It’s nice and subtle, but it’s there.

What music are you into these days? Do you listen to music when you’re working?

Always. The Aliens – the new album’s just out; it’s very nice. And I’ve been listening to a lot of Magazine recently. They’re an old post-punk band who I used to really like but had sort of lost touch with and then found a CD and started listening to that, and lots of reggae, as always, lots of stuff. The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, that’s quite nice.

You must have a guilty pleasure or two that someone might not initially assume that you enjoy. Any embarrassing TV shows or movies that you’re willing to come clean on?

[Laughs] Dire Straits’ Making Movies – that’s a fine album, I’m ashamed to admit. That’s the one album in my collection that I always keep hidden. I do secretly quite like it. [Laughs]

Video

www.atomfilms.com/film/rabbit.jsp

Websites

www.runwrake.com/
www.animateonline.org/films/rabbit/

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