13/12/2023 - We caught up with Chris Robinson, one of the world's foremost experts on animation and director of Ottawa International Animation Festival

(© Andrej Firm)

Chris Robinson, artistic director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, is the author of several books about animation and film. We caught up with him at the Animateka International Animated Film Festival in Ljubljana, where he presented his programme ‘A History of Collage Animation’ and his latest book on the topic, Earmarked for Collision.

GoCritic!: You once wrote a book entitled Stole This from a Hockey Card. Was this the beginning of your love for collage and collage animation?
Chris Robinson: I focused on hockey cards in that book; the title is a lyric from a Canadian rock song. It was a collage title. My love of the art goes back even further; when I gave the masterclass this week, I went all the way back to the first grade of school, where they set you art projects to just cut and paste stuff. When I was around 9 or 10, I started watching a lot of Monty Python, Terry Gilliam’s work. I didn’t know it was called collage back then. I also had scrapbooks of hockey players, so I cut and changed the teams on the cards.

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Do you think that collage evokes a certain sense of nostalgia in people because it’s an art form that uses pre-existing art? Especially when it comes to Lewis Klahr’s work, Altair and Pony Glass, for example?
It’s a twentieth century art form, so the materials you’re using are from the past. It can’t help but trigger some sort of nostalgia, even if it’s not often the filmmaker’s intention. Klahr has said that he uses material he remembers from his childhood, like the Superman comic books which feature in Pony Glass. For him, it’s a way of extending his childhood, so there is a little bit of nostalgia involved. He really lost himself in his own worlds as a kid, creating his own fictional stories with his characters. It’s kind of the same thing with collage. But his work isn’t necessarily nostalgic or sentimental, because he’s also critical. He creates his own stories using these materials. In some films, he rejects them, using old commercial images that once had great power. But when you see these 1950s pictures now, they’re totally powerless. It’s a different context.

Why do you think collage animation is so overlooked? Other artists also include pre-existing art in their works, even if they don’t do collage, like Gianluigi Toccafondo, for example.
When I started researching the topic in 2018, I was really surprised to find that there wasn’t anything about it, just sections on Larry Jordan, Terry Gilliam and Stan Vanderbeek, but nothing focused solely on collage because it had always come under cut-out animation. In my mind, it’s obviously a different genre. Toccafondo has some elements of collage in his work. I didn’t go into it too deeply in my book, but I hope somebody will in the future. That old film Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), by Starevich, also takes dead bugs and brings them back to life, and the Paul Bush film shown at Animateka’s opening (While Darwin Sleeps…, 2004) is a kind of collage too.

How did you approach writing a book about collage in the absence of any material?
When I became the director of the Ottawa Film Festival in the nineties, I had to teach myself all about independent animation. There weren’t any books about it back then, just about Disney, and maybe some mentions of Hank Mayer, Norman McLaren and the Quay brothers. I went to festivals, met animators, watched their DVDs or VHS tapes… It was a similar process to researching collage. I write in a very non-academic way and I don’t think of myself as a historian. I write to figure out what I actually think. The reader goes on this journey with me. I’ve always liked to mix writing styles, to make things personal. I’ve never liked those dry history books which don’t let us have an opinion. It’s supposed to be objective but there isn’t any objectivity, come on!

Do you think that AI, internet compilations and memes will bring about a second “golden age” of collage in digital form?
It’s already happening. When I was putting the programme together, I realised that collage is everywhere. Even in the music that I like, like Bob Dylan or the band Guided by Voices. It’s all collage. AI has become such a huge topic over the past year. It’s not all that different from collage, actually.