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MacDonald:
While metamorphosis is usually central in your filmswe watch the constant shifting of one thing into anotherduring the early part of your film career it was already taking two different forms, each of which tended to be primary in one film or another. In some cases you worked with generalized shapes:
Form Phases I, II,
and
IV
are examples. In other cases
Image by Images, Inner and Outer Space,
and
A Man and His Dog Out for Air,
for examplethe metamorphosis of the drawn line is the focus.
Breer:
Well, the linear ones come from my wanting to be simple, wanting to make a film with a pencil, or in this case, with Flomaster pens. I really got to be an expert with those pens. I called myself a Flo Master. Anyhow, I liked the idea that all I needed to make a film was paper and ink, or pretty close to it.
A Man and His Dog Out for Air
was a popular success, relatively speaking. It wasn't the first time I got noticed, but it had a large audience in New York, including people who wouldn't normally have reacted to avant-garde painting or avant-garde anything else. I thought maybe this was a special way of expressing myself simply, directly, and primitively, that could get a broader audience. And it was agreeable to sit and draw on cards or paper all day long. Those films came more from sitting at a drawing table or a desk, looking out the window, and having a nice time. And later committing it to film.
When I was making the collage films, I was more involved with what I was going to see on the screen at the end, which had more to do with editing and with thinking in terms of that big rectangle up on the wall with people looking at it. I alternated methods. I'd get tired of doing film one way, and the next time I'd do it the other way.
I just had a flash about something you said about metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is just a natural thing. In animation you make each frame, and for something not to be dead on the screen, it has to change. One of my tricks used to be to see if I could trace an image as exactly as possible. I knew it would still vary a little bit and that that variation would give it a sort of breathing presence on the screen.
Breathing
[1963] is an example. In trying to copy, I found I couldn't, and I liked the idea that it was impossible. Whether I tried to hold the images absolutely still or let them fly off in every direction, metamorphosis was what was going to happen anyway.
The tendency for someone who's just starting to animate will be to begin on the left side of the page and move something very laboriously a little bit at a time over to the right side. As you get more sophisticated, you plan ahead so that you know where the thing is going to be on the other side long before it gets there. And instead of starting at point A, maybe you'll start at point O or point L, somewhere in the middle of an