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his head, wondering what kind of sculpture
this
was. My reply to that was to have the cliff that they had gone over collapse and create an avalanche that covered both of them completely. He came back and had a helicopter with a magnet fly over and pull them out of the debris. I retaliated with the same helicopter flying too close to the sun: the blades dropped (in another version it was hit by lightning), and the two pieces fell into the ocean and disappeared. His retaliation was to have the ocean turn into the contents of a pop bottle, and the two sculptures became bubbles going to the surface in huge numbers. I didn't know how to answer that. I ended up making vast numbers of little sculptures half his and half mine out of Play-doh. I put them in cotton, in a box, and sent them to him. His answer was the rubber stamp, and of course you send a rubber stamp to an animator and it's going to get into his films. All that time I never saw Oldenburg.
MacDonald: TZ, LMNO, Swiss Army Knife,
and
Trial Balloons
seem to be blends of collage and animation with bits of live action. Do you still see each film as a new experience or is the newness now in the particular mixes of techniques you've already explored?
Breer:
You didn't use the word "rehash" but that might be your question. New wine in old bottles, or is it old wine and new bottles? I forget. I'm always hoping for a totally new kind of image, but I've been around long enough to know that repeating myself is something I can't help. I don't think you fall into ruts; I think you're born into them, but that every effort to break out is a healthy one and should be nurtured. When I was a kid, I thought style was going to be forever elusive, and that it was something some people had and others didn't. Now I realize that style is something everybody has in spite of themselves. Anyhow, the way I'd put it is that in those films I was looking for a maximum range of technique.
MacDonald:
Have you ever thought about making a feature-length animation? That's been the fantasy, and in some cases more than a fantasy, for a number of serious animators.
Breer:
To do an animated feature is reminiscent of fakirism, beds of nails, and other activities where you try to extend your normal capacities beyond the ordinary. The idea of filling up twenty-four frames every second for an hour or two hours sounds pretty dreary to me and, unless it was one of these full-blooded collective efforts like the Disney features were (which I'm not interested in anyway because in the long run that sort of collective process usually takes all the corners off the film so that it's no longer very expressive), everything would get stretched thin, and you'd see the stretch marks. At the rate of ten minutes a year, it would take me six years. So, no, I don't have any feature film yearnings, certainly not for films that would look like the shorter films I've made.