I don't think I've ever seen an interview with him before. Apparently there aren't many. He's always been extremely interesting and his designs catch the eye. Aeon Flux was apparently the first adult-level animation show, I didn't realize that. He says most people, even in the industry, seem to think 'Adult' in animation just means sex and violence (I've always considered it more juvenile really), but he used it as a way to explore themes that don't rely on the simple good vs evil or good and bad concept. He says he read a lot of Dashiell Hammett, where often you're made to believe at first that the protagonist's motives are for one reason, for instance that he's a 'good guy,' but you learn they really aren't. I went through a big Noir phase a year or so ago, mostly watching a lot of the movies, but I also bought some books of Noir fiction. Haven't read much of it, but I know Hammett is considered one of the best writers in the field, and he and a few others like Hemingway (who actually wrote a lot of Noir) are considered the ones who transcend it and reach literary levels. It does seem like reaching adulthood means largely loosening up on those moralistic ideas of good guys and bad guys and realizing that, as Chung said, people don't so much try to do what they think is good, as they seek justification for their pre-existing ideas. Something like that anyway, I probably messed up the wording. Or in the words of that great philosopher Dave Mason—"There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy. There's only you and me and we just disagree."
Then later some really interesting talk about the process and business of animation, and of how at the mainstream end of things there are people hired to only find ways to restrict what you can do, and they don't feel like they're doing their jobs unless they find things in your work and say "These need to be edited out."
And toward the end they talk about why the comic book format (panels arranged on a page for viewing in a very specific upright format) remains unchanged now that we can see them on screens, many of which are designed in a landscape format for movie viewing. And also why aren't there "Director's cuts" of comic books, where you can click to see only the pencils, the inks, the thumbnails or layouts etc?
On comics being 'the best of both worlds' (written story plus visual art) I always wanted them to be that, but I always realized they aren't. There's really no good way to intersperse words and pictures. You've got spot illustrations, full-page illustrations, and then various kinds of comic strips and comic books, and no matter how they're arranged, I find you always have to switch from one mode to the other, from looking at pictures to reading words. Partly it's a switch from left brain to right brain (that's a bit of an oversimplification, but you are switching between different brain apparatus), but it's just a very different way of taking in information. You have to put one on pause while you switch to the other one. And your brain just doesn't interpret them using the same structures and processes, so it's always jarring. You get a more pure experience from movies, where the story is entirely conveyed through visuals and audio, or pure written words, where visuals etc are entirely formed in the mind of the reader by hopefully evocative writing, or by just a single image with no words, or possibly a group of images. This is why I gave up on any idea of making comic books back in the 90's.
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