Animated documentary: I Met the Walrus

Concept

If I am making an animated documentary based on someone’s words, it’s important that these words are strong, relevant and profound. In the case of I Met the Walrus, director Josh Raskin has his disposal, based around the words of one of the greatest singers and speakers, John Lennon. “In 1969, a fourteen-year-old Beatle obsessive Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape machine, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto. The ‘Beatle’ rewarded the teenager’s pluckiness with an interview that contains the distillation of the musician’s message of peaceful protest.” (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2010/01/17/i-met-the-walrus/)

By taking the initial audio recording of the interview, the director develops Lennon’s words into a unique animation with non-stop visual bombardments. Eventually, ‘I Met the Walrus’ has won all manners of international animation awards, received over two and a half million views on YouTube and was Oscar nominated for best animated short film in 2008.

Design

The director tries to create an old film style as the basic tone to fit the interview occurred about 40 years ago, and he expands on Lennon’s words with a stream of images that complement the verbal content. This amazing animation combines with old school style ink sketching and modern digital illustration. One of the crucial members of the production team, James Braithwaite, “provides the distinctive plethora of pen illustrations. Influence from William Heath Robinson’s eccentric machines can be detected in Braithwaite’s retro style. The turn of the century artist drafted impractically complex and counter intuitive industrial activities. A comparable wit and tension is notable throughout ‘I Met the Walrus’. Alex Kurina is credited as a computer illustrator. This new media artist is likely to be responsible for the modern edge that acts as a counterpoint to Braithwaite’s traditional pen drawings.”(http://animateddocs.wordpress.com/page/6/)

The production team has created a rich visual language that balances past and present. Traditional and modern forms of illustration help audiences to remember the memories for the era.

Edit/Animation

This documentary fills with a huge amount of scenes switching and camera movements. As the camera moves, new images constantly appear from the previous area of focus. Most of these 2D graphics correlates directly to phrases they depict, and follow the rhythm of their description to emphasize and highlighting the meaning of these words. However, on some certain occasion, this style of visual display is not consistent with what they said. For example, when Lennon states that “…the only thing they don’t know about is non-violence and humour.” As the pace of the last word of this sentence is uttered, an image of a humerus bone appears on to the screen instead of showing an illustration of the word “humour”. Obviously, that was the certain purpose set up by the director. As a result, “the pun behind this visual/verbal collision is instantly absorbed while echoing the point that comedy can be powerful and elegant.”(http://animateddocs.wordpress.com/page/6/)