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It’s going to be held this fall in Berlin?

It’ll be at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in West Berlin from the 11th of October to the 14th. You should come.

Oh, I wish I could. It sounds like endless fun. But you have other Pictoplasma events, right?

We also have the Pictoplasma animation festival that alternates with the conference. It’s a two-day event that presents outstanding international short films, motion graphics, and music videos. We’re working on a third book and we’ll continue to build the online archives and travel with the installations.

Let’s talk about the life-size Characters at War exhibit here. It’s quite an attention-grabber.

We want to see what happens when we decontextualize characters and remove them from their homes -- the corporate world, merchandizing, fine art, etc. -- and strip them of their intended purpose. These blown-up characters are now fighting for our attention. We kind of like the idea of a degenerate war between capitalist pop logos and commercial mascots. The installation is another way of looking at the anthropomorphic and linguistic qualities of character design.

Contrastingly, The Essence of Rabbit piece on the far wall requires the viewer to hunch over and inspect the characters closely. What’s the story behind this piece?

We catalogue the characters in our archives according to animal as well as artist, and we found that the rabbit is the most popular animal in our collection. We wanted to take all of these rabbits together and create something new; the result is this repeated bunny mandala. There are over 850 hares in each one. Creating the mandala was a time-consuming undertaking since we had to resize and tweak the colors of each individual rabbit to make the design aesthetically pleasing as a whole.

Originally, we had people vote for their favourite bunny. We were considering arranging the rabbits in a manner similar to the way letters are arranged in an eye chart. The rabbit with the most votes would be placed at the top of the chart -- where the “E” goes -- and then the less popular ones would be smaller and placed in lower rows. But we decided we didn’t want the project to be a contest or a ranking, so we changed the orientation to a less hierarchical mandala.

You’re also exhibiting footage from the recently released Pictoplasma: Characters In Motion book and DVD. The short animations are a welcome departure from the hash out there now.

Much of animation today begets redundancy: it’s the same old family psychoanalysis every episode. After the first two minutes of watching a show, you already know what lesson is going to be taught.

If you think about it, there are three basic groups under which most present-day animation falls. All movies in the first group are primarily about a six-year-old boy coming of age. Disney films like The Lion King are perfect examples of this. Next we have the predictable story of the pubescent twelve-year-old girl, as seen in manga and anime. The third group presents us with the familiar teen angst theme of MTV-style cartoons. Where is the animation for adults?

Characters in Motion showcases animations and short films unfettered by classical animation and its conventions. There’s over 180 minutes of animation conveniently broken down into three categories: characters in narration, characters in rhythm, and characters in motion.

I like how the animations can be sorted according to artist or animal. Tokyoplastic’s work is on my list of favorites. Did you ever have a favorite animated series -- outside of Pictoplasma?

Ren and Stimpy was cool. And South Park was pretty revolutionary when it first came out.

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