It took me a long time to decide if I really need to talk in detail about this animation project. However by receiving feedback about my art I realized that there are not so many people who really care about the details and what has been done is enough already. Many people did share some really interesting and unique interpretations of their own understanding of the animation which I could not even imagine and realize by myself. I am grateful for this response. So let me tell you the real explanation of this story and how it was created.
If to be honest, this is the story about friendship and betrayal, about stealing and repentance, about regret and forgiveness. Could you imagine? That’s it! And here are the evidences. The Greeny and The Mouse – are the two main characters. They used to be good friends. You can see their images together on one of the moving pictures. That time the Greeny was wearing glasses and had a moustache. But the glasses themselves were the reason of jealousy for the Mouse. He was always dreaming to own them. So during one dark night he is stealing them. At some moment in the animation you can see the photo where they are friendly hugging each other and slightly soon after the photo is changing to another one where the Greeny is missing his glasses and the eyes of the Mouse are thievishly looking somewhere away. There is nothing else what the Greeny could do in this situation except of going on and finding the stolen glasses. The Mouse has weird feelings about all this situation and starts following the Greeny secretly by pretending himself as a tree and not only. As a result, caught in a whirlpool of contradictions, the Mouse is accidently losing the stolen glasses and the Greeny is successfully finding them at the same time. The main character of the animation is shown as a kind of creature who is moving and turning his head side to side. The world where he is walking and the appearance of the creature are just the reflection of his own inner feelings and condition. He is afraid. He is afraid of the Mouse attitude towards him and of the unknown world around him without the opportunity to see everything clearly. The black and white world represents his past and memory. By losing his own color he understands that the past is taking him back and is pressing him by the weight of loss. The only possible way of surviving is to change himself in order to avoid the old rotten regrets. So he is changing, and when he succeeds, the world becomes colored and vivid again. By taking back the lost thing (the glasses) he feels surprised by watching himself real. It is difficult to believe but the creature he founded at the end of the trip is purely himself. Therefore he turns off the lights and falls asleep with a sigh of relief.
How do you find this interpretation of the story? Does it really reflect the Truth? I would like to leave this subject open to discussion. In any way the story above was never written as the main idea and never been a plot. The story by itself was created within the process of a creative work for the animation. I was inspired by the 8 bit computer games and the art of the wonderful band from Switzerland called Yello. I liked their music since earlier times and was always dreaming to make a video clip on it. I had many ideas in my head while I was listening to their tracks from the different albums. By listening to the particular track which I decided to use for the animation, the idea of the slow monotone one way movement appeared in my imagination, similar to the old arcade kind of games of Sega and Nintendo computers. I was imagining a kind of dark gloomy world with lots of awkward creatures synchronizing their movements with the music. One of the most impressive things in the animation - the eyes and their winking on the wall. This is one of the first images which appeared in my head while I was listening to the music. Most likely there is a kind of particular sense in the title of the album called Cyclops. It was released in 1999 approximately at the same time when the idea of the animation appeared in my mind. Within the next 8 years I was planning to make the realization of my ideas. In September 2007 I started working for the animation and at the end of 2008 it was ready. Within that time I was also doing completely different things, in other words I was not totally concentrated on my animation project. Instead of an explanation of some technical details about the creation and the drawing process of the animation, I would like to take the opportunity to describe the creative side of the project. There are some interesting facts bellow:
- Forgive me all you savvy people who are the masters in this kind of work, I did not do any preliminary storyboard of the video and by start working on the film, I had no idea how it would end.
- The title Mishikbatllaban, rebus formed from two words Mictlan and Xibalba, both syllables form the word that symbolizes the World of the Dead. Mictlan is the name of the Aztec underworld, and Xibalba - the Maya world of the dead.
- I was considering several kinds of endings. In one of them, for instance, the god of the underworld of the Aztecs called Miklantekutli should be sitting. Finally I refused this idea in order to avoid the religious aspects. Generally many of my ideas were not used in the movie, either because of the technical complexity of the implementation, or from a lack of imagination or from laziness. While working for my project I didn’t have any time limitation, that’s why I cannot complain about it.
- - The idea of the red pepper which explodes at the beginning of the video has been taken from the series of The Simpsons "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)". In this series, Homer ate a pepper – Quetzlzacatenango - grown up by the patients of the psychiatric hospital of Guatemala and fell into a psychedelic trip which helped him to realize the value of his life. At the beginning, the bud of the exploding pepper had a different design but then I decided to implement this reference to The Simpsons.
- Besides the symbolism of Aztec and Mayan civilizations, here is a list of people whose work in many ways inspired me for my animation: Ivan Maximov and all his cartoons; Hayao Miyazaki (black creatures sitting on a tree branch looking alike many little Totoro creatures from his film My Neighbour Totoro); Maurits Escher - his paintings with spatial paradoxes are breathtaking; Salvador Dali – doesn’t need any introduction; Jerko Jacek (Jacek Yerka) - Polish artist, if you have never seen his paintings, just find them on the internet; Joe Vaux - American artist, by looking at one of his paintings I decided to include the image of the whale in my animation; Carlos Castaneda - yes, I have read his books but shhh, don’t say it to anybody, because the images of the desert, cacti and common cuckoo stuff still don’t mean anything particular...
- At 2:48 the small bugs trying to construct an inscription “eye sslag”. These bugs are not very literate, they wanted to put themselves down in order to create the word “Eyeglasses” but mixed it all up as usual.
- At 3:06 when the protagonist is getting out from the small door, he is wearing the beard and mustache. Under the bell button which is just next to the door there is written the word “ADD”. The one who wrote it was not very competent as well, because he wanted to write a “DAD”.
- At 3:45 there is a replacement of the painting behind the whale.
- The geometrical figure behind the whale is impossible within our 3D dimensional world, greetings to Asher. In addition the fork supporting the whale's tail is found in many paintings of Dali.
Actually that’s it. I have no idea if any continuation like ANABASIS is going to appear soon or ever.
If you like, Upvote plz.
Thank you!