Scribble Kibble is about animation.
All of these episodes and this animation, Death of the Firstborn Egyptians, is the first
one made in a program none of the others have used: Moho, also known as Anime Studio.
The link to watch the animation is below.
The more I look into Nina Paley’s animations, the more fascinating they become because of
their art style and their content.
In most cases the characters draw upon the aspects of how people in that time period
drew themselves.
So in the Firstborn Egyptians you have Egyptian paintings, but go over to God-Mother and the
elements are a combination of aboriginal and ancient art.
Or The Order of the Seder, where the figures are 2d but faces are turned three-quarters,
as is common in instructive Medieval illustrations.
What is happening in the animations is heavily informed by religious history.
There’s a great deal of knowledge that goes into Paley’s animations.
Layered on top of that is meaning.
So it’s not simply a straight interpretation of here’s the female essence of fertility
and creation and the source of all life.
There’s a point to it.
Room for interpretation, room for a message.
Look at Death of the Firstborn Egyptians in that light, and we have the story from the
Bible, Exodus 12, where the Israelites put lamb blood over their doorways so the spirit
of God would pass over their homes and not kill their first born children.
Paley’s animation explores the Egyptian side of the story.
The Egyptians don’t know to put blood over their doors, so all of their first children
die, including the Pharaoh's son.
Interesting point that the plague in this animation kills everything - human, animal,
and plant children.
And what do the Egyptian gods do?
They say nah, screw this, I’m outta here.
The second half of the cartoon recreates the Egyptian journey into the afterlife.
As I mentioned earlier, this is made in Moho Pro.
This program is expensive like any other high end software.
Its strong point is efficient 2D animation - so that means animation puppets and tools
to distort artwork.
It’s not meant for frame-by-frame hand drawings, though I’m sure you could animate that way
if you wanted.
The best place to see the program at work in Firstborn Egyptians is in complex puppet
movements, like the bird wings, these snake tails, and the underwater serpent.
Let’s look at the snake tail.
All it is is circles, however, getting these circles to move in a flowing line like this
is not easy to achieve without the right animation program tools.
A program like Moho isn’t animating the circles, it’s animating a line.
The artist distributes the circles along the line and then animates the line.
The line itself is a series of little bones that you click and drag, like this tutorial
shows.
These bones are also how the character puppet rigs work.
You draw the character, set up its skeleton, animate the skeleton by dragging bones around,
and the character art moves.
You can reuse that skeleton over and over in different puppets, as long as their body
structure is the same.
The men and women here are about the same, so they can use the same skeleton, just with
different art over it.
If you really want to see how versatile a puppet can be, This Land is Mine uses the
same puppet for every single human.
They’re all dressed differently.
That’s it.
Unless you set rules for the bones, they stretch as far as you need them to.
For death here, the stretchiness lets the profile stay nice and smooth even as the head
and body move around.
If the settings aren’t just right and the animator doesn’t do any touchup, you can
get breaks or bumps in the profile.
Notice here how there’s a bit of lumping around the head as death moves from sloping
from left to right.
Of course the bone tool isn’t unique to Moho.
Most professional animation programs have a bone tool, but all of them work a bit differently.
Adobe Animate, for instance, doesn’t give the animator the same amount of control over
setting bone rules as Moho does, and it doesn’t let you mesh warp a character for animation
like this.
You can mesh warp in Animate, but only one drawing at a time, so you would have to manually
do one image at a time and it’d take forever.
There are a ton of animations buried on Nina Paley’s vimeo channel.
I’ve linked some below.
A lot are bits and pieces from what looks like is going to be a very long animated feature
that will come out some time in the future.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode, and I hope to see you next time.