Joseph Gilland.

Ever since I can remember, I was powerfully attracted to the art of animation. Since my early days watching Tom and Jerry and Bugs on a black-and-white TV on Saturday morning, even as a young child, I somehow knew that animation eventually had to play a big part of my life in one way or another. Happily, my aspirations have come to fruition, and far beyond my wildest dreams. Animation has been my primary occupation and source of income for over 30 years now.

But at the same time that I was watching cartoons on television back in the sixties, I was also listening to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix on the radio. When I was about eight years old I got my first Beatles record and wore the grooves out of it, playing it on our old hi-fi turntable. My older sister was listening to James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, and that music seriously got my attention too. So at the same time I was realizing that animation might very well be my life’s calling, I was profoundly attracted to the world of music, and the idea of being a musician as well.

On top of that, I was an absolute art junkie, any kind of art, from comicbooks to fine arts, classical sculpture to modern conceptual installation artwork; it all fascinated and attracted me. I also devoured countless books and magazines, and I aspired to write seriously some day as well. In every sketchbook I filled, there was almost as much writing, pondering and poetry as there were drawings and paintings.

I have always been involved in writing, performing and recording music. This was a cover for an album that never fully materialized, although I wrote more than 20 songs for it. Unless otherwise indicated, all images courtesy of Joseph Gilland.

Through the following years, and throughout my animation career, all of these other artistic outlets have played an enormous role in shaping the artist I am today, and I have come to believe that it is very important, at least for me personally, to balance my animation with these other artistic endeavors. It’s no secret that lots and lots of other animation professionals do the exact same thing. Any animation studio I have ever worked in is full of painters, musicians, poets and writers. As a result of my observing this phenomenon throughout my career, during my years teaching animation I began to encourage the students I was mentoring to diversify their creative wanderings as much as humanly possible. To dip into as many aspects of the creative arts as they could squeeze into their creative lives. And for very good reason! Here are just a few of those reasons, as I see it, and as many of my closest animation colleagues see these as well.

For starters, animation is an incredibly tedious, time consuming and demanding creative process that requires a great deal of patience. Even short films can sometimes takes several years to finish, depending on the size of the crew, big feature films can seem to take eons to come to life, and, even though television cartoon schedules are getting ridiculously short, it still takes a great deal of patience to create a show and months and months often go by without seeing the finished product. So, the creative “payoff” in animation is frequently painfully slow in arriving. So what better thing for an animation artist to do, than engage in another creative outlet which rewards the artist with almost immediate gratification?

Pick up any instrument and play, and voilà! Instant results! Put pen to paper and write a journal, a song, a poem, or a column for AWN, and voilà! Instant gratification. Creative juices can flow more freely, and a sense of accomplishment is the reward, giving an animation artist more energy to get back to the laborious business of making cartoons! It has worked for me for three decades. It is rare when I am working either at home or in an animation studio, that I do not have a guitar, keyboard or some kind of noisemaking percussive instrument nearby that I can turn to, to immediately bang out some sounds and release my frustration with the animation “process,” and then calmly return to the work at hand. It is a fantastic creative release and, more importantly, it is a complementary creative force, which can enrich you as an artist and make your all of your artistic and animation skills improve greatly.

I will never forget, my first year animation teacher in Montreal telling our class that, “Sound is half of what makes animation work!” One of our first animation experiments was scribbling colors on clear 35mm film and then splicing every student’s work together and screening the results while playing various types of music, from Pink Floyd, to Mozart, to Miles Davis. Inevitably, the dancing shapes took on real life when viewed with a soundtrack, no matter what style of music, our abstract colors and shapes seemed to miraculously fall into step with the sound, and actually seemed to be “in sync.” It was a fantastic lesson on the importance of the animation soundtrack.