But what use are these pretty pipeline diagrams if they don't tell the truth? Why do we keep turning our backs on the incredibly beautiful truth? That animation, like life itself, is a messy, organic, unpredictable changeling of a beast, made ever so much more so, now that we have such a cornucopia of dazzling software to help us complicate matters. The animation process as I see it today has completely lost any kind of a standard way of doing things. And that has to be reflected in the way we explain it, the way we teach it, and the way we pitch our projects to the powers that be, because that is the way that it really is.

Try this little experiment with your friends and colleagues. Let's say you are working on a particularly gnarly problem with rigging some rigid-body special-effects elements in Maya, elements that must work closely with live-action elements, 2D background matte paintings, real-life special effects elements and 3D particle simulation elements. Try approaching three or four "experts" and asking each one of them how it should be approached. You will get, I assure you, three or four completely different answers.

Or, try something much simpler. Suppose you are building a simple cartoon character in Flash. Ask a few Flash "experts" what's the best way to go about it. Guaranteed, you will get several completely different answers. No two people use Flash the same way, that is certain.

There are no standards any more. There are simply too many people using too many different kinds of software, in completely unique and different ways. And this happens more and more often, because unlike animation studios in days of old, where people worked shoulder to shoulder in an open social environment, filled with conversation and communication and collaboration, more and more animation artists today spend hundreds, and thousands, of hours alone, in front of a computer, figuring out how to make the damned thing do what they want it to do. And they will only take off their headphones and actually communicate with other human beings as an absolute last resort. Try as we might to guide, direct, teach, and control our students, our crews, and our colleagues, standardizing the way we all create is becoming increasingly difficult and futile.

So, what is the new "How To Make an Animated Film 101"?

It seems to me, we try really hard to put it all in a box, or a chart, or a diagram, but it just doesn't really fit inside one. I have rallied around trying to create new standard creative procedures, and enforce them diligently. It even works sometimes in some production scenarios, when there are smaller numbers of people on the crew, or when a show goes on long enough to iron out the bumps and get it rolling along relatively smoothly. But at the creative level, something needs to be allowed to break, or it becomes painful and frustrating.

I have watched countless educators put together a flawless curriculum that explains everything in tidy and straightforward linear terms. Too bad that the reality is left out of the curriculum, and unsuspecting students and program directors have to find out the hard way how things really work in this day and age of learning alone, in a void, in front of a computer screen.

But how about this? Let us embrace the chaos! Let's roll with it! Don't leave it out of the diagrams, allow it space to breathe and live. Make exciting new diagrams that have looping cycles and spiraling designs of exquisite beauty! Let the artificial intelligence run amok with the isolated artist's inner workings. Let it meld with the pure creative energy that we learned to harness in a series of rough pencil drawings and hand-scribbled timing charts.

Let us bow to the left- and right-brained digital domain of the fourth and fifth dimensions, as we tumble forward, back into the unknowable future of the creative animation process.

In his 30-year animation career, Joseph Gilland has worked with studios as diverse as Walt Disney Feature Animation and the National Film Board of Canada. He has worked on all styles of animation, experimental films, television series, commercials, theatrical feature films, stop motion, title sequences, live-action films and documentaries. He is writing a passionate book about the art of animation.