Joseph Gilland (left) with Ryan Larkin. Courtesy of Joseph Gilland.

My inspiration, my mentor, my partner in crime, my friend, and my daily reminder. May your gentle soul rest in peace.

A lot has been written about Ryan since Chris Landreth’s amazing (and to some disturbing) film by the same name was shown in festivals around the world. Today, in Ryan’s honor, I’d like to write about the profound effect that he had on my life. Partly out of my profound love and respect for the man, and partly because so much of what I have heard and read about him these last couple of years has seemed to completely miss the point of this gentle man’s life story.

In 1966, at the ripe young age of eight years old, I saw a film that forever changed my life. That film was called Fantasia and, in particular, it was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment of that film that caught my imagination. Even at that tender age, it awoke within me a sense of awe, of magic and imagination, and animation had me thoroughly in its grip. I was destined to animate from that moment on. I knew it was what I wanted to do, but I knew very little about how I might go about it.

Then, in 1971, at the awkward age of 13 years old, I saw another animated film that would transform my life even more, and set me firmly on the course that I have followed to this day. That film was Ryan Larkin’s Walking. My high school art teacher rented a 16mm copy from the National Film Board of Canada, and screened it for us during our art class. As I watched the gorgeous images and movement unfold before my eyes, I knew I was seeing my destiny. Here was an animated film that, like Disney’s Fantasia, entirely mesmerized me and brought me into a world of magic, but this time, the drawings and paintings that I was seeing looked like something I might actually be able to draw myself.

Now I could see the paper, feel the pencil, pen and brush strokes, and animation suddenly became something that was accessible to me. Unlike the deeply technical and almost staggeringly complex images in Fantasia, which for me at the time were impossible to recreate, Ryan’s Walking showed me an art form that I could dig right into, a world I could enter with the simple tools of the average artist, paper, ink, and paint.

I shared my excitement with my high school art teacher, and she told me that she would do whatever she could to find out how I might actually make an animated film. However, for the next four years, nothing ever really materialized. I created countless little animation flipbooks, but it wouldn’t be until I got into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design’s three-year animation course, that I was finally introduced to the light table, the pegbar and the paper flipping.

The year was 1975, and my life as an animator got off to a pretty good start. My first student film, completed in 1976, was so heavily influenced by Ryan Larkin’s work, that it was fairly obvious, at least to me. Like Ryan’s Walking, I riffed on a walk cycle I had created. Using cutout masks and various painting methods, I splattered and water colored, and sketched, and did simple camera tricks, to milk all I could get out of my one simple walk cycle, creating a strobing kaleidoscope of images, without much real story behind it. I did animate a kind of short intro to my walk cycle, introducing my character, who was a cartoony fellow with his brain popping out of the top of his head, and I called the effort, The Fool on the Hill.

So between Ryan and the Beatles I completed a strange little student film, that was the springboard into a long career in animation. Thankfully, the single 16mm copy I had of the film was long ago destroyed or lost, or something, and I haven’t had to see it or show it to anyone since. I do not even possess one scrap of artwork from the film. Only my teachers and colleagues from that time can actually vouch for me that such a film ever existed!