Mary Ellen Bute (left) and Pierre Hébert. Photo of Mary Ellen Bute courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.

We're now coming to the end of my Notes from the Underground series, a journey that started well over one year ago.

Since I am not a writer (far from it!), this journey has been full of surprises, making me realize once again how much I would rather do, than write/talk about doing. (In passing, I must thank my dear friend and "proofreader par excellence," Sharon Bourke, for all her generous and so very competent help. She has managed to transform my words into something almost readable, quite an accomplishment!)

Trying to summarize what these articles were/are about, I come up with the following incomplete ideas: while being a fabulous medium, loaded with potential, animation, for the most part, leaves me totally unmoved, and hungry for more, for something "other."

It is as if artists, whether they be animators or not, have distanced themselves from their own experience and entered a realm where everything is fabricated, forced, puffed up.

So much work done today boils down to technical "tricks," or technological prowess. So few of the works we see in animation today stem from one's inner core, and seldom find/manifest (as in "make visible") one's "little music."

I think it was Ortega y Gasset who said that we were going toward the dehumanization of art. (While he presented that as a "plus," I think that what we are now witnessing is a definite "minus.")

There are, however, some remarkable exceptions in artists who give birth to works loaded with meaning, works that help me get up in the morning, eager to get to work. If this may seem fairly insignificant, I will say that if to work is sometimes difficult, to keep on working is even more difficult. Anything that can support the motivation and will to work and to live is a gift, and that is exactly how I receive those works that move me; I receive them with gratitude. If I can easily think off the top of my head about many artists, painters, writers and musicians whose works fit in that "gift category," I can name only a few animators who would belong to it.

Granted, this must, in part, come from my ignorance of all that animation is, but it nevertheless is based on seeing what is readily available in the animation world, through the Web, AWN and a few animation festivals. I am utterly convinced that animation, for the most part, has fallen into a trap that makes it a very minor genre, a form of smart puppeteering that is trapped in linear storytelling, reduced to using a very poor and cliché-laden visual language, and falling most often very short of its fabulous potential.

If storytelling is to be a fundamental of animation (why not after all?), why can't it be of the same caliber as that found in the film works of a Fellini, Kieslowski, Almodóvar, Mnouchkine, Jeunet, the Gilliam of Munchausen and Eliseo Subiela? (Just to name a few of my faves.)

I repeat here that I have no problem with storytelling per se, I greatly deplore this invasion by the dumb, unilevel, linear pabulum we see almost everywhere, including in animation festivals (can you say "Flash?").

However, there is more to the potential of animation than storytelling, there is this "making time visible" (or at least, "the experience thereof"), a far more demanding and meaningful task.