See Spot Animate

I’ve wanted to make cartoons for my entire life, but I’ve always had a mental block around getting started with the process. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but I do know that going spelunking in the cave network of “Why do I not want to do something I do want to do” quickly gets claustrophobic and morose. So who fucking cares why. Yesterday I just decided to start doing it anyway, because I don’t think explaining conundrums always fixes them (in fact more often than not it does the opposite) and because the same Alan Watts talk that helped me stop drinking almost 18 months ago came to mind again in the way that it very often does these days. The quick summary of his talk is this:

In Buddhism, there’s a principle that if you want to be free of something, you ought to just leave without making any declarations, or commotions, or forcing things. Those things all lead to great difficulty. Instead, just leave. The image sometimes given for this comes from Zen and the Art of Archery: the decision of releasing the bowstring and the action of releasing it must be the same thing. You must shoot before you think. Act and decide in the same moment and motion. In the Bible, this comes up when Jesus says not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and later in more colloquial Western terms perhaps, make sure you’ve been in heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead. Which is to say that the path is to stop trying, and to stop not trying.

So anyway, I started animating yesterday. Months ago I bought a program called Aseprite which makes the entire process super simple for beginners, so I looked up their documentation site and got to it. The very beginning of witnessing how a system works, noticing the coherence of the gears and pulleys and so on, is a wonderful moment, and below is the first piece of animation I’ve ever made on my own. Say hello to Albert the Talking House: