SFL:Your style of drawing the characters in Aeon Flux has now become instantly recognisable as yours. Did you originally set out to create your own identifiable style?
PC: No, it doesn’t quite work that way. I think if you try to contrive a style, it’s not really a style. I think style is something that comes naturally. Anyone who draws has to avoid the trap of being mannered. I just draw the way that feels natural for me to draw, and that ends up being your style. There is a sort of conscious avoidance of looking like anything else.
But now you have this style do producers ask you to specifically create something with that look?
But any artist, by following his natural instincts, has a style.
You say on the DVD Aeon Flux was a reaction to drawing Rugrats all day. Now that you are known for your stylised sci-fi would you like to try something different? Or do you just like sci-fi?
I’m trying to push it now into other areas, like CG, which is what I am using right now.
In Matriculated and Dark Fury there is a lot of 3D CGI animation. Did you use it to speed up production or because it can achieve things not possible with 2D line animation? Or a bit of both?
Both. It’s another tool, another way of doing things. Doing 2D animation is very, very laborious. Doing animation with computers is as well, but I feel that you get much more out of the labour you expend. Once you’ve created something in 3D it’s infinitely malleable, but with 2D you’re just stuck with the one version of what you’ve done.
With 2D you have to plan everything so far in advance you have no room for flexibility that you have with CG. Do you think that CGI is killing off some of the art and craft of animation that was with 2D, or is it simply moving it in a different direction?
There is nothing inherent in drawing animation by hand that makes it more pure. If anything I think doing animation using CG allows you to focus more on the animation. So much of doing animation in 2D is about the drawing and keeping things consistent. That’s how you spend most of your time actually, when you’re doing 2D animation; making sure things stay the same size, and a character doesn’t start looking like another character. You don’t have to worry about those things in CG. You can really focus on making it move interestingly.
Do you think you would have been able to achieve the look you got in Aeon Flux using computers, allowing for the fact that it was done over ten years ago?
I’m trying to do that now. I’m trying to make the transition to total CG. With Dark Fury and Matriculated I was combining 2D and 3D, but my goal is to go totally into 3D for future projects.
The work done by Pixar on The Incredibles was… incredible, with the characterisations and the look.
I thought that was very successful. It conveyed Brad Bird’s style and approach into 3D very well.
What about films like Ghost in the Shell 2 and Sky Blue, where they’ve integrated the 2D and 3D very tightly?
Honestly, I don’t know that I enjoyed looking at that as much. I’m not that interested in animation for the technique. I think that films like that really place an emphasis on the way they combine techniques and find that it takes away from the concept.
You would rather concentrate on story and characters than technique?
The goal of animation is to make you forget that you are looking at animation. I felt that much more watching something like The Incredibles.
I know you don’t want to talk about the movie, which I quite understand, but one of the many things missing from the film was the humour in the animations, particularly when Aeon kept dying. Some of the expressions of resignation and inevitability were great. Did you set out to make the animations humorous or was it more a case of “anything goes” that made it funny?
It was definitely a conscious decision to keep everything with a sense of humour. I think the medium of animation inherently has humour in it, or at least it should. I would find it very hard to make an animated film, or any kind of film, that didn’t have some humour. I agree; I felt it [humour] was one of the things that was really lacking in the movie.
Probably one of the best things they could have done was kill her off in the end.
I don’t know about that. She died a lot in the short films, in the full-length episodes she didn’t really die, and it wasn’t really about that anymore. I don’t see that as being particularly meaningful in the context of what they were doing. I think developing the relationship between Aeon and Trevor more… Trevor’s character is completely different in the movie from what I’d done with the series. Without going too much into it.
I guess you didn’t get much say over what was done on the movie?
No. When you create a TV show for television, the network owns it, you really don’t have a say in what they do with it afterwards.
What other projects do you have lined up at the moment, that you can talk about?
I am planning to do an animated adaptation of The Terminator, because they are preparing Terminator 4. That’s going to take a little time. I’m also planning to do more with Aeon Flux.
In 2D or are you going to experiment more with 3D?
In the case of Aeon Flux it’s going to depend on schedule and budget. To do good quality 3D, at this point, is more expensive than the kind of 2D animation I did on Aeon Flux. It’s a hard thing. At a certain point, to do really high-quality 2D, 2D is more expensive. With Aeon Flux being, how shall I say, a niche market kind of show, I’m not going for the broadest kind of audience, I’m really trying to keep things modestly budgeted, so I can have a lot of freedom to do what I want.
When you did the original series, was that all hand-coloured cels, or did you have digital paint?
That was ten years ago, so, yes, it was all cels.
Have you ever considered, or been asked to draw comic books, or are you just not interested?
I have been asked to do comic books. The studio asked me to do the Aeon Flux comic book, but I just wasn’t interested. I do read comics but there’s a lot more you can do on film. I actually don’t like to do illustration. It’s not something I enjoy doing. The advantage of animation is you don’t have to do drawings that hold up to a lot of scrutiny. Your drawings just flash by in a fraction of a second.
So you come up with all the character designs and give it to a studio to do all the hard work.
I actually do a lot of the animation myself. It’s a different thing to do animation than to do illustration. Animation involves doing a lot of simple drawings, whereas illustration you have to labour over each one, because people spend more time looking at each drawing. A lot of comics are drawn more for the sake of the artist getting to draw, than for what it conveys to you emotionally or mentally.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today, Peter, and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the near future.
To celebrate the release of the Aeon Flux DVD we are running a competion to win a copy of the box set, along with other goodies. Details of the competition can be found at the bottom of the review of the film.