Wells, this is my response.

I thought Wells’ article(/book?), “Notes on a Theory of Animation” was really great. Last year, I took Dr. Kreul’s Film Styles and Genres: Animation class, and this article reiterated a lot of the things we learned in that class. Many of the films it cites, we watched in the class. It made it really exciting to read this article, because I would think of an example of the idea it was talking about, such as the morphing of 2-D and live-action world. I thought “wow, just like the lightning artists and Alice Goes to Wonderland” and then the article brought them up. It’s exciting to have background knowledge :)

I think it’s interesting to see how modern cartoons that are geared towards kids tend to pick up experimental traits. Since my childhood, I’ve always loved cartoons of all kinds. Some are super generic: The Rugrats, Hey Arnold!, KaBlam, Spongebob Squarepants, and Powerpuff Girls are just a few. Many of these are semi-experimental. KaBlam did not have one particular style, it was a mixture of traditional cel animation and stop motion, with various highly-stylized segments. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJHE1wovio) Spongebob Squarepants has a totally self-aware episode, meant to be a Krusty Krab Employment Training Video.

Reading this article makes me realize homages to older works in newer animations. For example, there’s an episode of Spongebob (sorry to harp on this. I really love Spongebob) with a “magic pencil” that a live-action man drops into the ocean in the beginning. When Spongebob and Patrick discover the pencil and draw things, they come to life, creating an evil “Frankendoodle” which must be destroyed. They then send the pencil back to the real world. Reading this article makes me realize how similar that is to the oldschool animation meets live action films such as Koko the Clown Out of the Inkwell.

After reading both this article and the article on synesthesia, I had an idea. Wells describes experimental films as having a musical quality. Would it be safe to say that all (or most) experimental animations set to music could be considered synesthetic works? Because they are the combination of 2 different senses into one piece of art. Norman McLaren’s Boogie Doodle is one such work (which, now that I’ve done some cameraless filmmaking, is ten times more impressive!). It just makes you engage with the piece of art, on multiple levels. That is basically the definition of synesthesia.