When I was ten years old I bought a paperback book, How to Make Animated Cartoons, by Nat Falk, published in 1940. It's now long out of print, but I used it as a handy reference guide for 1940s Hollywood cartoon styles when I designed the characters and directed the animation for who Farmed Roger Rabbit.
More importantly for me, however, the book was clear and straightforward; the basic information of how animated films are mad registered on my tiny ten-year-old brain and, when I took the medium up seriously at twenty-two, the basic information was still lurking there.
I was living and painting in Spain when the incredible possibilities of what animation could do engulfed my mind. I planned my first film and took the money I had left from portrait painting to London. i starved for a bit, finally found work animating television commercials and managed to self-finance The Little Island - a half-hour philosophical argument without words which won several international awards.
