Ideas and Storytelling - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 100

One of Escher's impossible
architectures (Richard
Haynes).
logic to the thinking behind the paintings. This 'what if …?' is so often the starting point of a good
i lm, play or work of art. What if toys had their own private life away from humans, as in Toy Story ?
What if the characters in a painting had a life, as in Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George ?
What if there were monsters lurking in the cupboards, as in Monsters Inc .? What if we saw Hamlet
from the perspective of a couple of minor characters, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ?
What if the Wicked Witch of the West hadn't always been wicked, as in Wicked ? Asking this 'what if
…?' about the most familiar day-to-day subject or cultural icon is to be part way towards a good
story. For Next , the 'what if …?' was: what if instead of so many people doing Shakespearean
auditions, it was Shakespeare himself who was auditioning? Juxtaposing ideas this way has great
potential. Magritte asks what if the night sky was actually light and the ground dark, as in The
Empire of Lights (1954); or the lightest of objects, a l ying dove, was made of the heaviest, stone;
what if a window blocked our view rather than making our view? I went to a fancy dress party
as The Great War ; among the vicars and tarts and nurses, I should have gone as a lead balloon.
There's an oxymoron Magritte might have enjoyed. Actually, animation is a creative oxymoron,
where things don't behave as we thought they might, or what we think is solid is soft, or what
looks heavy is light, or what is inanimate is animated. I was interested to see that a production
of Billy , the musical of Billy Liar , had a Magritte-inspired poster, as shorthand for a
skewed reality.
There is a subtle reference to Escher in the feature i lm of The Wind in the Willows.
One shot has a rather clunky i sh swimming underwater, while a leaf l oats on the
surface and a rel ection shows the trees above. This consciously echoes Escher's
Three Worlds (1955). My only Magritte moment, other than the script waiting to