Different Techniques - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 152

complicated armatured puppets. Conversely, if you are looking for subtlety and richness,
you're unlikely to i nd that with basic puppets, but watch Jason Wishnow's remarkably lavish
and surprising ef ective version of the Oedipus myth, told entirely with vegetables. This is
not the i rst i lm to work with vegetables (Svankmajer's i lms often reference Arcimboldo's
vegetable portraits), but it's testament that if you are good enough you can get a complex
emotional performance out of anything, even potatoes.
Two characters from Jason Wishnow's epic Oedipus .
Jason Wishnow
Once in a while, immediately following a screening of Oedipus , someone from the audience will ask, 'Was
that all computer animation?' So I explain: No, if you set out to make Oedipus with vegetables, you need
to use farm fresh produce, and stop motion is the only way to go. Not that I've anything against CG,
we used it for a few scene enhancements, but we set out to capture as much of the story in-camera as
possible. There's a uniquely handmade texture that only comes from building Ancient Thebes from the
ground up. The rough edges are integral to its charm.
I didn't come from a traditional animation background. Every new project I take on tends to be
dramatically different than what came before, in both style and content. For the uninitiated, like me, stop
motion was a process shrouded in mystery. When I began production, I had never heard of armatures,