Throughout these early animations, I have taken inspiration from some stop-motion shorts by Timothy Hittle, Canhead and The Potato Hunter. Hittle was a computer animator at Pixar studios for a while before working on such films as MonkeyBone. The main character in these shorts is Jay Clay, and his mostly-human proportions yet lack of any real detail on his surface I really found inspiring. The extremely expressive emotions portrayed via body language was close enough to actual human movements, yet with a flair of cartoonish exaggeration to merge the two types of animation.

When creating a character for my small animations I used a similar character as I wanted to portray emotions and feelings without using facial expressions and do it mostly through body language to practice working with expressive gestures and silhouettes.

Another similar character is Morph, a figure I grew up watching from when I was young, and obviously left a lasting impression on me! The expressiveness about these mostly human but cartoonily simple forms really appeals to me.


Hittle's short film Canhead shows a great range of emotions from rage to fear and bravery and definately worth a watch:

Canhead