I've been making animated GIF's as of late. I don't know why I'm making them other than I miss the act of animating. I made about five animated shorts featuring an anthropomorphized hotdog. Two of them got into some festivals, and played to small crowds. I always knew I'd make these things. I didn't know how one creates any comic or cartoon, and thus had to study it. I went to art school, and took continuing ed classes at SVA. Animation became an obsession.
Seeing my own drawings move was magic. It was a magic trick I performed for myself and by myself! How many people can fool themselves with their own will? Sure, we fool ourselves all the time with our delusions, but how often can we trick ourselves while fully aware? Animation is a labor of love. It is a pain in the ass to get even a small effect to work. Why would one labor for months on a cartoon only minutes long? The illusion of seeing your own line (created by your own hand) move is like the birth of a new entity. A drawing is cool, but seeing your drawings take on a life of their own is something else. It's as if you get to see yourself through the eyes of a stranger. I know that's what it's like for me anyway. I also think the practice of animation is a meditation unto itself.
Life is impermanent. Change is the only constant, and you need to adapt or you die. Even lingering in the past can be a form of torture. You spend some significant time on every cell (drawing) of an animation. Every moment that passes is years of your life-force that you're spending. It goes by for another viewer in seconds... and that means you can't be clinging to your every drawing with clenched fists. You must allow for the changing of time, the fading image, and the arrival of the new to be okay. And I mean okay; we don't always need to be excited about "new." Sometimes, new means shittier. Sometimes, we liked old. Sometimes old is, in fact, better! I liked the time before social media; obviously, I'm all too aware I profit from it (I get a place to show my work nobody would see otherwise).
It is lore that Samurai would wake up every morning, and mediate on death. This sounds morbid at first, but then we mediate on it ourselves. We are alive, and have the unique opportunity to explore life. We can't explore life without the understanding of its opposite. Animation for me is a practice for life, not unlike Jiu-Jitsu. We grapple with the image at hand, bend it to fill a new moment, then take that moment and walk away. We repeat this process of care and consideration only to abandon it for the now. We live and die moment to moment. Every cell is dead, regenerates, and reemerges in a new incarnation. It's a never-ending chain of cause and effect originating from the big bang to the final bang. Zip, Pow, Kaboom, and that practice of recording life through moving pictures is an endeavor in futility. Why do we do it? We do it, because we get to participate in the gift of being alive.