Animator Weilin Zhang (Jujutsu Kaisen, Mob Psycho 100) has started a new interview series with fellow animators, and we are honored to bring them to Cara! The concept of this zine will be a serialized interview of many different animators I know, where I ask them about reasonably esoteric things on the craft of animation seldom spoken about in public discourse.I think there is a lacking amount of depth in the educational material available to animators on the internet, particularly in English-speaking communities, so this is in hopes of supplementing that pool of information.Introductions: Spencer WanSpencer Wan is an animator known for his work on Castlevania (2017); The Owl House (2020); and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). He is the founder and director of Studio Grackle, the studio responsible for the trailer of Hades (2018) by Supergiant Games. Weilin Zhang on Spencer Wan:Spencer Wan is one of the most "complete" animators that I know. I can elaborate on what I mean by admitting that it's kind of hard to encapsulate his body of work with a word more specific than ingenuity. In every department he's ever handled (there's a lot), he's always managed to pick up his own ideas and solutions. I felt that very early on when I came across his tumblr page in 2016. His style in terms of animation and illustration was something I had never seen before among the animators I had known during that time. Every aspect, from the color palette of his backgrounds, to the timing his of animation was new to me and still kind of exists in it's own compartment in my head... but that was just his work as a student and a freelancer. The Owl HouseSince then, he's worn more hats on the productions he's been on and his new tricks now are starting to solve logistical problems to do with animation itself. Did you know his lightning animation on looked the way it did to work with TV regulations to do with epilepsy? His body of work speaks on all aspects of animation, because he is kind of just proficient in every aspect of the craft. Introductions: WEILIN-ZINENice to meet you, My name is Jerry and I'm your interiew host for the glorious WEILIN-ZINE! Im conducting these interviews in the hopes of one day having a Great Forest of Knowledge for the next generation of animators to grow with. I love animation and I want there to be more animation in the future! More and if possible, better than ever before! So that the next-next generation can grow up with even better animation! And then they'll make even betterBETTER animation!!11!1! Please spread this interview far and wide so that generations of aspiring artists can enjoy these interviews!!!!Jerry Nguyen, host & interviewer, WEILIN-ZINEInterview with Spencer Wan6/23/2024~7/12/2024Jerry Nguyen: you know, I feel like growing up and talking to animators of different levels of experience one of the correlations that surprised me at first was that even an animator's tastes in the kinds of animation they like change. So much so I think I can almost guess what an animator likes more accurately by factoring their experience.I'd like to ask you if you still remember what "good" animation looked like to you when you were youngerI think animators that are just starting out, particularly younger animators, have a very specific and pointed preference in animation that they think IS goodSpencer Wan: Well I remember back then I was really attracted to simplicity. I used to get seriously put off by the use of heavy shadows and highlights, so I gravitated toward Norio Matsumotos animation because hed intentionally excluded shadows where other animators would assume it was expected.Like back then it took me a while to see value in some of the best animation out there. I remember I turned my nose up at both Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion because the styles were too detailed for what I was interested in.And when it came to the movement I really liked when things moved in a way I didnt expect.Like it couldve been the best looking hand drawn 3D rotation in the world and I would not have cared. I wanted to be surprised.This was all before I had the vocabulary or knew any of the animators names though. I just knew something about it was getting to meJN: you know I think the fact that he doesn't draw shadows really affects how he puts down black lines. Especially in fabric, I think there is always an extreme frustration where not putting down a line for a fold feels like too little, but putting down a black line is way too harsh, and so as an in between we'll use shadows to record those forms in the drawing. Norio Matsumoto I think excelled at visualizing the balance of his drawings when it was finished as a cel rather than the drawing he put down on the animation paper itselfSW: You know I dont think I ever really thought of it that way. I think for me it was like the drawings already sing without shadows and adding any more to it just felt like muddying it up.I remember when that internal shadow trend started for clothing and it never really landed with meJN: ohhhh, now that you say out loud I guess that was a trendactually, it's funny cause now you ended up bringing back a lot of those heavy black shadows for the Hades trailers and before that also in the Invader Zim Opening.I guess I might suspect that some of it is just a result of the artstyle of the projects themselves, but it looks like you've worked your style around it so I'm wondering if that opinion aged somewhat until nowSW: Well I more meant like specifically the use of only shadow for the interior of cloth. Like I remember thinking everyone was trying to copy that one Yutaka Nakamura scene from Space DandyThe black shadows I used on those projects were mostly just because the Zim one was supposed to look edgy and Hades already had those shadows in the styleAlthough I think it is kind of what my hand naturally wants to do nowId rather do like black shadows than have actual shadows hahaLike if you left it up to me Id only use shadow to show rim light or have one of those ones where it cuts diagonally across the character to make it moodierI love that shitJN: I love that shit too, honestly a lot of the web gen animators who joined around the 2010s feel similarly hahaI think with the Nakamura trend, people had never seen someone animate high fidelity fabric shading that emulated realism like that before. I reckon most people thought it was borderline impossible until he started to do itI think there's something interesting about your threshold for what counts as muddy, the fact that shadows seems to so clearly step over that line. You would think that shadows might be a bare minimum requirement of detail considering how it's basically everywhere in real lifeSW: I guess so, but Im really never aiming to make something look like real life in my workIve only ever wanted to make it look like animation.I dont know, theres a balance in my head that just gets ruined when you start throwing shadow everywhere.And you know, its a lot faster to draw without it, so win winJN: when you conceive of the thing your gonna draw, does it just start as a drawing rather than something like a real subject that you might have to perform the abstraction of in your head?SW: Yeah thats exactly it. I picture a drawing.I mean if Im drawing a real subject then Im going to picture reality, but if Im drawing an animated character then I picture an animated characterI just dont do much realism these days. No one pays me for thatIt used to be I couldnt make the drawings in my head so Id just let my hand run wild, but eventually my skill caught up to what was in my mind.Spencer Wan - SpiderPunkJN: well, lord knows you'd shake the earth if someone did. I still think about that spiderpunk testSW: That one was so hard for me to conceiveWe only had like a few early concepts for the character and they gave me some punk rock poster reference and said make it as crazy as you possibly canI couldnt come up with anything crazier than the style changing every single drawingBut it was like I had to conceive a new thing every time before moving on to the next drawing. I didnt want it to look like it was just changing color. It had to like feel like it was changing styles even if you couldnt see every single oneAnd I wanted to mimic the haphazard collage nature of early punk rock posters so I also had to collage everything togetherMy file crashed so many timesJN: I feel like I saw like 10 new illustration techniques that you've never done before in just that one animation.SW: Yeah I also was bad at them!I was like god damn Im not creative enough for this. I wanted structure back so badlyIf that test had been any longer I wouldve totally run out of ideasJN: so that was all stuff you figured out on the assignmentI legitimately thought you just have used techniques like that before on pieces I just haven't seen yetSW: Yeah I just looked at the posters and tried to recreate the techniques for some of themJN: crazySW: Like okay I can tell this was printed with a printer that was like straight up out of toner, but I have to do it on a computer soStreaky splatter texture subtract layer? I dunnoAnd then I ran out of poster techniques so I just grabbed anything that came to mindLike a spiderman Halloween maskJust slap that in there onceIts relevantI think they actually also did that in the movie on their own, but on MilesJN: This is such a strange reoccuring thing where you frequently lament that you don't possess this creative energyis there someone/something that you might look to as a foil to you in this regard??I can personally attest that I've tried to do some of the rendering styles in even just one frame of that test and I couldn't figure it outlike even the fact that you could identify that this one effect was a printer with no toner I feel like requires a degree of experience with printingSW: Well I used to play around with that stuff a lot more when I was youngerAnd thanks, but I never felt like I was really getting anywhere with any of those styles. It was like that feeling of trying to recreate a style but never quite getting there, only it happened to me a few dozen timesJN: I mean where would you liked to have gotten to?SW: Anything closer to the look they created just by experimentingIt never felt like I got that authenticityJN: hmmm, and for Spiderpunk structure was the thing was distracting you from that stuff?SW: Well I'm used to structure. Usually in production the quality of your work is measured by how well you met the director's vision and how well you stay on model. I'm used to doing that, but here they were telling me to just go off on my own and smack it as hard as I could with every creative tool available to meActually I struggled a lot with that on that production because any time I got Joaquim's boards I had a hard time moving away from themIt was like okay, I don't wanna mess this up, so I'd do a very literal interpretation where I'd be careful to keep everything he put into it in placeAnd then we'd get to review and they'd be like can you do this again but mess it upJN: When you went and messed it up did it go through?SW: Basically yeahJN: sounds like you really have to like strain yourself to do this other thing they were asking you to do hahaSW: Well it's just difficult when you get a storyboard that's detailed. It's like it's telling you you MUST do it like this.JN: Animatics do tend to be pretty compelling to work withI guess you've never really worked off of a comic panel storyboard aside from when you worked with Chengxi Huang rightEven he would do animatics and his panels had a specific blocking to them though, not sure if that dampened the effect storyboards have for youSW: Youre forgetting we both worked on that Carol and Tuesday thing a while backIts not the timing that gets in my way. Its the drawingsWith Chengxi its fine because I can more or less just use his poses and Im pret