I drifted through the rooms with mixed feelings. Character design is a strange field. It seems to attract designers with a twee Hello Kitty sort of sensibility (for some reason many of these people are Swedes, like the little group sitting in front of us at the "Characters in Narration" screening, Swedes with Japanese girlfriends, cuddling and giggling at the anthropomorphism on screen), but at the same time it attracts highly ambitious visual types; after all, if your cute little mouse or rabbit becomes a mascot for some campaign or the hero of some hit movie, you're made for life. So character animators display this odd combination of tweeness and thrusting ambition, tender-mindedness and opportunism. Actually, most successful characters have the eye-to-head and head-to-body dimensions of babies, and babies share this combination of weakness and opportunism; they use their cuteness to manipulate us, tapping into our mammalian programming like the most cynical advertisers.
There was also something impressively monastic about the drawing area upstairs, a place laid out with anglepoise lamps, light tables, pencils and pads. Here visitors to the conference were encouraged to sit down and doodle in flip-books. The room had something utopian about it; usually, left to their own devices on a Friday night, people tend to smoke, drink, flirt, schmooze, and jabber into phones. But here, instead, we all craned intently and intensely over sketches, mostly in silence, combining solitude and togetherness, austerity and playfulness. And actually, it was a lot more fun than smoking and drinking. Here's what Hisae drew, a flipbook in which an anglepoise lamp morphs into our rabbit Topo:
