Tender Bodies, film still [Enlarge in New Window]

James Duesing: Tender Bodies

Even though he has made it into the annals of animation history, it was only recently that James Duesing included his own work in the animation courses he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "It's kind of weird to talk about yourself," he says, but the fact is that Duesing was the first to make an animated film entirely on a desktop computer. Prior to the eight-minute Maxwell's Demon in 1991, this had been done solely on super computers. As a result, "Maxwell's Demon generated tons of press and TV sales in virtually every country," he notes, not to mention earning a place in the curriculum at such leading film schools as CalArts, University of Southern California, and finally even Carnegie Mellon.

Duesing is now at work on his fifth animation, called Tender Bodies. Like his earlier films, this computer animation presents a dystopian world in which strangely mutant characters act out deeply familiar emotions. Anxiety, fear, and desire permeate Duesing's post-apocalyptic urbanscapes, in which scenes and situations metamorphose with the free-floating logic of dreams. In this new film, we follow a beefy carnivore named Kisser as he chases his prey. He's a seducer, a consumer, and sometimes both, chomping down on a leg he was kissing just moments before. There's also Faun, a world-weary quadruped with human features, see-through skin, and skittish feet, and Other, a misshaped soul who elicits both fear and attraction and ultimately winds up on a dissection table, sold to party-revelers by the capitalist Kisser.

Plot summary is a futile exercise with Duesing's work, because he doesn't think in those terms. "I'm interested in experimenting with how narratives are constructed," he says. "Most narratives are spoon-fed to you. You follow a traditional trajectory of a story -- heightened action, climax, and resolution. In the stories I'm telling, there is a lot of information, but it's not always clear. I give you enough to figure it out. The construction tends to be this idea of 'hyper scenes' -- very condensed, encapsulating moments of important action that are connected through metamorphosis or some sort of visual."

Originally planning to be a painter and writer, Duesing turned to animation as a means of merging the two interests. Early on, he found inspiration in the work of Eastern European animators like Jiri Trnka and Yuri Norstein, whom he discovered while teaching at his alma mater, the University of Cincinnati. "Oddly, the public library in Cincinnati had a huge collection of this work," he notes. One aspect of it that intrigued him was that "these animators understand how to tell a story not just to people who know their language and slang. They don't use dialogue, but have developed a visual form that isn't silent."

Duesing has taken up the same challenge with Tender Bodies: to make a film without dialogue that transcends language through visual conveyers. Unlike his Eastern European mentors, however, Duesing eschews overt political content. For one thing, each of his animations takes too long to complete for such references to stay current. "It took me the entire time [President Ronald] Reagan was in office to make one project," he laughs. Furthermore, "I'm more interested in cultural or social situations than in political ones." Consumption, public spectacle, and the feared Other are his themes in Tender Bodies. But even here, Duesing strips his films of specific references, aiming to create something more universal. The reviled and desired character of Other could be gay, or he could be any cultural outsider. "I don't want it to be considered some kind of gay aesthetic, because it transcends that," Duesing, who himself is gay, insists. "It's more abstractly defined. Being an outsider is something that everybody feels, regardless of their situation."

For his part, however, Duesing should feel part of a venerated club that stretches from Dali to Disney, one in which metamorphosis is the key. "If you look at Bugs Bunny [the cartoon character], he's not a bunny," he says. "These characters get changed into something else, with lives and personalities, and somehow we just accept that. It's a type of American Surrealism." And that's an apt description of Duesing's own animations.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Animation | Digital Arts / New Media | The Human Animal | Fantasy & Myth | Mid-Atlantic | 2001