This was a story I developed when I was in animation school.

In 1990, I had been to California and was fascinated by the coastal mountains, with their trees running up the valleys. Looking down from the plane as I arrived, I couldn’t imagine what they were covered with. Imagine my surprise to discover that inland, they were covered in grass! Near the coast, though, the vegetation was different, and I called them ‘the Woolly Mountains’.

In 1992 I went back to school to study classical animation at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. We received and assignment where we had to design a scene containing Hansel and Gretel, the characters from the old European folk tale. At roughly the same time, I received another assignment: to write a story. I decided to partially combine the two.

The story: Evelyn’s Story.
Background info and a timeline: Notes on the World of the Woolly Mountain Incident.

I expanded this into an essay, “World Design: An Art A-Borning“. I was groping towards something ill-defined that I had always wanted to do, and was hoping to find a way to make it a job. As things evolved, it didn’t become a job. I talked myself out of continuing at animation school (not the most optimal decision of my life), and went back to my job in the electronics factory. There, eventually, I would learn to write and build books and deal with printers… and find another way back to the creative world. But that would be much later.

The background to the story and the assignment. Much of this is copied from the World Design essay.

In animation, both the characters and their surroundings must be precisely specified, so that many people can work on a given character or situation with seamless results. I had to design three characters (Hansel, Gretel and the Witch), their clothes and belongings, and their surroundings. Being a little tired of the ‘evil old hag’ stereotype, I decided to make the Witch a ‘good guy’. I also wanted her to have ‘magical powers’, so I had to figure out what those might be. I decided to set the scene in the central California mountains south of Big Sur, after being enormously impressed by the area while on holiday.

In the folk tale, Hansel and Gretel are the children of poor woodcutters deep in a European forest. What would a corresponding situation be in the coastal mountains, which are covered by bushes and grasses, with trees only in sheltered valleys? I decided to make Hansel and Gretel’s people itinerant herb-gatherers. The area needed to be isolated enough to support the herb-gatherers and provide room for a Witch as well, with only occasional contact between the two. Furthermore, it had to provide customers for the herb-gatherers and an explanation for the Witch’s history and powers.

For the writing assignment, I decided to write about the Witch: who she was, and where she came from. I named her Evelyn. This assignment became ‘Evelyn’s Story‘. During the writing of ‘Evelyn’s Story‘ I started to keep notes on the world Evelyn inhabited. These included a future history, and descriptions of some of Evelyn’s powers. These became the ‘Notes on the World of the Woolly Mountain Incident‘. The Woolly Mountain Incident itself, of course, is the meeting between Hansel and Gretel and the Witch.

In ‘Evelyn’s Story’, the meeting between Evelyn and the children is a minor incident in Evelyn’s centuries-long life, but it is a turning point in the lives of Hansel and Gretel. There is an unfinished version of the story which goes into more detail on this. This story would have included more background on the trading culture of the Traditionalists and their towns in the California valleys.

The red sketches in the first picture are by my teacher at Sheridan… who had worked at Disney. You can tell.

For the animation assignment we had to design our characters. Initial sketches of the Witch had her rather hideous, but gradually she became younger and less ugly. Hansel and Gretel and their parents were never as fully sketched out as the Witch, but I imagined the parents as tough, rather humourless hill-dwellers, all their energy used in the struggle for survival. Hansel and Gretel themselves, of course, were children, still being forced into the mould of their peoples’ lives. Hansel did not want to go…

I had to explain the names of the children. Why are they named ‘Hansel’ and ‘Gretel’ in California in the 24th century? I came up with this:

The Traditionalist culture reveres the ‘Good Old Days’, our time, and Traditionalists tend to name their children after ancient heroes and heroines. More often than not, this means names of celebrities, characters, people high in profile, who may or may not have been actual heroes: Mickey, Arnold, John, Paul, George, Ringo, Jayefkay, Liz, Jamesbond, Batman, Yoda, Eddie, Michael, Madonna, Ronnie, Lancelot, Hansel, Cinderella, Ojay, Elvis… all icons of the old civilization. The mix of names would depend on when the old civilization collapses and new celebrities cease to appear. By the time of the story, the details of the people behind the names have become garbled and half-forgotten, and a set of names such as these becomes customary in each Traditionalist tribes.

Later on we had to design a ‘layout’ for an animation scene involving these characters. Layout refers to the process of detailing the character’s relationship with objects in his (or her, or its) surroundings as the scene progresses, and also the planning of the camera moves. All of these go together into a tightly detailed and very exact package of drawings, which, when combined with the storyboard, guides the character animation.

I chose to place the scene near the coastal highway at the Bixby Creek bridge, south of what is now Big Sur, California, for several reasons. I had visited the area in person, and had taken photographs; it was easily located on topographical maps; and it is the kind of stunningly beautiful place that gets into a lot of travel books. Documentation was easy to find. The area is sparsely inhabited today, and it is likely to remain so; thus pictures taken today will remain fairly accurate.

In the background scenario, I had given the Witch, Evelyn, various powers so that she did not require elaborate shelter. I set one of her little houses just off the coastal road, near the ruins of the Bixby Creek bridge. (The whole area is unstable, and over a period of centuries, the road if left untended would almost certainly fall into ruins. They have enough trouble keeping it open as it is…) I had to do detailed and exact drawings of Evelyn’s house, which means that I had to design things down to the details of the kitchen utensils… Everything had to fit in. Evelyn is a Gaian, a member of an advanced biologically-based civilization, so she would tend to use local materials for the house and grow things that we (and the Traditionalists) would build…

Onwards and onwards it went. Each choice made in creating a world guides and constrains later choices. At the same time, there is great creativity in fleshing out the implications of each choice. If I had gotten to the point of actually doing a detailed background painting, I would have had to research the geology and plant life of the California coast, so that everything would look right. If I had gotten to the point of animating the scene, I would have had to plot out the motions and activities of the characters and design the properties of their tools and belongings necessary to the plot and action. This includes the activities of any of Evelyn’s living biological tools, which implies at least a faint idea of what they do, if not how they do it.

And now I know that “backgrounds” are a defined specialty in the world of animation. Meeting cartoonist Blake Sanders and actually learning how much he prefers doing characters while I prefer doing backgrounds was eye-opening. If only I’d been able to see that connection when I was at Sheridan!