December 30th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
15 shorts will be narrowed down to five early on in 2025 for the latest Best Animated Short Film Academy Awards category. One of the hopefuls is The Wild-Tempered Clavier, from director Anna Samo. She pays tribute to the music of Bach and the art of filmmaking with this unique presentation. (This Animation Scoop Interview was conducted as an Email Q&A and was edited for length and clarity. Images provided by Samo.)
Jackson Murphy: How does Bach’s music inspire you?
Anna Samo: Bach’s music has always been special for me. It has this transcendent quality and gives me the feeling of connection to something most important in life. When I feel overwhelmed, or distracted I like to listen to Bach to regain focus on what really matters. I remember when the pandemic hit New York City my family and I would drive to the ocean and take long walks along the shore. We would stare at the horizon line where the water touches the skies and reflect on how this view has been the same for millions of years. We would listen to the sound of waves breaking and be reassured, because we knew those sounds were the same for centuries.
Anna Samo: Bach’s music has the same effect on me. I was listening to it a lot during the Covid lockdown, while working. It was at that time that I built my version of an editing machine and began animating on toilet paper. It struck me that the combination of Bach’s music, that has been around for three hundred years, with toilet paper – the most perishable everyday object, was something interesting and worth exploring. I wanted to spend time with the music, hold onto its beauty in the tumult of momentary dramas and I wanted to play around with the materials at hand while creating animation – it was the initial impulse for making my film. The music piece I chose is a prelude in e-minor from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I did not animate to the music, but its structure and tone gave me ideas and inspiration for what to animate. The repetitive bass line in the beginning of the piece resonated with the feeling of being caught in the same daily tasks and chores, that was amplified by the pandemic. Later when the war in Ukraine started, I was shocked how quickly it became a new normal, almost trivial and how weapons and casualties entered our discussions.
I left Russia nearly twenty years ago, but I still have family and friends living there. The aggressive Russian invasion of Ukraine became a sore spot in conversations with my parents and I have seen many friends and fellow artists faced with the difficult choice to leave their country or to stay and to adjust to the new reality. I’ve found myself questioning the relevance of my work and my obligations to the world outside of my studio. It felt so ridiculous to be painting on toilet paper alone in my little studio, while the war was raging somewhere. Again, Bach and his music were an anchor and inspiration – I was thinking about how many wars were fought during his lifetime and how it did not stop Bach from creating his music. I was reminded that art has always existed back-to-back with violence and destruction and it was the duty of an artist to observe, to create, to reflect and to play.
Anna Samo
JM: What do you love about movies and moviemaking, and how did you want to pay homage to that with this film?
AS: I discovered the art of cinema and fell in love with it in my early twenties, while being a student at the Architectural University in Moscow. A friend dragged me along to a screening at the Museum of Cinema and I got hooked. I started skipping classes to go to screenings and this was the end of my career as an architect. The Museum of Cinema had tiny screening rooms where one would want to sit in the first row to be as close to the screen as possible. All films played from 35mm and one could peek into the projection room, which seemed to be a mysterious and sacred place. There was the magic of the light conjuring images on the screen in a darkened room, and the excitement of a shared experience. There I came across Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut, Jarmush, Kaurismäki, Fellini, Méliès among many others.
What probably fascinated me the most, was to be able to discover those strong directors’ voices and to feel the obsession of those auteurs with the medium they were working with. This presence of the author in the work is something that also attracted me to independent animation and finally pushed me to become an animation filmmaker myself. During my animation studies in Germany, I learned about Norman McLaren and loved his cameraless animation. Though I never had a chance to experiment with drawing or scratching on film stock, I like the thought of the uncertainty and loss of control that comes with it. As an animator you have to focus in a very different way working directly on film – there is no way to check the animation and the frames are never underneath each other, always next to each other. There is no “undo” button – one has to accept the possibility of making a mistake and work around or incorporate it. When the first wave of the pandemic hit NYC and toilet paper suddenly became a valuable commodity, I had my inspiration. I noticed that toilet paper has similarities with traditional film stock – it comes in rolls, it has separate “frames” that one can rip off and tape back together if needed.
Even though I was using digital technology, I created rules for myself, which helped me imitate the process of animating directly on film stock. For example, I did not use the onion skin option, that allows one to see the previous image underneath, but instead looked at the previous image and tried to create a similar one next to it, just as one would do when working on 35mm. I also did not watch the animation in progress until an entire roll of toilet paper was completely filled with images – just as one had to wait for the traditional film reel to be developed and returned from the lab. And when finally, I would allow myself to play the animated roll, it was always magical – the illusion of movement, the imperfections, the texture, the separate images that would come to life and trick me into believing they were real.
JM: What surprised you the most about painting on toilet paper?
AS: I wanted the colors in the painted animation to be bright, so I used Japanese watercolors which were developed to use on rice paper. I had to work very fast and take a photo of the image before it was dry – so the colors would still be vivid. The size of the image was small and there was no way to control the way the water color would soak into the paper, so the images could not be too detailed. It was surprising for me to see how far I could push the limits; how rough the separate images could be and one still would recognize the movement. There was also something very appealing in this idea of not being able to control the image – I feel that we can’t control so many things in the world and this is something we have to learn to accept and to deal with.
JM: What’s challenging about the movement of toilet paper, in a 35mm style?
AS: The paper would sometimes rip, because it was still wet in the middle when I would move it, but this gave me ideas for the story. When moving the strip of paper, I had to pay attention to where the roll was in the previous frame, so it wouldn’t jump around too much. It was more difficult to control when the roll on the right side would become almost full – it would be too thick and sometimes I would have to unroll the whole thing again and roll it tighter. In general, it is amazing how forgiving the stop motion technique is – we focus on the image in the center and don’t really notice the imperfections on the periphery. Much more challenging about the project was the fact that I did not use a storyboard or follow a specific idea about what kind of film I was making; instead, I followed my inner urgency to animate another roll of toilet paper, and then another and yet another.
I liked the idea of producing the footage first and then rearranging it, discovering new meaning during the editing process – something that doesn’t happen in the traditional animation pipeline where everything is planned in advance to optimize the production. However, something was holding me back from editing the animation for a very long time – I was probably just scared to commit to some kind of structure and I did not want to judge the animation I made too early on. This approach was liberating and, at the same time, nerve racking because I wasn’t sure if I was making a film, or just wasting toilet paper. It turned out that somewhere in the back of my mind the film was shaping itself in its own time. When I was ready, it only took me about three days to find the structure and to assemble a rough cut of the film. Accepting the challenge of uncertainty allowed my film to grow organically, and I feel the result continues to surprise me even after the film is finished.
JM: The story comments on music and artistry amidst the world’s problems. How do you feel about this, and what do you want audiences to take away from this aspect?
AS: In a way comparing toilet paper with 35mm film stock comes from a place of a doubt – is art and moviemaking as valuable as we artists want to believe? Are we escaping reality and hiding in our little world of magical light and shadows? I don’t think that art can be disconnected from the world in which it is created. The work of an artist is always impacted by the circumstances and by the society surrounding the artist. The past four years have been marked by the pandemic and wars and the feeling of impending doom. The Wild-Tempered Clavier is my attempt to express all the confused feelings about being an artist living here and now, struggling to make my work and to defend my right to play. Making the film helped me realize that this is the only way for me to react to what is happening in the world and to process it. I hope that the audience will feel that the music and art win at the end. It is a fragile and hard-earned victory, but for me it is the only one that matters.
JM: What makes music and animation a harmonious pairing?
AS: Music and animation have the ability to tap directly into the emotions of the audience –bypassing the guard of logic. They work with rhythm and are more direct without being literal. Both invite the audience to actively participate in the act of creation by interpreting the images or sounds.
JM: How would you feel about receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film?
AS: I try not to think about it – the possibility of the Academy Award nomination still seems to be too theoretical a concept to me at this point. I am sure there would be a wild mix of feelings.
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