‘Captain Yajima’ and the YouTube animator forging a new future for the medium
Many of us miss the good old days of cinema, a time when movies were made by people and creative integrity was a concern to those who made them.
While some genres seem to be thriving, others are quickly plummeting to the end, with animation in particular taking a sorry road towards mediocrity as artificial intelligence and modern technology diminish what used to make it so special.
In the past, animated features were sometimes made by artists who would draw each frame by hand, with old Disney films like Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians having a wonderfully delicate quality to them as a result of the faint pencil marks and brush strokes that you can sometimes see.
But even the animated features that weren’t hand-drawn require an enormous amount of time and attention to detail, with the world of stop-motion filmmaking being equally painstaking but leading to modern-day masterpieces like Coraline, Fantastic Mr Fox and Fantastic Planet. Any given moment in Coraline could be a standalone piece of art, with a rich and glamorous colour palette that contrasts wonderfully with the grey dreariness of her everyday life.
The same can be said for the golden age of Pixar, with a distinct style that led to the creation of some of their most universally loved characters. Each project was a result of a dedicated team of animators, blending their combined efforts using custom-developed tools and 3D modelling software to create instantly recognisable figures and story worlds. While their style has certainly developed, there is no denying their impact and influence on the medium as a whole.
However, there have been few projects in recent years that have come close to the innovation of the past, with the medium suffering under the weight of modern technology and increasingly quick production timelines. Studios like Disney are forcing their animators to work at record speed to keep up with their conveyor belt of new projects, but with few original or even vaguely good stories that come close to the magic of old animations.
Instead, a new style has been pioneered that allows these projects to be made quickly and maximise profit, but as a result, they look clinical and devoid of life, like a computer-generated image with no feeling or depth to it. But in a creative era that often feels bleak and hopeless, one animator is quietly changing the genre and challenging the idea that animated stories need excessive technology to make an impact, and doing so through an animated series on YouTube.
Ian Worthington, known by his YouTube alias Worthikids, has been making animated series and shorts on the internet for over ten years, and has been doing so using completely free software. His channel is populated by short, animated sketches and episodes of an original series he created called Bigtop Burger, one of his most popular creative ventures to date. As an entirely self-taught animator, it is all the more impressive that his work now rakes in millions of viewers, and when looking at his animations, it isn’t hard to understand why.
His style feels deeply nostalgic in its simplicity and charm, with a certain haze to it that almost feels akin to something like The Clangers. But miraculously, each film also looks as though it was created through stop-motion, with Worthington hacking the system by crafting rich and tangible 3D-looking characters that exist in 2D worlds, despite the characters being 2D and not through employing stop-motion.
But his animation style only becomes more impressive when learning how he makes them. Worthington makes each one using Blender, where teaching himself how to use it has led him to establish a style that exceeds the work many can only achieve using software that costs thousands of dollars.
He is a true innovator, establishing his signature style through quirky and vibrant worlds that feel intensely tactile, plunging us into fictional worlds that pop in all their details and eccentricities. Through the use of a grease pencil in Blender, Worthington has mastered a distinct style of drawing that feels truly timeless, taking us back to the good old days and showing how a stripped-back approach can give you so much more life and substance.
His 2021 short Captain Yajima is a perfect example of this, with a mood that blankets you in the comfort of a lost childhood, putting his own spin on the style that defined the golden era of animation and mysteriously defying the laws of the medium by achieving so much while using so little.
While there are some animated projects that are making the use of modern technology in a positive way or carrying on the techniques of the past, whether it be Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Flow or Memoir of a Snail, the art form as a whole is struggling. However, Worthington proves that we don’t need endless resources and budgets to create work that is entertaining, innovative and great to look at. All you need is a strong script, simple tools and an abundance of talent—and through this, animation can return to the beautiful yet deceiving simplicity of its past wonderment.
