Animating the Unspeakable

An Interview with Animator Signe Baumane

Signe Baumane is a Latvian animatorliving and working in New York. Her latest film, an animated memoir called Rocks
in My Pockets (2015), is a tragi-comedy about her
family history of depression. Narrated by Baumane herself, the film unfolds as
an essay read aloud in manic, often carnivalesque tones, accompanied by surreal
imagery meant to approximate an invisible landscape of the mind. In one
memorable scene, her mother walks, like a demented Snow White, through the deep
forest of her consciousness, greeting the many little woodland monsters—depression spirits—that accompany her wherever she goes. In these moments,
animation serves not to supplant or overpower Baumane’s spoken narration, but
to reveal the strange beauty and inherent comedy of language often used to
describe mental illness (“I felt haunted by myself”). Though it is her first
feature-length animation, Rocks
in My Pockets is not Signe Baumane’s
first crack at animating the unspeakable. Her web series, The
Teat Beat of Sex (2010) is a series of short
vignettes about the hang-ups and confusions of sexual intimacy. As a darker
twin of cool girl Teat
Beat, Rocks in My Pockets stands as Baumane’s latest achievement in
using the power of moving images to reinvigorate discussions of taboo subjects. 

Baumane’s characters look a bit
like weird cousins of the Simpsons. Their protruding mouths have a Matt
Groening duck-bill quality, and their eyes are all wide, round, and frozen in a
slightly spooked expression, even as the corners of their mouths turn upward
into smiles. For years, Baumane worked for animator Bill Plympton, and his
influence on Rocks
in My Pockets can be felt both in its
form and content: the jarring levity with which topics like death and suicide
are discussed, and the way in which all her characters are shaded in pencil, by
hand. These penciled shadings differ from frame to frame, causing characters to
tremble with their own internal motion as colors move across their bodies in
rapid, contained micro-animations. The look of these figures—loopy, comic, a
little on-edge—is inextricable from Baumane’s commitment to creating a hybrid
lexicon of words and images to signify gluey, inarticulable mid-states: despair
that is also joy, pain that is also pleasure, sadness that, in its bleakness,
becomes affirmative of “the crazy quest for sanity” that defines her
characters’ lives. 

I met with Signe Baumane on a
cold-ish Sunday at a tea place in Midtown Manhattan that had been remodeled
since she had last been there (“It used to be twice this size! Everything gets
smaller in this city!” she exclaimed as we sat down). In a corner of...