I’m only now beginning to see something I had never realised before. In my half-waking mind, I see what I have been animating.
This dog becomes the grotesque through external stimuli. It has very little control over it’s own existance. It’s interesting to animate a passive character with an active influence on it. The model no longer makes sense in light of the comb, which forces itself upon the dog. Twice in this scene the dog goes wildly off model, but it seems blissfully right that it should. The hardest parts are the parts that are not wild, that need to be subtle. If there is any life here, it is a mockery, a hideous caricature of what we imagine a dog should be. There is no dog but the one that exists in our mind’s eye.
After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality.