Enrico’s blog

We had the luck of having the prolific Joann Sfar (of “The Rabbi’s cat” and “Vampire loves” fame) visit Pixar a couple of days ago. He talked about storytelling and his way of going about making graphic novels. I found it amazingly inspiring. He’s a such a funny, witty and fresh thinking guy. Ronnie wrote a nice post about it on his blog. I will leave you only with a couple of quotes from him that have stayed with me.

While talking about storytelling in comics and writing scripts for movies:(I am paraphrasing from memory here)”… writing and making movies must be like being an architect, laying plans and working with a crew of experts - while telling your own stories through comics is more like being a lonely gardener, you plant seeds and watch them grow … not knowing exactly what’ll come out of the ground”
I loved this metaphore, I feel very close to that kind of thinking in my approach to comics. Joan trusts his characters and lets them guide him … without fear of making wrong turns.
One last thing that amused me … when asked how does he just go straight ahead page by page (he doesn’t throw anything away) without being unhappy with something, he said “Do you know what I do when I am unhappy with a page? I do the next one”
This fearless “Forge ahead, let the story be told through you …” attitude is totally inspiring and motivating for me, in fact, even with a crazy busy schedule at work, in the last couple of days I managed to get back on track with the Venice Chronicles, will upload a couple of pages soon !

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 11:42 am and is filed under Arts, Comics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.