Ryan Larkin and the addictive allure of illusions

During the summer of 1958, 15-year-old Ryan Larkin, his brother and friends were playing on a boat in a lake. Something went dreadfully wrong and Larkin's brother died. "It was a terrible boating accident. I was unable to save him. I was on the boat and was physically unable to save his life. I felt terrible and missed him greatly," Larkin would later say. The death of his brother quietly fractured the Larkin family. Something changed. "I was always the goofy, little guy, and they figured I goofed up again." Nothing was ever said, but he felt his family's scorching eyes. Larkin, a man who could bring beautiful images to life, could not save the life dearest to him.

More than cocaine and alcohol addiction, the downfall of animator Ryan Larldn--from a one-time protege of Norman McLaren and creator of one of the most influ ential animation films of all time, Walking (1968), to living on welfare in a Montreal mission house, panhandling for spending money began that summer day in 1958. Ryan Larkin grew up in Dorval, a suburb of Montreal. His father was an airplane mechanic and his mother worked as a secretary. He proved early on to be a special child. By the age of 10, he was already making oil paintings and at 13 was accepted into the prestigious Montreal School of Fine Arts. Larkin excelled at the school and with the help of his father landed a job at the NFB. He initially worked as an animator on instructional films for the army and navy. While the content of the films was not particularly inspiring, the overall experience was pivotal for Larkin. "Ryan's first assignments," says former head of English animation, Robert Verrall, "involved the talents of Rend Jodoin, Sidney Goldsmith, Kaj Pindal and others, not bad company for a 19-year-old apprentice. Such programs were part of the NFB mandate and allowed the hiring and training of people who would otherwise not have seen the inside of the place."

At the urging of Wolf Koenig, Norman McLaren began holding after-hours sessions for young NFB artists like Larkin. Within these sessions, the artists were given a roll of 16-mm film to shoot whatever they wanted. Animation came as naturally to Larkin as drawing. "Norman said I had natural control of timing and pacing over any given object," he says. At the same time, Larkin developed a unique technique involving stop-frame action and charcoal. Using a dense sheet of paper, he was able to draw deeply into the paper with charcoal and still erase it. Larkin made a one-minute test film called Cityscape (1966) utilizing this new technique.

People at the Board noticed Cityscape and were taken by its originality. McLaren approached Board producers and asked that Larkin be given carte blanche to make any film using the charcoal technique. "They said, 'Here's a budget. You've got three months to make any film,'" remembers Larkin. "One of Norman's friends presented me with a solo flute piece called Syrinx by Claude Debussy." Using the flute piece, Larkin then turned to the Greek myth about Pan. Syrinx received excellent reviews and won awards all over the world including the grand prize at a children's festival in Iran.

After Syrinx, Larkin put in a proposal to do a film based on sketches he had drawn of people walking around. The proposal was accepted and Larkin was given a year to do the project. However, dreading the thought of repeating himself, the film took two years as Larkin took time perfecting new techniques. "I was developing my Oriental brush work with water colours and human figures and the way that anatomy works, expressions of human behaviour, how funny people look sometimes when they're trying to impress each other with certain movements. I had mirrors in my little office and I would go through certain motions with nay own body." In concentrating" on motion and the details of the figures, Larkin abandoned background movement for a blank white screen.

The result of this two year project was Walking (1968), one of the most celebrated animation films ever made. Using a combination of line drawing and colour wash, Larkin observes the movements of a variety of urban characters. He weaves colours and sounds with an extraordinarily detailed visualization of faces, bodies, gestures and postures. Following Walking, which received an Oscar nomination, Larkin once again returned to NFB public-service films before being loaned out to a Vancouver art school. For eight months, he ran an animation workshop. During his stay, Larkin met a group of street musicians. "There was a whole little gang of them with their own children and stuff, hippies I guess, really good musicians." The encounter led to his next film, Street Musique (1972).

Very much a film in search of itself, Street Musique opens with live-action footage of two street musicians, before changing into a staggeringly animated stream-of-consciousness piece. One of the most dazzling scenes comes in segment two with a series of extraordinary landscape impressionist paintings. The film ends rather awkwardly with the last image stopping to wait for the music. "What happened was, I ran out of ideas and I didn't know how to end the film, so I just ended it on a strange little character, wiggling away in his little dance."