Finding Autistic Cool in Animation Anthology Autistic Mode

Second year alt-fest Smash by Smash West puts an emphasis on programming other bigger brand name conventions – perhaps ones whose naming structure is familiar to you – might pass on. Dropping this Tuesday into the screening room of leftist bookstore Monkeywrench at 8pm is just such a work: animatic anthology film Autistic Mode.

For those curious, an animatic generally serves as the step between animation storyboards and the finalized work. They are often used to give all involved a rudimentary sense of a film or TV show's final look. Autistic Mode consists of five animatics made by a roster of autistic career animators, including project head Bob Clark, whose short “Dreamcatchers” serves as the film’s wraparound plot.

Clark spoke with me over the weekend on Autistic Mode’s birth from the remains of an ultimately doomed project. “A number of us were recruited to work on a project that was really exciting to us,” Clark explained. “Right from the outset, the person running it was saying that they were going to pay us. Now, that's something that you don't run into very often.” According to the animator, work in his field frequently means trudging through “unpaid volunteer positions.” When neither payment nor a useable screenplay materialized, the recruited artists looked to each other in commiseration – and found they had more than just being hornswoggled in common.

“About half of us who had been recruited on the project, or maybe a little more than that, were, all on the autism spectrum,” Clark said. “And when I heard that, I thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute. We could get a grant for that.’”

Get a grant they did, for $10,000 split among the animators. While Clark acknowledged the amount was nothing to sneeze at, in animation budgets run pretty high – so to keep money spent smartly they kept their work at the rougher animatic level. However, with the product being less polished than a top-dollar feature film, their options for distribution narrowed. They’d been touring the feature to smaller film fests when Clark heard tell of Smash by Smash West from New York Film Festival press folks. Having already had a good reception from fellow Texas fest Boomtown Film & TV over in Beaumont, Clark said he was drawn to how “everyone really can push for their own independent spirit” at Smash.

“Whenever people talk about different sorts of, I guess you would call it disability activism,” Clark said, “there's always this idea of ‘disability pride’ or ‘autistic pride.’ What I want to have [in Autistic Mode] is maybe a little bit more personal, more a sense of autistic cool.” His own cyberpunk sensibilities in “Dreamcatchers” exemplified that idea of autistic cool Clark mentions, but so do the other shorts: from the RPG styled “Hard Mode” by Nix Busby to Charles Moss’ “Honeyjack,” which follows a Yogi Bear type more into bugs that picnic baskets, Malcolm Thomas’ Tex Avery take “Tooned Up” to the auto-bio music video “Canvas” by Gabrielle Teaford.

“My desire [was] to make sure that everybody is getting a chance to flex and show their own independent autistic spirit,” Clark said.

---

Autistic Mode

Tuesday 11, 8pm, Monkeywrench Books

instagram.com/neowestchester