Cathy(Zhixin) Zhou

Flee (Aimated Graphic Novel)

Flee is a narrative, 28 pages animated graphic novel with animated GIFs, it is about a dream of a retired museum curator Anton who suffers from a sudden illness. The main theme I am exploring in my project is human’s attitude toward death and illnesses. The title Flee refers to both Anton’s race against death in the story and human’s escapism mentality toward death outside of the story. The goal of this project is to illustrate a symbiotic and optimistic relationship between human and death, encourage people to enjoy their life.

“Flee is a narrative, 28 pages animated graphic novel about a dream of a retired museum curator Anton who suffers from a sudden illness. The main theme I am exploring in my project is human’s attitude toward death and illnesses. Human’s relationship with death and illnesses is complex, always build on fear and regret. In this project, the plot focuses on the adventure of an old museum curator in a whimsical museum that reveal the process of him surviving from a sudden illness, shown in a relatively light-hearted way. The title Flee refers to both Anton’s race against death in the story and human’s escapism mentality toward death outside of the story. The goal of this project is to illustrate a symbiotic and optimistic relationship between human and death, encourage people to enjoy their life. The inspiration of Flee comes from my own experience of losing my loved from disease, and how my attitude toward disease and death change through time. This is the first time I realized the heaviness of this inescapable topic that all human being needs to face. At first, I am pessimistic, it is hard for me to digest the fact as everything happened so sudden, and this led to a consistent debate inside my mind about human’s relationship with death. After talking with myself and my family, I found out the best way to face the death and the lost is to accept it and live with it. Birth and death are the start and end of human’s life, but the most important part is the journey between them. By creating this animated graphic novel, I wish I can share my own experience and opinion toward this topic. The aesthetic style of Flee is influenced by the increasing combinations of illustration and graphic novel with animated GIF in the contemporary art. Animated GIF is a form of looped animated image that frequently used in the digital art. My initial inspiration of adding GIF into graphic novel comes from the advertising animation for Coca-Cola’s Open campaign by Nimura Daisuke and Alva Skog. I am inspired by the clever union of animated GIFs and the comic panels. Animated graphic novel is an area that few artists focusing on, and I think adding animations did elevated the aesthetic expressiveness of the traditional graphic novel. The whole graphic novel is in digital form, illustrate and animate using Photoshop and Procreate. It will be display in both video form in MP4 format and web format with animate GIFs. Flee combines the expressiveness of animated GIFs and the narrativity of the graphic novel, to illustrate the relationship between human and death in an optimistic perspective. ”