Notes on the film
Honami Yano’s Honekami (A Bite of Bone) accentuates the detailed precision of ink markers. The film uses semi-translucent paper to blend underlayers shaded in coloured pencil with upper layers dotted by markers using a stippling technique. Adapting a drawing technique for animation, the artist gripped two or more markers together to dot the paper with multicoloured patterns reminiscent of pointillist painting. Once animated, these dotted compositions shimmer and blur across successive frames, creating an unstable mosaic that reflects the film’s interest in slippery childhood memories.
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definition of the stippling draws focus among a hazy memory
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The protagonist’s early recollections find resonance in the markers’ vivid synthetic colours, while the pulsating dotted swarms depict a natural world animated by interconnected particles. In the film’s exterior scenes, the dotted clusters depict a seaside landscape teeming with life. In intimate closeups, they flicker into faces that never fully come into focus. Honekami’s stippling technique recalls the sharpest instruments used for ink application – the tattooing needle that pierces skin to deposit pigment, and the engraving burin that incises a plate to prepare it for ink. (text adapted from Alla Gadassik’s curatorial essay “Dots, Lines, Washes: Animating Ink”)
Behind the Scenes
Director Honami Yano talks about the technical and conceptual process of making this film. This interview was done with the Annecy Festival in 2022 and uploaded to their youtube channel.
watch here
“Dots, Lines, Washes: Animating Ink”
Honekami (A Bite of Bone), as well as a number of other ink-based films, are discussed in Alla Gadassik’s curatorial essay, Dots, Lines, Washes: Animating Ink, written for the 2023 Ottawa International Animation Festival.
read essay
