Characters

a protagonist. child who doesn't have a name, or a gender...
but does have a motivation. and a fishtail.

What did we learn this week? Mostly, that no matter how interesting the story is, and how experimental you are trying to be, you still need a "main character"...someone who will mediate between the world of the narrative and the "real world" or what passes for it in the life of the animator. And even when you are trying to avoid anything that smells like a narrator. So I have just remade quite a chunk of movie to unbalance it in favour of a protagonist instead of two-sides-to-a-story.
Which makes the idea I have just started working on, of a one-minute animated Shakespeare play REALLY challenging - the complexity of the plot and the different scenes with different parallel stories and therefore parallel protagonists; do I leave out the subplot? The funny bit with the dog? Even the marvellous Reduced Shakespeare company needed two minutes for Hamlet.
On the plus side, the Viola/Cesario/Sebastian situation will be an interesting place to examine some of those issues of depicting gender in cartoons...