We all know that Disney and his studios got animation off to a big commercial start; and there are other artists who used successive drawings that were flipped together to relate a story. Then there was Ryan Larkin. He started with some drawings and then after watching how motion could be related through the flow of his lines got to creating some of the animated drawings that he did. Ryan was creative until he started to have a drug problem then there was a decline in his film work.
Ryan states that there were too many images in his mind coming all at once that did not give him enough time to draw and complete before the next came in. This was stated during an interview on the effect that cocaine had on his work. The artist who interviewed him stated that Larkin’s earlier animation was quite imaginative; the drug can induce a heightened sensitivity to your surroundings and can alter ones perception of reality.
But the drug also brought out the ‘dark side’ of Ryan according to the interviewer but one an always debate that. This comment was made alongside a film, animated by Ryan, that showed something similar to the creation of an Eden which gradually flourished and then became the object of a great fire that burnt everything alive. At first had one can attribute that to a the dark side of human nature but in relation to today there is a kind of poetic truth behind the tale; all we have to do is see what we are doing regarding our abuse of resources and making the world a toxic place to live! So the animated film that supposedly revealed his dark side can actually be taken as an epitaph for all the needless destruction we are orchestrating in the name of hunting out an ‘external’ enemy.
In the end Ryan was on the street collected change, it was a far cry from the time he was drawing for CBC studios and got paid for his work. A lot of the money he earned went to his habit and he soon lost his job because he could not be relied on. In later years a younger artist caught up with him and made a documentary on his story on his life as an artist and the ups and downs he had but sadly Ryan was not the same, he had greatly suffered from the loss of his companion and was otherwise no longer as creative as he was years earlier.
