The heart of animation is the ‘feel’ and expressiveness of the animated movements, a critical component in animated expression that we most often overlook in our modern approaches to animated filmmaking. We placed the importance of storytelling through cinematic staging, graphic natures of colors & design, gestural attitudes of poses, but much more lenient on the texture of animated motion.

The nature of movement itself carries a wealth of information, with embedded stories that goes beyond words, physically and emotionally through the way something moves.

Life flows in fluid ways. And in this presentation, we shall look into the pursuit of fluid animated movement as an attempt to reach the very delicate and intricate nature of life itself.

A special 20-min work-in-progress preview of the hand-drawn feature “My Little World” will also be introduced. The film is 21 years in the making, currently in continuing production at and supported in part by the Chungkang College of Cultural Industries, Korea. Members of production crew will also be presence and share their production experiences in regard to the nature of fluid movement required by the film.

Mike Nguyen received his BFA in character Animation at the California Institute of the Arts in 1988. Since then, he was worked primarily in the feature animation industry in the USA as a Character Animator in various studios, including Walt Disney, Warner Bros, and DreamWorks Animation. Among the films he had worked on include the critically acclaims [The Iron Giant] as a supervising animator. 

In 2000, he co-founded July Films, an independent theatrical animation production company and his directing debut is the theatrical animated feature entitled [My Little World], currently in production. He was also a Character Animation Instructor at the California Institute of the Arts from 1994 to 2010, and also has given frequent animation workshops in Denmark, Ireland, Thailand, Taiwan and Korea. He is currently a professor at the Chungkang College of Cultural Industries in the Animation Department. His primary interest is the hand-drawn animation filmmaking medium and aims to reflect beautiful thoughts toward this life on Earth.