Fansom the Lizard

Fansom the Lizard, an animated fable about a pet lizard who travels from his home in Louisiana to Las Vegas in search of adventure, is a bizarre hybrid of Evan Mather’s own past (the film’s content and style) and his present as a digital filmmaker (the creation of that style). Fansom is arguably Mather’s best film for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s here that the lines between past and present, fact and fiction, and digital video and film are at their most blurred, indistinguishable and ephemerally unimportant.

In awarding Fansom the Lizard the Best Animation prize at the Northwest Film Festival in 2000, Todd Haynes noted that “[the film] uses digital animation to celebrate the lost charms of projected celluloid”, mentioning in particular its “lo-fi look and hi-fi past”. This statement is perhaps a contradiction in terms, but nevertheless a telling one. The past in question is not genuine, but built (and then, as Haynes correctly noted, celebrated). The film, importantly, is not the past – but a digital recreation and manipulation of it instead.

The film is based on family folktale about a false story of a true event, the false story being a child’s (Evan’s cousin) dreamed explanation for his pet lizard’s disappearance (all that stuff about Las Vegas) and the true event being the real explanation (he gets sucked into the vacuum cleaner).

If this wasn’t already hyperbolic enough, Fansom looks like a good old fashioned 2D animation – and on grainy, handheld Super-8, no less! – but in fact was created entirely within a computer. A few Adobe programs, some filters, a Macintosh G3 and voila: a digital recreation of Mather’s own past – real or imagined or – more likely – somewhere in between. Notable, too, is the film’s score by Trancenden, a bizarre musical mongrel that would feel just as at home in the past as it seems to in the present and which is supported by the conspicuous sound of a film projector on the soundtrack.

So, here we have a very personal story about a dream from one’s childhood, told by the dreamer as an adult – and thus with the clarity of retrospect – using modern means and methods to recreate the style of his past, and all the strings have been hidden to a degree that nothing – not even the story’s family folktale status – can really be taken as a given. We are constantly aware that Fansom the Lizard is a digital film but its style keeps trying to convince us that it was really shot on Super-8. And in the end, it may as well have been, if only in a parallel universe.

– Matthew Clayfield

“… not only witty and wise, but uses digital animation to celebrate the lost charms of projected celluloid … with a low-fi look and a hi-fi past, this is smart and sophisticated animation that draws you right in …”
Todd Haynes, Director and Judge at 28th Annual Northwest Film and Video Festival