Not Your Usual: Will Anderson on his unique animation style

In Will Anderson’s films, as in life generally, time is a main character – and it has a fun sense of humour. As we sit down with Anderson at The Skinny's Edinburgh office over a Bittersweet Symphony – a Glayva Glocktail with Glayva, Whyte & Mackay Whisky, Campari and Angostura Bitters – we realise that we're directly across the street from the Edinburgh College of Art, where Anderson’s filmmaking journey began.

A childhood lover of The Simpsons and South Park, Anderson was drawn in by the challenge of animation – “I just thought it was the hardest thing that I could possibly try and do… but it's such a nice challenge” – and ECA offered a chance to explore the form in an interesting way. “You didn't really need to worry about the technical side of it too much,” Anderson tells us, “you just did your thing. Because that's kind of what you learn at art school – you're already an artist and you're just learning how to express whatever you want to express.”

“I just loved the freedom of that,” he says, “and I’ve somehow managed to keep doing it since then, which is almost remarkable.”

Anderson’s work is often freeform and freewheeling, playing with time, the boundaries of the screen, and the expectations of the audience. His graduation film The Making of Longbird combines Super-8 film, live action and animation to bring to life a Soviet-era character in a battle with his animator. Have Heart tells the story of a character from a viral animation, struggling with his work-life balance as his streaming numbers rack up. Betty scrobbles back and forth through the collapse of a relationship, with the animator’s voiceover chipping in and shuffling the timeline. A self-described “process filmmaker”, Anderson’s approach to animation is to set off on the road and see where we all end up.

He explains: “The problem with animation is that you edit first, and you make all this stuff and you have to know exactly what you want, and then you just spend ages, and then it's done. That doesn't sound exciting to me at all. I like making films where I actually don't know what's really going to happen. That could be in the recording of the dialogue; I don't storyboard often; I don't actually know exactly where it'll go.

“I love narratives that are playful, and that play with the form, because animation… everyone knows that it's a trick. When characters kind of let on that they're animated and they're in this world, like it’s a simulation or something, it's so funny.”

All of these elements – the time-shifting, the personal process, the pathos – come together in A Cat Called Dom. Anderson’s debut feature (co-directed with frequent collaborator Ainslie Henderson) combines animation, documentary and meta-narrative to tell the story of Anderson’s relationship with his mother after her cancer diagnosis. Created over an eight year period – “I actually thought it would never end at one point”, he tells us – it’s a messy, funny, confounding film which sees Anderson visited on his laptop by the titular cat over the course of the concurrent filmmaking and cancer journeys.

“The film's about failure, the film's about struggling with my mother maybe dying of cancer. That was what started it. But then it became a film about communicating through cancer and how difficult it is. So therefore, that actually linked to the form a little, actually the scatteredness of scrubbing back and replaying a moment and replaying a moment… that's how it feels. It's messy. So this messy mixture of documentary and animation all kind of started to make sense. It's not really knowing how to deal with a hard moment, so you're scrubbing through things and it's like you're sticking things together and you're trying to make sense of them.”

Ahead of an iPlayer release, Will and Ainslie took Dom on a tour of Scottish cinemas for a series of screenings and audience questions. Naturally, when you’re putting out a part-animated documentary with your own narration regularly chipping in, Anderson had some questions to field. “I originally joked with my friends about that,” he says, “that it meant I wouldn't need to go and do Q&As because I'm basically just telling people what the film's about as it's playing, which was… deeply flawed. What I found myself doing is having to go and talk about it way more.

“I think with Dom it's been a good growth thing. It sounds a little forced, but it isn't really – that film was so hard to make, so when I actually managed to finish it, it was almost like an out of body experience because I couldn't see a way out. You know when you watch a really good series and you're like, ‘how the hell is this going to resolve?’ It was a bit like that.”

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A Cat Called Dom will screen on BBC iPlayer in 2024; watch some of Will’s short films, including The Making of Longbird, Betty and Have Heart, at vimeo.com/willand
Follow Will on Instagram at @willandersonjr
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