Photo Credit Jim Trainor's Harmony

Following is an excerpt from the September 2005 F News interview with animator Jim Trainor:

If you’re unfamiliar with Trainor’s short animated films, of which most are hand-drawn with a Sharpie marker on office paper and animated frame-by-frame, it might upset you to learn that in Trainor’s new short, Harmony, animals in nature guiltily confess to their own instinctually driven actions. A Chickadee confesses, “I mated with a man who was not my husband. I mated with him. He lived in a magnolia tree behind a fringe of poplars.” A Pygmy Chimpanzee admits, “I rubbed my clitoris against the clitoris of my own mother. I rubbed my clitoris against the clitoris of my own mother, and against the clitoris of my mother’s sister. I rubbed my clitoris against the clitorises of my two sisters, both elder.”

And some males in a small pod of bottle-nosed dolphins collectively reflect on unsanctioned intercourse, saying, “We raped her. We all raped her. But in a certain sense we had to do it. In a certain, very real sense we couldn’t not do it. We couldn’t not do it any more than we could free the degenerate fingers from our paddles and wiggle them. We couldn’t not do it any more than we could remove the built-in smiles from our faces, which in turn is not to say that we were not happy, which is not to say that we were not weirdly happy all the time.”

Jim Trainor’s Harmony could very well be the painfully angsty older sister to the naive, cheerful younger brother of Nick Park’s Creature Comforts—and his other work isn’t much more light-hearted. “The animals sort of feel guilt or are expressing guilt for these transgressions, but the transgressions are documented aspects of animal behavior,” explained Trainor. “A film festival recently called me the Walt Disney of sexual anxiety. I feel like I should make that into a T-shirt,” he joked.

Read the full interview here.