LET ME FEEL YOUR FINGER FIRST
FRANCIS
About the artist
LET ME FEEL YOUR FINGER FIRST is a comic art project established in 1998 to disseminate comics, animation, live and web-based work. LMFYFF appropriates, plays with and destabilises the conventions of character-based animation. The LMFYFF characters are like a dysfunctional family whose behaviour references and sometimes mimics that of mainstream animated characters. They appear, exist for a short time and disappear again in different narratives, at times experiencing traumatic consequences only to reappear intact in later stories. Recent LMFYFF narratives have considered notions of the animate and the inanimate in relation to 'active' and 'passive' roles. The function of language in the work is a continuing interest; both in formal terms and as a tool of interpretation and manipulation. Examining different states of consciousness, in particular, circumstances where the character's mental faculty has been arrested or altered in some way, has been a constituent in much of the work. Predatory sexual desire, libidinal drives and cyclical existence were addressed in the short film 'Homo Zombies'.
About the work
FRANCIS is an account of the creation of a 9-year old 'defective' animated character. As the draughtsman's hand goes to work and Francis attains animated consciousness, his behaviour is observed and assessed by a child psychologist. The boy's responses - initially slow and apparently flawed - develop in unusual comic directions as the examination progresses. As his vocalisations begin to address the nature of his animated world and the psychologist continues to try and interpret his actions, it appears that Francis may 'break out' once and for all and become a 'real' animated character. FRANCIS playfully addresses notions of construction and the role that language plays in interpreting, classifying and creating certain 'types'. In an animated world populated by impressionable idiot figures, mischief-makers and oddballs with strange vocal mannerisms, FRANCIS puts the cute but 'simple' cartoon character into therapy for a case study of 'animated behaviour'. FRANCIS is an Animate Projects commission funded by Arts Council England and Channel 4.