"Do fish stare up at the surface of the water imagining what extraordinary worlds and fantastic creatures may lie beyond?"
Recently, I stumbled upon this question scrawled in an old notebook of mine titled “Questionable Late-night Ideas,” and it became my philosophical framework for this project. The human desire for discovery drives pursuits in both art and science, and animation sits right at the crossroads of these two fields. Early pioneers in the medium, like Émile Reynaud, the inventor of the praxinoscope (1877), and its successor, the Théâtre Optique (1888), were both engineers and artists.
Wildlife Management draws heavily on Reynaud’s designs to bring the medium back into physical space and reconnect the viewer to the magic that exists in watching still images come to life. I feel that same sense of wonder gazing toward the night sky, my mind filled with ideas and infinite possibilities. This is not without some internal conflict. While the logical side of my brain has an insatiable desire for knowledge about the universe, the creative side is hesitant. Does each answer diminish our space for imagination?
