Kohana Wilson’s animation work is predominantly hand drawn, and has a distinctive vibrant energy and fluidity. It also possesses a real sensitivity and a heartfelt tenderness, which is ever more valuable and meaningful in a world of spiralling brutality and disenchantment. I think Kohana’s work would speak to me and move me whenever I saw it, but the last five years seem like a time when we truly need it.
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to Kohana about their work and process, as well as their new film-in-progress, teaching, freelancing, queer animation and the animation community. To coincide with this interview, it is an honour to be able to present Kohana’s award winning short film edith and the tall child here in full, as it goes online for the first time.
edith and the tall child (2023) by Kohana Wilson
The film depicts the eponymous tall child ‘falling headfirst into their gender reckoning’, mirroring Kohana’s own experience around the time of making the film. Using the film “as a place to chart my gender undo-ing itself in real-time” as Kohana describes it, gives the work a powerful sense of urgency and necessity. Dynamic and exquisite drawn animation are used to convey a time of disorientation and sudden shifts in emotion. The domestic setting and restricted palette of graphite on paper are perfectly suited to expressing feelings of tension and confinement and their sudden eruption into the everyday.
In addition to edith, Kohana has produced animation for numerous commercial clients including MoMA, Adult Swim, GIPHY and musicians such as Coldplay, Dua Lipa and Florist. Throughout all these commissions their animation shines out with a highly distinctive command of line, movement and detail. They also teach at Parsons School of Design, and in 2021 started the wonderful Boiled Over podcast with Lije Morgan. Kohana is currently working on a new film which I was excited to discuss in the interview, and they have generously shared some wonderful images and storyboards from this work and others which I am very pleased to be able to include here.
Video for Have Heaven by Florist (2025) by Kohana Wilson
EoF: Can you tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to animation?
KW: I was born and raised in Hong Kong to a Japanese mom and an English dad. They’re both orchestra musicians – my mom a violist and my dad a cellist. The orchestra was like a second family and I got to try a bunch of fun instruments growing up. My ultimate musical dream was to be a clarinetist, but that was shot down when I was told I ‘didn’t have the hands for it’ (what this actually means still remains a mystery). But I had always loved to read and draw and paint, and that’s what stuck!
I knew for most of my life that I wanted to be a visual artist in some way, but I didn’t animate until I got to college. I went to The New School in New York where I studied Illustration and Philosophy in a dual degree program. I took a time-based media foundation year class, where we spent one unit learning how to digitally rotoscope. That was as far as we got with animation, but it was my introduction to the world and more than enough for me to know I wanted to keep going. I felt an immediate calling to it, and it felt very intuitive to arrive at animation through drawing. I mostly worked with digital 2D animation in college with Photoshop and Animate, but by the end of my time there I was working pretty exclusively with drawn paper-pencil animation, and still do! I had always been a draw-er, and the task now is to make the drawings move.
EoF: Your short film edith and the tall child is a wonderful, tender and emotional film that feels highly personal. What was the genesis of the film and how clear in your mind was it at the beginning?
KW: I started working on what would become my graduation project, edith and the tall child, in the summer of 2020. I hadn’t animated on paper at all or made a true complete film before, but had been eager to do both for a long time. I was coming to grips with my gender identity at the time, and had just come out publicly as nonbinary / genderqueer. It felt right to use this long stretch of time devoted to one project to make something about this gender reckoning, and to try making a film. Conveniently, I couldn’t leave my apartment for months at a time, so I dedicated all my time to figuring out this new analog workflow and animating very obsessively. The film became my whole world.
In edith, the tall child falls headfirst into their gender reckoning, while Edith – an illusory prehistoric, long-extinct ground sloth – casts a long shadow of heterosexuality, tradition, and memory over their shared living space. The initial inspiration for Edith came from comparisons I had been drawing with extinct animals and the act of coming out and of declaring this type of change in my life. Edith behaves in my own life like a shadow, and as a reminder that I think many queer people relate to having lived a past life or previous existences that they might now feel estranged from.
I had no clear sense of story when I began working on edith. My ‘knowns’ for the film were that I wanted to create something handdrawn on paper, that I wanted to treat it like a diary, and that it would mostly revolve around two characters and their charged relationship. The process began with a lot of writing – lots of scribbling, stream-of-consciousness journaling, generating what I called a ‘picture list’ of vignettes that felt striking to me. My ‘script’ was a list of bullet points that summarized what was happening in each scene. I had generated most of the pre-production material on paper, and so it felt natural to continue drawing on paper. Most of the editing decisions happened while I was animating the film, moving different scenes around the timeline, animating new shots intuitively as needed.
The film is peppered with eraser shavings, scanner lines, and the ghosts of erased frames. A lot of this was just a byproduct of not really knowing what I was doing, but going for it in spite of it. So much of what I was trying to accomplish with the film felt like a total mystery to me. I didn’t follow a traditional pre-production process, it was my first time animating on paper, I didn’t know what the right way to clean a scan-bed was – but I improvised a lot and gave myself the benefit of the doubt. I’ve come to really love the film for this reason. So many of those visual hiccups came from drawing and re-drawing and re-drawing the frames, constantly erasing, then scanning, then checking the motion, and then re-drawing again to make the gesture or angle feel closer to some intuitive metric of correctness. Making this film felt like a kind of self-determination. Something about building a world and all of its details from the ground-up felt right. I think it was largely because I was going through this gender reckoning, and re-learning what I wanted my reality to look and feel like. Carving away until some honest shape emerged, which I think is what drawing does at its best.
EoF: The film is all hand drawn, pencil on paper. Could you talk a bit about your decision to work with these materials? What does physical pencil and paper bring that digital drawing does not?
KW: This was the first time I worked with pencil and paper to animate, and I’ve been loyal to it ever since. I find so much delight and pleasure in the process. Every stage of edith’s production involved paper and pencil - from storyboards to roughs. When I work on films with pencil and paper I still stick to this approach, planning all the movement out without using digital roughs. The process can feel so slow and iterative, but I love that the end result reflects this kind of intuitive choreography. There was very minimal digital processing, and almost no digital compositing. I used a scanner to capture my frames and brought them into After Effects as image sequences to organize them into scenes and make final color adjustments.
I’m drawn to working with real, physical materials because they evidence a body – its blemishes and artefacts and all. I really enjoy how honest and simple working with graphite feels. Drawn animation’s 20th-century industrial baggage can feel really ordered and strict, but drawn animation is so lawless. How controlled you want your mark to be depends entirely on how much control you bring to it – how tightly you hold your pencil, if it's sharpened or blunt, whether you draw from your wrist or shoulder. I had an old art teacher who could tell what order I drew three portraits in during one sitting based entirely on how my lines felt. It blew my mind at the time, but I think about that ‘tell’ all the time now and it helps remind me of the value of practice and finding an intuitive flow. Graphite is a material that is so receptive and so responsive to your body. I also love that when you watch a pencil-on-paper film, you can immediately get some sense for how the film was made. I appreciate when production feels visible and obvious. Digital animation has a permanence and uncanny quality that I sometimes struggle with, I think because it can feel hard at times to locate the person within it. This isn’t blanketly true, but I prefer working analog in my own animations for this reason.
Garden of Unearthed Delights by Kohana Wilson (2022). Commissioned by GIPHY
EoF: Edith was Academy Award long-listed, won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, and has played at numerous wonderful festivals around the world. Congratulations on the film’s much deserved success! Now that you are putting it online, how do you feel about the film today?
KW: Thank you! I finished making most of this film in 2021, only adding final tweaks in 2023 - that’s when its festival run began. The film was from a different time. My life today looks very different than it did when I was working on the film. For one, I was feeling a lot of shame around my dysphoria and gender when I started working on it. I feel a lot less shame now, five years on. I was asked once at a festival what a film I’d make about gender euphoria would look like, and I think it’d just be one where gender wasn’t the hard focus of the film – where gender expansiveness and exploration would just be a given. In some ways edith feels very self-indulgent. Shame is slippery and fixes your eye inward – I was also making this during deep lockdown, when it felt as though the only place to look was inward, so I don’t really fault myself for this –, and while I’m glad I could use this film as a place to chart my gender undo-ing itself in real-time, I honestly feel relieved to have some closure. And to move onto new animations and new approaches to making films.
Esther Leslie wrote that animation is our nature returned back to us through mediations. I think of edith now as a tilted portrait of that time in my life. Lockdown was a time with no horizons – even though edith’s world is also confined to the walls of an apartment, its sparse, empty, and barren. It’s all makeshift horizon. I’m glad I can now let my eyes stretch over real horizons and look at the faces I love for as long as I want and take a slightly less monastic approach to animating.
EoF: Were you thinking of any particular reference points whilst making edith - other films, books, art or suchlike?
KW: I was obsessively watching hand-drawn films for reference and inspiration. Amanda Bonaiuto (EoF alum!) was one of my thesis professors, and I had long adored her work and still very much do. The weight of her characters and the pacing of her films really inspire me, and her guidance really helped shape edith tonally. Cheng Hsu Chung’s work was also a huge inspiration, ADORABLE in particular. Allison Schulnik’s MOTH, Atsushi Wada’s In a Pig’s Eye and Bryan Lee’s Cage Match were also all important films that leaned into elastic character animation and analog texture in ways I continue to find deeply inspiring.
I make a real point now when I’m doing visual research to avoid looking too closely towards other animations as reference. I think it's so much more fun to look beyond your immediate neighbors, to let your eye wander and find itself in surprising places. I think it in turn makes your work feel special and singular – the result of secret bridges you’ve made between far places.
When I talk about edith now, I also often talk about queer animation. There’s something inherently queer about imagining other ways of being, other ways for movement and objects and people to exist, and really being insistent and firm about its reality through creating that yourself and bringing it into life with your own language, on your own terms. Animation walks very close in hand with queerness in its fundamental construction because both animation and queerness are processes of change, discovery, and revelation. I was only really thinking about this and conscious of it after I finished edith, but since then, it's been exciting to come across more research in queer theory and animation theory that gives much better words to some of these ideas. Jack Halberstam’s writing about queer time, animation and memory in The Queer Art of Failure was especially eye-opening.
EoF: What do you most like to draw? What do you most like to animate?
KW: I thought about this question for a while! I think the things I like animating most are objects moving through wind. Birds, flower petals, fabric. I’ve been especially obsessed with albatrosses lately. I also like figuring out dramatic camera moves – I call it telescoping. Telescoping between wide landscapes and tiny units of life. Realizing as I’m writing this that all roads are just leading back to birds. Animation lets you really test the boundaries of what feels real, and I like extending this to the physics of the animated world itself, playing with nonsense gravity and elastic characters.
I like beginning with observational drawing and nature. So much of the joy of drawing for me is getting an excuse to get lost in looking at something. I’m so inspired by the natural world, and drawing is a very mortal attempt to emulate it.
EoF: Have you worked with other kinds of animation processes much? Do you feel like you would make an animated film using a non-drawing-based process?
KW: Teaching has really helped me explore and fall in love with other animation processes. I’ve been really enjoying making hinged paper puppets and using a multiplane setup. My approach to drawn animation can feel very controlled and tight at times, and there’s something so freeing about stop-motion and its ability to accumulate frames quickly, even though it requires its own kind of control.
There’s also something I really enjoy about playing with non-drawing based processes after feeling so tethered to that one way of animating for a long time. It keeps me feeling excited about animating in a low-stakes way. I’ve been trying to make more of an active effort over the last couple of years to go outside of my creative mainstays – getting back into playing music and learning music theory, kite-making, book-binding. I really like the idea of working with the limitation of making a film without drawing at all! And setting creative limitations to work within generally.
EoF: You make personal films, commercial work and music videos - as well as teaching. How is it finding time for your own films and balancing your workload?
KW: Difficult! I’m bad at it. My first couple of years out of school were very lonely. I spent most of my days working very long hours on freelance projects and not leaving my apartment for days at a time. I was left feeling adrift and really hurting for connection with the people around me, and severed from a true creative practice. I’ve been making a really active effort over the last couple of years to re-order those priorities, trying to live in my days and in step with the people around me – neighbors, strangers, friends. Teaching has been life-changing in this way, too. It grounds you in a community and punctuates your life with real service and meaningful connection. All of this also informs the work I want to make for myself and helps me judge what truly feels worthwhile. And I think that helps with balance, even though I’m not totally convinced that balance is a true state.
Artists need leisure and time. Everyone does. But working yourself down to your limits erodes your body and spirit, and those are the most important tools we have as artists. Time spent away from the studio is truly the stuff that guides your time in the studio. Re-framing time spent away from the light box in this way has really helped make the task of balance feel more achievable, and makes me happier while I’m animating too.
EoF: You started the excellent Boiled Over podcast in 2021 with Lije Morgan, broadcasting interviews with many great animators. It meant a lot to me and many others - especially during the pandemic - to have this connection to other animators and to hear them speak about their work. How important is the independent animation community to you and your work?
KW: It’s hugely important! So many of the kindest and most unguarded people I’ve met have been independent animators. It’s an incredible community. There are regional pockets of animators everywhere you look. There are so many different entry-points from online groups to DIY screenings and festivals, and it really helps make the art form feel less prohibitive and much more accessible. It’s really motivating to have that social web and to feel very enmeshed in it too, particularly in NYC. I think because animation can be such a solitary practice, any opportunity to share work or gather, whether it's online or in person, feels so energizing.
Boiled Over began as a shared desire that Lije and I had to connect with animators and to learn more about their individual practices while we were in the throes of early COVID. In every attempt to reach out to animators, we were only met with excitement and curiosity. It felt like a really promising omen for what was to come in our futures, to realize these were the kinds of people we’d be in company with. And this feels so reflective of the spirit of the independent experimental animation community itself, a group of magic-makers who are total open-books and just excited to share in the pleasure and pain of animation. I stepped back from the project a couple of years ago, but Lije continues to run Boiled Over solo until this day and is putting out incredible interviews! Be sure to check out all of the work they’re doing. Long live Boiled Over <3
Sequence for the Sunlight video for Flipturn (2024) by Kohana Wilson
EoF: I see you’re working on a new film! Can you tell us a bit about it?
KW: I’ve been working very slowly on a film tentatively called Where Can We Live But Days. It’s a hand drawn film that involves a subantarctic hospice, human-powered flying machines built from stolen medical supplies, and albatrosses. I’ve wanted to make something about medicine, the truths of ageing and illness, and grief for a long time, and that’s what the film is becoming.
I just wrapped up a residency in the Provincetown Dunes where I lived off-grid for a week and worked on the film. No electricity meant no light table, so I got lots of drawing and writing done. I spent every evening watching the sun set, waiting for night to smudge the dunes. It almost feels like cloud-gazing – watching the land leak and take new shapes in the dark. I thought a lot about silhouettes while I was there, and I’m really looking forward to playing with silhouette animation for this next film (speaking of non-drawn animation!). I was making drawings with sand, ink and seawater while I was there that I’m also hoping to incorporate into the film, and animate with.
For more info on Kohana and their work check out kohanawilson.com
Kohana had a great sequence in Jonni Peppers' latest film! Thanks for highlighting their work -- really interesting piece!
Wonderful.