Kill Your Idols: Run Wrake's Visual Anarchy
Words: Marisol Grandon
Run Wrake gives excellent directions to his home studio. "Take a left turn out of Leytonstone tube. Admire the Alfred Hitchcock mosaics on the walls, then walk up the lane," he instructs. Dutifully, I take time to study the public art -- 17 iconic scenes from North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Rear Window and others, all satisfyingly pixilated into tiny brightly hued tiles. This is just the kind of work that floats Wrake's boat, what he calls "a nice little piece of advert-free London."
Hitchcock was born in this now-multicultural district in 1899, when filmmaking was still in its infancy. What would the legendary auteur make of today's desktop directors like Wrake, who write, storyboard and produce entire films in one room? "Were he alive now," says Wrake, "I suspect Alfred would have continued to make his films in the way he always had." For his part, though, Wrake is taking a turn towards Hitchcock. For more than 15 years, the down-to-earth 42-year-old's critically acclaimed animation and illustration has focused solely on music. In the '90s, he made his name creating visuals for acid house raves and collaborating with Glaswegian ambient maestro and producer Howie B. Since then, Wrake has built a client list that's a virtual who's who of the era's musical champions: Future Sound of London, Stereo MCs, The Charlatans, Manu Chao, Spacer, Oasis and U2. But lately, Wrake has given new attention to storytelling, as seen in Rabbit, his dark, fascinating 2005 fable about a pair of vicious children whose avarice leads them to do terrible deeds. "I had always sort of sneered at narrative a little bit,"he reflects. "Well, not sneered, but I got into animation to put images with music. If you've got good music, there is a narrative in itself."
Wrake earned his professional name by letting music be his guide. His 1997 promo for Howie B's "Music for Babies," featured in the first-ever RESFEST Cinema Electronica program, was a stunning statement of intent. "Ever since I saw [Zbigniew Rybczyński's] video for Art of Noise's 'Close (to the Edit)' in 1984, I've loved that really tight synchronicity between moving image and rhythmic, beats-based music," he explains, sitting back in his peaceful studio. "When I got to Royal College, I learned how you can break down sound and create a map of the soundtrack so you knew exactly which frame the beat would hit, and that was the real revelation for me -- that you could create images to perfectly replicate the music. Difference is, now you can get software for VJing -- back when we were doing it, it was Super 8 projected with a big roll of film."
In those days, Wrake fancied himself "a bit of an anarchist," and his visual style was marked by vibrant line drawings, frenetic jumps and crowded frames chock-full of surreal motifs. Every second exploded with life; insects, fish and animals vied with vivisected human bodies for primacy within scenes of fantastical decay. Wrake attributes this early approach to a fascination with Gray's Anatomy, and also Dada. "All those collages -- Max Ernst and John Heartfield -- were my early influence in graphics," he says. As a young British artist and burgeoning hip-hop fan, Wrake also found Keith Haring's boldness and New York exoticism irresistible. "It was so striking, so powerful and vibrant," he remarks. "It just leaps out at you off the wall. That's what I like. Things that leap out and kick you in the teeth."
Although running figures recur throughout his work, Run Wrake's nickname predates his moving image ambitions. The son of an army chaplain, he was born John Matthew Charrosin Wrake in the Republic of Yemen in 1965. He earned the nickname that would stay with him for life at a cricket match at age 11, after the Wrake family had relocated to Sussex, England. Everybody but the bank manager knows him as Run, and the filmmaker admits the name probably helped disassociate him from his rural background when he first arrived in London. "You can hide yourself under an identity like that," he grins.
Although his family moved around when he was young, Wrake managed to become quite skilled at hoarding. His unassuming terraced house is a hobbyist's paradise, stuffed to the gills with vinyl records, toys and unusual artwork. "Found material has always been a big part of my work," he says. "Truth is, I can't pass a junk shop without stopping." Wrake's animation has often mixed inspirational collectibles like figurines with objects of personal significance, such as a black-and-white portrait of a young Run interviewing his musical hero, the late British radio DJ John Peel.
It was this collector's instinct which led Wrake to write Rabbit. While living in Sussex, he discovered an intriguing set of stickers in a local thrift store. They were pedagogical relics from the late '50s and early '60s, designed to expand children's vocabulary. Each illustrates a word -- such as "mother," "catch," "cake," "train," "horse," "jump" or "dress" -- in happy English scenes, innocently colored and printed in a primary school font. "They sat in a drawer for a couple of years, until I moved to London and rediscovered them," Wrake remembers. "It was at a time when I really wanted to make a film and I was writing something else. I was going round in circles when one day I dug these out. I laid out all the images, looked for connections and there was one -- the 'idol' sticker -- which I thought was a very odd choice." He produces the peculiar sticker, which depicts a grinning, caramel-colored, Buddha-like figure sitting cross-legged against a backdrop of long grass, palm trees and a mustard sky. Bold and brash, more Keith Haring than Romper Room, the idol became the starting point for Wrake's story. "I decided he was going to be the central character who could transform objects."
Rabbit relates a moral tale with a subversive, macabre tone achieved through black humor and graceful menace. The story takes place in a seemingly idyllic English countryside complete with portentous cloudscapes and bleating farm animals, all based on those helpful stickers. A boy and girl capture a rabbit, slice it in half, and discover a magical monster inside. The snarling, strangely endearing creature runs amok in their house, zapping bothersome insects, which turn into jewels, bottles of ink or feathers. The conniving children quickly realize their new pet's earning potential and exploit it by butchering local farm animals to attract swarms of flies and wasps. As in all good fairytales, the children get their comeuppance and meet a gruesome end. The artfully disturbing combinations of vocabulary tags ("rabbit," "muff," "knife," goes one train of thought) mixed with silent, premeditated violence makes for a highly entertaining short film. Whatever led the anarchist to write such a neatly moral story? "We live in such greedy times," Wrake says with a frown. "The images in Rabbit hark back to a time when it didn't seem so important to be greedy. To have a massive house and a big income and bling and all this stuff that seems to be seen as a positive thing now. We admire people who are ostentatious with their wealth and we all seem to aspire to it. Clearly it doesn't make you happy, so why? Nobody seems to know what to do any more. The past always seems a bit more rosy, but it genuinely did seem to be a simpler time where simpler values were admired. It's a very unfashionable thing to say, but I think it's worth thinking about."
The film's conflict between surface culture and subculture exposes Wrake's social agenda. Here is a mature British artist with an interest in fringe politics who is now exploring his own identity. The Englishness that pervades his work -- for instance, the Victorian aristocrat in his MTV "Music Man" identities -- is entirely deliberate. Yet the landscapes of modern city life also inhabit his every frame. Wrake keeps a foot comfortably in both worlds, and views them with equal affection. In all his films to date, he assumes the viewer is familiar with the subcultures that fascinate him, creating scenes rich with hidden meanings that invite you to abandon normality and slide away into free association.
Rabbit's wistful soundtrack also marks the first time Wrake's longtime collaborators Howie B and Craig Richards provided music to fit the images, not the other way around. "Good old Howie," Wrake chuckles. "I was working with him on all the effects but I wanted something minimal and it worked beautifully. It's based on a few Mozart chords that I took to him. He grabbed the record, stuck it on the turntable and sampled it and came up with that little melody. Bang, five minutes."
After a well-earned summer break with his partner Lisa and new baby daughter Florence, Wrake plans to lock himself into the studio come fall and start work on the next film, which will star a character called Meathead (see the baby meathead and father on the cover of this issue). "He appeared in Jukebox, my 1994 short, as a metaphor for fear, and then in 'Buttmeat' for Howie a few years later. I've done comic strips with him. He's always existed and I really want to make a film. Whether it's a short, a pilot for a series or a feature I don't know yet."
Whatever comes next for Wrake, narrative will remain his focus, and he welcomes the change. "Rabbit opened up a whole new set of doors because it was tightly storyboarded from the start, whereas in the past I quite liked to just let it roll. I really enjoyed the discipline of each shot having to tell the story. It was a completely new way of working for me." Next time he's giving himself yet another new challenge -- dialogue -- which, he admits, is "a bit scary." Meanwhile, Rabbit's inner gremlin hops around the world with a life all its own.
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Rabbit is currently on tour with the tenth annual RESFEST. For more information about RESFEST|10, please visit www.resfest.com.
