A Million Faces by Yanggantian Li
Short Film November 1 2024
Intro
A Million Faces is an animated project exploring the challenges of identity and self-image.
Inspired by Yanggantian Li’s personal experiences and various creators, it tells the story of a character who changes her appearance every day to fit in. Through bold, bright colors, the animation shows how the character's true self slowly fades, reflecting the artist’s message about the pressure to be someone else and the struggle to find authenticity.
A Million Faces
From the Artist
“I had the idea of putting my identity crisis into practice. For a long time, I felt like I was reacting and performing differently on various occasions, which led to the confusion of finding my true self. To achieve the goal of recognizing who am I indeed, I started to research about this idea.”
Colors are the best tool for me to express emotions, whether it is happy, anxious, furious, or sad. I can pass my feelings through different combinations of colors. I tried to use vibrant, neon colors to express my anxiety about looks. It is the age of internet, I constantly receive comments on my looks whenever I post a picture of myself. I have appearance anxiety and that is also a reason why I wanted to do makeup at first. I wanted people to like me.
As makeup became my need, I started to act like whatever I thought people wanted me to be like. Then it came to the idea of making this project—A Million Faces. A story of a girl who changes her personality and looks every day.”
Inspired by
“Paprika is a 2006 Japanese thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon, an animator, film director, and manga artist in Japan. I loved this movie because it contents a lot of fantasy elements that would only appear in the dream. One scene of his movie inspired me to make the “take off skin scene”, which is a character hiding under another character’s skin.”
The Japanese photographer Tomoko Sawada explored the concepts of personality and identity by dressing as different people and making portraitures.
Her work reminded me of my existence, such as schooldays, friendships, our first job, or marriage, which are all major things in life that can be associated with one of the characters presented by Tomoko Sawada. I was inspired by her portraitures so I made a character with a million faces and turned out that they were the same person. I also made my animation focus on the characters’ faces, the details can tell the story.
Sin Wai Kin created characters and made them dance and use body language to express their emotions and feelings. Also, she painted their faces and made posters of them. I learned how to tell a story by learning her work putting personalities into individual characters. The painted faces give an unrealistic look that gives me a strong visual impact, and the characters' actions and the dresses they wear give me a novel and eerie feeling. This gave me inspiration to color my character's skin rather than just color their hair.
Mathieu Labaye is an animator and filmmaker in Belgium. His animation Orgesticulanismus explored freedom and movement in a way that changed the characters’ shapes and forms. His work let me know that animation is not being restricted, the character can be anything, any shape, and any form. I am inspired to make a part of facial organs disappear on my character’s face to show their feelings without a word.”
