Centered in the Circle: Talking Anxiety, Observation, and Stillness with “Tennis, Oranges” Director Sean Pecknold

Anxiety for me feels like cacophony. Like everyone’s asking me to do something at once, but no one is clear. I can’t keep straight all of the things that I need to do or that I think are expected of me. I don’t have a clear idea of who thinks what about me. There is disorder. There is chaos. If I were to visualize it, it would be information thrown at a blank surface— words, images, and dates being splattered on a canvas like a Pollock painting. 

There are a few ways to quell this. The method I resort to most is to sweep up the mess of information and organize it into an easily digestible format, like a list or a spreadsheet. But while this helps manage anxiety within the strictures of my life, it’s not an effective way to actually eliminate anxiety. For this I must shed my context, I must become immersed in something outside of society—a good conversation, an activity which requires great focus, a great piece of art, nature.

Animator and director Sean Pecknold funneled his anxiety into a years-long stop motion project. The meticulous nature of the work and the devotion it commands force one to be present. The practice of writing compels one to observe and collect quiet pieces of one's environment. In this sense, art is meditative. But Sean’s quest to find stillness also led him to examine symbolism in his life and the imagery his body and mind respond to. The common thread he found—in a ceiling fan, a tennis ball, atoms, planets, a clock, oranges, a robot vacuum—was a circle. 

His film Tennis, Oranges is about circularity and repetition in literal and figurative senses, calming, sad, and beautiful in all the ways they reflect our existence. It feels like a Shintoist piece, in which everything in the universe is alive, but so is the universe itself, and so are places, all exerting energy and interacting with each other. It’s a short film but an intense experience and I found myself welling up with emotions I couldn’t explain while watching for the first time.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean about the process of making Tennis, Oranges, quiet spaces in LA Chinatown, and the power of saying as little as possible. 

Hyperreal Film Club (HFC): I would love to know where the initial idea came from, because the setting here is a Chinatown community center for the elderly. It's very specific. Is that a space that you have any connection to?

Sean Pecknold (SP): When my wife and I first met in LA, I found an old art space. It was an art gallery on Chungking Road in Chinatown, and it was right across from the community center. We were there for about four and a half years, 2015 to 2019. We were there every day working on all sorts of projects, so we got to know the street inside and out and all the people there. 

We met a woman who became a friend who owned a gift shop on that road, and she would sit out front for 10 hours a day on a small blue chair. There was another man who consistently, every day at 8:30am, would walk to the community center with two canes, open it, sit, be there for anyone who came by, and not many people would come. It was one of those community centers that was really vital and important in the 1930s and 40s when there was a lot of immigration from China. And it’s still a special and important part of the community today. There was something we appreciated about each of their consistent daily rhythms. It was something to look forward to and marked the beginning and end of each day without having to look at a clock.

We ended up becoming friends with the guy who would open the community center, and then he passed away in 2020. The person who took over for him was Jimmy Wong, who is a very interesting, philosophical guy, and we would just have long conversations about the meaning of life and war. The place has real significance to me. 

The dreamier aspects of the film are inspired by the Redwood Forest. When I was there, I was struck by the beauty. I didn't grow up religious so I don't have a vision of a heaven that's in the clouds with pearly gates and stuff, but it did feel like if there is some sort of after life, that it would be that forest. It's been there forever, hopefully will last beyond humans.

HFC: Stop motion animation is such a different process from any other kind of filmmaking. How long did it take to build the sets? How big was the team and how long did it take to shoot all of it?

SP: We started in the summer of 2020. Building that main community center set took several weeks. We had a studio in LA called SingSing, that we do commission work out of, so we just kind of had this ongoing animation project happening alongside all of that. 

There’s a miniature artist named Emily Franz, whom we had worked with on a documentary animation project for Netflix for a show called Song Exploder. She made a miniature TV for that that we ended up using in the film, because it's so good. Emily is so good at making small things that we asked her if she could make the puppets for us. 

We did a couple months total of work in 2020, and then really dug in during the winter of 2020 into 2021. And my goal with bringing a crew on was to bring in other animators. Because previously, I would either animate myself or maybe have one other animator but I really wanted to meet other animators in LA.

There are amazing stop motion animators in Portland and LA and it's kind of a cyclical industry. There'll be a show and then there'll be no work. So we were able to get really high caliber talent, but they'd only be available for a week or two weeks. I'd say the bulk of the animation was 2021. And then 2022, I took care of the easier scenes, like the ones with the vacuum.

We weren't financed, it was independent. So we'd have to do a commission project, save a little bit of money, and then do another two weeks of animating, which is not uncommon for an animated short. And then editing was 2022 into 2023, and we finished in January of this year. 

HFC: All of the inanimate objects in this film are imbued with life, but the only inanimate object which speaks is the little robotic vacuum which kind of traverses the space and checks in on everyone. It almost has the personality of a dog—it has a sense that our protagonist, the elderly rabbit, wants to dance. Can you talk about the development of the character of the vacuum?

SP: At the end of Chunking Road, there was a small regional hospital that was beautiful. It was such a beautiful color on the outside, it was like this soft purple. And originally in the script, the character was not a vacuum. It was a nurse who quits his job. And in real life, the nurses would be outside of the hospital smoking cigarettes, and it was, again, one of the things that we saw every day. And that's like where the hospital came from. And like a worker at the hospital. Do you know Sherwood Anderson? He was a short story writer. He wrote a book in the 1950s, called Winesburg, Ohio. 

HFC: Yes!

SP: It's great. It follows a small town reporter learning about people in the town, and each chapter focuses on different people in the town. There was one in particular that I always thought about. Someone who feels stuck in life and wants to leave their town, and they leave their house after dark one night and they take all their clothes off. And they're so full of life and everything is perfect and wonderful at that moment. But then after the moment passes, they cower down and realize how stupid that idea was, and end up back where they started. I always just loved that framework. Feeling stuck and wanting to move on, but then often becoming even more frustrated. 

But I had to change the nurse character to be a vacuum for simplicity. It's much easier to animate a simple disk. But I’d also been thinking about inanimate objects. Something that’s not a total blank slate, but to which you can apply universal feelings. It was tricky, though, because there is a fine line between too much characterization and not enough. It also has no eyes, so it’s hard to know if there’s enough to connect to.

HFC: That is an interesting thing to think about. You would think it needs some kind of anthropomorphized element, which it didn't have physically. But it doesn’t really matter, I don't think as a viewer.

SP: No, I think I prefer that. I did a music video years ago for the Fleet Foxes song “Mykonos” that was just paper triangles on a journey. I loved that because it was just enough. It's just like feet walking and triangles and it feels like we're on this epic journey. I think I am drawn to things where it's simple enough to where you can project your own stuff onto it rather than being so specific to a character and I think that's good for shorts.

I applied that to the rabbit characters. I knew I didn't want them to talk. I love things that are as minimal as they can be. And it's also a ballet. It's wordless storytelling. And there's so much told through motion.

HFC: I’m struck by the theme of the volley in this film. There’s the volley of tennis, the volley of partnered dance, of relationships in general, physics and metaphysics—I know you have him with his metaphysics book—between what we want and what we have, and between a life force and a death force. Is that something you set out to explore?

SP: I'm a tennis fan, I got into playing it with my brother in 2017. It was the thing that brought us together.

For this short, it was less of the back and forth as it was the circular and rotational aspect of some of both the visuals and the situations. I don't know if this is super clear, but the ceiling fan was also a character in the film. I spent a lot of 2020 looking at a ceiling fan, because I had experienced anxiety for the first time like, you know, like crippling anxiety where you just have to lay down. I ended up just doing that in my bedroom and looking up at the ceiling fan. And it was like something that comforted me and calmed me down. It was something about its consistent nature— this unending rotation. 

I was thinking about the parallel between an atom spinning and planets that are circular and also spinning and finding some comfort in geometry in the universe. And I also like thinking of the idea that time, or even the universe itself could be circular, if that makes sense. I think that's a beautiful idea. Repetition is circular, and that can be very comforting. 

HFC: If you’ll indulge me a little and let me wax effusive to you: There is a sequence at the end in which we see all of the circular images in the film in succession—it’s really one of those moments where art transcends language, and I don’t want to do it a disservice and strip it of its power by analyzing it too much. The metaphors of a circle are familiar; they're working on a very subliminal level here. I feel like it’s so rare and so destabilizing in the best way to process something without creating any associated internal monologue, and that’s what happened for me in that moment. I saw the series of circles and they hit me like a tennis ball to the chest, but I accepted it with silence. I had no thoughts in that moment. It kind of makes you feel like an animal. Or like apes with the monolith. We are so, so tied to language, and more than that even, we are so, so tied to analysis, that it really puts you out of your being for a moment to be moved profoundly by an image or a juxtaposition without analyzing its meaning or analyzing your reaction to it. I didn’t know in that moment why I felt so sad—sad is the wrong word—why I felt so much. 

Even posing this question is risking stripping away some magic, but can you talk about that sequence?

SP: I think for me, the way the song is unwinding and the story is unwinding, it’s a wistful sadness at the end. The bitter sweet reality of life. Even if there isn't massive life change for the characters, there is something different in mood or feeling. There's some tragedy in it. But there's also beauty and stillness and a quiet, nostalgic, bitter sweetness. 

With the circles: the ceiling fan and the elements of the tennis ball and the oranges and some of the street signage, I wanted to find symbols that weren’t necessarily specific. I love hearing what people interpret.

I'm a huge fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kubrick in general and I love work that you can still have a new idea about years later. I am trying to embrace symbolism where I can, because symbols can tell you: “It’s okay, life will go on, life does go on, things aren't necessarily as finite or linear as we think they are.”

For me, there's comfort in that shape; there's comfort in a circle. There is something very calming about it because life can be so chaotic and there’s consistency in that geometry. It's like getting a hug from the universe.

HFC: I also had another association that might just be me, but it was hard for me not to choke up a little bit, thinking about the idea of pets running away to the woods to die. That's a more oblique association, but because of the imagery and because they're little animals, I had that association. Have people brought up other somewhat disparate associations to you?

SP: Not pet stuff. Our sound designer initially did the project because he had just lost his grandfather maybe a few months before I sent the script to him. And he felt this strange sense of comfort, I guess, in the film, and maybe the tone of it and the way it's trying to explore some elements of peace in death. I haven't heard anyone talk about pets, but I like that.

HFC: I guess because going back to the woods is circular again. 

SP: Totally. Similar feelings to what I had when I was in the Redwood Forest. That this feels like home in a weird way. I think we build up these walls. We've built all these amazing boxes that structure our lives and we put our lives into them, but when we get back to the way we used to live, even if it's as simple as being in the woods or camping, you realize there shouldn't be such a big wall between us and nature.

I try to make films that are a vessel for feeling. That sounds really cheesy, but I hope that people can feel something. It's hard to make anyone feel anything. I hope my work helps people feel slightly less alone. A lot of my work explores loneliness. I don’t know, that sounds really cheesy too. That's why I try to leave things unsaid. I get really excited about creating a world and then keeping the story line as simple as it can be to let you have space in it so it rewards on a second watch or a third, rather than just, “Oh, I get it,” and it's over. No, no.

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