Falling Lizard

In the late 1970s, Dan McLaughlin instituted what soon came to be known as Falling Lizard Weekend. The annual event was conceived of as a community-building opportunity to experiment, collaborate, and have a lot of fun via the act of making animation. Held in the last week of January, students, alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of the Workshop convene to make a film centered on a theme (originally predetermined by Dan, in later years voted on by the group after a weeklong period of eclectic submissions).

But why a Lizard?

Dan travelled to Nigeria in the early 1980s to design and direct a national animation studio for the government where he asked students in the program to define animation. A student named Vincent stated, “animation is just like falling lizard, you got to step to stop to get it.” The consensus was that this was as good a definition of animation as any, and so the moniker of Falling Lizard was born, and the Falling Lizard Weekend became an annual tradition (with one exception: in 1984 a second Lizard weekend was held to commemorate the Los Angeles Summer Olympics).

The result is an imaginative and energetic animated short, an exquisite-corpse like evocation of different interpretations, techniques, and styles that truly exemplify a tenet of the Workshop: animation has only two limitations: imagination, and exhaustion.