French animator Jon Boutin's quick-witted shorts will have you creasing

After watching just one 15-second animation by French animator and illustrator Jon Boutin, the It’s Nice That team were sold. At a time where more and more animation is venturing off into the realms of virtual reality, Jon uses simple illustration combined with classic and quite silly humour to put a smile on your face. It’s a credit to the animator that some of his best work is pared-back drawings on a background where lined paper is still visible.

Growing up in the south of France, Jon was “crazy about drawing and playing music” and soon realised “that animation allies both music and drawing”. Consequently, Jon’s work uses one to enhance the other. One example, Irrintzi even utilises just one man’s opera vocals to animate a man chopping a block of wood, someone swimming, and an egg that looks like it’s hula hooping.

Jon moved to Paris to study art, before joining the EMCA, an animation school in Angoulême. While studying, Jon has expanded his practice to include longer animations, which use the same quick-witted humour as his shorts and gifs. Des Résidus Analytiques in particular is the animator’s graduate film, and displays the animator writing longer form narratives to animate, in this case about a man who spends his entire life on hold, waiting for a hotline advisor to pick up the phone. Other short snippets of Jon’s imagination are intermixed with this story line, such as a man who is trying to walk the circumference of the world on a home stepper.

The animator also recently completed a short, Les Amants Verts, with a collective in Angoulême but, the full versions of Jon’s own animations are under wraps at the moment. Nevertheless, we highly recommend you check out his back catalogue and the teasing trailers of what’s to come.