Priit Pärn, a legendary cartoonist and animation director from Estonia [1], has used an excellent term, "mileage of the line". I DeepL-translated (with rough ed

Priit Pärn, a legendary cartoonist and animation director from Estonia [1], has used an excellent term, "mileage of the line". I DeepL-translated (with rough editing) a couple of excerpts from interviews he has given. First excerpt: Q: How is your inner self-critic working, are you satisfied with the results of your work? PP: Yeah, I think I'm a very good drawer. One of the best. Q: How long do you estimate the mileage of your line at the moment? PP: For "Gabriella", I tried to calculate how many final frames I drew, about 10 000 to 15 000, 50 cm of line for one frame, so five to seven kilometres for one film. It's the kind of consistent drawing neccessary for an animator to keep his hands in. A beginner animator who is at the beginning of the road with the search for their own line and is making a film is forced to draw hundreds or thousands of drawings with the same rudimentary line. A cartoonist is not limited by his own predetermined rules, he can experiment and search. In most cases, one has reached a line of one's own by the age of about 35. --- Another excerpt from another interview (rough translation again): "It has come with decades that you can draw without any preparation in all sorts of angles and dynamic positions. And it also emerges from somewhere that you can draw in whichever way you want, but it's still your drawing. This requires a very high degree of thoughtful line mileage, which means you have to think while you're at a line." (Priit Pärn is actually a trained biologist, so his way of reasoning is always very precise and synthetic, clearly influenced by an education in the natural sciences. Always a joy to read his interviews. Quite obviously, in addition to his views on the technical process of drawing, this level of analytical thinking also manifests in the hyper-multi-layered black humour and visual language of his animations [2, 3]. A national treasure for Estonia for sure.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priit_P%C3%A4rn 2: A short animated commercial, 1988 Cannes Bronze Lion winner: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=NkCuh8K4L8s 3: More stuff: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtxgLxLGpJWwueQ-wL3DIOa https://invidious.protokolla.fi/playlist?list=PLeD_epa2UKjtx...