It began—like almost all films—with a clean, black slate. No color, except for that conjured up in audience members’ minds from the sounds of a whispering, spraying ocean. And indeed, the first scene of the stop-motion animated film Torrey Pines opens on a parking lot in front of the Pacific Ocean. It is a child’s paper world, colorful and alive, yet split between the gray, depressing plane of the parking lot and a mysterious field of grasses and red mountains, penetrated by a highway. The wild side is about to be explored. True nature, once hidden, revealed.
Torrey Pines is a sixty-minute, coming-of-age journey of trans director Clyde Petersen’s life growing up in California in the 90s, just north of Torrey Pines State Beach. According to the onStage pamphlet at the movie viewing in Evans on Feb. 23, Torrey Pines are beautiful trees that only grow on the sandy bluffs above the Pacific Ocean. Petersen often escaped from his schizophrenic mother to count pelicans there and walk on the train tracks running parallel to the ocean, as demonstrated in the next scene of the film, after his mom tells him while driving on the highway the conspiracies at the White House, which include an alien spaceship and hippies.
Cue the beach music, literally, for the film was accompanied by live music played by Petersen’s band Your Heart Breaks. As paper Petersen traverses the parking lot filled with people drinking beer and listening to music, and under the bridge of the highway, with red Converse beating the train tracks, audience members could observe Zach Burba beating the drums, Petersen plucking his bass, Jacob Jaffe strumming his guitar, and Lori Goldstein playing the cello on stage. The feel-good, sincere music brought the animation to life and made the audience members better connect and listen to Petersen’s story.
However, Torrey Pines can already relate to viewers. Be it from the annoying boy who sat next to you in middle school science, finding your pet parakeet dead when you came home from school, or even watching Star Trek on TV late at night, Petersen’s childhood echoes all others by being unselfconsciously honest.
“He was really trying to just tell the truth of his life,” noted attendee Sara Abbazia ’21, a student in the introductory art class Concepts in Two Dimensions. “He laid it all out on the table, he wasn’t going to edit anything out.” Torrey Pines covers all the quirks of growing into adolescence.
The animation of these day-to-day battles was spectacular, and crafted entirely by hand. Petersen and fellow animator Chris Looney used a small, 99-square-feet bedroom as their studio for a year and half, assembling and painting the paper characters, backgrounds, and sets with the help of seven interns. According to the DVD kindly given to the writer by Petersen, Torrey Pines was created on a multiplane animation stand, or to be less formal, a “wire Ikea shelf frame without the baskets.” Custom cut glass layers provided different stages for the paper objects to be laid upon, making the animation cleaner and creating a sharp foreground and foggy background on film. On the very top shelf, pointing down at all the layers through a cut hole, was a DSLR camera. On the very bottom shelf lay the beautiful shifting background scenery, which could be scrolled through as the characters “moved” above.
“You could see a lot of detail went into this, a lot of love,” said Abbazia. “And the creative ways that he conveyed texture.” For example, in one scene Petersen is brushing his teeth in the mirror, and viewers can watch the individual bristles move and fit into the teeth as if in 3D. “There were certain techniques. It was all 2D, but then certain things made me question it, like it looked 3D and it had the illusion, but it was all flat paper.”
All the sounds in Torrey Pines were also handmade, with most noises created live on stage by Susie Kozawa rubbing a towel over a drum for sea spray, or smooching into a mic for a kissing scene. However, except for the film’s paper-remake of the 80s TV series Beauty and the Beast, no verbal dialogue is spoken.
Torrey Pines is radical in many aspects, mixing the awkward and bizarre with the hilarious, thus perfectly capturing Petersen’s life in her town as a twelve-year-old. Tigers leap out of arguing mouths, a freshly dissected frog is squished into a desk drawer, and newborns are flung at a distraught Petersen after he realizes the harsh realities of woman.
“His art style and the music style wasn’t always ‘pretty,’” noted Abbazia. “I went to another movie event and it was about mental health, and we were watching film clips and they were all very nice, but they were all very ‘pretty,’ and it was like you’re burying your story, but you’re also making it something that we can consume easily… it’s like, ‘oh, this is so aesthetically pleasing.’ But it’s not the truth.”
Torrey Pines confronts and embraces the uncomfortable truth. Petersen wanted to create a queer punk autobiographical film in order to help others going through mental health situations in families or feeling alone in small towns. The song “Torrey Pines” that Petersen had recorded nine years before the release of the movie speaks to this theme: “Open up your mouth, and let it all out / you’ve got to get it all out, just get it off your fucking chest. The shit that you’ve been through is the reason you’re you / and I bet someone’s listening with a similar history. Once the words are spoken, they’re all out in the open / it will help other people feel a lot less broken. So open up your mouth.”
Torrey Pines is Petersen’s blank slate, a way of starting anew. Even though Petersen values his past (as shown by the love that he put into his film, as an audience member remarked), it was difficult, and sharing it with others makes it less so. It is art with a purpose.
And yet, it is also art for art’s sake. After the viewing, audience members, including Abbazia, came up to Petersen in the lobby and asked him if the recurring appearances of the ocean or birds symbolize anything. “But he was like, ‘This is what I like. Me and my friends have a band. We’re playing music,’” laughed Abbazia. We feel a need to “read” into a story and expose the truth. However, Petersen clearly demonstrates that already nothing is hidden—he is out in the open, colorful, free, and wild.
