Animating Climate Science, One Frame at Time
A still from 'Why was Sigmund Freud interested in the Afsluitdijk?", the latest video from the Penn Animation as Research Lab, depicts a Dutch polder.
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It’s 1932. The Netherlands is undertaking a bold land reclamation project, crowned by the ambitious Afsluitdijk, a 20-mile dam enabling the Dutch to drain or reclaim a province’s worth of land from the sea. Looking on from Austria, Sigmund Freud sees the project as analogous to his own theory of the human mind: reclaiming fragile pieces of ego from a dark and stormy id.
The analogy is the starting point for new episode in an ongoing video series from the Penn Animation as Research Lab (PAR) that couples visual storytelling with rigorous evidence-based climate science to increase climate literacy. The campaign centers on the figure of Professor Poldergeist, an affable academic who argues, in this particular episode, that lurking beneath the surface of Dutch hydrological ingenuity is a costly phenomenon known as subsidence, or sinking land due to centuries of maintaining artificially low water tables.
The Poldergeist videos stand apart from climate science in the news media not just because of the medium but for their visibly hand-drawn origins. But like journalists, the artists behind the PAR videos are engaged in the research as well as the storytelling.
PAR is a collaboration between Simon Richter, professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, and Joshua Mosley, professor of fine arts at the Weitzman School of Design.
“As a scholar of the cultural aspects of climate adaptation, especially in the Netherlands, I had something I wanted people to hear,” Richter says of the project’s origins. “And I was in search of the medium that would allow me to do that.”
Joshua Mosley and Simon Richter co-direct the Penn Animation as Research Lab
Over the past four years, Richter, Mosley, and their team of Penn undergraduates have produced six short but dense episodes in the Professor Poldergeist series—that’s “polder,” as in the characteristically Dutch landmass that results when land is filled in through reclamation.
Mosley, an artist whose primary medium is animation and who teaches animation in the Department of Fine Arts, acts as a creative director for the series, helping to shape its form by guiding students through an iterative process of drawing, writing, and consultation.
He underscores that the students on the team are not solely focused on becoming animators. The students are all double majors, and PAR offers the opportunity for them to develop skills in both research and visual communication. The entire team is involved in learning the material, interviewing experts, and working together to come up with compelling visual metaphors or engaging approaches to tell these complex stories.
“Even though there are multiple stages of development, the finished animation reveals their search for a way to draw features and to represent forms and relationships. The finished animations also have a disarming quality because they retain the energy of this urge to share an idea; the animation traces the learning process that made it.”
On a research trip to the Netherlands in the summer of 2023, students Annabel Sumardi, Justine Seo, Cecily Nishimura, Melody Kuo, Katherine Li, Lilian Liu visited the Lely pumping station near Medemblik, one of several stations built in the 1930s to drain the Zuyderzee.
Last summer, with support from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, Mosley and his team traveled to the Netherlands’ low-lying farmland, where they spent a month interviewing Dutch policymakers and water management experts, and touring key sites like the Afsluitdijk. The result was the fifth episode, “Why is the future of the Netherlands measured in sand?”, as well as the sixth, which was released last month.
In many ways, says Mosley, the Dutch are at the forefront of climate resilience efforts. They have spent centuries developing robust water management systems and think of themselves as the “safest delta on earth.” Meanwhile, 26% of the country’s land lies below sea level and an additional 34% is at risk of river flooding in extreme weather. The goal behind the series is to challenge Dutch hubris and bring to light the vulnerabilities that are latent in the national environmental subconscious.
In the Netherlands, the videos are reaching policy makers, professors, and professionals in the climate adaptation space. They are sparking conversations in town halls and university classrooms about serious topics—like retreat—often considered taboo.
Deniz Ikiz Kaya, assistant professor on heritage and climate change at Eindhoven University of Technology, shows the videos in her courses on the transformation of Dutch water management structures and landscapes. “They depict the climate urgencies and the Dutch adaptation strategies in a brief and critical manner, and always lead to interesting debates with the students."
“They have an impact because they’re from an outsider’s perspective,” says Richter. “We think it’s really important that they hear these things, and that they look into the mirror that we’re able to hold up to them. Insofar as our original desire was to reach policy makers, not just to explain, but to persuade—on the basis of research—we have succeeded. And it’s incredible.”
The Lely station as rendered by student animators in the Professor Poldergiest video, "Why was Sigmund Freud interested in the Afsluitdijk?"
One measure of the series’ success, says Mosley, is their scientific credibility. He also points to the unique appeal of hand-drawn animation. Another is that Richter is seen by many as a thought leader for imagining what managed retreat could mean in the Netherlands. In the summer of 2023, he was invited to join a research consortium, co-directed by Weitzman professor of practice Matthijs Bouw, that explored how to accommodate sea level rise.
The technique that Mosley insists upon is more time- and labor-intensive than cutout computer animation, which Penn students learn in the undergraduate course Art, Design & Digital Culture using 2D animation programs like Adobe After Effects. PAR artist Melody Kuo (C’23), explains, “you draw a circle then you can keyframe it to move left or right. But for hand-drawn animation, you have to draw it out each frame. To move a circle, you have to draw 20 frames.”
Computer cutout animation, where objects move as puppets, is often used in typical “explainer” videos, which proliferate online. Instead, Mosley’s team uses Toon Boom Harmony and industry-standard tablets from Wacom, one of the Lab’s sponsors, to create frame-to-frame animations. For the viewer, Mosley says, this kind of animation is “a kind of magic. We sense expressive movement and at the same time every one of those marks has a human gesture within it.”
Melody Kuo (C'23) in the Netherlands in the summer of 2023 with the Penn Animation as Research Lab
He continues, “It’s like having someone draw something for you, like they're drawing a diagram on a napkin to help explain an idea. Our goal was to keep it feeling alive, and to make it look like it's been made by people who are thinking about systems and how water is impossible to manage. And that’s a bit easier to achieve with hand-drawn animation because you're constantly making pictures, you're constantly embedding or encoding the thoughts in images.”
“I really liked how [Mosley] explained it,” Kuo admits. “So I was like, okay, fine, I’ll draw 20 frames to move a circle.”
Looking forward, the Poldergeist team is planning episodes focusing on the Dutch Caribbean, where island nations face many of the same threats as the Netherlands, but without the same levels of protection.
Mosley and Richter are also hoping to expand the PAR Lab beyond the Professor Poldergeist project, and are open to new collaborations with scholars at Penn who are looking to communicate complex ideas visually with new audiences.
“We would like to work with researchers who have audiences they want to reach, but it's not just a matter of graphic design challenges. What we are looking for are opportunities for artists to be immersed in difficult problems, to understand the issues deeply, to experiment with deploying animation to visualize these scenarios accurately so we can reach the audiences who are able to make an impact.”