by MATTHEW WOODLEY

We all have our childhood fantasies, but few go the disquieting distance of the hallucinations, apparitions and soundtrack of voices that populated Jim Woodring’s fecund young mind. Life-altering, you can be sure, but for surrealist sympathizers the world over, the cartoon-like frog that prompted Woodring to drop out of college when he hallucinated it in the middle of an art history class is an odd blessing.

“I was extremely troubled, I was ambivalent about being in school, I was desperate to be an artist and had no idea how to go about it,” the now 54-year-old artist recalls. “I saw the frog on the blank screen at the end of a slide show on ancient architecture, and I took it as a sign that what I was looking for wasn’t on the regular program, if that makes any sense. And I made such a scene, and actually injured the woman sitting in the desk behind me by tipping my own desk over backwards, that I wasn’t in a big hurry to come back. That frog became an obsession for me. I spent years trying to find the place where it came from. I’ve drawn it hundreds of times; I put it on the cover of the first Fantagraphics issue of JIM.”

Woodring hasn’t lost his frog fancy either. “Frogs are great symbols of spirituality,” he says. “They sit completely still as if in meditation, but they are never caught napping. They move with breathtaking rapidity. Their amphibious nature reminds one of the goal of living in two worlds. And finally, they metamorphose, so you actually get four animals in one: tadpoles, legged tadpoles, froglets, and frogs. They make wonderful sounds. And you can eat them.”

After years trying to translate the inner world of his head onto paper, living as a garbageman, freelance cartoonist and honing his craft during a stint in an L.A. animation studio, JIM was the springboard to a full-time cartoonist career. The very weird personal anthology was followed by a barrage of books and, perhaps most notably, his Frank series, the way-out adventures of a cat-bear-man-type-guy in a crazy, candy-coloured world. Woodring’s work has surfaced on the Simpsons, Francis Ford Coppola is a fan, and he’s done some killer collaborations with the equally evocative guitarist Bill Frisell—the children’s book-with-soundtrack, Trosper, as well as live performances.

Woodring’s comics have also been brought to life—as if you could squeeze out any more—through Japanese animated adaptations, a collection of which is being screened at Fantasia this weekend. And not only will the very cheerful man behind the madness be there to speak a few words, after the screening he’ll present his 20-minute piece Lazy Robinson.

“It’s a video I prepared for Mysterio Sympatico, Bill Frisell’s and my first stage collaboration,” he explains. “It’s a series of images of objects floating in a void; each one has some form of partial consciousness. The images cross dissolve in progression from dimmer to brighter and are designed so that the midpoint of each cross-dissolve contains the actual message. Bill and his band won’t be there to play, unfortunately for the audience, so I’ll read a text that relates to what is seen on the screen. It was performed only once before, to an audience of acidheads in San Francisco, and they loved it.”

Visions of Frank screens at Fantasia Saturday, July 15, 7:35 p.m., at the J.A. de Sève Cinema, followed by Lazy Robinson, www.fantasiafest.com