Lines Fiction: the movie Labyrinth Runner starts with a running boy and then turns into a b&w animation showing huge spaces suggesting an underground station. Do these halls and gangways represent physical inner space?

Robbie Cornelissen: The film starts with this running boy which slowly turns into a black and white world which dissolves into numbers, which brings us in this other world, because this scene you can see on a screen in this other reality. There are many lines and possibities for connection in this piece. When I run myself I always count the numbers ( I count my life, I draw my life, this whole creative process helps to be conscious of the passing time…and I am just fond of numbers), the same as when I was doing my meditation in the past. Here my son is running , he is a part of me and more important he is in this age where you are getting conscious of your own identity and your inner world becomes more and more important. This changing from the inner world to the outside world is very important in my drawings and films, this film is very much on the edge of both worlds.

Lines Fiction: The animation, that is obviously based on drawings on paper, changes from 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional. How do you manage this, and how did this concept became part of your work?

Robbie Cornelissen: When I was making a film of a drawing I realized the possibilties of the lines moving and absorbing the viewer into the drawing which creates this vertigo feeling. It took some time before I changed from filming a drawing to working with Daniel Dugour who is a 3-D animator.
He transforms my drawings in his computer, and he is using this pencil feeling and my handwriting, and then we start to build the film with his computer programs. I like very much the edge between 2-D and 3-D, between computer animated film and handmade charcoal animations, between reality and imagination.

You create huge drawings on paper- are these drawings connected with your animations or did you develop different concepts?

Robbie Cornelissen: My drawings are my starting point and the films give another entrance to my world, they are very much coming from the same concept. In my exhibition in Centraal Museum in Utrecht there for the first time came together this complete world of drawings, films, sound, sculpture and most of all the architecture of the exhibition space. On seven spots in this exhibition there were animations like moving drawings or rooms like the shower room and the number room.
The size of the drawings and the presentation of the films on a big scale make it possible for the visitor to become part of this world . The perspective is an invitation to come in and to be a part of the drawing , to wander around in the labyrinth.

www.robbiecornelissen.nl