Spot the Nina

Watching Pixar movies always give me goosebumps. The characters are so loveable, the story is so engrossing, the animation is so classic. Just everything about them is so perfect. So the other day I was browsing through the making of "Up". Its just amazing how these artists make their characters, the extent they go to to add character to these inanimate objects.

The square face of Carl (the old guy in Up) always made me wonder why that weird shape. In the making of Up they say that square face depicts that the guy dint like change. The pixar animators got that idea from an American caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld is famous for using the minimum number of strokes to make a character according to their personality. Over time getting caricatured by him was considered an honour.

Spot the nina was one such cult following of Al Hirshfeld's work. After his daughter was born in 1945 he started hiding her name Nina in all his drawings. The name would appear in a sleeve, in a hairdo, or somewhere in the background. This continued for many years, and soon got a little out of control. Hirshfeld feared it overshadowed his artwork and tried to kill it, but was not received well.

Apparently it got so famous that US Army started using his cartoons to train bomber pilots with the soldiers trying to spot the NINAs much as they would spot their targets. Hirschfeld found the idea repulsive, saying that he felt his cartoons were being used to help kill people. In his 1966 anthology The World of Hirschfeld he included a drawing of Nina which he titled "Nina's Revenge." That drawing contained no Ninas. There were, however, two Als and two Dollys ("The names of her wayward parents").

Am simply amazed what one topic leads us to. Had it not been about reading making of "Up", I would never have heard of Hirshfeld and his spot the nina. Maybe this craving for knowledge never ends. And thats the way it should be.