Hi Lorin. Thanks for taking the time to speak with Occhi Magazine. Before you ever thought of yourself as a filmmaker, what were you making—drawings, stories, performances, photographs—and what was the first moment you realised, “I’m building worlds, not just images”?
Growing up with dyslexia, I spent much of my childhood in creative isolation. Drawing became my refuge, a way to quiet my mind and make sense of the world. In the 1980s, learning disabilities weren’t well understood, so I often tried to avoid humiliation, or the sheer anxiety of it caused me to stay home. My mother, who studied art at Kent State before becoming a nurse, left me where she could: hospital hallways, laundromats, meeting rooms, long waits in parked cars. I always carried a drawing pad. Illustration became my first fluent language.
At home, I lived largely outdoors. Our small farm was overrun with more than twenty cats, who became my first cast of recurring characters. I sketched them obsessively, over time, exaggerating their features, gifting them personalities, quirks, and emotional lives. What began as an observation slowly turned into a transformation. Without realizing it, I was no longer just drawing animals, I was developing their mythology.
Reading remained difficult until I encountered Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Their playful logic, lyric, and nonsense reframed language for me. That discovery cracked something open. In my teens, I began writing music and lyrics, treating sound and voice as another way to build atmosphere and emotion. By my twenties, the need to physicalize those inner worlds led me into modern dance and performance. Movement became another narrative tool, a way to embody psychological states and invented realities without relying on linear text.
In 2001, I premiered a full performance work, An Occurrence Remembered, in New York City. It was the second time many of my creative threads, image, sound, gesture, and narrative were woven together before an audience. But in the aftermath of 9/11, audiences disappeared almost overnight. The performance folded under both emotional and financial strain, and I retreated inward. That period of isolation became intensely generative. I returned to writing and illustration with disciplined focus, and it was there that true worldbuilding finally asserted itself. During that time, I began Me’ma and the Great Mountain, the story of an Indigenous girl who survives and overthrows tyranny through ancestral knowledge rather than brute force. This project marked a turning point. I was no longer making discrete works; I was creating a self‑contained cosmology. For the first time, I understood that my instinct was not toward singular images or performances, but toward fully inhabitable worlds.
In the following year, I moved to Los Angeles to study Cultural Anthropology at Cal State LA. Courses in folklore, myth, and creative writing gave academic grounding to instincts I’d been following my whole life. I became deeply interested in dark humor, satire, and the way culture encodes trauma, belief, and rebellion through story. In 2009, with an appreciation for DIY aesthetics, I launched a small press and began hand‑binding my own books, treating the object itself as an extension of the world inside it. I released a series of short‑story books (Simon Snootle and Other Small Stories, A Boy Born From Mold and Other Delectable Morsels, and The Dreaded Summons and Other Misplaced Bills) about downtrodden characters longing to be themselves. These narratives became the seedbed for the much later Imperfectualism Films, first realized in Poor Poor Eldon (2025) and later in The Decline and Fall of Holly Dew and Walter Melon (2026).
The Goodbye Family emerged almost accidentally, from a single line in Me’ma describing a peculiar funeral casket she encounters on her journey. That one image refused to remain peripheral. It pulled focus, demanding history and characters. While I was traveling through Paris and Cardiff, the family revealed themselves in flashes: Pyridine calmly sewing an arm back onto her body, Otis stopped at customs with a shrunken head, Orphie perched atop Notre Dame, Dorian consuming a fairy without a second thought.
Later, sketching alone at Paramount Ranch, I suddenly saw Orphie as the sheriff of a decaying Weird West town. The world snapped into place.
Since then, the Goodbye Family universe has continued to expand, across two novels, sixteen comic collections, and the development of a television series. Looking back, the realization that I was building worlds rather than images wasn’t a single epiphany, but a gradual recognition: that every drawing, character, performance, and sentence I made was less about representation and more about habitation. I wasn’t depicting stories. I was constructing places to live inside.
What did animation let you say (emotionally or psychologically) that live action couldn’t—and when did you first understand animation as a serious storytelling tool rather than a style?
Animation began as a way to support my books, but I quickly understood it opened a creative space with far fewer physical and financial constraints. Anything I imagined could exist in my own visual language, without sets, actors, or the logistical weight of live action. The only real limitation was my imagination, which gave me the same autonomy I’d felt when producing my modern dance work.
Animation allowed me to build a stage and to populate it with voices and sound that could carry emotional weight beyond performance alone. For example, in Decline and Fall of Holly Dew and Walter Melon, I worked with voice actors Abby L. Hendricks (Holly Dew), Nick Gligor (Walter Melon), Nana Grace (Hornita), alongside composers Textbeak and Joshua Kovarik. I also circled back to include dance choreography by Berlin Richards and Penelope Longstaff. This gave the inner lives of these characters texture, irony, and vulnerability that live action would have made inaccessible or prohibitively expensive.
How did you learn the craft—through mentors, school, trial-and-error, obsession—and what’s one “wrong” way you learned something that later became central to your process?
I learned the craft through trial and error, sustained obsession, and a small number of personal connections rather than formal training. A Welsh educator and friend, Jason Shepherd, introduced me to the cut-out puppet animation style of Ivor the Engine. Its tactile simplicity immediately resonated, both creatively and financially.
My first attempt involved physical paper cutouts. While it technically worked, the labor, time, and support it required were far beyond my capacity. That “wrong” beginning forced me to confront my limitations and redefine them.
That realization led me to Toon Boom Harmony. I taught myself the software through persistence, online clips, and close study of camera angles, timing, and movement from non-animated 1950s television comedies like The Munsters and The Addams Family. Out of that experimentation emerged a “gothic, pen-scratched” aesthetic that has since become inseparable from my comics and animation. Poor Poor Eldon was the initial project where that self-taught process fully cohered. It taught me pacing through restraint, how stillness could carry as much weight as movement, and how imperfection could feel intentional rather than unfinished. Many of the structural and visual decisions that later defined Holly Dew were first tested, quietly, in Eldon’s world.
Who shaped you most in your early years, whether they taught you directly or simply by example, and what did you take from them that you hear in your head when you’re stuck?
It wasn’t a single mentor, but the collective experience of growing up in a learning-disabled classroom and being tutored through ninth grade. I was surrounded by students with vastly different challenges, non-English speakers, neurodiverse peers, and those facing serious developmental or mental obstacles. A natural camaraderie formed among us; we understood what it meant to live on the margins. What shaped me just as deeply was seeing how the wider school system treated us, excluded, underestimated, sometimes openly ridiculed, even by teachers. That pain of being visible but not valued never left me.
Drawing became both my refuge and my bridge. My illustrations made classmates laugh, and laughter created a connection.
What echoes when I’m stuck is that instinct to lead with empathy, to give space to sidelined voices, and to trust visual storytelling as real communication.
That is where my story intersects with the film. Holly is a guardian perched above a world that rarely acknowledges her. She sees others deeply, even while remaining unseen. Walter embodies those who slip through society’s cracks until they’re alone on a ledge. Holly’s raw artwork becomes the truth she was never allowed to express, and when it draws attention, she’s pulled into a dazzling but exploitative system. That tension mirrors my lifelong conflict between wanting recognition and fearing consumption by systems that prioritize output over humanity.
Was there a person, film, book, or moment that permitted you to pursue this professionally—especially if it felt impractical or too personal—and what did it unlock in you?
That permission began with my wife Valerie’s unwavering belief, deepened with the birth of our daughter Berlin, and reinforced by a close circle of collaborators who chose to take the work seriously.
Public validation followed. Exhibitions in museum spaces signaled that the work could exist inside cultural institutions. Book fairs and conventions revealed a growing audience intrigued by its evolution. Online engagement widened that circle further. The Goodbye Family, The Animated Series eventually found homes on Tubi, Roku, Amazon Prime, and beyond. My books entered collections at Yale and the National Library of Wales.
Together, these moments unlocked the confidence to pursue the work not as a side project, but as an evolving professional practice, proof that something deeply personal could also belong on a larger stage.
What was the very first seed of The Decline and Fall of Holly Dew and Walter Melon—a single image, a line of dialogue, a feeling, a place—and how close is the finished film to that original spark?
Interestingly, my daughter was close friends with the child of a celebrity. During a visit to their home high in the Hollywood Hills, I found myself poolside, staring up at the Hollywood sign looming closely overhead. I casually said, “What if someone lived inside one of those letters?”
The idea unfolded immediately. I imagined a figure whose job wasn’t glamour, but vigilance, someone who watched over those without insulation or privilege, keeping them from stepping off the edge. Looming behind it was the ghost of Peg Entwistle’s tragedy, the cruel intersection of aspiration, invisibility, and institutional indifference.
The finished film remains remarkably close to that original impulse. While its world expanded, its emotional core remains unchanged, a vantage point above what I called Movieland that reveals both its cruelty and its strange tenderness for those caught in-between.
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The setting is loaded with symbolism—fame, spectacle, the edge of collapse. Why did you choose the sign as the story’s spine, and what does it represent to you personally about the industry and the self?
The Movieland sign functions as both a landmark and a trap. Like the Hollywood sign it echoes, it promises arrival, proof that one has crossed an invisible threshold from obscurity into meaning. It towers over the city like a proclamation of success, while beneath it operates a system that very few people can survive intact. What looks like destiny from a distance is, up close, a tightly controlled mechanism built on gatekeeping, repetition over risk, and carefully engineered outcomes disguised as discovery.
To me, the sign is a magnificent false front. It draws the eye upward, demanding aspiration and obedience, while diverting attention away from the ground, the labor, care, and invisible support that actually sustains people. It suggests transcendence while requiring erasure. In Movieland, the sign isn’t just symbolic; it has dimension enough for someone to live inside. Holly inhabits it literally and psychologically, suspended above the city, watching the machinery of ambition churn below her. From that vantage point, she sees how value is assigned not through care or depth, but through visibility.
As Walter begins to recognize Holly’s gift for painting, her ability to render grief without filters or protection, something dangerous is set in motion. Her honesty, which begins as an act of care and expression, catches the attention of Hornita, a decadent star who rules from a fortress of fame. Under Hornita’s gaze, visibility becomes reward, and care quietly disappears. What was once private and sustaining becomes extractable.
Holly is a guardian; Walter is a rescue that keeps returning to the ledge. What were you trying to interrogate about caretaking, co-dependency, and the limits of saving someone who won’t—or can’t—save themselves?
Holly and Walter are not written as people trying to fix one another. What binds them is recognition. The ledge becomes a place where action gives way to presence. One stays. One keeps returning. Through repetition rather than resolution, a fragile, earned kind of love forms.
Their relationship explores the often unspoken tension within caretaking: how devotion can be life‑sustaining and quietly consuming at the same time. Together, they can fly; apart, they cannot. Their bond makes survival possible, yet it also forms a closed system that limits both of them. Holly’s vigilance keeps Walter alive, but it also suspends her own becoming. Walter leans into the role of the seen, slowly shedding the mask of celebrity and performance, while Holly begins to redirect her attention inward, discovering art as a form of healing rather than constant rescue.
The film circles a difficult truth: love can support and witness, but it cannot replace the change a person must make for themselves.
Holly’s painting is described as “raw honesty,” and it becomes a doorway into glamour and exploitation. Do you see art-making as healing, dangerous, or both—and have you ever felt your own work pull you away from something essential?
Both, unavoidably so.
Holly’s painting bypasses polish and permission. It externalizes what she has carried silently for years: grief, watchfulness, responsibility. In that sense, art becomes survival. It gives form to what cannot be spoken and allows the body to breathe. Her work doesn’t decorate pain; it reveals it, unmediated and unresolved. That honesty is what makes the work alive.
The danger emerges when that honesty enters the wrong system. Vulnerability becomes a commodity. Recognition arrives without care. Praise coincides with erosion. The same structures that reward authenticity often punish the human being who produced it. When art begins to replace rest, relationships, and self‑preservation, identity fuses with output. Suffering becomes romanticized as evidence of sincerity.
That tension is deeply familiar to me. The betrayal in Holly’s story isn’t the artwork; it does exactly what it must do. The betrayal is the system that consumes truth while refusing responsibility for its cost. Art can heal, but without boundaries and care, it can also destroy the person it was meant to save.
The film asks, “What does it mean to truly be seen?” In your experience, what’s the difference between being visible (applauded, recognised, consumed) and being seen (understood, held, confronted)—and has making this film changed what you want from an audience?
Visibility is not the same as being seen. Visibility is applause, circulation, consumption, being noticed without being known. It’s quantifiable, fast, and often empty.
Being seen is reciprocal. It requires presence, discomfort, and a willingness to stay. Holly offers Walter that kind of seeing on the ledge. She doesn’t offer solutions or transformation; she offers witness. She listens without an agenda. She returns. That, in the film, is the most radical act.
I’m interested less in impact than in resonance, what lingers, unsettles, or subtly alters how we understand care, ambition, and responsibility. My hope is that audiences leave reflecting on their own definitions of success and recognition, and on the cost of asking to be truly seen in a world built to consume rather than hold.
If anyone would like to know more about my work, please go to www.lorinrichards.com
The Decline and Fall of Holly Dew and Walter Melon’ will premiere at the Beverly Hills Film Festival on April 18, followed by FirstGlance Film Fest in Philadelphia on May 8th.
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