New look and new showreel for Mutant Hands

James Wignall has curated a new reel to encapsulate his recent animation work and created a fresh visual identity to boot.

Mutant Hands – AKA animator and art director James Wignall – burst onto the creative scene back in 2005, one of a new wave of creatives at the vanguard of the noughties motion graphics revolution. Bringing together vector graphics, geometry and desktop animation tools, Mutant Hands and his contemporaries brought motion to the internet, pushing bandwidths and the aesthetic of the day.

Now, after leaving a little too long for reasons all busy creatives understand – there’s always a new project to tackle, right? – James has created a showreel, website and brand identity to reflect how his direction has evolved. Although he loved all the work in his previous reel, a lot has changed, and it was time to update things.

“I’ve tried to include a spectrum of work ranging from personal to commercial projects but still keep an overarching theme so that the work hangs together,” says James. “I like to think that theme is to raise a smile or some kind of intangible intrinsic quality, like umami. The website and reel are a letter of intent.”

As such, highlighted work includes client pieces such as the motion graphics title sequence for the Apple TV+ show Platonic and complex animated visuals he created for ITUPP in Dubai – a collaboration with his wife, the illustrator Jing Zhang. These are interspersed with examples from the Play area of James’ portfolio, including looping, kaleidoscopic patterns, and typographic and character-based designs.

You’ll detect Asian influences in his work here and there—from samurai to Japanese-y cute furry creatures, which juxtapose nuance and texture against his more common vector aesthetic. The inspiration is found in his family history.

“My grandparents actually met in Malaysia in WWII; my Auntie is Malaysian, and I visited my uncle in Tokyo when I was a few months old,” says James. “Apparently, my twin brother and I were constantly swamped by girls, as twin blonde Caucasian babies were quite a rarity in 80s Japan! A year or so later, my parents took us to Guangzhou. Little did I know that decades later, I would become intimately acquainted with the region as that’s where my wife Jing is from.”

Geometric forms have always played an important role in James’ work – particularly circles and semicircles. No sharp corners make them friendly and approachable, and James loves animating objects along curved lines, the circularity of orbits and even looping narratives. This feeds into both the showreel opener, which begins with a ball rolling into a curve and eventually highlights the roundness atop the numerals in 2024. It informs the new Mutant Hands brand identity, with the curving top of the lowercase M and H lending a sense of motion to exemplify what the studio creates in a still format.

Alongside the title sequence to Platonic, one of James’ favourite projects of late is an explainer for the creative agency Beam, demonstrating its environmentally conscious work process. “I worked closely with the creative director and founder, Dom Latham-Koenig, to turn what could have been quite a dry topic into a fun, character-driven narrative,” says James. “They were delighted with the result, which was a relief.”

Next year, Mutant Hands will celebrate 20 years in motion, and perhaps the new look will attract a new generation of clients and potential collaborators. It has James thinking about other projects he’d like to progress: “I know it’s a bit of a cliché as every creative who becomes a parent has a similar thought, but I love the idea of making an illustrated kids’ book. Likewise, creating something more long form, maybe a 30-minute short story or film. I love the idea of creating something that will outlive me.”