On animation: Welcome to dust bunny country

When Rayon floats to the floor of The Andrew’s messy bedroom, he enters a landscape sculpted from furniture and laundry, form and chaos. The bed towers over Rayon as if he were standing at the base of a continental slab or tectonic plate. 

A chest of drawers or a wardrobe are towering monoliths high as skyscrapers and vast as city blocks, sometimes shrouded in shadow, their outline and faces sometimes fractured by light.

Chairs, bed legs and table legs become something vast, majestic and imposing when seen from Rayon’s lowly point of view.

But Rayon and all the other tribes of dust bunnies also inhabit and travel through another kind of landscape, more organic this time.

Dust bunnies are native to the accidental geography that defines domestic untidiness; the curves and convolutions of crumpled clothes draped across chair and floor, the gulches, crevasses, canyons and gullies in the folds of fallen or discarded towels or sheets, the caves of gaping socks. 

Down here at floor level thoughtlessly discarded laundry takes on the contours of rolling hills with ravines and blind gullies.

In between the furniture and the squalid laundry, there are the great expanses of uncluttered carpet; the steppes, the prairies, the wide open spaces where only a foolish dust bunny tarries because that is the realm of the vacuum cleaner.

The dust bunnies do not inhabit a candy-coloured world. 

Dust bunnies occupy a landscape of light and shade, of textures only hinted at, colours muted by shadow.

How shall their many realms be portrayed?

Almost at dust bunny level this is from the National Ballet's 1971 production of Tales of Beatrix Potter directed by Reginald Mills. The film's designer, Christine Izzard, was nominated for BAFTA awards for best art direction. 

So I'm looking forward to seeing Rayon and all the tribes of dust bunnies in some very lovely places, however humble they might be.